Steven Spielberg (59 page)

Spielberg may have been one of the soberest members of the
1941
company, but his “dedication to getting the finest picture possible” escalated into a near-addiction during the eighteen months of production, with more than a million feet of film cascading through his cameras. This time he did not rely on an extensive use of optical effects to help create his grandiose illusions. “I had it, waiting half a year to see film on
Close
Encounters,
so I decided to make a picture the way they used to make 'em,” Spielberg explained. “… I've had it with matte work and motion-control cameras. Everything
here is done the way it would have been done by D. W. Griffith…. I'm going to make this one as physical as possible.” As a result of that questionable decision, the largely studio-bound production ran up extraordinary expenses for the staging of full-scale gags and the construction of elaborate miniature sets.

At a cost of almost $400,000, two takes were filmed of a full-sized P-40 fighter plane crashing at sixty miles an hour onto a street at the Burbank Studios decorated to resemble Hollywood Boulevard during the 1941 Christmas season. The master shot of the riot sequence involved numerous crashing vehicles, Stuntmen doubling as zoot-suiters, and several hundred extras in period costumes, including 650 in military uniforms, stampeding on cue when Milius fired a rifle into the air. For the film's ending, Spielberg had an actual full-sized house built at a cost of $260,000 and dropped off a beachfront hillside, with seven cameras capturing its descent.

The spectacularly detailed miniatures built by
Close
Encounters
modelmaker Gregory Jein included a panoramic aerial view of the San Fernando Valley; the Hollywood Boulevard canyon where the dogfight occurs; and Ocean Park in Santa Monica, where a Ferris wheel blasted free by Japanese shells rolls into the ocean. Impressive as the miniatures are on screen, they required extensive use of fog effects to make them believable. That meant smoke had to be used in all the other scenes for matching purposes. Although cinematographer William A. Fraker created a subtly fantastic mood in the scenes involving miniatures, his lighting in other scenes sometimes appeared fuzzy and overexposed.
§

The entire first month after filming began on October 23, 1978, was spent working on the miniature set featuring the Ferris wheel. Shooting on miniatures went for weeks following the conclusion of principal photography on May 16, 1979. “Steven fell in love with his miniature footage, which, in my opinion, is the best miniature stuff ever filmed,” Gale says. “But he used every single shot he did of the dogfight, in some way, shape, or form, and I think that sequence is probably about 30 percent too long. How many times can you watch the planes go up and down the street? Sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees, and I think that's what happened in
1941
.”

S
PIELBERG'S
disenchantment with
1941
was evident long before its first exposure to an audience. “Comedy is not my forte,” he admitted during the shooting. While editing the film, he bluntly called it an “utter horror…. I can't correct the overall conceptual disasters about
1941,
but I can fix little pieces here and there that I think will help speed the pace. If you can't do anything about it, then you're at the mercy of what comics call ‘the death silence': you expected a laugh and all there is is a hole.”

Following the first preview on October 19, 1979, at the Medallion Theater in Dallas—where Spielberg had had such success previewing
Jaws
and
Close
Encounters
—the opening was delayed from November 16 until December 14 while
1941
underwent what
Daily
Variety
called “surgery.” “When we opened with that sub surfacing and the [
Jaws
] music and so forth, the people started to applaud, they flipped,” Veitch recalls. “Leo Jaffe [Columbia's chairman of the board] was sitting next to me; we thought we had something very special. Then it started to dissipate. By the time the picture ended, we knew we were having some problems with it. They applauded, but it was not the thunderous applause that you were hoping to get after a Steven picture. I think the audience expected a lot more than what was on the screen.”

In the lobby after the preview, Sid Sheinberg put his arm around Spielberg and said, “I think there's a movie somewhere in this mess. There's a really good movie, and we should go off and find it.” “The rest of the executives from Columbia and Universal,” Spielberg remembered, “didn't even want to talk to me.” The angry director said at the time that the preview had taught him one important lesson: “I learned not to invite Universal and Columbia executives and sales people to previews anymore. Let them stay home and watch
Laverne
and
Shirley
on TV. I'll preview my pictures and make the changes.”

