Steven Spielberg (90 page)

T
HAT
the first film Spielberg directed after starting his own studio,
The Lost World: Jurassic Park
(1997), was for another company (Universal) was a warning sign not lost on Hollywood observers. Spielberg’s agreement with DreamWorks allowed him to shop his services elsewhere, directing two of every three movies for other companies, which gave him additional freedom but weakened the value of his involvement with his partners and took away vital sources of possible revenue. That split focus may have helped account for Spielberg’s tendency to display a lack of follow-through on his grandiose plans for the studio. He kept his old company, Amblin Entertainment, alive as a personal refuge, another example of hedging his bets, which may have been a sound strategy personally but further affected industry and public perception of his commitment to DreamWorks. Even Katzenberg admitted that Spielberg’s outside obligations were “more demanding than any of us had anticipated.”

The Lost World
was the director’s sequel to his own 1993 blockbuster
dinosaur
movie, whose position as the biggest-grossing film in history was
surpassed
by James Cameron’s 1997
Titanic
. (Cameron eventually broke his own record with his 2009
Avatar
.) Spielberg said he agreed to make
The Lost World
when he looked at his daily log and saw that “every meeting I had scheduled had nothing to do with directing movies. That’s when I realized that what I do best is what my partners would want me to do: direct.” But Spielberg’s motivations for making the dinosaur sequel were coldly pragmatic. Not only would it be a guaranteed smash hit, whatever its quality, it was a film
Spielberg
felt a need to control because of his disdain for the tawdry sequels
Universal
had turned out to
Jaws
. He had avoided making his own
Jaws
sequel and always would refuse to make a sequel to
E.T.
, believing it would cheapen the original. The level of cynicism behind such projects was spoofed in the 1989 Amblin sci-fi comedy
Back to the Future Part II
by director Robert
Zemeckis
and executive producer Spielberg when they showed a theater marquee in 2015 featuring
Jaws
19, directed by Max Spielberg (the son of Spielberg and Amy Irving). But the idea of another director capitalizing on
Jurassic Park
was anathema to Spielberg. His possessiveness proved unfortunate, for though
The Lost World
fulfilled its main functions by grossing $614 million
worldwide
and helping promote Universal’s
Jurassic Park
ride at its studio theme park, even he seemed bored by the formulaic film.

Like Graham Greene, Spielberg often alternates “entertainments” with more serious films, sometimes within the same year, as he did in 1997, when he followed
The Lost World
with
Amistad
, a historical drama about a revolt of African captives and their liberation by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1841. Such artistic dexterity is one of Spielberg’s strengths, and sometimes his
entertainments
are superior. But not that year.
The Lost World
, made for the
wrong reasons, is a piece of hackwork that utterly lacks the original’s sense of joyous discovery. The wonders of CGI (computer-generated imagery), which allowed Spielberg and company to recreate dinosaurs onscreen so believably, had quickly become routine. Although the creatures in
The Lost World
are more supple and lively than those in Jurassic Park, the effects seem predictable and unexciting, especially when coupled with a virtually nonexistent storyline that generates little suspense or involvement with the characters. Possibly the worst film in Spielberg’s directing career,
The Lost World
proved a strikingly unworthy vehicle for his return to his craft after receiving his first Academy Award for
Schindler’s List
. Spielberg recognized during the shooting what a dispiriting comedown it was and said, “I beat myself up … growing more and more impatient with myself…. It made me wistful about doing a
talking
picture, because sometimes I got the feeling I was just making this big silent-roar movie…. I found myself saying, ‘Is that all there is? It’s not enough for me.’”

Michael Crichton’s dismal source novel for
The Lost World
shamelessly steals even its title from Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel, without which the whole saga might not exist. Crichton’s novel lacks the entertainment level of the pseudo-scientific speculation in
Jurassic Park
and has even thinner
characterizations
. The gimmick of revealing Site B, a dinosaur breeding ground for the theme park, seems a transparent cheat to recycle the first book and film rather than an organic development. After some verbose but amusing expository scenes in which Jeff Goldblum’s mathematician character, Dr. Ian Malcolm, expresses anger at the deception but is lured back to try to thwart a mad scheme to bring the dinosaurs to the U.S. mainland, the movie
degenerates
into a series of mechanical and noisily violent scenes of chasing and mayhem. Goldblum’s sarcastic and bitter remarks over the park being turned into a franchise reflect Spielberg’s own ill-disguised contempt for the material, which is evident in the monotonous pacing, uninspired compositions, murky and dingy lighting style, and his uncharacteristically haphazard direction of actors, such as Julianne Moore, who rattles off her dull scientific lines as if she’s reading from the telephone book.

The listless screenplay is by David Koepp, Spielberg’s go-to screenwriter for his less cerebral fare (Koepp has also worked on
Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds
, and
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
). The director paid him an ambivalent compliment in 2008: “You can smell the popcorn coming out of David’s computer when David’s coming up with original
concepts
.” Koepp appears in a cameo in
The Lost World
, being attacked by a rampaging dinosaur outside a San Diego video store (his character is listed in the credits as “Unlucky Bastard”). In this tongue-in-cheek section of the film, Spielberg comes creatively alive, escaping from the tedium of the jungle and having fun with the dino romping through a suburban neighborhood. He throws in a gag about some Japanese tourists being chased by the
Godzilla-like
monster, and for the Japanese release of the film, he added a close-up of one of the tourists exclaiming, “I came to America to get away from this!”

