Steven Spielberg (75 page)

Ross rewarded Spielberg's professional favors with unusually generous film deals and stock options. The other stockholders did not complain about this special treatment. Explaining the hidden benefits of letting Spielberg use
the company's Acapulco villa, Ross once said, “Look, Spielberg goes down there on the company plane and wakes up in the middle of the night after a nightmare. He can't sleep, and in the morning he gets up and writes the script for
The
Goonies.
‡
That's worth tens of millions to us.”

Perhaps even more important to Ross, Spielberg threw his power and prestige behind the executive during periods of upheaval at Warner Communications Inc. and its successor, Time Warner. At a WCI shareholders meeting in 1987, Spielberg said, “I am too secure in my line of work, and too fat as a result of it, to be seduced by deals and perks and promises. I have settled down to live and work in only two houses…. MCA and WCI.” He said he had decided to do so because of his “respect and admiration … for two people in particular, Sidney J. Sheinberg and Steven J. Ross.”

S
PIELBERG'S
involvement as producer has varied greatly from film to film, ranging from his virtual takeover of the directing of
Poltergeist
to his far more tangential involvement as executive producer on movies with strong directors he respects, such as Robert Zemeckis, Joe Dante, Don Bluth, Martin Scorsese, and Clint Eastwood. On their movies, Spielberg has regarded himself largely as the filmmakers' advocate, protecting them against studio interference. Describing Spielberg as “a perfect executive producer” on
Back
to
the
Future,
Zemeckis said, “The most important thing he does is create an atmosphere for you to comfortably create a movie. He says, ‘It's your movie—but if you need me, I'm here.' He respects the filmmaker's vision. He lets you do the movie the way you see it.”

Spielberg's reluctance to play the heavy with other filmmakers, even mediocre ones, sometimes has led him to be too much of a hands-off executive, when a firmer hand might have been more advisable. “The worst thing about working at Amblin,” Richard Benjamin said while directing
The
Money
Pit,
“is that one day I'm going to have to leave it and go back to the real world.” That film's screenwriter-producer, David Giler, says Spielberg's greatest strength as an executive producer is that “he's got final say. He doesn't really have to ask anybody else. You convince him, it stops there.”

Spielberg's popular instincts enabled him to go against conventional Hollywood wisdom when he produced the original
Back
to
the
Future.
The biggest hit Amblin has produced, other than the films Spielberg himself has directed, it grossed $211 million in domestic box office. But the rest of Hollywood had turned thumbs down on the script by Zemeckis and Gale, believing that movies about time travel never make money. “Steven was the only guy who said, ‘I want to do this,'” Zemeckis recalled. “And I said, ‘Steven, if I do another movie with you that fails, the reality of the situation
is that I will never work again.' And he said, ‘You're probably right.' A lot of lean years went by because I had done two movies that he executive-produced [
I
Wanna
Hold
Your
Hand
and the 1980 black comedy
Used
Cars
] and they did no business. The word was getting around town: Bob Zemeckis can't get work unless Steven Spielberg is the executive producer.” After Zemeckis finally directed a hit movie away from Spielberg's company,
Ro
mancing
the
Stone,
he took
Back
to
the
Future
back to Spielberg, who set up the deal with Sid Sheinberg at Universal.

Spielberg also participated in the painful decision to replace the star of the movie (Eric Stoltz) with Michael J. Fox after five weeks of shooting, a decision that necessitated the scrapping of $4 million in footage and proved a serious setback to Stoltz's career, but added a crucial element to the picture's box-office chemistry. “We've got to do something drastic, because this isn't funny,” Spielberg said after the worried director showed him the Stoltz footage. Spielberg blamed himself for not voicing his reservations earlier, “but I didn't do anything about it [at first] because I thought it was up to Bob to make his movie.”