A second preview was held in Denver, where the film played “a little better,” says Veitch, “but still by that time the word was out.” Spielberg and editor Michael Kahn finally emerged from the cutting room with a 118-minute release version of
1941,
17 minutes shorter than the version previewed in Dallas. Many of the discarded scenes turned up later in the expanded ABC-TV version and in the restored 1996 laserdisc version released by MCA Universal Home Video, which runs 146 minutes. Although the restoration is somewhat less frenetic and more coherent than the theatrical version, the essential foolishness of the concept remains impervious to change. But Gale was correct in observing that the director's prerelease editing tended to sacrifice character development for spectacle: “Steven got scared of the movie. Steven had a certain amount of impatience about not wanting to take the time to set things up. When he got nervous that it was taking too long to get to be night in
1941,
he'd start lopping out chunks of exposition, not realizing how important some of the stuff was. Bobby Di Cicco is not in the movie enough, and he was intended to be the central character. Steven played against the wrong-side-of-the-tracks aspect of his character. Steven was always afraid of those kind of guys; they were the ones who used to pick on him. So he was afraid about how to make that kind of character into a hero.”

Knowing that critics and his Hollywood colleagues were “just waiting in ambush to tear me apart,” Spielberg chose not to attend the film's predictably deadly premiere at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood. Instead he took Amy Irving on a vacation to Japan, where he wouldn't have to face the first batch of devastating reviews, such as Charles Champlin's in the
Los
Angeles
Times,
which was headlined “Spielberg's Pearl Harbor.” Describing
1941
as “the most conspicuous waste since the last major oil spill, which it somewhat resembles,” the usually benevolent Champlin was provoked into a rare display of wrath: “What characterizes
1941
is its abiding cynicism, which arises, however, not in a considered contempt for the world's follies but out of an apparent indifference to and withdrawal from anything but spliced celluloid. It offers a nihilism based not on a rejecting rage but on an arrogant indifference to values.” Michael Sragow of the
Los
Angeles
Herald-Examiner
used even harsher rhetoric, calling it “a movie that will live in infamy….
1941
isn't simply a silly slur against any particular race, sex, or generation—it makes war against all humanity.”

Spielberg later complained that “it was like the critics thought I was Adolf Eichmann.” By almost any standard of critical taste and judgment, the attacks on the film were richly deserved. But the unusually hostile reaction of some critics also may have reflected a gleeful desire to see its precociously successful young director receive his comeuppance. “Maybe
1941
will finally force a few reevaluations of this
wunderkind,
”
wrote Stephen Färber of
New
West.
In the “cult of puerility” that had taken over Hollywood in the 1970s, Farber declared,
1941
stood alone as “the most appalling piece of juvenilia yet foisted on the public.” Spielberg could not resist the director's favorite dodge of passing the blame to his writers, who, he told
The
New
York
Times,
“caught me at a weak moment…. I'll spend the rest of my life disowning this movie.” As he had done after publicly disparaging Peter Benchley's source material for
Jaws,
Spielberg “came to us and asked us to forgive him,” Gale recalls. “He'd given an interview to some magazine and he said he'd blamed the whole movie on us—[implying,] ‘These writers just kinda buffaloed me into doing it.'”

1941
was not the box-office disaster its reputation might suggest. With a worldwide gross of $90 million, it actually turned a profit, and it found somewhat more favor among viewers in other countries who enjoyed its jibes at American jingoism, a response that caused Spielberg some discomfort. While the film's alarming extravagance gave Hollywood serious concern about Spielberg's reliability, the damage it did to his critical reputation would have a far more long-lasting effect. Its failure cast a retrospective cloud over the childlike vision of
Close
Encounters
and the technical cunning of
Jaws,
encouraging critics who harbored lingering doubts about those aspects of his earlier films to castigate Spielberg as emotionally arrested and overly infatuated with technique for its own sake.

