Steven Spielberg (68 page)

When Landis made a public appearance in December 1995 to autograph copies of his movies at a Los Angeles area laserdisc store, the author approached him with tape recorder in hand, seeking an interview for this book. All Landis would say about Spielberg was, “I haven't talked to Steve in years.” Landis heatedly refused to answer questions posed to him about
Twilight
Zone
—
The
Movie.

Spielberg made a rare public statement on the accident in an April 1983 interview with Dale Pollock of the
Los
Angeles
Times.
“This has been the most interesting year of my film career,” Spielberg reflected. “It has mixed the best, the success of
E.
T.,
with the worst, the
Twilight
Zone
tragedy. A mixture of ecstacy and grief. It's made me grow up a little more. The accident cast a pall on all 150 people who worked on this production. We are still just sick to the center of our souls. I don't know anybody who it
hasn't
affected.”

Spielberg summed up the lessons of the accident with a philosophical observation that, while not referring by name to Landis, seemed a pointed criticism of his former friend and colleague:

“A movie is a fantasy—it's light and shadow flickering on a screen. No movie is worth dying for. I think people are standing up much more now than ever before to producers and directors who ask too much. If something isn't safe, it's the right and responsibility of every actor or crew member to yell, ‘Cut!'”

A
FTER
the accident, Spielberg lost interest in making his own segment of the movie. “His heart just wasn't in it anymore,” said his first assistant director, Patrick Kehoe. Indeed, Spielberg tried to abandon the entire project,
but Warner Bros. lawyers, fearing that cancellation of the film could be construed as an admission of guilt, insisted he fulfill his contract.

Feeling there was “something odd about proceeding” under the circumstances, Joe Dante was the first director to film a segment following the accident. “When the accident happened, everybody became very scarce. George [Miller] and I, whose first studio filmmaking experience this was, were given a lot of autonomy. I was amazed that they went ahead with it.” Dante remembers being anxious to do as good a job as possible on his contribution, because he knew there would be “a lot of people looking to justify that movie. It's not
Schindler's
List
—it's not worth dying for.
No
movie is worth that.”

Dante's “It's a Good Life” began filming on September 28, 1982, and was followed before the cameras by Miller's “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” and then by Spielberg's segment (Dante later filmed a new ending for the film, a gag taking the movie full circle back to Landis's prologue). The story Spielberg originally planned to film, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” would have required a permit for a prominently featured child actor to work outdoors at night, in frightening scenes involving special effects. Spielberg switched to a simpler, less disturbing story from the TV series, “Kick the Can,” which also had scenes taking place at night involving children but was filmed mostly on a soundstage during normal daytime working hours.

As a boy living on Crystal Terrace in New Jersey's Haddon Township, Spielberg had played kick the can, a simple game requiring only a tin can and some imagination. His remake of George Clayton Johnson's ethereal, sweet-natured fantasy about old people reverting to childhood centers on an itinerant miracle worker, Mr. Bloom, played by Scatman Crothers, whom the director called “the black E.T.”
‡‡‡
After Mr. Bloom's magical game of kick the can turns them into children, all but one of the old folks of the Sunnyvale retirement home decide to go back to being old, realizing that they value their adult memories and accumulated wisdom too much to start over. That poignant addition to the original story reflects the complexity of Spielberg's view of childhood—not a simple nostalgia, by any means, but the acknowledgment of an unfulfilled wish for a state of innocence that perhaps never really existed. Mr. Bloom's gentle influence has taught them that “fresh young minds” do not require young bodies. The defiant exception is a Peter Pan–like character who emulates the swashbuckling fantasy life of his movie idol, Douglas Fairbanks Sr. Part of Spielberg could not surrender that dream of escapism, which he had inherited from his own father, a boyhood admirer of Fairbanks.

“Kick the Can” began shooting the day after Thanksgiving 1982 and finished only six days later. “It seemed like he was just going through the
motions,” said Spielberg's secretary, Kathy Switzer. Although filmed in an excessively whimsical manner that blunts some of its emotional potential, “Kick the Can” represents a further step in Spielberg's maturation process. Under the sobering influence of the events of the previous summer, he made a bittersweet film about the need to turn one's back on childhood and accept the coming of age.