“I'll tell you a great story about how Steven earned his executive-producer fee on
Back
to
the
Future
[a reported $20 million],” adds Gale. “Sid Sheinberg will deny this story, because he doesn't remember it, but it's a true story. Sid Sheinberg didn't like the title
Back
to
the
Future.
Every other executive at Universal thought it was a great title, as did Steven, as did we. And Sheinberg would not get off [the idea] that
Back
to
the
Future
was a bad title. He said, ‘It's not hip, like
Ghostbusters
was hip.' So he sent us a memo and he said, ‘My suggestion for the new title of this movie is
Spaceman
from
Pluto.
Here are some notes I have regarding the script and how we can make reference to this in the movie.'

“There's a scene in the movie when the DeLorean is in the barn and the kid has a comic book, and it's called
Space
Zombies
from
Pluto.
Sheinberg said, ‘Change that to
Spaceman
from
Pluto,
and have the kid say, “Look, it's a spaceman from Pluto!” And in the scene when Marty intimidates George McFly by saying, “My name is Darth Vader—I'm an extraterrestrial from the Planet Vulcan,” have him say that he's a spaceman from Pluto.' We were saying, ‘He's serious about this, Steven. What do we do? We don't want to change the title of this movie.' Steven said, ‘OK, I know what to do.' So Steven dictated a memo back to Sid, and the memo said something like this: ‘Dear Sid, Thank you for your most humorous memo of such-and-such a date. We all got a big laugh out of it. Keep 'em coming.' Steven said, ‘Sheinberg will be so embarrassed to tell us that he was serious about this that we'll never hear from him about it again.' And he was right.”
§

Spielberg has admitted that in his relationships with directors, he has “found out that not everyone is like Bob Zemeckis.” As a result, he said in
1992, “Producing has been the least fulfilling aspect of what I've done in the last decade.” He began scaling back his producing in the nineties partly for that reason and also because he finally recognized that his name was appearing on too many inferior movies. Furthermore, Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy were becoming restless and wanted to start their own independent company; Marshall also was branching out into directing, starting with second-unit work for Spielberg before making his solo debut in 1990 with Amblin's horror comedy
Arachnophobia.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave Spielberg its Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1987, an honor given to “creative producers whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production.” That award was generally regarded as more a gesture of apology by the Academy for past slights of his work as a director than a genuine measure of his highly uneven track record as a producer.
¶
Far too willing to encourage his many protégés to make
faux
Spielberg movies rather than express their own individual visions, he has not been responsible for developing even half as many first-rate talents as B-movie
meister
Roger Corman. Spielberg may have given the world at least one genuine original, Zemeckis, and elevated Dante to A-picture status, but he has given his imprimatur to a host of forgettable talents as well. Could it be that he has a problem fostering genuine competition? The occasional films Amblin has made with major directors, such as Martin Scorsese's
Cape
Fear
(1991), Peter Bogdanovich's
Noises
Off
(1992), and Clint Eastwood's
The
Bridges
of
Madison
County
(1995), have been solid pieces of craftsmanship but not among those directors' most important work. In some cases, including
Cape
Fear
and
Madison
County,
Amblin's productions have been projects Spielberg seriously considered directing before losing interest.

Spielberg occasionally has reached out to help one of the legendary directors whose work has given him inspiration. He and George Lucas found financing and distribution from Warner Bros. for a 1990 film by Japanese master Akira Kurosawa,
Dreams.
But no such support was forthcoming when Orson Welles, near the end of his life in 1985, invited Spielberg and Amy Irving to lunch at the West Hollywood bistro Ma Maison. Welles hoped Spielberg would finance his stalled project
The
Cradle
Will
Rock,
in which Irving had agreed to play Welles's first wife. Just a few months earlier, Spielberg had spent $60,500 to buy a Rosebud sled from
Citizen
Kane
as “a symbolic medallion of quality in movies. When you look at Rosebud, you don't think of fast dollars, fast sequels, and remakes. This to me says that movies of my generation had better be good.” But rather than offering to help Welles with
The
Cradle
Will
Rock,
Spielberg spent most of their luncheon asking questions about
Citizen
Kane.
“Why can't I direct an
Amazing
Stories?”
Welles later wondered. “Everybody else is doing
Amazing
Stories.”
||

A
MAZING
Stories
was Spielberg's “elephant burial ground for ideas that will never make it to the movie screen because they are just too short-form. And if I didn't exorcise them in one form or the other, they would just float around in my head and mess me up later in my life.”

