Steven Spielberg (69 page)

“I wasn't happy with [
Temple
of
Doom
] at all,” Spielberg said in 1989. “It was too dark, too subterranean, and much too horrific. I thought it out-poltered
Poltergeist.
There's not an ounce of my own personal feeling in
Temple
of
Doom.
”

T
HE
first negative reaction came even before shooting began, when Spielberg and Lucas were refused permission to shoot location scenes in India. Indian government officials, Katz recalls, were offended by the storyline because they “thought it was racist.” With its stereotypical Indian villains and its lurid relish in depicting bloodthirsty Thuggee rituals,
Temple
of
Doom
went far beyond the casual racism of
Raiders
of
the
Lost
Ark,
paying mindless homage to the worst aspects of
Gunga
Din
and other past examples of Hollywood cultural imperialism. As a result, most of the location work had to be done in Sri Lanka, with matte paintings and miniatures filling in for the village, the temple, and the palace of the boy maharajah. Other location shooting took place on the island of Macao, in Hong Kong, and in northern California, Arizona, Idaho, and Florida, but 80 percent of
Temple
of
Doom
was shot on soundstages at EMI-Elstree Studios in London.

Principal photography on
Temple
of
Doom
began in April 1983 and finished a week behind schedule in September, because Harrison Ford had to return to the U.S. for treatment for a previously sustained back injury. Despite budgetary inflation, which made the sequel cost $28 million, almost $8 million more than the original, Spielberg continued to take pride in his frugal and often ingenious shooting methods. When scenes inside a moving car were shot at Lucas's Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) for a car-chase sequence set in China, it turned out that the background plates filmed earlier in Hong Kong by the second unit had been shot at the wrong angle. Assistant director Louis B. Race recalls that Spielberg “came up with an idea he said he'd used on a film as a kid [
Firelight
]. He'd taken Christmas tree lights and put them on a clothesline and run them through the background. It's what's known as ‘poor man's process.' So at ILM we built a tubular metal lazy Susan and put the car in front of it. We hung pieces of cardboard cutout for the window. We had beer signs in the background modified to look Chinese, and we spun the lights around on the lazy Susan behind the window. The location manager, Dick Vane, turned to me and said, ‘You ever get the feeling that you're making films in somebody's garage?'”

With the
Twilight
Zone
crash fresh in his mind and a child actor involved in many of the action sequences, filming most of the film in controlled studio conditions made Spielberg feel more confident about safety concerns. Discussing the underground-mine chase sequence in an interview with
American
Cinematographer,
Spielberg stressed that he had achieved its sense of danger and speed through various forms of cinematic illusion.
“What we actually did,” he said, “was build a roller-coaster ride on the soundstage. And it really worked. It was safe. It was electrically driven. You could take rides in it.” Some of the shots involved miniature mine cars with puppets standing in for the actors. “Movies are unharnessed dreams,” Spielberg reflected, “but if they become too costly, or if danger is a factor, or it will take ten years to get there, you have to pull back on the tack and compromise your dream.”

W
HEN
Temple
of
Doom
was screened internally, “Everybody was appalled” by its violence, screenwriter Gloria Katz recalls. “Everybody was saying, ‘Steve, let's take it down,'” adds Willard Huyck. “At such a late point, it was very difficult to make changes. There were some changes having to do with the intensity of the violence.”

Ever since the institution of the Motion Picture Association of America rating system in 1968, there had been controversy over the MPAA's lenience toward violence in films, particularly in those released by major studios.
Jaws
and
Poltergeist,
which received PG ratings, often were cited as examples of films that were too violent for young children. “I don't make R movies! I make PG movies!” Spielberg declared while making a successful personal plea to the MPAA's Classification & Rating Appeals Board in May 1982 to overturn the R rating originally assigned to
Poltergeist.
Despite the opposition of the MPAA toward changing the system, there was increasing support in the industry for an intermediate rating between PG (parental guidance) and R (restricted for children unless they attend with a parent or an adult guardian).

