Steven Spielberg (61 page)

Spielberg offered Marion to Debra Winger, the sultry star of 1980's
Urban
Cowboy,
with whom he later would be romantically linked in the press.
||
But Winger also had a scheduling conflict, so he turned to Karen Allen, a winsome alumna of
Animal
House.
In the boys' fantasy world of Spielberg and Lucas, Allen's Marion behaved less like Lauren Bacall than like an overage tomboy. As critic Molly Haskell put it, Marion “has lived a little, talks tough, can drink men under the table, but she has neither a nose for danger nor the guile to get out of it. In other words, she has the failings of both sexes and none of their virtues.”

S
PIELBERG
“was in a strange state” when he returned from his ill-fated trip to Japan, Kasdan recalls. “He had just had
1941
coming out, and I think his personal life was in turmoil. He had done some storyboards, and he was full of ideas about how to improve the script. Some of them were great, and others just seemed crazy to me. He wanted the guy with the monocle
**
to have a light in his head coming from his eye wherever he looked. I thought if we have a guy with a light in his head, that broke the conventions of the story we were telling, which was a 1930s serial.

“I reacted badly, I think. I had worked hard on the script, and I had not had this experience before. I don't like rewriting, and I'm not one of these guys who can write for other people's whims. I went to George and said, ‘I think you need somebody else for this job. These ideas are too crazy for me. It's not the story we set out to make.' George told me, ‘Steve's always full of ideas at this stage, but a lot of them will fall away before you get to the movie. Just ride it out.' Some of his ideas I wrote into the script, and some I was able to argue him out of. They were always kidding me, ‘Oh, you won't write it, but we'll do it when we make the movie.' When they were in North Africa, they sent me a picture they had taken of Steven, Karen Allen, and Harrison Ford all sitting at a typewriter.”

The most serious disagreements came over Ford's character. Lucas's initial concept of Indy as a James Bondian playboy who uses archeological expeditions to fund his expensive lifestyle met resistance from Spielberg, Kasdan, and Ford. “My feeling,” said Kasdan, “was that Indiana Jones's two sides (professor and adventurer) made him complicated enough without adding the playboy element.” At Lucas's insistence, Kasdan wrote a scene involving
a tuxedo-clad Jones at home with a blonde, but Spielberg successfully argued against filming it.
††
Spielberg wanted to go to the opposite extreme. Thinking of Indy as resembling Humphrey Bogart's unscrupulous bum Fred C. Dobbs in John Huston's
The
Treasure
of
the
Sierra
Madre,
the director suggested making Indy a seedy alcoholic. Lucas vehemently resisted the idea, but Spielberg felt he still managed to insinuate enough grittiness into the character to provide an intriguing contrast with Indy's tweedy, academic side.

“The original idea,” Kasdan says, “was to have him be a little more tortured about what he does, about having fallen from the pure faith of archeology into this graverobber status. It was George's idea—George said the guy who is going after the ark is ‘sort of a dark figure'—and it was in the first draft even more. Steven liked it too, but as we did more drafts that sort of fell away, and he became more of a standard action type of guy.”

Commercial expediency no doubt was the principal reason for the failure to create a three-dimensional character. Lucas and Spielberg wanted to make a film of nonstop, unreflective derring-do, the kind that takes no time to grapple with moral ambiguities. But since
Raiders
is not a 1930s serial but a film made with a postmodernist sensibility, there had to be at least a nod in the direction of complexity. Spielberg claimed that Indy is “not a cardboard hero but rather a human being with ordinary frailties.” But despite Ford's valiant attempt to suggest those frailties with his brooding, world-weary demeanor, Indy remains peculiarly unformed, hardly less artificial a character than any tough-guy hero in the old serials.

