Steven Spielberg (97 page)

As D. H. Lawrence once observed, “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.” Despite Spielberg’s own misgivings about what he had wrought, and though
Minority Report
sometimes seems to get distracted by the mechanics of high-speed chase sequences and elaborate special effects, the film’s popular success showed that he could take his audience on a serious moral journey while entertaining them with an ingenious deployment of genre conventions, riveting visual imagery, and impishly entertaining black comedy. With
Minority Report
and his subsequent films dealing with the threat to American
values, Spielberg identified that threat as coming mostly from within a
traumatized
society that had come to doubt its own founding principles.

S
PIELBERG’S
busy directorial agenda saw him making two films for release in 2002 (the other was the comedy-drama
Catch Me If You Can
), but his corporate allegiance again was split by making
Minority Report
in conjunction with Twentieth Century Fox, which released it in the United States and other countries. Spielberg had long had a practice of not being paid upfront for the films he directed but instead taking a large share (usually 20 percent) of the box-office gross; he and Cruise reportedly earned a total of at least $70 million from
Minority Report
, compared with less than $20 million each for Fox and DreamWorks.

DreamWorks limped along with a mostly mediocre performance in the early 2000s. Its box-office duds included a dull and charmless version of
The Time Machine
, directed by author H. G. Wells’s great-grandson Simon Wells; Woody Allen’s stylish but underappreciated farce
Hollywood Ending;
and Chris Rock’s ineptly directed, only intermittently amusing comedy
Head of State
, a proto-Obama piece of whimsy about the first black president. A solemn genre piece from director Sam Mendes, the 1930s gangster film
Road to Perdition
, was a moderate commercial success. DreamWorks’ penchant for postmodern genre pastiche and parody had become one of its hallmarks, and in-joke references to Spielberg’s own movies were a staple in many of the company’s films.

By 2003 DreamWorks was having what Spielberg admitted was “our first shitty year.” Even the animation division, so soon after the runaway success of
Shrek
, was in the doldrums in 2002–03, dragged down by such
underperformers
as
Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
and
Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas
. The division reported losing $189 million in 2003. By the following year, it would be spun off as a publicly traded company, with Katzenberg still in charge. That split, necessary to raise production capital and protect the division from the vagaries of the live-action operations, further weakened DreamWorks’ overall clout in the industry, especially since Spielberg kept his distance from DreamWorks Animation, reportedly because he otherwise would have had to disclose details of his compensation for directing films for DreamWorks SKG. But the indefatigable Katzenberg would soon lead the new animation company into a more fertile period, thanks in part to its gradual purchase of Pacific Data Images, a leader in the field of computer animation. That deal gave DreamWorks Animation a second studio in the northern California town of Redwood City. Although
Shrek
2 (2004) became the most successful animated film ever made, the live-action component of DreamWorks continued its dispiriting run with such creatively challenged program fodder as
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, EuroTrip, The Stepford Wives, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events
, and the relentlessly crude and witless “comedic” train wreck
Meet the Fockers
, a grotesque parody of the original
Meet the Parents
and a career low point for Dustin Hoffman,
Barbra Streisand, and Blythe Danner, as well as another dispiriting outing for Robert De Niro. A more ambitious offering, Vadim Perelman’s
House of Sand and Fog
, from the novel by Andre Dubus III about a lethal battle over the ownership of a California home, is sometimes compelling but suffers from a dully inexpressive lead performance by Jennifer Connelly, while Ben Kingsley’s magisterial characterization of a doomed former Iranian military man veers into the operatic.

