Steven Spielberg

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:

It’s not that he ever said, ‘This shot is a copy of one in Stagecoach; the remake, not the original,’ or, ‘Here’s my Lawrence of Arabia shot. But you just had a sense… He asked me to do one shot [on Indiana Jones and the Lost Crusade], and I said, ‘Steven, I don’t know why I’m making this move.’ And he said, ‘Well, in Adam’s Rib, Spencer Tracy…’ And I just held up my hands and said, ‘That’s fine.’ Obviously he knew exactly what he was doing.

Kevork Malikyan, who played Kazim in The Last Crusade, had a similar experience. Spielberg spent hours staging his death. He was to collapse into Alison Doody’s arms and slide down her body. After grabbing him, she pulls her hands back to find them covered in blood. The shot refused to gel, and Spielberg dropped it, never mentioning he’d been trying to recreate the death of a disguised Daniel Gelin in the arms of James Stewart in Hitchcock’s remake of The Man who Knew too Much.

One can multiply such stories by the dozen. TV exposed the Brats to more movies than most Hollywood professionals saw in a lifetime. They wore their knowledge self-consciously, even arrogantly, and while Spielberg didn’t carry it to the extremes of Schrader or De Palma, he prepared his first cinema feature with a sense that he was not so much creating something new as building on what had gone before. ‘Once,’ recalls John Milius, ‘Steve and I were talking about how easily we could recreate the atmosphere of a Ford or Hitchcock film. He said, “But how is it we’re able to do that?” and I said, “Simple. We stole it.”’

Older heads despaired of the Brats’ fascination with movie lore. The newcomers, too young to have worked on the films they admired, saw old films not, as their makers did, in terms of personal experience, but as collections of themes, catchphrases, stylistic tricks. Recycling a gibe of Oscar Wilde, British critic Philip French accused them of knowing ‘the credits of everything but the value of nothing’. John Gregory Dunne agreed.

It always struck me that of all the people who were at the Phillipses that summer, there were very few who actually work… the social and cultural mines. [They were] basically gadgeteers. More interested in things… People graduate from Michigan State or wherever, take their book bags, come here to film school, and have no other basis in life except the movies they’ve seen. That’s why they’re making movies about Superman and poltergeists, and about psychic phenomena… Their problem is that they have never done anything.

‘You get the feeling,’ wrote Pauline Kael in an influential review that did much to put Spielberg on the map, ‘that the director grew up with TV and wheels (My Mother the Car?), and that he has a new temperament. Maybe Spielberg loves action and comedy and speed so much that he doesn’t really care if the movie has nothing else in it.’

The model for The Sugarland Express was, inevitably, another movie. In 1951, Austrian-born Billy Wilder paid an acid tribute to the affection of his adoptive country for bread and circuses with Ace in the Hole. A reporter named Chuck Tatum, played by Kirk Douglas at his most misanthropic, happens on the story of a lifetime, a man trapped in a mine under a New Mexico mountain. Rescuers expect to dig him out in a day or two, but Tatum, spinning out the story, persuades them to sink a shaft from the top. A ghoulish carnival gathers around the stricken man, with the reporter as its arrogant ringmaster. Tatum becomes famous, but the man dies.

To nobody’s surprise, least of all Wilder’s, Ace in the Hole flopped. ‘Americans expected a cocktail,’ he said, unperturbed, ‘and felt I was giving them a shot of vinegar instead.’ But Spielberg never concealed its affinities with The Sugarland Express: ‘I loved the Ace in the Hole similarity. I liked the idea of people rallying behind a media event, not knowing who the characters are or what they’re about, but just supporting them because they are on an errand of mercy to get their baby back – and that sparks a good deal of good old American sentimentality.’ It was a theme he would return to in 1941: the power of the media to convince people of almost anything, and the readiness of those people not only to believe what they hear but to act on it, often catastrophically. Sight and Sound saw the connection between Wilder and the anarchic hymns to road violence to which The Sugarland Express superficially belonged by summing it up as ‘Ace in the Hole meets Vanishing Point’. Few people grasped that Spielberg, as he been on the side of the truck rather than the car in Duel, wasn’t deploring mob rule in Sugarland Express but relishing it.

Once he started shooting, Spielberg had his hands full controlling his first major feature crew, and in particular Zsigmond, who had ambitions to direct and wasn’t backward in suggesting how he would have planned a scene. These problems were exacerbated when Spielberg insisted on operating the camera himself for many sequences. Lighting cameramen traditionally work with an operator who runs the camera while they concentrate on placing lights and mapping out movements. Spielberg, however, still had the amateur’s love of shooting, and would continue to handle the camera on many scenes throughout his career, to the irritation of directors of photography.

