Steven Spielberg (62 page)

“We knew that we were making a B picture. We knew we had to compromise. There were some moments where it would go to take two or take three and take four, and something wasn't working. Steven would say, ‘That's it, let's move on. We'll figure out another way to do it.' He was very, very good in that respect.
Raiders
was his first picture he brought in on budget. I heard Steven say that all his friends were doing smaller pictures than him, less expensive pictures than him, coming in on budget, and they were able to see more money on the back end. Steven rarely had that opportunity, so he
was bound and determined to bring a picture in on budget, so he could see back-end. Steven said, ‘If we had spent another dollar, we wouldn't have gotten another dollar at the box office.'”

Working with four illustrators, Spielberg storyboarded
Raiders
more fully than any of his previous films. He initially succumbed to the temptation of planning elaborate compositions full of
film
noir
shadow effects. “I orgasmed in the first two months of my preparation,” he said, “and then I essentially tore it up and just told the story.” For the first time in his career, Spielberg also made use of the services of a second-unit director, action veteran Michael (Mickey) Moore, who spent three weeks shooting the truck chase from Spielberg's storyboards. “Steve wasn't always going for 100 percent, sometimes he was going for 50 percent,” Lucas said. “But my theory is that a director as talented as Steve going at 50 percent is better than most people giving their all. When he goes at 100 percent it can get out of hand.”

Raiders
officially was scheduled for eighty-five days of shooting, but Lucas and Spielberg had a secret plan to make it in only seventy-three days. Kazanjian explains that this was done “to challenge Steven to do it on schedule and budget” and to minimize studio interference: “There are times when you're over a day, but you know you can pick it up somewhere, and the pressure is so great from the studio. George didn't want that. George had been successful in being able to make his pictures without studios; that was one of the reasons why
Raiders
and
Star
Wars
were [based] in Europe, because they were farther away from studio control. [Spielberg's] taste was richer in the shooting than it had been in preparation, but if Steven wanted something else, we took it from someplace else.

“We had a model of the Flying Wing [a futuristic airplane for transporting the ark to Hitler]. I said to George, ‘It just is too big. We can't build this thing. It's going to cost about a million dollars, and we need to make it smaller. We need to do
something.
'
I had already gone to Steven on that and was vetoed. So I went to George, and George walked into this conference room we were in, I'll never forget it, and said [
sotto
voce
],
‘OK, listen to what I'm going to do.' There was the model. He said, ‘Oh, what's
this?'
He picked up the model of the Flying Wing, like he didn't know that this is the Flying Wing. It had four engines, two on each side. He said, ‘Terrific'—George always talks in short sentences—‘It's great. Looks super.' And he broke the ends of the two wings off, taking two of the motors away. He said, ‘How much money do we save if it's only
this
big?'”

With that one gesture, they saved $250,000. The film was completed just under its final budget figure of $20.4 million ($400,000 had been added after Harrison Ford was cast) and exactly on its clandestine seventy-three-day schedule.

H
OWEVER
lively and entertaining
Raiders
proved to be, the price Spielberg paid for his “rehab” was a soulless and impersonal film. Reestablishing
his professional credentials meant taking a step back artistically, a run for cover rewarded handsomely by Hollywood and the public. With a worldwide gross of $363 million,
Raiders
became the runaway box-office champion of 1981 as well as the highest-grossing film in the history of Paramount Pictures.
¶¶
Spielberg received his second Oscar nomination for directing the film, one of its eight nominations; although he did not win, the film received five Oscars, all in technical categories.

Spielberg's anxiety over the possibility of commercial failure and his need to please the widest possible audience would continue to motivate him throughout much of the 1980s. His intermittent forays into new creative territory often were followed by retreats into safer, more derivative material. When those formulaic efforts were rewarded with great commercial success, Spielberg found himself increasingly trapped in a need to follow narrowly defined audience expectations. The critical reception for some of his more ambitious, problematical works would, in turn, be colored by those expectations. When he was being praised for the wrong reasons, he also tended not to be praised for the right reasons.

