Spielberg Page 7

  Sheinberg described his wife’s relationship with the director: “Actors love to work with Steve. The one I’m closest to—Lorraine—would keep walking off a building if Steve told her, ‘Keep walking off the building.’ Steven listens, which is a very important thing. There are a number of important directors around town who are convinced they know it all. Steve sent drafts of Jaws’ scripts to a lot of people to get their reactions.”

  Jaws’ phenomenal commercial and critical success drew the inevitable backlash, supporting the maxim, the only thing people like more than putting someone on a pedestal is yanking him off it.

  Spielberg was no exception. After Jaws grossed $60 million in its first month of release, the New York Times said, “There are those, of course, who say that no matter what the wunderkind does, he will never again have another supercollossal success like Jaws. In other words, they think the kid has peaked.”

  Even Spielberg was wary of his success. The future director of E.T. and Jurassic Park accurately and inaccurately predicted, “I don’t think I’ll ever top Jaws commercially. But I define my own peak. The peak of my career will come when I make the best film I ever make. I have the right to determine when I have peaked, and when I’ve slid the other way.”

  He also refused to take sole credit for the film’s box-office performance. Modestly, he insisted, “You know I should write John Williams a check for Jaws and George Lucas should write him one for Star Wars. If I’d released Jaws without John’s music, it would still have done 60 million. Because of his score, it did 115.”

  Despite or perhaps because of its financial success, Jaws started an almost lifelong criticism of his works as being commercial drivel. Spielberg, however, liked commercialism. Harking back to the days when he screened 8 mm films like Davy Crockett for the neighborhood kids, Spielberg liked putting fannies in theater seats. He had no tolerance for critics who wanted him to make message movies or character-driven “little” films.

  “If I had made Jaws a vehicle for an actor, and if I made the picture about the effects of one shark attack on the socio-economic decline of a community that is dependent on summer dollars to avoid winter welfare, I think Dick Zanuck, David Brown and I would have been the only three people to have gone to see that movie. I believe there is a way to combine the acting, the personal things inside a director, with a major entertainment experience.”

  As the director and his work matured concomitantly, he would prove that thesis in spades—even though it would take him twenty years to completely fulfill his desire to combine the personal and the commercial.

  The one thing his early success didn’t do was turn him into an outrageous egomaniac. For example, even though he was, in the words of the usually restrained New York Times, “the most prized and sought after director in the business,” he generously agreed to speak to a film class at UCLA only a few months after Jaws had been released.

  His demeanor in the small classroom proved that success doesn’t go to everybody’s head. He showed up wearing his now trademark baseball cap, a flannel shirt, and jeans. There was no entourage of publicist, manager, or personal assistant. Only his friend and confidant, director Brian De Palma, joined him for the UCLA visit.

  Not only did he show up, he arrived before the teacher, who was late. The door to the classroom was locked when the first students showed up for class. They were greeted by Spielberg, who was standing in the hallway, patiently waiting to be let into the locked room.

  Spielberg told the class how he directed one of Jaws’ most powerful scenes. It focused on Robert Shaw’s character, Quint. For a film that wasn’t character-driven, Quint was a colorful, at least two-dimensional character. Next to being swallowed whole by the shark, Shaw’s most memorable scene may be the one that contained no action save his chugalugging whisky while he recounts a World War II experience in which his shipmates were devoured by sharks.

  As Quint drains his whisky bottle, the story gets more and more colorful. Spielberg confided in the class, “Normally, I don’t let actors drink on the set, but for this scene I actually let him swig from a bottle of whisky. He ended up improvising most of his speech. Unfortunately, after about twenty takes, his monologue became unintelligible, and we ended up not using any of the later stuff.”

  Spielberg was modest about his success and attributed much of it to luck—not dumb luck, but smart luck.