‘Vilmos is a very interesting man,’ Spielberg said diplomatically, ‘And when you employ his great camera eye, you also get gratis his thoughts. He would offer ideas beyond the definition of the American cinematographer.’ Arguments were common, but Spielberg won most of them. ‘When a cameraman [has] free rein,’ he said, ‘he becomes the director and the director becomes the apprentice.’ And he felt he’d gone through his apprenticeship at Universal already. However it was Zsigmond who persuaded him that the camera, rather than occupying the position of a detached directorial Eye of God, should always represent the point of view of a character. Thereafter, Spielberg’s films became more concerned with people and a little less like cartoons.

‘Several crew members said they’d never been on a happier location,’ Goldie Hawn remarked. ‘Four of them ended up marrying local girls from San Antonio, which was our base of operations. One was a waitress, another took reservations at the Holiday Inn. Hollywood meets Texas. It was a happy company.’ Spielberg was unaffected, even amused by the nocturnal sighs and moans, which, characteristically, he noted in relation to a movie. ‘Walking along the hall at one in the morning at those Holiday Inns sometimes sounds like Gyorgy Ligeti’s Atmospheres from 2001.’ Sex helped alleviate the tensions of working in a district fed up with film units. Sam Peckinpah was shooting The Getaway in the area, and his piratical crew had looted CB radios from their hired police cars. As a result, Zanuck/Brown had to buy twenty-five junked black-and-whites at auction. After the shoot, Spielberg bought the Poplins’ car, with dozens of bullet holes still visible where the special effects technicians had drilled them, and drove it for years.

In February, he had cause to be glad he turned down White Lightning. Scandal erupted on location for Reynolds’s The Man who Loved Cat Dancing, shooting in Gila Bend, Arizona, with his one-time playmate Sarah Miles. Miles’s ‘personal assistant’ David Whiting was found dead after a Quaalude overdose, and evidence at the inquest suggested he and Reynolds had been sharing Miles’s bed. In different circumstances, it might have been Spielberg, not Vanishing Point’s Richard Sarafian, who had to handle this production and public-relations nightmare.

In May 1973, just as shooting on Sugarland ended, literary agent Roberta Pryor delivered to Zanuck in the California office and to Brown in New York typescripts of a new novel by an unknown writer. Both men read it overnight. Richer producers, once they got around to looking at it, were ready to buy the book, but by then Zanuck and Brown, often telephoning from public phones and restaurants to disguise their interest in the property, had snatched Peter Benchley’s Jaws for $175,000, with a further $75,000 for writing the first-draft screenplay, plus 10 per cent of net profits.

A few days later, Spielberg spotted the manuscript on Zanuck’s desk and took it home for the weekend. After reading until late, he tried to sleep, but woke from disturbed dreams. At 3 a.m. he picked up the book again, gripped by the story of a monster ravaging an East Coast resort until killed by a coalition of the local police chief, an Ivy League scientist and an old shark-hunter.

By Sunday night, he knew he had to film Jaws. All his life he’d feared the sea and its creatures. When he bought a house at Malibu in the eighties, he had nightmares of the waves undermining the foundations, and dreamed of piling up sandbags to protect it. He felt personally attacked by the shark, and wanted to strike back. This was reflex thinking, punch/counterpunch, the sort that video games sharpened. On Monday he walked into Zanuck and Brown’s office and said, ‘Let me direct this film.’

‘We’ve got a director,’ Brown told him.

He was Dick Richards, a competent technician but, more importantly, a client of Mike Medavoy, who also represented Benchley and had attached Richards to the project at its inception.

‘Well, if anything falls out,’ Spielberg told Brown, ‘I love this project.’

He didn’t have long to wait. Two days later, Zanuck and Brown lunched with Richards, Benchley and Medavoy. To Benchley’s mounting irritation, Richards kept referring to ‘the whale’. Finally Benchley blew his top; nobody who was unable to tell a shark from a whale was going to film his book. Richards said he’d rather make Raymond Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely anyway, and the fragile coalition collapsed.

Four days after Spielberg expressed interest, Zanuck and Brown offered him the film – and found, to their dismay, that he’d changed his mind.

‘I don’t know,’ he told Zanuck. ‘After all, it’s only a shark story.’ Wouldn’t it be perceived as another Duel: Everyman v. The Beast? At other times he compared it to just an inflated episode of Sea Hunt, the popular 1950s TV scuba series with Lloyd Bridges.

He was also finding the UFO project ‘Watch the Skies’ both more interesting and more challenging.

When pressed, Spielberg always professed scepticism about UFOs. He never mentioned his teenage UFO feature Firelight, nor the phenomenon seen by other members of his Scout troop in the Arizona desert. Later he would claim to have been converted by the US government’s objections to him making ‘Watch the Skies’. ‘I really found my faith,’ he said, ‘when I heard that the government was opposed to the film. If NASA took the time to write me a twenty-page letter, then I knew there must be something happening.’