D
ESPITE
opening on June 24,1983, the same day the indictments were handed down in the criminal case,
Twilight
Zone
—
The
Movie
was not a total failure at the box office, grossing $42 million worldwide. It even received a few good reviews, mostly for the Miller and Dante segments, but some of the critical response was vitriolic.

“A lot of money and several lives might have been saved if the producers had just rereleased the original programs,” Vincent Canby wrote in
The
New
York
Times.
The critics for both
Time
and
Newsweek
seemed almost as outraged at Landis for the aesthetic shortcomings of his segment as for what took place on his set. “Even with the helicopter sequence mercifully cut,” wrote Richard Corliss of
Time,
“the story hardly looks worth shooting, let alone dying for.” David Ansen of
Newsweek
judged that the segment's “poor quality and moralizing tone make that tragedy doubly obscene.”

Spielberg's contribution, which might have seemed innocuous enough in another context, came in for some remarkably vicious attacks, of which J. Hoberman's in
The
Village
Voice
perhaps was the most extreme: “In terms of pathology, … Landis is easily eclipsed by the project's
capo
di
tutti
capi,
Steven Spielberg, whose remake of the 1961
Zone
episode ‘Kick the Can' is a lugubrious self-parody set to a raging torrent of sappy music…. Spielberg has become the King Midas of Candyland—from space monsters to senility, everything he touches turns to icky goo.”

I
N
what may have been partly an expression of disgust over the events surrounding the making of
Twilight
Zone
—
The
Movie,
as well as a more obvious backlash against the runaway success of
E.T.,
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences again snubbed Spielberg in the Oscar competition. Although nominated as Best Director for
E.
T.,
Spielberg lost to Richard Attenborough, director of
Gandhi.
§§§
Attenborough's victory did not come as a surprise, for he earlier won the Directors Guild of America award, traditionally a harbinger of things to come at the Oscars.

At the DGA dinner, Attenborough “went out of his way to embrace me before going up onto the podium to collect the award,” Spielberg recalled in 1994. “That meant a great deal to me then, as it does now.” Attenborough
explained, “I thought
E.T.
was the more exciting, wonderful, innovative piece of film, as against
Gandhi,
which fitted into the David Lean mold in terms not of cinematic execution but of concept and sweep…. Steven and I were at opposite sides of the room, and when the winner's name was announced after all the speeches and such, I literally had to be nudged. I couldn't believe it. I got up from the table and it was a sort of knee-jerk actor's reaction. I didn't go to the podium, I went over to Spielberg. He got up, I put my arms round him, and I said, ‘This isn't right, this should be yours,' and then I went to collect the award.”

Although he regarded Attenborough's gesture as “an honorary Oscar,” Spielberg reflected a few hours before the Academy Awards ceremony, “I've been around long enough to know that people who deserve Oscars don't always win them…. If the Academy decides to give me an Oscar someday, I'll be glad to accept it. But I don't think I'll get it for a film that I really care about.
E.T.
is my favorite movie, although it's not my best-directed film. That's
Close
Encounters
of
the
Third
Kind.
”

P
ERHAPS
it was just a coincidence that Spielberg's next film after
Twilight
Zone
—
The
Movie
featured a twelve-year-old Asian boy and dealt with the rescue of a village of lost children. Perhaps the horrifying images that filled
Indiana
Jones
and
the
Temple
of
Doom
—images of enslaved Indian children, people being burned alive by an evil cult, a man's heart being ripped from his chest—were not a reflection of any inner turmoil on the part of the director. Perhaps the film's nightmarish sequence depicting a drugged Indiana Jones as an evil, menacing father figure was nothing but a plot device. Perhaps
Temple
of
Doom
was just what Spielberg said it was, a “popcorn adventure with a lot of butter.”

