Steven Spielberg (76 page)

“The most amazing thing about the first episode, in fact, was that Steven Spielberg directed it,” wrote David Blum in
New
York
magazine.
Amazing
Stories
proved that “the emperor is naked,”
L.A.
Reader
television critic Michael Kaplan charged just a few weeks after the premiere. Kaplan claimed Spielberg had already “squandered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: to reshape a commercial medium that has opened itself up completely to one man's artistic vision.”

Spielberg was his own series's worst enemy, feeding the press's antagonism with what was widely perceived as an arrogant approach to publicity. Not only did Spielberg follow his habitual practice of keeping sets off-limits to virtually all members of the media—with the exception of two reporters from
Time
preparing that magazine's Spielberg cover story—but he even refused to allow NBC to preview
Amazing
Stories
programs for TV reporters and reviewers, claiming that to do so would rob the series of its ability to surprise the audience. The network later persuaded him that he had made a serious mistake.

His secretiveness provoked an all-out attack profile by Richard Turner in the August 2, 1986, issue of
TV
Guide,
perhaps the single most negative piece of writing ever published on Spielberg. Turner, then the Hollywood bureau chief of the nation's most widely distributed magazine, painted Spielberg as autocratic, paranoid, and stingy in his dealings with employees and the press, and as a “consummate Hollywood insider” who bullied network executives into acceding to his demands. “Spielberg tends his public image
carefully,” Turner wrote, “and it's no coincidence that stories about him are almost universally positive.” The reality, charged Turner, was that people who worked with him “were
scared.
Scared? Of Steven Spielberg? That beneficent troll, that kindly gremlin whose gentle fantasies transport millions? Scared? They were terrified.” Sid Sheinberg told the
Los
Angeles
Times
he had to read Turner's article two or three times because “at first, I couldn't believe what I was reading…. It characterized Steven as being greedy, cold, and selfish. But that's not the Steven Spielberg I know. You're talking about someone I've known for seventeen or eighteen years.”

Spielberg's remarkable deal with NBC helped bring about the resentment in Hollywood, particularly after Brandon Tartikoff, president of NBC Entertainment, described Spielberg as behaving like an “800-pound gorilla.” Without even having to make a pilot, Spielberg was guaranteed a two-year commitment for
Amazing
Stories,
ensuring that forty-four shows would be broadcast no matter how the series performed in the ratings. He was granted creative carte blanche, having to conform only to network standards and practices, which in his case were relaxed considerably. The average budget for each half-hour program was a lavish $1 million, as much as the average hour-long dramatic program on television at that time; NBC put up $750,000 per show, with Universal making up the difference.

Many
Amazing
Stories
directors were Spielberg protégés, such as Joe Dante, Phil Joanou, Kevin Reynolds, and Lesli Linka Glatter. The unusually generous budgets and shooting schedules helped attract such major feature directors as Scorsese, Eastwood, Zemeckis, and Irvin Kershner. While directing “Ghost Train,” Spielberg invited his idol, David Lean, to visit the set. The famously perfectionistic Lean could not resist the temptation to offer a suggestion: “Don't you think on the next take that it would be absolutely marvelous if the debris fell a beat sooner than it had on the first two takes?” “Absolutely!” said Spielberg, yelling to his special-effects crew. “Drop the
day-bree
a beat sooner!” Then he asked Lean, “Would you like to do one of these?”

“Well, dear boy,” Lean replied, “how many days do you give a director?”

“Between six and eight,” said Spielberg.

“Oh, my,” said Lean. “Well, if you perhaps add a zero after the six or the eight, I'll consider.”

Some
Amazing
Stories
directors, mostly those who came from features, nevertheless managed to exceed their budgets and schedules. The series “was impeccably produced—
too
impeccably produced,” Dante feels. “And because the shows were so overproduced, it diminished the series.” The second show Spielberg directed, a thinly plotted World War II fantasy titled “The Mission,” was padded to fill an hour slot when his first cut clocked in eight minutes too long.