In 2004, ten years after its founding, DreamWorks faced the inevitable and opened negotiations for selling itself to a major studio. That step marked the partners’ recognition that going it independently was just too daunting in the face of modern Hollywood economic realities, such as the huge costs of production and marketing. DreamWorks’ concentration on live action at the expense of its original plans for diversification had made it increasingly vulnerable to the ebb and flow of the marketplace and terribly exposed if it had an off-year. In his book on DreamWorks, Daniel M. Kimmel somewhat melodramatically overstates the case that by 2004, “the DreamWorks story was over … a failed dream.” But DreamWorks did not cease to exist; it downsized and became a subsidiary of a major studio, with access to corporate financing that kept it more insulated from the vagaries of the commercial marketplace. That was an unhappy comedown but not a complete collapse of Spielberg’s dream of independence, which, after all, is always a relative concept in Hollywood unless you are Charlie Chaplin and are able and willing to fully finance your own studio. “Our eyes were bigger than our stomachs,” David Geffen admitted to the
New York Times
in 2004. “We did what we could do. We started a number of things that turned out not to be good ideas. The world has changed a great deal in ten years.”

Spielberg loyally offered DreamWorks to his longtime home, Universal Pictures, which was already involved with DreamWorks in foreign and DVD distribution. But he was publicly humiliated when Universal’s new owner, General Electric, seemed less than eager over the prospect of buying his company. When DreamWorks suffered another slump, caused in part by the unexpectedly weak U.S. box-office returns of Michael Bay’s $130 million futuristic thriller
The Island
(ironically enough, one of his more watchable films, a relatively restrained and affecting dystopian chase thriller that still did respectable business overseas), GE demanded that the company lower its $1.4 billion asking price by $200 million, a move that offended Geffen, its point man in the negotiations. DreamWorks misguidedly turned to a new suitor, Paramount, a subsidiary of Viacom. They reached a deal in December 2005, completed the following February, for Paramount to pay $1.6 billion for DreamWorks (including assumption of debt). Each of the three founding partners in DreamWorks received a return of $175 million from the sale of the company, on their initial investments of $33.3 million. Paramount recouped some of that investment by selling the DreamWorks library of live-action films to a group led by investor George Soros in 2006 for $900 million, while keeping world distribution rights. The DreamWorks deal with Paramount
contained clauses allowing Spielberg and his partners to depart after a
three-year
period.

Spielberg issued a statement in December 2005 admitting, “I was saddened that after long negotiations and many compromises we were unable to come to terms with Universal’s parent company, GE.” When Los Angeles
Times
writer Rachel Abramowitz met with him to discuss his new film
Munich
just hours after he agreed to sell DreamWorks, she found him “slumped—almost curled up against a pillow—on a banquette by a window overlooking the Pacific. His hair is gray, his face pale, his manner muted. He seems tired—soultired— almost emptied out, as he talks; gone is the excited purposefulness that is the hallmark of his on-set persona.” The following February, Spielberg said that DreamWorks would continue to have strong ties to Universal because “Universal is my birthplace, and because of that, I’ll always have a weak spot for partnerships there.” These were not auspicious statements to make as he and DreamWorks entered their partnership with Paramount. Since Spielberg always wanted to preserve his flexibility in setting up directing projects anywhere he pleased, his deal with Paramount was nonexclusive. After the messy negotiations involved in finding a new owner for DreamWorks, Spielberg’s seller’s remorse and the frustrations that soon followed in his working relationship with Paramount seemed inevitable.

S
PIELBERG
often flirted with projects that he wound up passing to other directors. But he dallied for an unusually long time over whether to direct a film version of Arthur Golden’s novel
Memoirs of a Geisha
for DreamWorks, which he began considering in 1997, before giving the project to director Rob Marshall, who filmed it in 2004. If Spielberg had made the period film about a Japanese peasant girl being sold into a geisha house and surviving World War II, it probably would have had echoes of
The Color Purple
and
Empire of the Sun
, but he seemed to find the story too remote from his more compelling interest during that period in examining American social problems. His partners were unenthusiastic about the project, which he planned to film on a modest $10 million budget: “No one wanted to make that movie—even with me,” Spielberg lamented. The film that finally emerged is overly glamorized and dramatically torpid, as well as inauthentic; much of it was filmed in California, and the three lead actresses are Chinese and Malaysian, a fact that caused some controversy. The stilted English dialogue, which makes the movie sound dubbed, damages the quality of the performances,
demonstrating
the wisdom of Spielberg’s initial plan to film it in Japanese.