Many reviewers welcomed what they saw as Spielberg's return to form with
Raiders,
a film that encouraged a retreat from complexity and a revival of simple, old-fashioned Hollywood pleasures. “It's hats-in-the-air, heart-in-the-mouth time at the movies again,” wrote Sheila Benson of the
Los
Angeles
Times,
praising the film for having “no pretensions to importance.” But the implications of its success were troubling to some critics. Robert Asahina observed in
The
New
Leader,
“Raiders
tells us less about society as a whole, I'm afraid, than about Hollywood, which of late seems to be laboring under the illusion that today's moviegoers are subliterate teenagers unable to distinguish between good and bad comic books. Or worse, perhaps films are now made by people who are no brighter than the dullest members of the audience they have in mind.”

Spielberg felt he was “playing a role” in directing
Raiders
of
the
Lost
Ark.
“I was the Indiana Jones behind the camera. I felt I didn't have to shoot for a masterpiece. Every shot didn't have to be something David Lean would be proud of.” That melancholy admission seemed to reveal Spielberg's awareness of “the perils of facility … the journeyman-for-hire aspect of his collaboration on
Raiders,
”
Victoria Geng wrote in
Film
Comment.
“Indy the hack adventurer is a bit of a self-portrait, with touches of both vanity and self-loathing…. But if
Raiders
represents his approach to this material, only a miracle can save him now.”

S
U
RROUNDED
by thousands of snakes on a British soundstage, Steven Spielberg was becoming depressed about the movie he was making.
Raiders
of
the
Lost
Ark
was a mechanical job of work offering few opportunities to express his personal feelings. “Action is wonderful,” he said later, “but while I was doing
Raiders
I felt I was losing touch with the reason I became a moviemaker—to make stories about people and relationships.” Feeling lonely far away from home and his girlfriend Kathleen Carey, Spielberg yearned to escape into a world of the imagination where he could express the sense of wonder that had sustained him since childhood:

“I remember saying to myself, ‘What I really need is a friend I can talk to—somebody who can give me
all
the answers.' It was like when you were a kid and had grown out of dolls or teddy bears or Winnie the Pooh, you just wanted a little voice in your mind to talk to. I began concocting this imaginary creature, partially from the guys who stepped out of the mother ship for ninety seconds in
Close
Encounters
and then went back in, never to be seen again. Then I thought, What if I were ten years old again—where I've sort of been for thirty-four years anyway—and what if he needed me as much as I needed him? Wouldn't that be a great love story?”

Luckily for Spielberg, he had somebody on hand who could help realize his fantasy. Melissa Mathison was a thirty-year-old screenwriter with only one credit, a rewrite on
The
Black
Stallion.
Mathison accompanied her boyfriend, Harrison Ford, during the shooting of
Raiders,
and Spielberg found himself “pouring my heart out to Melissa all the time.” He told her his idea for a movie about a lonely little boy and his friend from outer space, an idea he later claimed he had been harboring as a fantasy since childhood. Mathison said her interest in the story was “not on any sort of sci-fi level. It was the idea of an alien creature who was benevolent, tender, emotional, and sweet that appealed to me. And the idea of the creature's striking up a relationship with a child who came from a broken home was very affecting.”

A beautifully simple and lyrical parable of interplanetary friendship,
E.T
. The
Extra-Terrestrial
was also the little movie about “keeds” François Truffaut had been urging Spielberg to make since 1976.
*
Produced for Universal by Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy,
E.
T.
was made for a comparatively low production cost (about $10 million) and with few of the elaborate visual effects that accompanied the aliens' visit to earth in
Close
Encounters.
But, ironically, it was in finally delivering the “little movie” he had promised himself and the public that Spielberg made the film that accumulated the largest domestic box-office gross in movie history until
star wars
reclaimed the title with its 1997 reissue.
†
What touched the hearts of more than two hundred million moviegoers throughout the world in the
E.T.'s
first year of release was a disguised emotional autobiography of Steven Spielberg.