“I've been advocating a fifth rating for a long time, along with many other filmmakers and studio executives,” a more subdued Spielberg said in 1984. “But we just don't have the strength to get it through…. The responsibility to the children of this country is worth any loss at the box office.” When
Temple
of
Doom
and
Gremlins
received PG ratings around the same time, both movies became battlegrounds in the debate about cinematic violence, all the more so because of their commercial success. In another rash of bad publicity, Spielberg came in for some harshly personal attacks in the press.

Part of the outcry against
Gremlins
was the false expectation, encouraged by the advertising campaign, that the movie was another feel-good children's fantasy like
E.T.
The most notorious scene in
Gremlins
shows a housewife chopping up gremlins in a blender and exploding them in a microwave oven. Joe Dante remembers getting “vitriolic” letters from people whose “big worry was that somebody was going to put his little brother or his poodle in the microwave. I think people are smarter than that. It didn't happen.” But before the film's release, Spielberg persuaded the director to tone down some of the bloodier scenes of humans attacking gremlins, telling him, “I don't know if they've done anything bad enough to deserve this.”

Spielberg also publicly admitted that he would be inclined to put his own hand over the eyes of a ten-year-old child during the lengthy passage in
Temple
of
Doom
depicting torture and human sacrifice.
Temple
of
Doom
was denounced by
People
magazine film critic Ralph Novak as “an astonishing violation of the trust” audiences placed in Spielberg and Lucas as makers of family entertainment. “The ads that say ‘this film may be too intense for younger children' are fraudulent,” Novak complained. “No parent should allow a young child to see this traumatizing movie; it would be a cinematic form of child abuse. Even Ford is required to slap Quan and abuse Capshaw. But then there are no heroes connected with this film, only two villains; their names are Spielberg and Lucas.”

It can be argued, on the other hand, that subteens are the natural audience for the outlandish violence and gore of
Temple
of
Doom,
just as they were for the horror comics that provoked such overwrought outrage in the 1950s. Spielberg often is mistakenly accused of having an overly sunny view of life, but the phobias he has wrestled with since childhood have deeply affected his work. Whether children are traumatized by nightmarish imagery when it is presented in an unrealistic context or whether they find it cathartic in helping them deal with their own fears, as they do with the gruesome violence in fairy tales, is a matter on which child psychologists sharply disagree.

In
The
Uses
of
Enchantment,
his 1976 book on the psychological implications of children's fairy tales, Bruno Bettelheim observed that “the dominant culture wishes to pretend, particularly where children are concerned, that the dark side of man does not exist…. [and] the prevalent parental belief is that a child must be diverted from what troubles him most: his formless, nameless anxieties, and his chaotic, angry, and even violent fantasies. Many parents believe that only conscious reality or pleasant and wish-fulfilling images should be presented to the child—that he should be exposed only to the sunny side of things. But such one-sided fare nourishes the mind in a one-sided way, and real life is not all sunny.”

The uproar resulting from
Temple
of
Doom
and
Gremlins
led in short order to the MPAA's creation of the PG-13 rating, which cautions parents that “some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.” The PG-13 rating has helped filmmakers avoid the stark editing choices previously dictated by the lack of an intermediate rating between PG and R, and it has helped ease some of the pressure on Hollywood from groups calling for greater censorship of sex and violence on screen.

M
AKING
Indiana J
ones
and
the
Temple
of
Doom
may have been a cathartic experience for Spielberg personally. Although he paid a price in public opprobrium for making such a grisly film, it may have helped him deal with the living nightmare of
Twilight
Zone
—
The
Movie.

Like so many other irresponsible father figures in Spielberg's work, Indiana Jones in
Temple
of
Doom
must exorcise his adult weaknesses and undergo a purifying test of character in order to be worthy of his fatherly responsibilities. Before he can rescue the lost children, Indy must be freed
from his murderous trance, brought on by the forced drinking of blood during the ritual of human sacrifice. “Tempted by the violent cruelty of adulthood, Indiana is called back to childhood's innocence by his surrogate son [Short Round],” observed critic Henry Sheehan in
Film
Comment.
What is crucial for Indy “is that he abandon the corrupt world of adults and once again affirm his essential child-ness. The film even closes with a shot of Indiana and Willie—happy, it seems, at being a mom—being engulfed by a tide of laughing children.”

At age thirty-seven, Steven Spielberg finally was ready to become a father.