But the film's unusually gruesome and disturbing imagery, coming in the wake of the
Twilight
Zone
tragedy, gives cause to wonder what was going on in Spielberg's subconscious while he made his return to feature-length filmmaking following the event he said made him “sick to the center of his soul.” Spielberg himself added the character of Short Round to the story as Harrison Ford's sidekick, casting the Chinese/Vietnamese child actor Ke Huy Quan. “I wanted a kid in this movie,” the director explained. “…I wanted this mission to come from Indiana's heart.”

The film's screenwriters, Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, insist they did not find Spielberg in a dark mood when they spent five days blocking out the storyline with him and George Lucas at Lucas's home in northern California. Any personal obsessions of Spielberg's that can be found in the movie are “unconscious,” Katz feels. As well as recycling unused ideas from the scripts of
Raiders
of
the
Lost
Ark
(the escape from the airplane, the mine chase sequence) and Lucas's then-unfilmed project
Radioland
Murders
(the opening musical number),
Temple
of
Doom
borrows liberally from old movies. The idea of the kidnapped children emerged at the story meeting when
someone suggested, “What's weird about the village? No children. It's like
Village
of
the
Damned.
”
The writers attribute the morbidity of
Temple
of
Doom
to the desire of both Spielberg and Lucas to do “something very different” from the sunlit derring-do of
Raiders.

“I had some worries about making the same film, only trying to do it better—I didn't want to spin my wheels,” Spielberg said. “I had to make this film different enough to make it worth doing, yet similar enough so it would attract the same audience. I had to satisfy myself creatively.”

The sequel (on which Lucas gets story credit) originally was titled
Indiana
Jones
and
the
Temple
of
Death,
until it was decided that
Temple
of
Doom
would sound less of a “downer.” “Steve wanted to do a very dark movie,” Huyck recalls. “This was going to be his nightmare movie.” Publicly, Spielberg attributed that to his producer: “When George Lucas came to me with the story, it was about black magic, voodoo, and a temple of doom. My job and my challenge was to balance the dark side of this Indiana Jones saga with as much comedy as I could afford.”

But even the comedy in
Temple
of
Doom
is the stuff of nightmares, from the early sequence of Indy, Short Round, and Indy's blond girlfriend Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) plunging in a rubber raft from a pilotless airplane to the squirmy scenes of Willie covered with crawling bugs and being served a revolting dinner of “Eyeball Soup” and “Snake Surprise.” Katz considers the movie “boy's adventure time. We didn't see it as being that realistic. We saw it as being sort of funny. We had a lot of fun sitting around thinking of the most disgusting meal you could eat—monkey brains.” Forced into the same helpless, bullied position occupied by Spielberg's kid sisters when he was tormenting them in childhood, the audience may giggle uncomfortably at such sights and feel relieved when the ordeals of
Temple
of
Doom
are over, but it is a strange kind of “fun” Spielberg is inflicting on his paying public. If the imagery of a film serves as a window into the soul of the filmmaker, then what was filling Spielberg's soul in 1983 was (in his words) “torchlight and long shadows and red lava light … a lot of spooky, creepy, crawly, nocturnal imagery…. I always try to bring my own terrors and fantasies to a film.”

If such a thing is possible,
Temple
of
Doom
could be described as an impersonal personal film. While tapping into Spielberg's subconscious, it does so in the slick, mechanical manner he adopts when he wants to skate lightly over the surface of his material and avoid dealing consciously with its implications. It is Spielberg in his theme park mode, using a plot as merely a springboard for a safe, enjoyable thrill ride, without genuine danger or emotional involvement. After the dazzling panache of the opening in a Shanghai nightclub, a wide-screen homage to Busby Berkeley in which Kate Capshaw sings Cole Porter's “Anything Goes” in Chinese, the film soon degenerates into lurid, melodramatic claptrap, stirring little emotional involvement other than a frequent sense of disgust. While touching on some of Spielberg's personal obsessions, it does so only to trivialize them; one need only compare the glibly picturesque treatment of child slavery in
Temple
of
Doom
with
the angry passion that suffuses every frame of the forced-labor camp scenes in
Schindler's
List.