Steven Spielberg (74 page)

Shortly after the Oscar ceremony, Spielberg left for Israel to join Amy Irving on location for
Rumpelstiltskin,
a film in which she was being directed by her brother, David. Speaking to a reporter from an Israeli newspaper, Spielberg attributed his snubbing by the Academy to the box-office success of his movies. Then he added:

“When I'm sixty, Hollywood will forgive me—I don't know for what, but they'll forgive.”

A
WEEK
before Max was born in 1985, Spielberg vowed that “the child is going to change my life…. I want to be like most parents. I want to drive home in bumper-to-bumper commuter traffic, which means I've got to leave the office by five-thirty to hit the peak traffic hours. And that's going to change everything I do.” Fatherhood did bring profound changes to his life. “Steven's a great father—I sometimes can't get him to go back to work!” Amy said when Max was a year old. “He's cut his work week to four days; he doesn't want to miss anything at home. He changes dirty diapers, which he vowed he'd never do, and he gets up in the night with the baby.”

Those habits have persisted. He said in 1994, “I've grown up more because I have kids, because my kids don't
want
me to be a kid.
They
want to be a kid, and in a sense they have directed me to be more of an adult than I probably ever could do for myself.” Being a father deepened Spielberg's work as a filmmaker, teaching him to accept adult responsibilities in every aspect of his life. But his final passage from boy to man was not smooth or easy.

S
PIELBERG'S
sideline as a producer of other directors' movies kept his workload heavy following his founding of Amblin Entertainment. From 1984 through 1990, when he began cutting back on his producing chores, his name appeared on nineteen feature films as producer or executive producer, other than the films he directed. In that same period, he produced an ambitious but unsuccessful sci-fi/fantasy series for Universal TV and NBC,
Amazing
Stories
(1985–87), and started his long-running Warner Bros. TV animated series
Tiny
Toon
Adventures
(1990–present).
*

Spielberg began conceiving grandiose plans of running his own Hollywood production company as early as the 1970s. “He said he wanted to do what Walt Disney had done, except that he would do it for all audiences,” recalled Warner Bros. president Terry Semel. After
E.T.,
Spielberg rejected offers to run Disney and three other major studios, preferring to be what
The
Wall
Street
Journal
described as a “one-man entertainment conglomerate.” “After Max was born,” he explained, “the ambition wasn't there as much. It became, in some ways, a real choice. I realized that I could be a Disney, but that I would be a terrible father, or I could forget Disney and be a great father.”

Whether it was wise to spread himself even as thin as he did with Amblin was debatable. In addition to taking up time he could have devoted to directing, his work as a producer has often exhibited dubious artistic taste along with uneven commercial results. How he fares as a partner with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen in his own fully fledged studio, DreamWorks SKG, which they founded in 1994, and how that ambitious venture will affect his directing career, remains to be seen.

Art Murphy of
Daily
Variety
warned in the early 1980s that by attaching his name to films he did not direct, Spielberg ran the risk of confusing the public and cheapening his reputation. Since many people outside the industry are unclear about the difference between what a producer does and what a director does, they might assume Spielberg had as much to do with such stinkers as
The
Goonies
(1985),
The
Money
Pit
(1986),
Joe
Versus
the
Volcano
(1990), and
The
Flintstones
(1994) as he did with such classics as
Close
Encounters,
E.
T.,
and
Schindler's
List,
and wonder why his work has seemed to fluctuate so widely in quality. But by and large, as far as the public is concerned, Murphy's dire prediction does not seem to have been borne out. The public is more intuitive and discriminating (as well as more forgiving) than Hollywood tends to recognize, and Spielberg's box-office appeal as a director has not been tarnished appreciably by his association with many mediocre or downright awful films as a producer or executive producer. The better films bearing his name, such as Robert Zemeckis's
Back
to
the
Future
(1985) and
Who
Framed
Roger
Rabbit
(1988), have helped enhance his image. Such smaller-scale, quietly affecting Amblin films as Gary David Goldberg's
Dad
(1989), Jocelyn Moorhouse's
How
to
Make
an
American
Quilt
(1995), and Don Bluth's animated feature
An
American
Tail
(1986) have broadened Spielberg's image and made the public more receptive to his own ventures into more challenging emotional material.

There can be little doubt, however, that Spielberg's critical reputation, which became increasingly problematical when he started directing more “adult” movies in the 1980s, suffered as a result of his producing sideline. Critics' fixation on the image of Spielberg as an emotionally arrested filmmaker, despite mounting evidence to the contrary in recent years, is not easily dispelled when the title “Steven Spielberg Presents” precedes such movies as
Young
Sherlock
Holmes
(1985),
Harry
and
the
Hendersons
(1987),
The
Little
Rascals
(1994), and
Casper
(also 1994), the kind of derivative, assembly-line product that gives family entertainment a bad name. Much of Spielberg's producing output has been aimed at teenagers or subteens, and most of his protégés, who tend to ape his style shamelessly, find it next to impossible to duplicate his knack for visual and emotional wonderment.
Young
Sherlock
Holmes,
an uncharacteristically formulaic early effort from director Barry Levinson, was so derivative of other Spielberg special-effects extravaganzas that one reviewer called it
Indiana
Holmes
and
the
Temple
of
the
Goonies.
“It used to be that when a director's hits were copied he was far from happy about it; he understood that his pictures were being devalued —cheapened,” Pauline Kael wrote in
The
New
Yorker.
“But Steven Spielberg ‘presents'
Young
Sherlock
Holmes
…. Spielberg has said that he had ‘virtually nothing to do' with this movie except to offer some advice on the special effects, and there's no reason to doubt that. But didn't he even look at the script?”

