Steven Spielberg (72 page)

On the other hand, it proved even harder for Spielberg than it had for Walker to get inside the skin of Mister (Danny Glover), that embodiment of patriarchal insensitivity whose two-dimensionality on screen evoked a firestorm of protest. Spielberg's visceral revulsion toward bullies left him little room for understanding how someone becomes a bully, particularly someone from such a vastly different social background. When Mister finally
redeems himself, Spielberg musters up far less sympathy and forgiveness than the novelist feels for the character, whom she based on her own grandfather. Spielberg cannot help keeping the repentant Mister at a wary distance, treating him as a solitary and pathetic figure bereft of the mature companionship he shared with Celie in the latter parts of the book.

Ironically, the white male director's reworking of Walker's novel sees the relationship between Celie and Mister from a viewpoint that is even
more
onesidedly feminist. But as the novelist pointedly observed, people who most vehemently objected to the characterization of Mister often displayed a selective sense of outrage: “[W]hen
The
Color
Purple
was published, and later filmed, it was a rare critic who showed any compassion for, or even noted, the suffering of the women and children explored in the book, while I was called a liar [as was Spielberg] for showing that black men sometimes perpetuate domestic violence.”

Walker exercised an unusual degree of influence over the filming of her book. She consulted on the casting and had a clause inserted in her contract providing that half the crew members would be “women or blacks or Third World people.” Using photographs of her grandparents' home to indicate how Mister's home should look, she convinced production designer J. Michael Riva that not all southern blacks lived in abject poverty during the early 1900s. Riva admitted that “to do justice to this film, I had to confront my own prejudices.” Walker also wrote her own screenplay, which was rejected in favor of one written by Menno Meyjes, a Dutch immigrant who had impressed Spielberg with his script about the Children's Crusade,
Lionheart.
||
The author was present for much of the production, working closely with Meyjes and the cast to ensure that the dialogue sounded true to the period and did not violate the spirit of the book.

There were moments of anxiety for Walker when she questioned the depth of Spielberg's understanding of racial issues. One such occasion was the day “Steven referred to
Gone
With
the
Wind
as ‘the greatest movie ever made' and said his favorite character was Prissy [the childlike slave played by Butterfly McQueen]…. I slept little for several nights after his comment, as I thought of all I would have to relay to him, busy as he was directing our film, to make him understand what a nightmare
Gone
With
the
Wind
was to me.” Spielberg's naïveté about some aspects of the black American experience also showed through in a poignant moment of mutual misunderstanding. At a preproduction meeting, Spielberg and his colleagues were discussing how they could make cameo appearances in the movie (the director eventually dubbed in the forlorn whistling of Willard Pugh's Harpo when
his wife, Sofia, leaves him). In what he undoubtedly intended as a heartfelt gesture of solidarity, Spielberg asked the novelist if she would appear in a scene holding his infant son, Max.

“I was upset by your question, because of course I could not,” Walker wrote Spielberg in 1989. “There is just too much history for that to have been possible. It's a very long Southern/South African tradition, after all—black women holding white babies. And yet, I felt so sad for us all, that this should be so. And especially moved by you, who had this history as no part of your consciousness.”

F
OR
the first day of shooting, Spielberg scheduled the scene of Shug Avery serenading Celie in Harpo's rowdy “jook joint.” In a happy confluence of milestones, this also was Whoopi Goldberg's first day before a movie camera, and her shy, elated look of surprise represents the beginning of her character's sensual awakening.

As the scene was described by cinematographer Allen Daviau, “We have this tiny, scared woman, who has barely been off her farm in over a decade, yet there she is in a nightclub, a ‘jook joint,' seeing a life she didn't know existed, as a churchgoing woman of that time. Here she was, almost hiding, in this marvelous old hat that Aggie Rodgers, the costume designer, gave her, as all the action of the ‘jook joint' happens around her.” With Celie's face softly caressed by a tiny light hidden on the table, but seemingly by the glow from a kerosene lantern, “This shot is when we first realized the magic of Whoopi Goldberg's eyes,” Daviau recalled. “It was one of those wonderful moments when you're working on a movie and you realize something special is really happening. You feel that you've just seen a character
live
on screen and you really know where the movie is going.

