Steven Spielberg

Spielberg also saw that overseas markets would transform the selling of cinema. Action and special effects needed no translation, so his films were perfect for foreign audiences. Long before the American economist Theodore Levitt propounded the theory of ‘globalisation’ in 1983, Spielberg was making the kind of universally appealing product which Levitt foresaw would dominate world markets in the future. Coca-Cola, Volkswagen, McDonald’s and rock stars like Madonna were sold in the same form and with the same trademark all over the world; so was Raiders of the Lost Ark, the emphatic comic-book logo of which, with its lettering of crimson and gold, would become as widely recognisable as the Coca-Cola wave. Increasingly throughout the seventies and eighties, Asia and Europe would almost equal Spielberg’s domestic audience.

At Warners, Zanuck and Brown’s five-film deal was winding down in mutual boredom. Ace Eli, from Spielberg’s story, with Cliff Robertson as the pilot, still hadn’t gone into production, and the administration was showing cold feet about most of the duo’s projects. They had accepted only one ‘youth’ package, Steelyard Blues, assembled by Michael and Julia Phillips with actor-turned-producer Tony Bill. The script was by David S. Ward, and Alan Myerson would direct Jane Fonda and the then-hot Donald Sutherland.

In midsummer, word got around of an imminent move by the partners. Lew Wasserman had decided that he wanted Universal in the feature business. Rather than promote Sheinberg or Tanen, however, he offered Zanuck and Brown a bungalow on the lot and a role as, in effect, its feature division, developing projects with studio funding, and releasing only through Universal. They leapt at the opportunity. In July they left Warners to form Zanuck/Brown Productions, and six weeks later they announced the Universal deal. In the weeks before they left and in the month immediately following, agents were asked to come in and pitch. Fields and Spielberg joined the queue.

Anxious to be seen as creative film-makers rather than loose-cannon executives, Zanuck and Brown boxed the compass with their purchases: black exploitation and horror, comedies and thrillers, prestige pictures and women’s stories. Some were trivial, but their choices showed they knew what the market wanted: not sex, but sensation and humour. Having succeeded with Patton at Fox by giving the story of an American military hero to a radical young screenwriter, Francis Coppola, they decided to have George C. Scott repeat the feat, this time playing Douglas MacArthur, and commissioned a screenplay from Barwood and Robbins. Would Spielberg be interested in directing? He said ‘Probably,’ though in truth he hated the idea of ‘two years working in ten different countries and getting dysentery in each one of them’.

He remained keener on comedy, of which Zanuck and Brown had a number of films in development. From American Graffiti’s writers Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, they’d bought Lucky Lady, a thirties farce about booze running. Paul Newman, another client of Freddie Fields, showed some interest in it, and in Spielberg, for First Artists, the consortium he’d just formed with Barbra Streisand, Steve McQueen and Sidney Poitier to take more control of their films.

Mike Medavoy, representing Michael and Julia Phillips, sold Zanuck and Brown a period script, The Sting, about a con trick perpetrated on a gangster in Depression Chicago. The brainchild of David S. Ward, it had attracted Tony Bill. Ward, however, wanted to direct it, and was leery of letting it be shown around as a script. Bill persuaded him to recount the plot into a tape recorder, and the Phillipses, impressed, financed the screenplay.

One casualty of Zanuck and Brown’s move to Universal was Ace Eli. Lacking their protection, it was botched by Fox, who decided the ending, where Robertson commits suicide, was depressing. They reshot it, and producer, director and screenwriter all removed their names: Erman became ‘Bill Sampson’, Robert Fryer ‘Boris Wilson’ and writer Claudia Salter ‘Chips Rosen’. Spielberg probably had some part in the choice of these noms du cinema, since ‘Chips Rosen’ resembles ‘Josh Rogan’, a pseudonym he assigned to Melissa Mathison when she wrote part of his Twilight Zone: The Movie episode in 1983. Spielberg himself, however, kept his screen credit for Ace Eli’s original story. Savagely reviewed in Variety, the film was dumped in sixteen cinemas, mostly in regional centres like Washington DC and Baltimore, earning a paltry $13,400 in its first week.

With no decision in sight from Newman on Lucky Lady, Zanuck and Brown put The Sugarland Express into their schedule, burying it under a black exploitation film, Willy Dynamite, Clint Eastwood’s The Eiger Sanction, a reptilian horror film called Sssssss, and The Sting.