  “I don’t think I’m a phenomenon at all,” he said after Jaws hit the jackpot. “I think part of my success at the age of twenty-seven has to do with lucking out! I think a lot of it has to do with being prepared when the man with the money comes to you and says, ‘What have you got?’ And you fast draw two scripts and three ideas. To go back to the Boy Scouts, the motto was, ‘Be prepared.’ And when the time came, I had fifteen films under my right arm. I had three scripts under my left arm, and I was knocking down doors. It was something I wanted to happen, not when I was thirty or thirty-five years old, when most directors start working, but now. By the age of eighteen I was determined to become a professional movie director.”

  For all his professed modesty, the young director did have occasional brushes with self-importance. In her memoir, producer Julia Phillips claims that Spielberg and a friend, actor-director Albert Brooks, roamed New York City in a cab, shooting home movies of the people lined up outside theaters showing Jaws.

  Phillips, who would have a love-hate relationship with the director when she produced Close Encounters of the Third Kind, acidly summed up his self-absorption at the time. “He is so blatant in his excitement for himself that he is adorable. I did not notice for at least a year that this kind of behavior bespeaks a childish self-preoccupation that tends to remove all hope.”

  Who could really blame him, however, for indulging himself on occasion; after all, he was the hottest property in Hollywood. Fame is a powerful aphrodisiac, in the words of Graham Greene, and Spielberg attracted his share of groupies and female admirers. But things never got out of hand. There were no River Phoenix- or Sean Penn-style revels.

  “After Jaws, I did cut loose a little. I only went a little bit crazy because I was too busy to become a real hedonist,” he said of this heady time.

  He did find the time to date a few gorgeous actresses such as Victoria Principal and Sarah Miles, but he insists, “I didn’t stop to notice if women were interested in me, or if there was a party that I might have been invited to. I didn’t ever take the time to revel in the glory of a successful or money-making film. I didn’t stop to enjoy. I never had a chance to sit down and pat myself on the back or spend my money or date or go on vacation in Europe.”

  Not surprisingly, Jaws did make him independently wealthy. He told Women’s Wear Daily that he cleared $4 million after taxes. But this sudden avalanche of wealth didn’t transport him to the ranks of the nouveaux riches. “I live as I did before,” he said in the wake of Jaws’ release. “I have the same house I bought for $49,000 five years ago. And I drive a black and white police car with 10 bullet holes in it that I used in Sugarland Express.”

  Instead of partying with starlets, he immersed himself in the business of making movies, since he had clearly already mastered the technical side of it. “I pretty much hung out with the Brooks Brothers realists,” including the late Steve Ross, then chairman of Warner Brothers; Terry Semel, the studio’s current chairman; and ICM chief Guy McElwaine, Spielberg’s agent for years. “I don’t think it made me a Brooks Brothers or a realist, but it gave me a real good primer on the film industry,” he said of this early mentoring.

  “I remember Guy McElwaine taking me over to Terry Semel’s house simply so Terry could sit me down and explain distribution, which I knew nothing about.”

  (Years later, Spielberg would outshark the movie studios by discarding the standard distribution deal in favor of a new deal that would enrich him and pal George Lucas by hundreds of millions. He was a very good student of Ross and Semel.)

  “Terry must have talked for four hours straight.
And I was taking notes. At the end of the day I knew more about distribution and exhibition than I ever wanted to,” he recalled.

  His wooing of McElwaine paid off as well. Shortly before Jaws’ release, when no one knew for certain what a monster hit it would be, McElwaine renegotiated Spielberg’s contract and got him an additional 5 percent of the profits. That little negotiating trick earned Spielberg tens of millions of dollars in excess of the paltry $4 million he claimed in the Women’s Wear Daily interview. Maybe he feared the IRS might read the fashion-industry trade paper. McElwaine’s splendid performance was forgotten years later, however, when Spielberg unceremoniously dumped his longtime agent in favor of the number-one agent in Hollywood, Mike Ovitz, who reportedly wooed Spielberg by offering to take less than the usual 10 percent agent’s cut.