“Even though it might've been done for logistical reasons, it was a stroke of real genius by Steven to choose to start in the ‘jook joint.' I think he knew in his heart that a lot of things would come together in this scene. It was one of those magic decisions that sets the tone for the film in all aspects.”

The performance Spielberg evoked from Goldberg has few, if any, equals in the director's body of work. Perhaps only Ben Kingsley's Itzhak Stern in
Schindler's
List
has a similar degree of richness and complexity, expressed with such eloquent economy of gesture and intonation. But while Kingsley's Stern is ever a man of infinite subtlety and shrewdness, Celie's character is formed before our eyes, year by year, look by look, word by word. She begins as a helpless girl of seemingly artless simplicity, only gradually acquiring the fiercely self-protective survival skills that, in the end, give her a transcendent strength and wisdom.

Goldberg came to Spielberg's attention with her acclaimed one-woman show, in which she played several offbeat characters. The comedienne (whose real name is Caryn Johnson) read
The
Color
Purple
and, like many
other female readers of the book, felt a personal emotional connection with it. She wrote Alice Walker asking to play Sofia in the movie, adding that just to be part of it, she would be willing to “play a Venetian blind, if necessary.” Walker caught Goldberg's show in San Francisco and recommended her to Spielberg for the part of Celie.

Spielberg asked Goldberg if she would perform her act for him and “a couple of friends.” She was stunned to find Spielberg's screening room filled with people, including Walker, Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson, and Lionel Richie. She cheekily included in that performance “a piece I'd been asked not to do by other people”: a parody of
E.T.
in which the alien winds up on dope in an Oakland jail. Although Spielberg later expressed outrage when the
Los
Angeles
Times
pictured E.T. wearing a coke spoon, he “loved” her privately performed parody, Goldberg reported. He asked her to play Celie, but she wanted to play Sofia, a character she felt “had more spirit, more heart…. And then I realized that Steven Spielberg's sitting there trying to convince me to be in his movie. And it was like, ‘Wake up, stupid. Say
yes.
'
”

During rehearsals, Spielberg felt Goldberg “didn't interact with the other cast members very well—she was intimidated by the professionalism of Danny Glover and the spontaneity of Oprah Winfrey. I got very worried about her because she wasn't part of that cast. Then once she got on the set she essentially gave herself over to me, and just said, ‘Listen, you're going to have to help me because I don't know what the hell I'm doing!' That performance came out of her soul.”

Spielberg patiently taught her the basic lesson of movie acting, which is to work from within, letting the camera observe the character's thought processes rather than projecting the character as one would do on the stage. “In that camera are a million people,” Spielberg told her. “They can see everything you do.”

“The cat just gave me all kinds of faith,” Goldberg recalled. “Plus, we had a lingo because he's a movie fanatic like me. He would say something like, ‘Okay, Whoopi, do Boo Radley right after the door opens in
To
Kill
a
Mockingbird.
'
Or he'd say, ‘You know the scene where Indiana Jones finally finds the girl at the end? That kind of relief he has? That's what I want.'… When I had a terribly wrenching scene with Danny Glover, he'd say, ‘OK, it's
Gaslight
time,' and I'd crack up.”

Oprah Winfrey, who at the time was the host of a local TV talk-show,
AM
Chicago,
also made a spectacular film debut in
The
Color
Purple.
The role of Sofia introduced her to the nationwide audience that soon would make her a TV superstar. Winfrey was cast in the film after Quincy Jones, on a visit to Chicago, saw her on his hotel TV. Immediately recognizing her similarity to the stout, outspoken, defiantly self-respecting Sofia, he suggested her to Spielberg.

