Steven Spielberg (81 page)

Spielberg had no trouble seeing reflections of himself in Hart's workaholic protagonist, yuppie arbitrageur Peter Banning: “He's very representative of a lot of people today who race headlong into the future, nodding hello and good-bye to their families. I'm part of a generation that is extremely motivated by career, and I've caught myself in the unenviable position of
being
Peter Banning from time to time. I've seen myself overworked, and not spending enough time at home, and I got a couple of good lessons from making the movie.”

Hart, however, found himself replaced by other writers, including Malia Scotch Marmo and actress/novelist Carrie Fisher. “I loved Jim Hart's script,”
claimed Spielberg, “but I didn't feel he had written Captain Hook, and neither did Dustin. Malia rescued that.” Marmo received screenplay credit along with Hart, but Fisher was uncredited for rewriting comedic dialogue for Tinkerbell (Julia Roberts). “Steven tends to use writers like paintbrushes,” Hart noted. “He wants this writer for this, this writer for that. The joke was that everyone in town who had his fax number was writing for it.”

Much of the press coverage generated by
Hook
came for reasons that had little to do with the story of Peter Pan growing up. The gargantuan scale of the production made it a prominent symbol of 1990s runaway excess in Hollywood, with lavish sets filling nine stages on the Sony lot in Culver City. Although, as usual, Spielberg kept the sets closed to most of the press, a constant flow of Hollywood celebrities made
Hook
the town's “in” attraction after filming began on February 19, 1991, continuing into the summer.

Spielberg, Hoffman, and Williams did not take salaries for the film. Their deal, negotiated by the Creative Artists Agency (CAA), instead called for the trio to split 40 percent of the distributor's gross revenues from all markets. They were to receive a total of $20 million from the first $50 million in gross theatrical film rentals, with TriStar keeping the next $70 million in rentals before the three resumed receiving their percentage. As Medavoy pointed out at the time, if Spielberg and the two stars “went out and got their regular salaries, they would have gotten a lot more than the aggregate of 40 percent of $50 million. A huge amount more. I think it was a fair deal for everybody.” Medavoy's explanations did not stop the absurdly exaggerated gossip around Hollywood that the film would have to gross as much as $300 million to $500 million to see any profits.

When
Hook
opened with less than expected box-office numbers in December 1991, many people wrote it off as a bomb. With a production cost variously estimated at between $60 million and $80 million, far in excess of its original budget of $48 million, it is often regarded as one of the most conspicuous money-wasting debacles in Sony's profligate Hollywood spending spree. In fact, says Medavoy, “Sony made a lot of money on that picture. It did better overseas, but it did just an enormous amount here [the total worldwide theatrical gross was $288 million]. The video sold well. The studio will do somewhere between $40 million and $50 million profit.” As for Spielberg, Hoffman, and Williams, “They made a lot of money,” Medavoy says. “But so did everybody else.”

Medavoy points out that
Hook
also was designed as a way for Sony to say to Hollywood, “Take notice. The studio is open for business, and it's going to do big movies.” Unfortunately, that attitude seemed to infect everyone on the set, including Spielberg. Although he had been practicing frugality ever since his “rehab” on
Raiders
of
the
Lost
Ark,
he became intoxicated with the sheer scale of the production
||||||
and reverted to the kind of indulgence that
characterized his work on
1941.
Hook
ran forty days over its seventy-six-day shooting schedule. Among the other contributors to the laborious shooting pace were the notoriously perfectionistic Dustin Hoffman, the physically and emotionally overwrought Julia Roberts, some amateurish child actors, elaborate special effects, and crowd scenes with hundreds of extras and Stuntmen. But Spielberg said, “It was all my fault…. Nobody else made it go over budget. I began to work at a slower pace than I usually do…. For some reason this movie was such a dinosaur coming out of the gate. It dragged me along behind it…. Every day I came on to the set, I thought, Is this flying out of control?”

H
OOK
“gets the prize for the most lavish, extravagant, opulent ode to simple joys and basic values ever made,” quipped
Village
Voice
reviewer Georgia Brown. The more intimate scenes, particularly those revolving around Peter's relationship with his son, are so far superior to the spectacle scenes that it almost seems as if another director made the rest of the movie. The lifeless and garishly photographed scenes in the pirate village, the overly ornate and pointlessly cluttered production design,
****
the slapdash construction of the Neverland sequences, and the forced humor involving the punkish Lost Boys betray what
New
Yorker
reviewer Terrence Rafferty called “a profound weariness in Steven Spielberg's attitude toward his art and his audience. In this version of
Peter
Pan,
the imagination seems like a burden—a terrible, crushing obligation.”

Spielberg intends the audience to come away feeling that Peter is freed of his anal-retentive, Type-A behavior by immersing himself in the carefree behavior of childhood. The director's confused notion was that Peter “rescued his past. He rescued that memory of himself as a child and carried that best friend with him the rest of his life. It will never leave him again.” But the movie actually seems to be saying the opposite—that Peter needs to get his infantile tendencies out of his system for once and for all, through this one last monumental effort of regression, before he can go back to his family and behave like a
mensch.
Saving his children from Captain Hook requires that he give up his wish “to be a little boy and have fun.” “I can't stay and play,” Peter sadly tells the Lost Boys, although he carries away from Neverland a renewed sense of the importance of play in everyday life and an awareness of the futility of a life devoted exclusively to greed and ambition.

The troubled relationship between Peter and his son, so full of echoes of Spielberg's relationship with his own father, is the emotional heart of the film. An orphan himself, raised by his Granny Wendy (Maggie Smith), Peter
says, “I knew why I grew up. I wanted to be a father.” But he is a terrible failure as a husband and father, so “obsessed with success” at the expense of his family (as Captain Hook puts it) that he takes a business call during his daughter's school performance of
Peter
Pan
and sends an assistant to videotape his son's Little League baseball game. When he promises to attend games in the future, adding, “My word is my bond,” his son bitterly replies, “Yeah—junk bond.” Scarcely repressing his hostility toward his father, Jack nevertheless retains a tender core of wounded love that he finally is able to express when his father stands against the devious, child-hating Captain Hook.

After kidnapping Jack and his sister Maggie (Amber Scott)—the latest in a long string of child abductions in Spielberg movies—Hook woos them from their family allegiance with a lecture entitled “Why Parents Hate Their Children.” Hook's arguments are so persuasive because they are so accurate. “Jack and Maggie are gone because Peter has wished them gone,” Henry Sheehan noted in
Film
Comment.
“Hook is merely the agent of Peter's most secret, repressed desires, and as such is his mirror image. When Peter first confronts Hook and is taunted by the mustachioed pirate into attempting a rescue, his failure to do so is deeply ambiguous, the result partly of physical shortcoming [ironically, a fear of heights] but also partly of nerve and, hence, desire.” In one of the most quietly affecting scenes in the movie, Peter's wife Moira (Caroline Goodall) chides him by saying, “Your children love you. They want to play with you. How long do you think that lasts? Soon Jack may not even want you to come to his games. We have a few special years with our children, when they're the ones who want
us
around. After that you're going to be running off to them for a bit of attention. So
fast,
Peter—it's a few years, then it's over. You are not being careful. And you are missing it.”

That is the lesson Peter Banning learns in
Hook,
and it is one Spielberg took to heart in his own life, even while he was being pulled in the other direction by his own obsession with success. In learning to take the responsibility of fatherhood, Spielberg also learned to take greater responsibility as an artist.

“So,” Granny Wendy tells Peter, “your adventures are over.”

“Oh, no,” he replies. “To live—to live will be an awfully big adventure!”