  A year after Jaws made him the man of the moment, he apparently grew tired of dating starlets. He had speculated that he dated actresses because he knew he could never become serious about one. Years after the fact, Spielberg was still smarting from his parents’ divorce, and he feared a commitment that would lead to the same painful parting.

  By 1976, however, it seemed he wanted to settle down with one actress.

  At least that’s what happened when Brian De Palma introduced Spielberg to Amy Irving, a frizzy-haired actress who played the high school student with a heart of gold in De Palma’s sleeper hit, Carrie. They met at a dinner party where De Palma played matchmaker.

  De Palma recalled, “I think they’re very well suited to one another. I had a feeling Amy and Steven would like each other when I got them together. One night, while we were shooting Carrie, a group of us had dinner. Martin Scorsese and his then wife Julia Cameron, Steven, Amy and me. All evening they talked.”

  Irving had a prestigious pedigree. She was the daughter of actress Priscilla Pointer and actor-director Jules Irving, one of the founding directors of the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater in New York City.

  Spielberg compared favorably with her much-loved father. “Like Steven,” she said in 1985, “Dad was a wonderful, boyish man, a real hard worker—gifted with a silly sense of humor. And, they both loved me, so they always had that in common.”

  Both Irving’s parents were classy and appreciated the arts. So was their daughter. Spielberg was reportedly “immediately smitten” when De Palma introduced them.

  But Spielberg didn’t let his heart overwhelm his professional sense. A year after they met, she read for the role of the young mother in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He told her forthrightly that she was too young for the role. (George Lucas had similarly nixed her when she read for the part of Princess Leia in Star Wars; Carrie Fisher got the job instead.)

  Irving said approvingly of her disappointment, “He doesn’t come on to young actresses in his office.” And later when they became romantically involved, she added, “And I’m glad.”

  A year after meeting, they were cohabiting in a modest house in rustic Laurel Canyon, just north of Hollywood.

  Irving remembered those early, heady days when she was the consort of the king of Hollywood. “I was living with Steven when he was very successful, and I was just starting out. I was insecure in that situation and wanted to go out and find my career by myself. Also, the L.A. life-style didn’t come naturally to me. It wasn’t a place that nurtured truth and growth for me.”

  Their relationship was not made in heaven. The tempestuous pairing broke up in 1980 (in the middle of a prehoneymoon flight to Japan), got back together in 1983, wed two years later, only to divorce four years after that.

  The biggest problem in the relationship seems to have been Irving’s fiercely competitive spirit. She had grown up being the daughter of “famed director Jules Irving,” she once said, and now, her biggest claim to fame was being the girlfriend, then wife, of the most successful director of all time.

  “I started my career as the daughter of theater director Jules Irving. I don’t want to finish it as the wife of Steven Spielberg,” she said ominously while they were still together.

  Irving wanted her time in the spotlight, even if it meant taking some of her husband’s lighting away.

  Spielberg’s friend, producer-writer Matthew Robbins, put his finger exactly on what was wrong with the relationship from the start.

  “I like Amy a lot,” he said, covering his flanks. “But when Steven decided to marry her, I was very worried. It was no fun to go over there because there was an electric tension in the air. It was competitive as to whose dining table this is, whose career we’re going to talk about or whether he even approved of what she was interested in, her friends and her life as an actress. He really was uncomfortable. The child in Spielberg believes so thoroughly in the possibility of a perfect marriage, the Norman Rockwell turkey on the table.

  “And Amy was sort of a glittering prize, smart as hell, gifted and beautiful, but definitely edgy and provocative and competitive. She would not provide him any ease. There was nothing to go home to that was cozy.”

  Robbins’s insight was hardly a closely held secret. One of the infamous quotes attributed to Irving was a sharp put-down of her husband’s entire body of work. “Steven makes terrific films, but they’re not my kind of films,” she once said when asked why she had never starred in any of his movies.