Wasserman wasn’t fooled when Zanuck and Brown visited his home to outline their first year’s production plans.

‘We think Steve has a great future,’ Wasserman told them, ‘but I have to tell you we do not have faith in this project.’

They pressed, and the studio chief relented, though with ill grace. ‘Make the film, fellows, but you may not be playing to full theatres.’ Had Zanuck and Brown known Wasserman better, they would have realised that such predictions tended to become self-fulfilling.

Encouraged by the Phillipses, Schrader was writing Taxi Driver for Scorsese. Hoping to win over Spielberg permanently to their side, the Phillipses encouraged their conversations about a project on UFOs.

Spielberg grew up watching films about alien contact and invasion. Trying to get his vision on paper in 1970, he wrote a short story called ‘Experiences’, about UFOs over a midwestern town which are seen only by the kids parked in the local lovers’ lane. It echoed his Boy Scout troop’s experience in the Arizona desert and his own memories of the New Jersey hillside where hundreds of people watched a meteorite shower. The Phillipses could see the idea had promise, though they urged a stronger political message, suggesting that the failure to investigate might be a kind of Watergate cover-up.

Schrader, arguably the most original mind of New Hollywood, had never seen the films that influenced Spielberg. Raised by Calvinist fundamentalists, he skipped junk film entirely: his heroes were ascetics like Robert Bresson, Yasujiro Ozu and Carl Dreyer. However, once Spielberg began describing the international network of UFOlogists and their struggle to convince officialdom, Schrader’s fascination with morally driven characters was engaged.

One of the leading investigators, J. Allen Hynek, had begun investigating UFOs for the US Air Force. After discounting 80 per cent of sightings, he was left with a residue of genuinely inexplicable phenomena. Inspired by Hynek, Schrader drafted a script, called variously ‘Pilgrim’ and ‘Kingdom Come’, about Paul VanOwen, a sceptical federal agent converted by what Hynek called a ‘close encounter of the third kind’ – physical contact with aliens, as opposed to lights in the sky or signs of a landing. He persuades the government to fund a fifteen-year investigation of the phenomenon, only to find, in Schrader’s words, ‘that the key to making contact isn’t out there in the universe, but implanted inside him’.

After one Sunday at the Phillipses’, Spielberg stopped his car in the middle of the night on Mulholland Drive, the road that weaves sinuously along the ridge between Los Angeles and the Valley. Climbing out, he flopped on his back across the bonnet to gape at the night sky. Tilting his head, he saw the Valley’s net of light inverted, spread out above his head, as if the constellations had suddenly arranged themselves in orderly lines of red, green and diamond white. He was no longer looking down on a city but up at… something else: a space ship so huge that it filled the sky?

Now at least he knew what the UFO film would look like. He was less sure what it was about.

In October 1972, Goldie Hawn had signed a three-film deal with Universal. Her career, which soared after she left TV’s comedy Laugh In to win a 1969 Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her first film, Cactus Flower, had slumped with a Warren Beatty thriller, enigmatically called $s, and the comedy Butterflies are Free. Zanuck suggested her as Lou Jean Poplin in Sugarland Express. Hawn wanted to ditch her ditzy image, and Spielberg was happy to agree. She signed in December.

Julia Phillips in her autobiography harps on Hawn’s scruffy style and dirty hair, but to Spielberg these were her charm. She became the model for the tousled, untidy women of all his films: Close Encounters’s Melinda Dillon, sleepy in T-shirt and cut-offs; tomboyish Karen Allen and Kate Capshaw in two Indiana Jones films; Holly Hunter in Always; harassed mum Dee Wallace in E.T.; Laura Dern in Jurassic Park; Julia Roberts’s Tinkerbell in Hook. All fit the ‘younger sister/older brother’ model with which Spielberg characterised his romantic relationships. Mostly sexless, these women in his films live for and through their children or boyish men. Femininity is a reward conferred by their lovers, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Color Purple, Always and Hook, women don ‘girl clothes’ as a sign of desirability. ‘It’s not the clothes,’ sighs Holly Hunter deliriously in Always when Richard Dreyfuss presents her with a cocktail dress and high heels, ‘it’s the way you see me.’