While Marshall was preparing to film
Geisha
, Spielberg turned his
attention
to shooting
The Terminal
, a DreamWorks project he took over from another director, Lasse Hallström, and completed for release in the summer of 2004.
Catch Me If You Can
in 2002 and
The Terminal
enabled Spielberg to take what he called a relatively lighthearted creative “vacation” from the emotional agony of
A.I.
and the graphic violence of
Minority Report
. And yet
both of these comedies have their disturbing elements, and
The Terminal
deals directly with contemporary social anxieties, contradicting his comment that “when I see darkness I can’t make funny films about it.”

Spielberg had flirted with the idea of directing
Meet the Parents
for
DreamWorks
in 2000, but Kate talked him out of it (“She said I was not funny enough to direct it”). He had avoided directing comedies since the debacle of
1941
, worrying that his critics were right and that his comic tastes tended toward excess, even if the humorous elements of his more serious films showed he could calibrate those instincts effectively. Spielberg made an “impulsive decision” to commit to directing
Catch Me If You Can
in 2001 when a brief window of availability opened up on the project about a young con man and impostor. Frank W. Abagnale Jr., the son of a feckless New York businessman, chronicled his scams and impersonations in a best-selling 1980 memoir of equally dubious reliability (written with Stan Redding). Abagnale claimed to have impersonated, while still in his teens or just beyond, an airline pilot, a doctor, a prosecutor, and a college teacher, while supporting himself by forging checks.

Spielberg was attracted to this brash, far-fetched yarn partly because he saw a connection with his own youthful adventures roaming the Universal lot as a cheeky seventeen-year-old and, within a few short years, directing Joan Crawford in a television program while commanding hostile crew members three times his age. Remembering when he “went into a disguise—I became a sixteen-and-a-half-year-old [
sic
] executive with a tie and a suit … got me to say I can get into this kid’s skin. I kind of understand what he went through.”

While there’s no doubting the emotional resonance Spielberg found in the subject, especially since he responded to Abagnale’s messy family situation by having Jeff Nathanson strengthen that element in the screenplay, it’s curious that the director’s identification with Abagnale’s con games is itself something of a con on the media and the public. Spielberg’s often-repeated claim that he “broke into” Universal by conning his way past the gate guard and setting himself up in an empty office, pretending to be a filmmaker, was debunked in the 1997 edition of this book. The reality—that Spielberg was given a job by Universal librarian Chuck Silvers as an unpaid clerical assistant in the editorial department and shared an office with Silvers and purchasing agent Julie Raymond—was studiously ignored by the director in his promotional interviews for
Catch Me If You Can
, along with the fact that his original meeting with Silvers had been arranged through family connections. Since directorial “creation myths,” however dubious, are more appealing to segments of the public than the truth, many people continue to believe the false account of how Spielberg got his start. Perhaps they share the view expressed by Lord Gainsford in Frank Capra’s
Lost Horizon
when he says of Robert Conway’s
adventures
in Shangri-La, “I believe it, because I
want
to believe it.”

When Spielberg was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors in 2006, Tom Hanks amused the VIP audience by telling the story: “A few decades ago
a young man showed up at the gates of fabled Universal Studios, dressed in a cheap suit and carrying an empty prop of a suitcase, hoping to sneak into one of Hollywood’s great temples of magic-making.” Hanks went on to talk about Spielberg bluffing his way onto the lot and setting up an empty office to use while crashing sound stages for two and half months. The show contradicted itself by also giving the other version about Spielberg jumping off a tram on the Universal tour and staying for only two weeks. When
Washington Post
writers Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts questioned these accounts, the CBS-TV show’s producer, George Stevens Jr., asked their researcher, “
Really
, are you new to show business? Does he have creative license to retell his story? Yes, I would imagine…. Maybe we should just say it’s part of the ever-expanding legend of Steven Spielberg.” The
Post
cited this book’s revisionist account and quoted film historian Douglas Gomery as commenting of the mythic version, “It makes a better story than the guy who works his way through the system. As the story grows older, the mythology grows stronger. And I’m sure even [Spielberg] now believes it.”