Such disparities between the elaborate scale of production and the tongue-in-cheek wispiness of the storylines were a recurring problem. As far as
Amazing
Stories
had any particular formula, Orton says, it was to introduce
“one drop of magic” into a dramatic setting and then “develop it in a realistic way.” On rare occasions, the magic worked, such as in the haunting “What If … ?,” directed by Joan Darling from a script by Spielberg's sister Anne. This show has what most other
Amazing
Stories
programs lack—a powerful emotional situation leading to a satisfying fantasy presented with conviction and a minimum of gimmickry. The tale of a small boy who suffers from parental neglect and is granted his wish to be reborn as the child of a kindly female stranger, “What If … ?” touches the heart much like
E.T.,
by providing a delicate fable of childhood pain, but it does so with a freshness and originality that never seems imitative of Steven Spielberg. On too many other
Amazing
Stories
programs, “Steven would come up with the ideas and the people who wrote the shows would be afraid to deviate from them,” Dante observes. “They would do slavish versions of his ideas.” While lambasting Spielberg for encouraging “an infantilization of the culture” through the work of his imitators, Pauline Kael added caustically of
Amazing
Stories,
“I can't think of any other director who's started paying homage to himself so early.”

After the series finished its first season a disastrous thirty-fifth in the ratings, one of its producers, David E. Vogel, said that “the spectacular visual effects for which Mr. Spielberg is renowned didn't work on television,” such as the locomotive crashing through the living room of a suburban ranch-house in “Ghost Train.” Tartikoff thought the series was too childish, and Spielberg vowed that in the second season, “The silly factor will be seriously minimalized,” but the series played out its run to diminishing audiences.

Spielberg's “The Mission” was a perfect exemplar of the “silly factor.” The director staged the crash landing of a bomber with elaborate, often dazzling camerawork, but the story built up to a ridiculous climax.
**
A young crew member (Casey Siemaszko) trapped in a plastic gunnery bubble under the plane draws cartoon wheels that magically materialize so the plane can land safely. Richard B. Matheson, who served as a story consultant on
Amazing
Stories,
“had to be more honest with Spielberg than is smart to be. I told him they spent all this money on ‘The Mission,' they had a great cast, and it was all based on this guy
drawing
a
wheel!
On
The
Twilight
Zone,
the stories were so interesting. There were not enough interesting or involving stories on
Amazing
Stories.
”

“Steven never could make up his mind what the show was going to be, whether it was going to be scary or whether it was going to be fantasy,” says writer and story consultant Bob Gale. “Every month Steven would change his mind about what direction we should go. Television is not a director's medium, and it's great that Steven got all these directors in there to do these shows, but the scripts weren't any good. He should have spent more time getting the best writers in the world to contribute, and
then
worrying about the directors.”

Spielberg expressed similar sentiments in his eloquent speech when accepting his Thalberg Award at the 1987 Oscar ceremony: “Most of my life has been spent in the dark watching movies. Movies have been the literature of my life. The literature of Irving Thalberg's generation was books and plays. They read the great words of great minds. And in our romance with technology and our excitement at exploring all the possibilities of film and video, I think we've partially lost something that we now have to reclaim. I think it's time to renew our romance with the word. I'm as culpable as anyone of exalting the image at the expense of the word…. I'm proud to have my name on this award in his honor, because it reminds me of how much growth as an artist I have ahead of me in order to be worthy of standing in the company of those who have received this before me.”