For Spielberg, as for many directors, the erotic gratification of shooting films transcended sex. ‘When I’m making a movie I become celibate,’ he has said. ‘I get into the routine of fucking my movie.’ (He also avoided seeing other films at such times, fearful, he says, of his work being impregnated by the ideas of others.) He deprecated those film-makers preoccupied with ‘sport fucking’. ‘Location shooting is the Rites of Spring to most film crews,’ he said. ‘Holiday Inns across America are probably host to more sprung beds and screaming orgasms when a movie company comes to town than at any other time.’

Spielberg lost his virginity at seventeen in a Holiday Inn motel – ‘With a creature,’ he joked, in the wake of E.T., ‘that was anything but extraterrestrial.’ During his days at Universal, he dated regularly, encouraged by the more aggressive De Palma, who made the pick-ups and set the pace. When Spielberg finagled one of the first portable phones out of the studio, he and De Palma enjoyed calling girls from their driveways to ask for a date, then ringing the doorbell half a minute later. De Palma, an enthusiast for voyeurism and porn, both of which are recurring themes in his films, shot all their excursions on the 16mm camera he always carried. Their conquests were mostly starlets as low in the pecking order as themselves. Spielberg briefly tangled with Sarah Miles, and with striking Hispanic Victoria Principal, but neither relationship was exactly serious. Miles was no stranger to romance, and the later star of Dallas was so nakedly ambitious that she founded her own talent agency and blitzed casting directors with head shots and resumes of its favourite client: herself. Spielberg later ruefully rated her ‘a great mind trapped in a great body’.

‘Spielberg has always surrounded himself with women,’ Martin Amis observed. ‘Surrogate aunts, mothers, kid sisters.’ But he recoiled from relationships which might have forced him to assume responsibility for another’s emotional well-being. Actresses never posed that problem. They were too self-absorbed for more than a passing involvement. But that cut both ways. An actress offered no reassurance or consolation when Hollywood turned and savaged you. ‘You can’t cry on a shoulder that’s wearing a shoulder pad,’ Spielberg told one friend revealingly.

On 14 December 1972, just a few days before Spielberg’s twenty-fifth birthday, Universal printed out the red-covered Final Screenplay of The Sugarland Express. Shooting would begin on 8 January 1973 near San Antonio. Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins took sole writing credit, from Spielberg’s original story, but because of his intensive observation and discussion of the script during writing, Spielberg’s signature was on almost every scene.

Scarfing up the remains of the youth boom, Warners and United Artists had also put films into pre-production about young outlaw lovers. Badlands, directed by another newcomer, Terrence Malick, a Rhodes Scholar and Harvard graduate with a convincing line of intellectual chat, was based on the 1958 plains states murders committed by Charlie Starkweather and his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, while Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us retold a Bonnie and Clyde story against a rural Depression background. Though both promised to be radically different in tone to Sugarland, Universal was nervous about so much competition. Spielberg didn’t care. Scouting locations, he was already thinking about ‘Watch the Skies’, as the UFO film was now called. Visiting Texas with Mike Fenton and Shari Rhodes to cast small roles for Sugarland, he’d earmarked some isolated airfields for what he told columnist Archer Winsten would be ‘an Air Force picture shrouded in science fiction’.

During this trip, Spielberg experienced a close encounter of his own that was to have far-reaching effects on his work. He found himself in a remote, old-fashioned hotel in Jefferson, Texas, with Diane Bucker, head of the Texas Film Commission, and Elliot Schick, the film’s production manager (and later producer of The Deer Hunter). Around midnight, as he undressed, he kept glimpsing a figure from the comer of his eye, though it disappeared as he tried to focus on it. A moment later, the entire room went cold, especially around the four-poster bed. Panicked, Spielberg roused the others and, pausing only to snap some flash pictures, fled. Bucker’s new Mercedes refused to start, so a mechanic was called. Once he had it going at 1.30 a.m., they drove sixty miles to the comforting anonymity of a Holiday Inn. Spielberg disavows any belief in the supernatural, putting such phenomena down to the power of suggestion. What the incident most resembles, in his retelling, is a movie, and in particular a favourite of his, Robert Wise’s 1963 version of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, which he called The Haunting. True to form, Spielberg recycled the experience in Poltergeist, another demonstration that in his universe everything, even the incorporeal, aspires to the condition of film.