Perversely, the immediate origins of
E.T.
were not in Spielberg's Disneyish fantasies but in the darker side of his personality. The idea mutated from
Night
Skies,
a screenplay John Sayles wrote for him about a band of extraterrestrials terrorizing a farm family. The leader of the band of eleven aliens was an evil creature called Scar, after the Comanche villain in John Ford's
The
Searchers.
In the opening scene of Sayles's script, Scar killed farm animals simply by touching them with his long bony finger. Only one of Scar's followers was benevolent, an alien called Buddy who befriended an autistic child. Buddy, of course, turned into E.T. Spielberg later mused that he “might have taken leave of my senses” in developing the xenophobic
Night
Skies.
But its evolution into
E.T.
paralleled the process by which the sinister aliens of
Firelight
gradually evolved into the benign visitors of
Close
Encounters.

E.T.
can be read as a fable of immigration, but with a bittersweet ending in which the unassimilated alien, after almost dying of homesickness, decides to leave American suburbia and return to his homeland. Spielberg saw
E.T.
as “a broad-based story about an ugly duckling, someone who didn't belong. Someone who wasn't like everyone else. And because E.T. wasn't like everyone
else, he was picked apart and made very sick and almost died. I always felt
E.
T.
was a minority story … that stands for every minority in this country.” As a pencil-necked geek with a huge head, big eyes and nose, and protruding ears, the younger Spielberg could have passed as a human cousin to E.T., whom he described as “a creature that only a mother could love.”

Spielberg's relatively impersonal involvement in
Night
Skies
was evident from the fact that he was only planning to produce it, with cartoonist Ron Cobb making his directing debut on the $10 million film.
‡
Night
Skies
began preproduction at Columbia in April 1980, while Spielberg was in England preparing
Raiders.
Reflecting a lingering anxiety in Hollywood over the
1941
debacle, John Veitch, who had become Columbia's president of worldwide production, pointedly told
Daily
Variety
that “Steven is not a one-man show” and vowed that studio executives would be working closely with him on
Night
Skies.
“We had a meeting or two with Steven on it,” Veitch recalls. “Steven wasn't quite positive that he wanted to do that particular story. The more he thought about it, I guess, and with Melissa getting involved, it changed [and Spielberg decided he wanted to direct]. Then when we got the script, the script was the one that they filmed, with the little creature.”

Before pitching his new concept to Mathison, Spielberg asked Sayles if he would be interested in trying a fresh draft. But the novelist and screenwriter, who had made his directing debut with
The
Return
of
the
Secaucus
Seven
(1978), was about to begin directing another movie of his own. In any event, Sayles had little interest in writing a movie about a sweet-natured alien. “The
last
scene of
Night
Skies,
”
Sayles noted, “is of the nice E.T. being marooned on Earth by his peers” (the scene that became the opening of
E.T.
). Sayles did not pursue screen credit, considering his script “more of a jumping-off point than something that was raided for material. I thought [Mathison] had done a great job.”

Mathison's collaboration with Spielberg was harmonious, and she received the sole writing credit on
E.T.
However, a public dispute arose in 1989 when she won a Writers Guild of America arbitration award giving her a share of the lucrative merchandising revenues, on the grounds that the first written description of the alien character was in her screenplay.

Arbitrator Sol Rosenthal found that Mathison had “extensively detailed her main character in her first two working drafts, before Carlo Rambaldi's model was done.”
§
Universal argued that the character had been described by Spielberg and Sayles for
Night
Skies,
but Rosenthal concluded that while there were “some similar references to the extraterrestrial in the earlier material … a review of Sayles' description (of a character with a beaklike mouth
and eyes like a grasshopper's) demonstrates that E.T. was not copied from Sayles' script…. Mathison did not stop at writing only that E.T.'s finger glowed. She described his unique hands and fingers. Mathison did not only write that E.T. was three-and-a-half-feet tall; she created short squashed legs, a telescopic neck, a protruding belly, long, thin arms and a glowing heart. She did not simply write that E.T.'s face was round, but detailed his wide head, the softness in his face, his large, round eyes, the leathery creases and furrows in his brow.”