I
N
the mid-eighties, Spielberg attempted to produce a feature film for David Lean, who had returned to directing with
A
Passage
to
India
after a fourteen-year hiatus. Lean was considering filming J. G. Ballard's
Empire
of
the
Sun.
The 1984
roman
à
clef
dealt with the author's harrowing experiences as a boy living in Shanghai's British Protectorate and interned without his parents in a Japanese prison camp during the World War II occupation. Spielberg initially agreed to produce Lean's film version of
Empire
of
the
Sun
for Warner Bros., which controlled the rights.
††

But the elderly director became daunted by the prospect of working in China and by the problems of adapting the novel. “I worked on it for about a year,” he told biographer Kevin Brownlow, “and in the end I gave it up because I thought, This is like a diary. It's bloody well written and very interesting, but I don't think it's a movie for me because it hasn't got a dramatic shape…. I gave it up and Steven said, ‘Do you mind if I have it?' I said, ‘Of course I don't.' And he did it and I must say a bit of what I felt, I felt about his film, too.” (Spielberg subsequently agreed to produce Lean's planned film version of Joseph Conrad's
Nostromo
for Warner Bros., but angered Lean in February 1987 by handing him a detailed memo suggesting changes in Christopher Hampton's screenplay. “Who does he think he is?” Lean demanded, waving the memo at Hampton, who replied, “He thinks he's the producer, and he is.” Spielberg withdrew from the project, Hampton said, “because he could see there would be some sort of fight between him and David and he wanted to avoid that.” Lean continued preparing
Nostromo
until soon before his death in 1991.)

Spielberg's 1987 film version of
Empire
of
the
Sun
combined Lean's epic grandeur with Spielberg's own thematic concentration on the painful process of growing up. “The kid in
E.T.
that Henry Thomas played was as much who Steven Spielberg was when he made that movie as the kid in
Empire
of
the
Sun
was when he made
Empire
of
the
Sun,
”
Bob Gale observes. “By the time he made
Empire
of
the
Sun,
Steven was cut off from normal, everyday stuff by virtue of his success and how he lived. He was the kid in the ivory tower, so to speak, the kid in the sequestered existence. He was identifying with that kid [splendidly played by thirteen-year-old Christian Bale], because that was more who he was than the kid he was when he made
E.T.”

“From the moment I read the [Ballard] novel, I secretly wanted to do it myself,” Spielberg admitted. “I had never read anything with an adult setting—even
Oliver
Twist
—where a child saw things through a man's eyes as opposed to a man discovering things through the child in him. This was just the reverse of what I felt—leading up to
Empire
—was my credo. And then I discovered very quickly that this movie and turning forty [in December 1986] happening at almost the same time was no coincidence—that I had decided to do a movie with grown-up themes and values, although spoken through a voice that hadn't changed through puberty as yet.”

By adventuring into Lean territory and, indeed, Oedipally taking over a project from Lean himself, Spielberg was making a further declaration of artistic manhood.
‡‡
When he was a schoolboy, his favorite movie was Lean's
The
Bridge
on
the
River
Kwai,
which similarly takes place in a Japanese prison camp. His obsession with World War II also was stimulated by his father's stories about his experiences as a B-25 radio operator in the China-Burma-India Theater. Like J. G. [James Graham] Ballard's surrogate in the novel, Jim Graham, the young Spielberg developed an obsession with airplanes. “It's a fetish, I guess,” he said in 1991. “I think it's interesting to be psychoanalyzed via my films, and I agree with this idea because I consciously like flying and have flying in all of my films. But I'm afraid to fly in real life, so there's an interesting conflict here.”

To Spielberg, as to Jim, flying symbolizes both the possibility and the danger of escape. Jim's growing alienation from his prewar self and society is reflected in his hero-worship of the Japanese aviators based at the airfield adjoining the camp. “I think it's true that the Japanese were pretty brutal with the Chinese, so I didn't have any particularly sentimental view of them,” Ballard recalled. “But small boys tend to find their heroes where they can. One thing there was no doubt about, and that was that the Japanese were extremely brave. One had very complicated views about patriotism [and] loyalty to one's own nation. Jim is constantly identifying himself, first with
the Japanese, then when the Americans start flying over in their Mustangs and B-29s, he's very drawn to the Americans.”