I
NDY'S
two sides never add up to a coherent whole. A scholar who loves adventure and physical danger, he behaves in a casually amoral and brutal way whenever it suits his purposes. He loots Third World cultures and slaughters the natives with the abandon of a mercenary from colonial days. And yet the contemporary audience throughout the world was skillfully manipulated into identifying with this ruthless figure and finding him heroic. Cynically exploited for purely visceral thrills, Indy's violence and greed is presented in a winking, tongue-in-cheek style to anesthetize the audience's moral sense. The scene of Indy pulling out his pistol to mow down a sword-wielding Arab—a gag Spielberg and Ford improvised on location to shorten the shooting schedule—“was very popular, but it disturbed me,” Kasdan says. “I thought that was brutal in a way the rest of the movie wasn't. I'm never happy about making jokes out of killing people. Steven is more in touch with popular taste than I am.”

Spielberg seemed eager to pass the blame to Lucas for Indy's violent behavior:
“Raiders
is more in George's vein; it's the only film of mine [until that time] in which scores of people are violently eliminated. But George's
violence is kids' violence; it's intentionally scary-funny…. I took the movie as seriously as I took a barrel of buttered popcorn.” While conceding that the “concepts in
Raiders
were extremely violent,” Lucas insisted “the treatment was not repulsive. For one thing, we were back to good guys beating bad guys. Steven actually got carried away in a couple of places, but we cut back on the blood.”

To help make its violence seem acceptable and amusing,
Raiders
recruits its legions of “bad guys” from groups the audience is expected to hate at first sight. Nazis satisfied that requirement so perfectly in
Raiders
that Spielberg pressed them into service as cartoon heavies again in
Indiana
Jones
and
the
Last
Crusade
(1989). But as
New
York
magazine's David Denby wrote in his review of
Raiders,
Spielberg used Nazis “for a thrill of evil, for graphic and even comic possibilities, not because he has anything to say about Nazism. In pop filmmaking, neither death nor history ever matters. Only thrills matter.” The Third World villains in the Indiana Jones movies tend to be drawn from racial stereotypes, a mindless carryover from the mentality of old-style adventure movies made in a less enlightened age when colonial attitudes still prevailed.
Raiders
has hordes of caricatured Arab and South American bad guys, while
Temple
of
Doom
employs Indians and Chinese as the evil antagonists of the square-jawed white American hero.

Because of modern ethnic sensitivities and the controversy that often results from ethnic stereotyping in movies, “When you pick villains, you get into trouble,” notes
Temple
of
Doom
cowriter Willard Huyck. One of Lucas's suggested storylines for the third Indiana Jones film was set in Africa. Locations were scouted, and Chris Columbus
‡‡
wrote a screenplay, but it was rejected because, as Charles Champlin reported in his book on Lucas, “neither Lucas nor Spielberg was comfortable with the story.” “I knew there was no way they were going to make the movie in Africa,” says Huyck. “Natives were going to be a real problem if any of them were foolish or villainous. They couldn't do it, and they went back again to Nazis.”

In their portraits of Third World heavies, Spielberg and Lucas fell into the trap of uncritically imitating antiquated Hollywood conventions. But the absence of malicious intent hardly excuses the presence of such stereotypes in movies made in the 1980s; indeed, one can argue that their unthinking perpetuation for the purposes of mass entertainment constitutes a far more insidious form of racial insult. With its revival of previously discredited fantasies of American cultural dominance over Third World primitives and cartoonish villains from an evil empire,
Raiders
of
the
Lost
Ark
was the perfect film to mark the beginning of the Reagan era.

I
T
was a measure of Spielberg's emotional distance from
Raiders
of
the
Lost
Ark
that he so willingly surrendered his independence to work as an employee of Lucas. Spielberg's pragmatic decision to prove that he could toe the budgetary line by turning out a piece of unabashed commercial entertainment was only possible, however, because of the mutual respect he and Lucas shared. “I generally let Steven do whatever he wants to do,” Lucas said. “I'm very sensitive to the director and what his problems are because I've been a director. And Steven takes suggestions. I mean, I offer lots of suggestions and he takes some of them and some he doesn't take…. Steven does a great deal of homework when he goes into a picture. He's very organized.”