As shooting loomed on Sugarland, he began choosing his team. He persuaded Verna Fields to take leave from USC to edit. Carey Loftin again planned the stunts, using one of the Corvettes he and Max Balchowski rebuilt as camera cars for Bullitt. Finding a cameraman was harder. Since he’d be shooting in winter, and on the open road, often in bad light, Spielberg needed the best. ‘Visually wooed,’ he said, ‘by the thought of all those cars,’ he wanted, as on Duel, to put his audience into them, like kids on a fairground ride. To do that, a cameraman had to be intimate with Robert Gottschalk’s spherical-lens Panavision cameras which, although they had only a shallow depth of field, allowed one to shoot on a wide-angle lens without distortion. In particular, he wanted to use the Panaflex, its lightweight and noiseless version, inside the cars.

He chose Vilmos Zsigmond, whom he’d met through McElwaine and Altman. A Hungarian with a massive ego, Zsigmond had bribed his way to the West with watches in 1956, bringing with him footage of the Soviet invasion. Within a decade he’d become one of Hollywood’s best cinematographers, with a reputation, earned on films like John Boorman’s Deliverance and Altman’s chilly Western McCabe and Mrs Miller, which Spielberg admired, for shooting in bad light and worse weather.

A few weeks before he began shooting, Spielberg found himself judging a student film competition with Douglas Trumbull, largely responsible for the special effects on 2001: A Space Odyssey, and composers Marvin Hamlisch and Jerry Goldsmith. The young director’s name didn’t register with Goldsmith, but Spielberg was so familiar with Goldsmith’s themes for series like Thriller and The Twilight Zone, and for Planet of the Apes and Patton, that he could hum long stretches of the music. He flirted with asking him to write the score for Sugarland, but opted instead for John Williams, who, though less inventive than Goldsmith, could be relied on to turn in a score squarely in the Hollywood vernacular.

Williams’s Sugarland music would indeed be consensus composing by a master pasticheur. ‘I wanted John to do a real symphony for this film,’ says Spielberg, ‘but he said, “If you want me to do The Red Pony or Appalachian Spring, you’re going to ruin your movie. It’s a very simple story, and the music should be picking and soft, with just a few violins and a small orchestra; cradle-like.”’ He used Dutch harmonica virtuoso ‘Toots’ Thielmans to enliven fragmentary music of a folksy simplicity. Working with Goldsmith, however, became an ambition for Spielberg. ‘I heard,’ says Goldsmith, ‘that Steve and Zanuck tossed a coin to decide between me and Williams to score Jaws.’ Coincidentally, Goldsmith also did the music for Ace Eli and Rodger of the Shies, but still didn’t associate its author with his fellow panellist.

From the start, the logistics of Sugarland promised the most problems. Universal’s technical departments helped Spielberg visualise the action by building models of locations like the used-car lot so he could plan his shooting with military precision. An artist sketched every scene in storyboards which he took to Texas and taped around his motel room – ‘so I could see exactly what the film would look like from a bird’s eye view… I always had a visual overview in terms of day-to-day shooting.’

A hundred cars participated in the original chase. Universal’s publicity claimed the film used 250, failing to mention that this included the crew’s private cars and support vehicles. In fact only forty appeared on camera, and even that number threatened to be unwieldy. Richard Zanuck arrived on location the first day with trepidation.

I was thinking, well, let’s take it easy. Let’s get the kid acclimated to this big-time stuff. But when I got out there the first day he was about ready to get this first shot, and it was the most elaborate fucking thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I mean tricky; all-in-one shots, the camera going and stopping, people going in and out. But he had such confidence in the way he was handling it. Here he was, a young little punk kid, with a lot of seasoned crew around, a major actress on hand, and instead of starting with something easy, he picked a very complicated thing that required all sorts of intricate timing.

And it worked incredibly well – and not only from a technical standpoint, but the performances were very good. I knew right then and there, without any doubt, that this guy knew more at that age about the mechanics of working out a shot than anybody alive at that time, no matter how many pictures they’d made. He took to it like – you know, like he was born with a knowledge of cinema. And he never ceased to amaze me from that day on.