  This author personally encountered the jealousy she felt toward her husband when he interviewed her in 1987. At one point during the interview at their Coldwater Canyon home, he asked her what her husband was doing.

  “He’s in China,” she said, offering what seemed like the least bit of information she possibly could. In fact, that’s all she offered. When asked what he was doing there, she said, “Why don’t you ask him? I don’t do PR for Steven.”

  Ouch!

  A magazine story at the time had hailed her and her husband as Hollywood royalty. Sounding jaded, Irving replied, “It doesn’t surprise me. I feel like Hollywood royalty. Steven is such a power in this town,” she said, adding with bitterness, “But I didn’t get here on my own. I married into it.”

  “I’ve never talked to the press about my personal life with Amy,” Spielberg once said, inaccurately. “She talks about it.”

  But only at gunpoint, apparently.

  Indirectly, Spielberg hinted that it wasn’t just his future wife’s competitiveness that soured the relationship. He suggested that maybe it was his tendency to “direct” the relationship rather than share it that contributed to its problems.

  “It’s a lot easier for me to commit to a movie than a personal relationship. I often want to direct reality, to direct the scene, to say, ‘Stay in your frame. I’ll deal with it, but stay there.’ ”

  Ultimately, Irving would be unable to take “direction” from her husband, but that climactic epiphany was years away.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Close Encounters of

  the Fabulous Kind

  SPIELBERG’S NEXT FILM WOULD SHOW THAT Jaws was no fluke. Close Encounters of the Third Kind only made half of Jaws’ take, about $270 million, but it was, well, light years ahead of the earlier film in sophistication and maturity. In fact, Close Encounters showed Spielberg could inspire awe, not just terror and thrills.

  Jaws had made him rich and famous, but more importantly for the self-effacing, nonmaterialistic director, the box-office success of the film had given him Hollywood’s ultimate prize, power. Spielberg suddenly was “bankable.” He had the clout to film the Yellow Pages in Esperanto if he wanted.

  “The minute that Jaws hit, I seized the chance to make a movie I’d wanted to do for years—Close Encounters. At the time, my script of it was stalled at Columbia, but I marched in and shook those Jaws box-office receipts at them and they gave in. I said, ‘I want 12 million to do this picture.’ They agreed.”

  Before Jaws turned him into Mr. Bankable, every studio in town had turned down his script for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. On the surface, the project had a lot of things going against it. Typical visitors-fro
m-outer-space movies, beginning in the fifties, featured extraterrestrials who were malevolent, bent on enslaving or destroying the planet they were visiting. At the turn of the century, H. G. Welles started the ball rolling with War of the Worlds, the ultimate visitors-from-hell/outer-space novel. It’s a theme that continues to this day, whether on Star Trek’s many reincarnations or other popular television series like Babylon 5. Extraterrestrial equals evil is the inevitable equation.

  Spielberg begged to differ and offered some impressive statistics: “In thirty years of UFO reportings, the encounters have been very benevolent,” he said. “No sci-fi death rays, no radiation poisoning . . . That’s the attitude I take in the picture. I have tried to take interspace relationships out of the science fiction closet and give them an aura of respectability.”

  As for all that extraterrestrial benevolence, Spielberg must have been unaware of other accounts that detailed invasive surgery and anal probes performed on unwitting humans who claimed to have been spirited aboard UFOs. And if Whitley Streiber’s alleged real-life account, Communion, about close encounters of the grisly kind, had ever crossed his desk, he might have rethought his script and turned it into a sophisticated version of all those campy death-ray extravaganzas.

  But Spielberg had only good feelings for any potential extraterrestrial guests touring Earth. The idea for Close Encounters came from one of the few good memories of his relationship with his father. His fascination with the sky began one night when his father woke the six-year-old and drove him to a large meadow to witness a meteor shower. He was hooked.