What he really believed is unimportant. Not for the first time, he was adopting the beliefs of his audience, sensing what polls later made clear: that many Americans, without having particularly strong convictions, felt there ‘might be something to’ flying saucers. For a consensus film-maker, that was enough. Five years before John Naisbitt’s Megatrends became the fashionable read, Spielberg and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as ‘Watch the Skies’ was renamed, exemplified its propositions: that the best way to beguile America’s slow-reacting public is not to be original but to spot a trend and exploit it; that such trends seldom emerge in Washington or New York but are more apparent in a few heartland states, and in California; and that Americans had lost interest in travelling to outer space. What they now wanted was for outer space to come to them.

It was for the ability to chart the Zeitgeist, to articulate the mood of the crowd before they knew it themselves, and then to exploit it, that Spielberg most admired Orson Welles, whose radio version of War of the Worlds in 1938 convinced thousands that Martians had landed at Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. Welles, he said, ‘was not so much writing a radio program about Martians invading New Jersey as about America’s fear of invasion from Europe. War was just a few months away, but Welles’s invasion was not the Stuka, it was the Martian; it preyed on the vulnerability of the time.’ Spielberg, both in this film and in Jaws, would do the same For the record he repudiated Welles’s broadcast, but later he bought the original script for the programme and displayed it under glass at his home.

In Schrader’s script for what would become Close Encounters, VanOwen bargains with the Air Force. He’ll keep quiet, providing they give him the money to keep investigating. They agree, and he spends his life searching, a counterpart of the protagonists in films which Schrader later directed or wrote: Yukio Mishima, Hank Williams, Patty Hearst, John Latour of Light Sleeper and, archetypally, Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, visionaries drawn to self-destruction as their only means of redemption. At the end of his life VanOwen finds the aliens and, as Schrader put it, is ‘taken off the planet, like Elijah. He had fought the good fight and he was transcended.’

But Spielberg wasn’t happy with this approach.

‘Steve took violent objection,’ Schrader says. ‘He wanted the lead character of this drama to be an ordinary guy, a Joe Blow.’

‘I refuse,’ Schrader said, ‘to send off to another world, as the first example of earth’s intelligence, a man who wants to go and set up a McDonald’s franchise.’

Spielberg said, ‘That’s exactly the guy I want to send.’

After a series of increasingly recriminatory meetings, Schrader abandoned the project.

Throughout his discussions with Schrader, Spielberg had kept his options open on Jaws. He even came into the Zanuck/Brown office and handed out T-shirts printed with Doubleday’s inspired cover design of a phallic shark rising from an inky ocean towards a swimming girl. But in the long nights, he fretted that the narrative expired after the first hundred pages, and didn’t revive until the last hundred. Where was the drive for which he’d been praised in the reviews of Duel?

‘I don’t want to make a film,’ he explained to his eventual star Richard Dreyfuss. ‘I want to make a movie.’

Increasingly he visualised Jaws in far simpler terms than Benchley, as ‘an experiment in terror… the behemoth against Everyman… There is nothing subtle about Jaws. There are underpinnings that are subtle, but what it’s about is pretty slam-bang.’ He told journalist Monte Stettin, ‘Jaws isn’t a big movie. It’s a very small picture. It deals with one social issue [i.e.] There is no place in the world to stay unprotected. Which is what this film is all about.’

Benchley’s story had a journalistic simplicity. The town of Amity, an East Coast summer resort based on Martha’s Vineyard, is terrorised by a rogue Great White Shark which snaps up unwary bathers. The police chief, Brody, a newcomer from New York, bows to pressure from local businessmen to hush up the deaths, but when the shark begins taking children from the shallows and wrecking the boats sent out to hunt it, he finds his courage again and hunts down the fish. He’s helped by Hooper, a wealthy shark expert, and Quint, a local eccentric who shows them the brutal techniques necessary to kill the giant. In their final confrontation, Quint and Hooper are killed, but the shark spares Brody, sinking back into the depths with the body of Quint in its jaws.

Writing in the shadow of Watergate, Benchley drew the people of Amity as products of Nixonian moral blight. Quint is a ruthless environmental despoiler. (In case we miss this, he baits a hook with the body of an unborn baby dolphin.) The town’s Chief Selectman has sold out to the Mafia in a land deal. Brody frets about losing his job, while his wife Ellen itches for sex and attention, which Hooper, the conceited Ivy League ichthyologist, provides. Spielberg disliked them all. ‘The only likeable character was the shark,’ he said, ‘who was a garbage-eating machine and ate all the trashy characters.’ In particular, the Spielberg of the broken home, the one man in the house of women, found Hooper distasteful. He saw him as emasculating and cuckolding the sheriff, and making the sheriff as vainglorious as he was. Benchley, already writing the screenplay, didn’t agree.