“This man is a fountain of story ideas,” says Peter Z. Orton, story editor during the series' second season. “When I first got on the show, they gave me a looseleaf binder of story ideas. I realized when I got a quarter of the way through that they were all by Steven. That notebook I saw was about three inches thick. When people ask me to describe Steven, I say, ‘He's a guy you'd swear had just drunk four cups of coffee, but that's just him.' He gets his enjoyment out of his work. He's there at seven in the morning making matzohs and he's there until nine or ten at night. Ten to fifteen percent of what he says is way over the top, about fifty percent makes you think, and twenty percent is absolutely great. If you wait long enough, he'll have a genius idea.”

Launched with loud fanfare and great expectations by NBC-TV in the fall of 1985,
Amazing
Stories
was touted as a blend of
The
Twilight
Zone
and
Alfred
Hitchcock
Presents,
filtered through the visionary talents of Steven Spielberg. But Spielberg's anthology series, a highly uneven mixture of fantasy with often leaden doses of whimsy, soon proved an expensive, embarrassing dud, like most of his TV ventures before he finally managed to strike gold in 1994 with the hyperkinetic medical series
ER.

Speculating on the failure of
Amazing
Stories
to find an audience, Orton offers the theory “that when people watch television, what they're looking for are continuing characters. The anthology shows that succeeded had a modicum of continuity. They had the same host, Walt Disney or Rod Serling, who would be there at the beginning of every show. At the time there was some discussion of Steven Spielberg hosting
Amazing
Stories.
He nixed that idea. He felt, ‘I don't want to be mobbed every time I go out.' He tends to be a behind-the-scenes kind of guy. He likes to let the work speak for itself.” Spielberg also vetoed the network's suggestion of calling it
Steven
Spielberg's
Amazing
Stories,
saying, “I don't want my name to give it that false continuity.” He might not have the same qualms today, since he has become increasingly comfortable over the years appearing in public and promoting his work.

Amazing
Stories
never lived up to the grandiose promise of its title, borrowed from the venerable pulp magazine that inspired Arnold Spielberg's
boyhood interest in science fiction. “I like stories that were the sort told to me when I was sitting on my father's knee at four or five years old,” Steven said. But TV critics were quick to seize on the title as a handy battering ram against Spielberg. Tom Shales of
The
Washington
Post
wrote in his review of the first program, “I hear America asking, what was so Amazing about
that?”
Indeed, the sense of wonder that Spielberg conjures up so naturally in his best theatrical films was largely absent from the overly literal-minded, often fatally hokey series. Ironically enough, it was the stories themselves (many of them credited to Spielberg) that constituted the weakest element of
Amazing
Stories.
Even so, it was hard to shake the suspicion that in writing off the series as hastily and completely as they did, the critics were betraying an eagerness to see the cocky, fabulously wealthy
wunderkind
fall flat on his face.

That was especially unfortunate because the opening program was the underrated “Ghost Train,” an eerie and poignant vignette directed by Spielberg and photographed by Allen Daviau. Inspired by Spielberg's childhood memory of hearing an unseen train speeding each night through his neighborhood in New Jersey, as well as by his love for his Grandpa Fievel, “Ghost Train” (written by Frank Deese) tells the story of a seemingly blinkered elderly man (Roberts Blossom) who tenderly convinces his grandson (Lukas Haas) that he must board the ancient express taking him to his rendezvous with death.