The Lost World
contains one entirely fresh element, and ironically, it drew some criticism. Malcolm has a black adolescent child, Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester), who is simply presented as his daughter without further explanation. Some reviewers actually complained about this admirably
matter-of-fact
way of depicting an unconventional and modern family relationship; that this kind of criticism surfaces whenever Spielberg deals with black characters seems more a reflection of reviewers’ biases than on the director’s genuine level of empathy for social outsiders. When Kelly starts complaining to Malcolm that he’s too busy and selfish to fulfill his fatherly responsibilities, the Spielbergian family theme shows signs of becoming a knee-jerk plot device he trots out on all occasions. But there are a few moments of genuine emotion between father and daughter. When they are in peril on the island and Malcolm assures the terrified girl, “I’m coming right back—I give you my word,” she replies, “But you never keep your word.” Spielberg’s cut to a large close-up of her face at that moment is a heart-wrenching frisson, a momentary jab of truth in an otherwise inconsequential movie.

T
HE
second DreamWorks release,
Amistad
(1997), received a mixed
critical
reception and was one of the least commercially successful films of
Spielberg’s
career. “I got calls from relatives consoling me on the
Amistad
grosses on the second weekend,” Spielberg ruefully recalled. “… I said, ‘Hey, have you seen the movie yet?’ ‘Uh, no.’” The film’s searing examination of race and abolitionism in pre–Civil War America seemed to stir less emotional reaction in the media than a damaging controversy over a lawsuit by an African
American
novelist who claimed that the film was stolen from her book. Spike Lee and others denounced Spielberg for his effrontery in dealing with a historical event that had largely been ignored by American historians and filmmakers. Reviewers and audiences alike seemed eager to retreat from the film’s
unsparing
look at slavery and the moral issues surrounding it; the lawsuit provided them a welcome out from grappling with the actual story, as well as another opportunity for Spielberg haters to bash him for his presumption. As he said, “People seemed more interested in asking me questions about the lawsuit than about the content of
Amistad
.” The subtext Alice Walker discerned in the criticism of his film of her novel
The Color Purple
(“What makes this
Jewish
boy think he can direct a movie about black people?”) overwhelmed the reception for
Amistad
as well. Despite all those distractions,
Amistad
is a film for the ages, one of Spielberg’s most eloquent and moving works.

Spielberg’s strong emotional commitment to civil rights in his adolescence led to a lifelong loyalty to such causes as well as to adopting two African American children, Theo and Mikaela, with his wife, Kate Capshaw. He said during the shooting of
Amistad
, “I am making this film for my black children
and
my white children. They all need to know this story.” Other Spielberg works with black protagonists include the “Make Me Laugh” segment of the
Night Gallery
television series and the “Kick the Can” segment of
Twilight
 
Zone—The Movie
. Also, his documentary on American history,
The Unfinished Journey
, made for the misnamed
America’s Millennium
CBS-TV special and presented live as part of a multimedia show at the Lincoln Memorial on
December
31, 1999, features many African Americans, includes Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Maya Angelou as narrators, and has a lengthy section dealing with the civil rights movement (along with such other Spielberg obsessions as World War II, pop culture, and air and space flight). Giving Jeff Goldblum a black daughter in
The Lost World
is further evidence that Spielberg not only talks the talk but walks the walk. His long-standing identification with “aliens” of all kinds is a reflection of that integral part of his personality;
La Amistad
, the ship bringing the captives to America, has antecedents in films as varied as
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
and
1941
. It is to Spielberg’s great credit that attacks such as those leveled at him for
The Color Purple
and
Amistad
have not made him abandon his exploration of racial themes or
discouraged
him from delving into other potentially inflammatory social issues.

Choreographer and producer Debbie Allen, who is African American, pitched the idea of making
Amistad
to Spielberg in 1994 because she thought
Schindler’s List
demonstrated his affinity for the project. Hearing about the captive leader Cinqué made Spielberg think of the American black activist Donald DeFreeze, who assumed that
nom de guerre
in the 1970s as the leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Spielberg admitted he had never heard of the story of the Africans who survived the harrowing Middle Passage in a slave ship before rebelling against their Spanish captors, sailing
La Amistad
to the coast of Connecticut; the event became a
cause celebre
of the abolitionist movement. “Really?” Spielberg asked Allen. “Did that happen?” She had to persuade Spielberg to overcome his anxieties about another backlash like the one that beset him when he made
The Color Purple
. “Steven, that was then, this is now,” she told him. “I think things will be looked at differently.” From that point on, “Steven was so committed and passionate,” she recalled. “From the beginning, we were on the same page.” Spielberg said that when she told him the story, “I immediately thought that this was something that I would be pretty proud to make, simply to say to my son [Theo], ‘Look, this is about you.’”

Allen told the author of this book in 1997, before the film opened, that she had come across the story at her alma mater, Howard University, in 1978, when she found a book of essays edited by John Alfred Williams and Charles F. Harris in 1970,
Amistad I
. She said she optioned William A. Owens’s 1953 novel
Black Mutiny: The Revolt on the Schooner Amistad
in 1984 and became determined to make it into a film (it is listed as “a major source of
reference
material” in the film’s end credits), but received many turndowns before
Schindler’s List
convinced her Spielberg would be right for the project.

However, novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud had submitted her 1989 historical novel
Echo of Lions
to DreamWorks in 1988, through her editor at
Doubleday
, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. DreamWorks passed on the project, and when Chase-Riboud later learned it was making a film on the subject, she
objected and demanded payment and screen credit. After settlement
negotiations
with DreamWorks failed, the $10 million copyright infringement
lawsuit
ensued in October 1997. Chase-Riboud told the press, “I absolutely feel my intellectual property has been kidnapped. Therefore, I’ve been stolen—mentally if not physically. This isn’t the 19th century. The United States is no longer a plantation.” DreamWorks attorney Bertram Fields responded, “Miss Chase-Riboud acts like she owns a piece of American history. It’s like saying we can’t write about George Washington.”