Another unfortunate side effect of such mediocre Spielberg movies is that they and their often offensively crass merchandising have helped foster a perception that Spielberg is not only a commercially minded filmmaker but a greedy one as well. Why else would he want to waste his time making such a lumbering, unfunny dinosaur of a comedy as
The
Flintstones?
Spielberg may have been trying to signal his disdain for the work of director Brian Levant by jokingly changing his own screen credit to “Steven Spielrock Presents,” but with all of his vast wealth, does he really need more money badly enough to make such a movie? Or, as Kael wrote of George Lucas when they made
Raiders
of
the
Lost
Ark,
is Spielberg still so “hooked on the crap of his childhood” that he feels a compulsion to keep replicating it on the big screen, in all its unalloyed dreckiness?

As an executive producer, Spielberg is motivated largely by the fact that he “just likes movies and wants to make movies he would like to see, movies he doesn't want to spend a year of his life on,” says Michael Finnell, who has produced three films for Amblin. Spielberg's ability to spawn so many productions while still managing to focus on his own personal projects is a
byproduct of his remarkably overactive metabolism. His Amblin partner Frank Marshall, who served as line producer on many of the company's films along with his wife, Kathleen Kennedy, once said of Spielberg, “He has an idea every thirteen seconds. I have to figure out how serious they are. If he wants to do something, I figure out how to make it possible financially. Steven doesn't think in monetary terms.”

But that image is somewhat illusory, a bit of Spielbergian public relations to distract the paying customers from the fact that, as Sid Sheinberg once told
The
Wall
Street
Journal,
“Steven's as good a businessman as he is a director.” Spielberg is renowned—and sometimes deplored—in Hollywood for driving hard bargains with everyone from technicians to actors to studio chiefs. In recent years, his standard deal has been a remarkable 50 percent of the distributor's gross on his pictures (compared with the 5–to–15 percent even major stars can command, with only a few going higher). The studios also fully finance Spielberg's films, even though the copyright is owned or shared by Amblin or one of its subsidiaries. “Steven gets the studios to carry the risk and he takes in the money,” observed Jeffrey Berg, chairman of International Creative Management.
†

From the time he worked his way out of his remaining obligations to Universal in the early eighties, Spielberg has taken care to avoid being pinned down to any one studio. Even his own DreamWorks allows him to take directing jobs elsewhere. While ensconced for many years in his cozy headquarters on the Universal lot, Spielberg freelanced projects all over town, but concentrated his work at two studios, Universal and Warner Bros.

T
HE
Warners connection came through his close friendship with Steve Ross, the late chairman of the board of Time Warner. Ross was the most colorful, and controversial, of the film industry mentors to whom Spielberg has attached himself. There can be little doubt that Spielberg's growing interest in becoming a movie mogul during the eighties was largely a result of their mutually enriching friendship. And if Spielberg imbibed some of Ross's piratical attitudes along with his largesse, that would hardly have been surprising.

From their first meeting in 1981 until Ross's death in 1992, Ross carefully cultivated his and Time Warner's relationships with Spielberg, whose association with the company became a crucial element in its success and stability. Biographer Connie Bruck reported that Ross “was determined to find a
means to loosen the Universal-Spielberg bond and bring Spielberg to Warner Bros. Spielberg would have been an alluring asset for the Warner studio at any time, but the early eighties were especially fallow.”

“I had typecast what a CEO was—I'd never met one before, and I wasn't far off, because I've met them since—and in my mind, they looked like J. C. Penney,” Spielberg recalled. “And suddenly here was this older movie star. We quickly found out what we had in common: my favorite movies were made between 1932 and 1952 and those were his favorites, too. Steve to me was a blast from the past. He had silver-screen charisma, much like an older Cary Grant, or a Walter Pidgeon. He had style in a tradition that seems to have bred itself out of society. He had flash. He was a magnetic host—eventually, that became his calling card. And at Acapulco, he
was
the weekend.”

Assuming the roles of Spielberg's best friend and idealized father-figure, as well as business mentor, Ross began educating Spielberg in the finer aspects of life as a Hollywood mogul. Studio president Terry Semel recalled that when he introduced them, Spielberg “was a young man, in his early thirties, with no business sophistication. He found Steve, who was much older, so fascinating. Steve Ross was into things we knew only a little about—art, planes, homes.” Wooing Spielberg with lavish gifts and hospitality (he once sent the company plane to fly Spielberg's dogs from California to New York), Ross went so far as to insist that Spielberg become his neighbor in East Hampton, setting the real-estate deal in motion almost before Spielberg knew what was happening.

The Spielberg-Ross relationship resulted in Spielberg making eleven feature films for Warners during the executive's tenure, including
The
Color
Purple
and
Empire
of
the
Sun,
as well as the studio's TV series
Tiny
Toon
Adventures
and
Animaniacs
(the latter began airing after Ross's death). Spielberg also lent his name and talents to more ephemeral projects aimed unabashedly at glorifying the house of Ross. When the executive's wife, Courtney Sale Ross, produced
Strokes
of
Genius,
a 1984 TV series of documentaries on artists, Spielberg donated his services as director for the introductions, hosted by Dustin Hoffman. Spielberg himself was one of the hosts of the 1991 TV special
Here's
Looking
at
You,
Warner
Bros.
And when Columbia Pictures vacated the former Burbank Studios in 1990 and Warners reclaimed sole ownership of the lot, Ross tapped Spielberg to serve as an executive producer for a “Celebration of Tradition,” an outlandishly decadent super-A-list party costing $3 million. While being driven through the lot on trams, guests watched spectacular musical numbers being performed in the studio streets before arriving at a soundstage transformed into Rick's Café Américain from
Casablanca,
with the added attraction of bathing beauties diving into a swimming pool for a Busby Berkeley–style homage.