Spielberg's lawyer, Bruce Ramer, subsequently wrote in a letter published in
Daily
Variety,
“That determination does not justify, by any stretch of the imagination, the implication that Mr. Spielberg had little or nothing to do with the birth and shaping of the character and concept central to the most successful motion picture in history. As Ms. Mathison would unquestionably confirm to you, Mr. Spielberg conveyed his views and concepts to her respecting
E.T.
in the most minute detail, both before and during the writing process.”
¶

I
NCREDIBLE
as it seems in retrospect, Columbia passed on the opportunity to make
E.
T.

After running demographic surveys on
E.T.
and
Me
(as Mathison's screenplay was then titled), Columbia's marketing and research department, headed by Marvin Antonowsky, concluded that it had limited commercial potential. Antonowsky thought
E.T.
and
Me
would appeal mostly to juvenile audiences; the word around Hollywood was that the studio considered it “a wimpy Walt Disney movie.” Columbia president Frank Price took the advice seriously and put Mathison's script into turnaround, allowing the project to escape to Universal. Spielberg reportedly was so angered at Price that when the executive later shifted to Universal himself, Spielberg insisted that in any dealings with the studio, he would not have to talk to Price.

Price publicly blamed Universal for his decision to put
E.T.
into turnaround, claiming Universal had exercised a contractual hold on Spielberg for another picture. “I could have told Steven to go direct a picture for Universal and then come back and do
E.T.
here,” Price said. “But this was the project he wanted to do next.” Sid Sheinberg denied that account, saying, “Steven had no compulsion to deliver that project to us—contractual or otherwise. It is very simple. Steven brought us the script and said he thought we could acquire it from Columbia.”

Columbia “had a million dollars into [
Night
Skies/E.T
.] for development before we let it go,” Veitch recalls. “I talked to Sid Sheinberg about it, and they were willing to go partners with us, but [Columbia] for whatever reason didn't want to do that. [Price simply explained, ‘I don't do co-ventures.'] But
we kept a little piece of
E.T.
[5 percent of the net profits], and I think that year we made more on that picture than any we did on any of
our
films.”

Before taking
E.
T.
to Sheinberg, Spielberg tried to sell Universal on letting him make a musical,
Reel
to
Reel,
which he had been developing with writer Gary David Goldberg.
Daily
Variety
columnist Army Archerd described
Reel
to
Reel
as “a semi-autobiographical original story by Steven Spielberg … about a young director making his first movie—a sci-fi musical!” One of the principal characters was based on Sheinberg. While in London working on
Raiders,
Spielberg had Goldberg ensconced in the same hotel, writing the script for the musical.

“Many days while we were in Europe shooting
Raiders,
”
recalls executive producer Howard Kazanjian, “Steven and I, and sometimes Kathy [Kathleen] Kennedy, would ride out together or ride back to the studio, and Steven was talking about a musical,
Reel
to
Reel,
that he wanted to direct next. At one time he flew home to make the presentation to Sid. Sheinberg didn't want to do it. When Sid said no on this musical, Steven kinda said, ‘OK, I'll quickly do this other little picture,
E.T.,
to get my obligation out of the way.' I think that's why he really did it, just to fulfill that last-picture deal with Sid.”
||

S
PIELBERG'S
description of
E.T.
as “a very personal story … about  the divorce of my parents, how I felt when my parents broke up” helps  account for his film's extraordinary ability to touch deep emotional chords in  the mass audience. 

By the early 1980s, divorce and single-parent families were becoming the norm in America. The 1950s model of the ideal nuclear family survived largely on sitcoms and in Disney movies. As
Daily
Variety
critic Art Murphy observed at the time, one of the reasons
E.
T.
succeeded while Disney films were failing was that Spielberg was willing to acknowledge the harsh reality of divorce and incorporate it into his fantasy. Disney's misguided executives, on the other hand, were trying to replicate the kind of movies their founder had made in the fifties. What they failed to understand, in Murphy's view, was that if Walt Disney himself were still alive,
he
would have changed with the times. The reason Spielberg and Disney became such enormously popular artists was that they were such representative figures, their personal obsessions coinciding with major underlying currents in their society.