Lucas was present “to troubleshoot” for five of the sixteen weeks of filming. Though he directed some second-unit footage on location in Tunisia, his influence was unobtrusive, leaving no doubt that Spielberg was in command. Most of Lucas's efforts as an executive producer were concentrated on preproduction and postproduction. Lucas believed Spielberg's tendency toward excess could be kept in check with careful preplanning and a solid screenplay. “He got a lot of bad press for
1941
,” Lucas said, “but his direction was brilliant—the
idea
was terrible.”

Lucas could say no to Spielberg, and Spielberg, humbled by his experiences on
1941,
would listen. When they disagreed, Lucas would say, “Well, it's your movie. If the audience doesn't like it, they're going to blame you.” Giving in, Spielberg would joke, “Okay, but I'm going to tell them that
you
made me do it.”

Lucas also provided Spielberg with a first-rate British crew and support staff, many of whom had worked on
Star
Wars
and
The
Empire
Strikes
Back.
Most of
Raiders
was filmed in places where Lucas had shot the earlier films, including the so-called
“Star
Wars
canyon” in Tunisia and EMI-Elstree Studios in Borehamwood, England. Additional filming took place in France, Hawaii, and Long Beach, California. The London area was chosen as the film's base of operations both for cost reasons and because its distance from Hollywood enabled the filmmakers to keep a lid of secrecy on the project, as Spielberg had done in Alabama on
Close
Encounters.

Spielberg requested that Frank Marshall be hired as producer of
Raiders.
Marshall had met Spielberg through Verna Fields in 1974, when he was working as an associate producer for Peter Bogdanovich. Skilled at the art of bringing in films economically while serving the director's needs, Marshall recalled that Spielberg was “looking for someone who would protect him from a studio situation … someone to sort of be on his side and work with him, rather than
against
him…. He wanted a producer who could actually get the movie made for a price, keep the momentum going on set … which is the way I like to do things.”

Marshall's future wife, Kathleen Kennedy, worked closely with him on
Raiders.
Kennedy and Marshall went on to be Spielberg's most important professional collaborators throughout the 1980s. They produced most of his
films in that period and were his partners in Amblin Entertainment, the production company they founded together in 1984.

Previously a TV talk show producer in San Diego, Kennedy entered the film industry as an assistant to John Milius during preproduction on
1941.
After three weeks, she was asked to help Spielberg organize the film's special effects. Arriving at the director's home, she found he “had little pieces of paper, backs of envelopes, tops of newspapers, anything he could get his hands on, on which he had written these notes and camera shots, drawn little figures. And he said, ‘Can you take these and make some sense of it?' … The only thing going through my mind was, I can't work here because he'll figure out I don't know how to type. So I gathered everything together and headed back to the office. I poured myself into this, all day, all night, going through, redrawing the little drawings, calling him a few times to clarify things I didn't understand. And I made these little booklets, which I had stacked up on his desk when he came in.

“He was blown away. It seemed to me a certain amount of common sense, but for whatever reason, he had never had anyone organize things for him in that way before. From that point on, he gave me little jobs to do, things he wanted me to take care of.” While working on
Raiders,
she “didn't think about where it was leading. When Steven asked me to produce his next film, which later turned out to be
E.T.,
I was shocked. It seemed to come from out of the blue, but I think it was because he felt confident about the way I got things done for him. He had come to rely on me to get things done. And that is basically what a producer does.”

Lucas's right-hand man on
Raiders,
executive producer Howard Kazanjian, had known him since film school at USC.
§§
Kazanjian was given authority to crack the whip on budget and scheduling. “Part of my job was to say no to Steven,” he recalls, “and I never said no to Steven. There are ways—and you had to work at it—for Steven to say no to himself. You present the two sides, especially if it's monetary, and let Steven say no. I guess
occasionally
I said no, but I didn't like doing that, I liked to have Steven come to a decision on his own.