Steven Spielberg. John Baxter
but the latest productions. Martin Scorsese dismissed them generically as ‘Youpeople’, while Spielberg, like many of his friends, called them ‘The Suits’.
None of the young directors had any quarrel with making money; it was the only way one measured success in a business where personal satisfaction with what appeared on the screen meant less and less. Nor were they entirely opposed to Old Hollywood, which had nurtured them and furnished the fantasies which drove them to make films. But all of them hated the compromises forced on them by the corporate caution of the agents and accountants. Spielberg lamented:
The tragedy of Hollywood today [is that] great gamblers are dead… In the old days the Thalbergs and the Zanucks and the Mayers came out of nickelodeons, vaudeville, they came out of the Borscht Belt theatre, and they came with a great deal of showmanship and esprit de corps to a little citrus grove in California. They were brave. They were gamblers. They were high rollers. There is a paranoia today. People are afraid. People in high positions are unable to say ‘OK’ or ‘not OK’. They’re afraid to take the big gamble. And that’s very very hard when you’re making movies. All motion pictures are a gamble.
By the seventies, Hollywood had largely turned its back on the old virtues, as Spielberg saw them, of showmanship and mass appeal which had drawn audiences back to the cinema every Saturday night for the latest ‘big picture’. Talky films with ageing actors had alienated teenage filmgoers, whose billions in disposable income were flowing into the pockets of record producers and clothing manufacturers.
Spielberg was one of the few newcomers to sense the path American movies must take in order to survive in the last quarter of the twentieth century. He knew instinctively that issues were Out and entertainment In. He became instrumental in transforming a cinema of stories and characters into one of sensation. Jaws would be one of the first films since Gone With the Wind to exploit a movie as a national event. ‘Up until The Godfather,’ says Julia Phillips, ‘every time you had a picture you thought was going to have reviews and audience appeal, you let it out slowly in a handful of chichi theatres in the major cities, and let it build. Then you went in ever widening waves.’ But Spielberg sensed that the twelve- to twenty-year-olds who, though they made up only 22 per cent of the population, represented 47 per cent of filmgoers, wanted the week’s hot movie now. TV promotion and TV reviewers had made the measured opinions of Time, Newsweek and even the venerable New York Times redundant. Within a decade, studio bean-counters would be able judge whether a film was a hit or flop simply by the takings of the first weekend of its release. By the time the print-media critics caught up, their judgement was irrelevant.
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