“Terrified” to be acting in her first film, Winfrey also felt intimidated by the director. When she had difficulty crying on her first day of shooting, she
thought, “I'm gonna go down in history as the actress who couldn't cry in a Spielberg movie.” Spielberg “didn't seem upset but said we'd get it another day. I left the set and cried all afternoon because I couldn't cry for him.” With some pointers from veteran actor Adolph Caesar (who played Danny Glover's father), she finally managed to cry on cue, but continued working in a constant state of insecurity. In the journal she kept during the filming, she wrote of Spielberg, “I know he hates me. I know he must be sorry he ever cast me, a non-actor, in this movie. If I don't get better soon he's probably going to ask me to leave. Or maybe we've shot too much already. O God, why didn't I take an acting class?” After she criticized a fight scene between Sofia and her husband, Harpo, as being “too slapsticky,” the director told her, “You're being too analytical, and you can't watch the dailies anymore.” But she felt vindicated when he eventually dropped the scene from the movie. Spielberg admitted being “a little frustrated” at first with her inexperience, but his respect for her acting ability grew and he enlarged her role as filming progressed.

When Winfrey played Sofia's reawakening scene at Celie's dinner table toward the end of location shooting in North Carolina, it became an emotional epiphany for both the character and the actress. That scene also is a major turning point for Celie, in which she finally gives liberating vent to all her pent-up rage against Mister. Spielberg's usual method of shooting underwent a dramatic change when it was filmed.

“That was a tough scene,” Allen Daviau recalls. “We were in a real house in North Carolina, not on a stage, and the
heat!
We were filling the room with smoke; we had a lot of people crowded in. They were seemingly simple setups, but when you're dealing with that many people, every time you shifted a setup, a whole bunch of things had to shift. And he wanted every reaction there was. He went by the book in covering that scene. He had different [image] sizes, he had different looks, he just had it every way you could possibly look. I kidded him, ‘This is George Stevens' kind of coverage.' Very unusual for him. Most of the time you know he's got exactly in his head what he's going to do. He generally does not shoot a lot of takes. A lot of it had to do with Oprah's character being very, very lost, showing all of her pain and then having a recovery, and how this was going to be achieved.”

Winfrey recalled that Spielberg encouraged her to improvise much of her dialogue in that scene, “like when I started to rock in my chair, and I said to Whoopi, ‘I want to thank you, Miss Celie, for everything you've done for me.' And then Sofia started to cry—I started to cry. When Steven yelled ‘Cut,' I looked up, and there he was, giving me a great big hug…. Whoopi stood up and said, ‘My sister today became an actress!'”

The
Color
Purple
marked “only the second time I didn't storyboard the whole picture,” Spielberg said. “The first time was
E.T.,
because it was an emotional journey. I felt that
The
Color
Purple
was even more of an emotional journey, and I wanted to surprise myself through the process of discovery
every day during the making of the movie.
**
I was afraid the storyboards would tie me down to preconceived ideas that would no longer be relevant once the cast got together and began performing their hearts out…. Allen and I were very gentle to everybody. On
E.
T.,
we were yelling and screaming all the time, but on this picture we were a lot more mellow. I was never more relaxed while making a picture.”

Alice Walker carries a lasting impression of “the feeling of love that was palpable daily on the set…. ‘What makes this Jewish boy think he can direct a movie about black people?' critics fumed. Well, what did, exactly? It was this that I wanted to know. I thought it might be love. I thought it might be courage. I thought it might be the most wonderful thing of all: Steven had outgrown being a stranger.”

H
O
W
disheartening it was, then, for Spielberg when his labor of love was met with a hostile response from critics who were not content to attack his work but also tried to put him in his place with venomous personal insults. The majority of the film's reviews actually were positive—thirty-three reviewers put it on their 1985 top-ten lists—and the public warmly embraced it. Opening on Spielberg's thirty-ninth birthday, December 18, 1985,
The
Color
Purple
grossed a remarkable $142.7 million in worldwide box office, with a production cost of only $15 million. But its popular success only served to heighten the contempt of Spielberg's detractors. The negative reviews left a lasting sting, as did the angry reaction in some segments of the black community.