Zanuck and Brown were so depressed by these conflicts that they contemplated ditching Jaws entirely. During a meeting with Peter Gimbel, the documentary producer whose Blue Water, White Death had shown in graphic detail the dangers of filming sharks, Gimbel offered to direct the film, and Zanuck and Brown, in a moment of frustration, invited him to buy them out. Fortunately for the team, Gimbel declined.

The partners finally convened a make-or-break conference with Spielberg, to which they pointedly wore their Jaws T-shirts, a reminder of his earlier commitment. Sidney Sheinberg also urged him to make the film and, with ‘Watch the Skies’ still lacking a script, Spielberg accepted at last. His deal gave him, on top of his salary, a meagre 2.5 per cent of net profits, against Zanuck/Brown’s 40 per cent and Benchley’s 10 per cent. Almost in passing, the trade papers of 21 June 1973 announced that Jaws had a director.

Spielberg was unaware that he had enlisted for the duration. The bane of Zanuck and Brown’s days at Fox had been Darryl Zanuck’s veto, exercised in its most extreme form when he fired them. Going into business on their own, they had agreed privately never to reverse a firm decision. As Bob Woodward put it, ‘Loyalty was their vice.’ They even refused to give interviews separately. If one spoke to the press, the other was always present, even if only on a telephone line. Like an old married couple, they often finished one another’s sentences.

Meanwhile, the board of an ailing Columbia, Hollywood’s most underfunded and troubled studio, had installed, at the urging of the town’s most reclusive and Machiavellian power broker, Ray Stark, a new president, David Begelman. The ex-agent, one of Hollywood’s great gamblers, took over in the summer of 1973. Within three years, he would have turned Columbia’s loss into a huge profit. Begelman’s first act was to sign a number of old friends and clients to lucrative production deals. Michael and Julia Phillips were given a contract for two pictures, both written by Schrader. Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and ‘Watch the Skies’. With Jaws still lacking a script, Spielberg signed that deal too.

All summer, editing on Sugarland had continued. Satisfied with finishing only five days over its fifty-five-day schedule and near enough to the $2.5 million budget, Spielberg initially spoke warmly of the film. ‘I guess if I had Sugarland to do over again, I wouldn’t change anything,’ he said at the time. But within a few years he all but disowned it as mechanistic and heartless, unconcerned with its characters.

Universal had promised that, if he had a release print before 10 September, the film could open on the November Thanksgiving weekend. Spielberg delivered, but from the moment the studio viewed the rough cut, they decided they had a loser. Richard Zanuck drove down to Palm Springs and showed it to his parents. Darryl didn’t think much of it either. Nor did Goldie Hawn, who found it ‘too serious, too unrelenting and too uptight’.

It contrasted starkly with their period comedy thriller The Sting, which had worked out far better than Zanuck and Brown had dared hope. After ousting scriptwriter David Ward as director, they replaced him with the bankable George Roy Hill, who had a deal at Universal but also, more important, inspired confidence in Robert Redford and Paul Newman, who starred as the two swindlers of gang boss Robert Shaw. Hill realised the film brilliantly. With its Depression setting, lovingly recreated on the Universal backlot, its ragtime score skimmed from Scott Joplin and the inspired joint performance of Redford and Newman, it exuded the heady perfume of a hit.

Rather than damage The Sting’s Christmas release, Zanuck persuaded Spielberg to withhold Sugarland Express until the following April. As their Universal deal guaranteed control of advertising, he argued that this would give them time for some intelligent promotion. Spielberg reluctantly agreed.

‘Our early ads were our own,’ said Zanuck. ‘Spielberg himself shot one of them.’ They featured the image of a road leading to an empty horizon which he would use again for Close Encounters. In the middle distance was a police car. In the foreground, scattered over the centre line, were broken glass, handcuffs, a policeman’s Stetson, a handgun, a rifle and a teddy bear. The advertising copy was ambivalent: ‘It’s Not Every Day You Take a Ride Like This!’

These ads barely survived the press and trade screenings in the first weeks of March. ‘Our campaigns didn’t work,’ Zanuck admitted. ‘We learned that any ad with a gun is anathema to the East Side public on Third Avenue in New York City. On Broadway, however, show lots of guns. We learned a great deal.’

Zanuck and Brown took Sugarland, and Spielberg, to Cannes. Benchley was also in Europe to promote his novel, so the four men met in a cabana at the Hôtel Cap d’Antibes to chew over Benchley’s screenplay, which Spielberg was due to start shooting almost immediately. After Benchley left, the film-makers gloomily contemplated the chasm between their perception of Jaws