W
HEN
George Lucas, in 1977, first told him the story of an intrepid, somewhat disreputable archeologist searching for the lost Ark of the Covenant, Spielberg was intrigued by the sheer fun of it, the opportunity to do “a James Bond film without the hardware.” But by the time he began shooting
Raiders
of
the
Lost
Ark
in June 1980, Spielberg had a more urgent agenda.
Hoping to “make some amends for going way over on
1941,
Close
Encoun
ters
, and
Jaws
,”
he had to prove he could “make a movie responsibly for a relatively medium budget that would appear to be something more expensive.” Michael Finnell, a producer who later made three films for Amblin Entertainment, recalls that Spielberg “used to say he was born again after
1941
.”

Working as a hired hand for Lucas, a conservative and highly disciplined producer, Spielberg used
Raiders
of
the
Lost
Ark
as a form of professional “rehab,” veteran film business analyst A. D. Murphy wryly observes. At the time preproduction began on
Raiders
in the fall of 1979, Lucas was riding the crest of
Star
Wars
and finishing work on its sequel,
The
Empire
Strikes
Back.
Joining forces with Lucas and his production company, Lucasfilm, enabled Spielberg to assuage Hollywood's fears that
Raiders
would turn out to be another
1941.
But several studios still passed on the opportunity to become involved, despite the fact that Lucas and Spielberg were responsible for four of the top ten box-office hits at that point in film history. The problem was that the two filmmakers were demanding what Spielberg called an “unprecedented profit definition” for their joint venture.

“I hate to talk like a mercenary,” Spielberg said at the time of the film's release in 1981, “but George came over to my house when we decided to make the picture and he said, ‘Let's make the best deal they've ever made in Hollywood. And let's do it without the agents, just you and me.' We wrote it out on lined note paper and shook hands over the table. And then we presented that to our agencies and said, ‘This is the deal we want. Now, fellows, go try to make it.'”

The Lucas-Spielberg proposal was presented to the studios not by their agents but by their lawyer, Tom Pollock (who later became the head of Universal Pictures), Lucasfilm president Charles Weber, and Howard Kazanjian, who was executive producer with Lucas on
Raiders.
The proposal dared to assault standard Hollywood financial practices at several especially sensitive points. Chief among them was that while the distributor would be expected to put up the movie's budgeted $20 million negative cost, it would receive no distribution fee and take no overhead charge. Those items usually accounted for more than 50 percent of the gross film rentals (the amount returned to the studio after exhibitors take their share). Besides demanding large sums of money up front, Lucas and Spielberg also wanted enormous shares of the distributor's gross, a demand that was especially unusual for a director in that era. And while the distributor would be allowed to recover the entire negative cost of
Raiders
from gross film rentals before Lucas and Spielberg started to receive their shares of the gross, Lucasfilm eventually would assume full ownership of the movie.

Not only were the studios taken aback by such
chutzpah,
they were dubious about the apparent cost of shooting the film. Lawrence Kasdan's flamboyant screenplay paid homage to grade-Z serials on a spectacular scale more in keeping with the grandiose fantasies of
Star
Wars
and
Close
Encoun
ters.
“A lot of people looked at that first scene with the huge rock and thought it would cost $40 million just by itself,” said then Paramount president Michael D. Eisner.

Such were the filmmakers' track records, however, that when the proposal was circulated, Paramount, Warner Bros., Columbia, and Disney expressed interest (Fox, which had made
Star
Wars
under the previous regime of Alan Ladd Jr., passed on
Raiders,
as did Universal's Ned Tanen). Frank Price, president of Columbia's film division, was eager to establish a working relationship with Lucasfilm, “but Columbia did not have a strong distribution system,” Kazanjian says. “We knew we could make a deal somewhere, or we knew we could sell financing, or we knew we could make the picture. What we couldn't do was distribute the picture, and we wanted the best distributor.” Closing the deal with Paramount took a year of contentious negotiations. Some at the studio “thought Michael Eisner was crazy,” Kazanjian remembers. “Barry Diller [Paramount's board chairman and chief executive officer] thought he was crazy. But he did it. And they made a ton of money on it.”