Zanuck was right about the shooting, but charitable about the performances. Then, as later, nobody got much direction from Spielberg, who simply outlined the action and let them provide the characterisation. ‘The most I ever heard him say before a take,’ recalls one actor in his later films, ‘was, “Lots of energy” – which is what directors always say when they don’t know what they want. And afterwards he said, “A nice sense of reality.”’

Paul Freeman remarks diplomatically, ‘Steven is one of those people who do their direction of actors in the casting. They trust the performer to know his or her business, and to get on with it. On Raiders, he knew Karen Allen and I were from the stage and were used to rehearsing, so he sent us off to improvise. When we came back and showed him, he said, “Fine.” All that stuff in the tent between Karen and me was made up like that.’

Casting was, and is, agony for Spielberg. He often chooses actors from tests shot on his behalf, and almost never talks to the performers until they arrive on the set. ‘Steven goes with his nose,’ says Julian Glover, the villain of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He looks for performers who physically resemble his conception of the character and who have enough experience not to need direction. Wayne Knight arrived in Hawaii to play the fat computer hacker and embryo thief Nedry in Jurassic Park without having met him.

I got out of the van, walked up to him, and said, ‘I hope I’m the guy you wanted.’ He said, ‘Yeah, you are.’… So I get in the Jeep, and Steven gets in the Jeep, and here we are, me and Steven Spielberg sitting in this Jeep. I had never had so much as a conversation with him, and it was like, ‘So how about those Mets?’ I had no idea what to say.

If Spielberg auditions someone in person, it is seldom with a scene from the film. Usually he asks for some trivial physical action. On Raiders he held casting sessions in the Lucasfilm kitchen, asking nonplussed actors to mix and bake cookies, in an attempt to throw them back on their natural reactions. Emily Richard, the hero’s mother in Empire of the Sun, was requested simply to put her hair up for a moment. ‘He actually blushed when he asked me,’ says Richard, ‘and I blushed when I did it.’

William Atherton’s physical appearance rather than his acting recommended him for Clovis in Sugarland. ‘He’s a very soft-spoken individual with wild eyes,’ Spielberg said. ‘He could be so easily misunderstood by somebody with a pair of binoculars. One look at Bill [in Looking for Mr Goodbar] and you think, “My God, he’s going to kill Diane Keaton.”’ Michael Sacks was chosen for ‘Slide’ because Spielberg wanted the cop and Clovis to look as much alike as possible. ‘It’s two men who really began in the same small town, and went in two different directions.’

Casting as he prefers, exactly to type, paid off best in his choice of John Ford veteran Ben Johnson as Chief Tanner. With an actor whose screen persona was so firmly established, direction was superfluous. As Sacks remarked admiringly, ‘he has an extraordinary quality – he can say any cliché to you and make it seem profound.’ So effective was Johnson, however, that Spielberg came to regret his subsidiary role, feeling he should have spent more time on Tanner, explaining the compassion both for his quarry and his men that leads him to chase the fugitives rather than force a shoot-out.

The Poplins’ flight, trailed by scores of police cars, was again structured like a carnival ride, with incidents of random violence – an ambush by vigilante deputies, a chance pile-up at an intersection, the ‘potty stop’ scene, with Clovis flushing a gunman hiding in a Portaloo – breaking the exhilaration of sheer movement. Film historian Diane Jacobs rightly called Spielberg and his coevals ‘excruciatingly conscious of their medium and its history’. Hollywood had nursed them through adolescence and handed them a means of expressing themselves. As a result, they revered its past to a degree that baffled the Suits. The studios’ response to the credit squeeze of the sixties had been to sell backlots for office buildings and auction off their props. In June 1982, however, Spielberg would pay $60,500 at Sotheby-Parke Bernet for one of the surviving ‘Rosebud’ sleds from the last scene of Citizen Kane – a sequence which inspired the last shot of Raiders, where the Ark is sequestered in a giant warehouse choked with anonymous crates.

All Spielberg’s films are ‘about’ cinema before they are about anything else. ‘It’s very clear his references are to film rather than literature,’ says Tom Stoppard, who wrote the script for Spielberg’s version of J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun and acted for more than a year as his informal dramaturg. ‘If one was talking about Captains Courageous, one was talking about Spencer Tracy and the movie, rather than the book.’ Julian Glover says: