16. SAVING SPIELBERG

WHEN THE LIGHTS WENT UP after the first screening of Saving Private Ryan—reserved for Spielberg and a small coterie of friends and filmmakers—the reaction was not typical of a Spielberg debut. "It was a tiny screening room, everyone was separated by two to three seats, and when the film was over, my jaw was on my chest, everyone was stunned," said Robert Rodat, who wrote the film's script. "Nobody said anything for a little while."

Matt Damon, who played James Francis Ryan in the film—the private who would be saved—was still riding high on his Good Will Hunting Oscar. He was sitting next to Rodat. As the credits rolled, he looked over and, wordlessly, patted the writer on the leg.

"It wasn't a congratulatory pat," Rodat said. "It was a pat of—Wow, that was intense."

As the group—which also included Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, and producer Mark Gordon—stood and emptied out into the hallway, the silence persisted. Only when Rodat was out of earshot of Spielberg did he dare breathe, and say the unsayable: "Holy shit! How are they going to sell this baby?"

"We were worried," Rodat said. "We were afraid the headlines would say: 'Too Violent. Don't See It.'"

There was reason to worry. The first twenty-four minutes of the film, which re-created the D-day battle scene on Omaha Beach, was so unflinchingly violent that when the film was screened for a group of veterans, one man had a heart attack and had to be rushed to a hospital (he recovered).

As originally written by Rodat, the scene had been twelve minutes long, with the action commencing only after the Allies had landed onshore and ascended the fog-swathed cliffs. But Spielberg had something more immediate in mind. He had wanted the audience to feel the carnage and violent fury in the very first shots, before the Allies' boats even landed on the beach. To maximize the drama, he wanted the scene to last for close to half an hour.

Spielberg hadn't actually rewritten the scene, but had come up with the sequence visually, in his head, and then dictated it out to Marc Haimes, a young executive at DreamWorks, in a rush of ideas and images. The scene had then been storyboarded out and shot. Scott Frank (Get Shorty), who did rewrites on Saving Private Ryan, recounted the situation for Variety editor in chief Peter Bart, for his book The Gross, which chronicles the making of the movie: "When I heard how Steven intended to shoot the first twenty minutes, my first reaction was, hell, the story is irrelevant. If he could deliver those twenty minutes, you could run a Buick commercial for the rest of the movie."

When Frank arrived on the set in County Wexford, Ireland (Spielberg likes to have writers on hand during filming, in the event that an idea strikes), in July of 1997, Spielberg was in the midst of the opening sequence, and pumped: "He's telling me the whole D-day sequence. He's in the middle of shooting, and he's saying, 'They're gonna come up the beach there, come out of the boat there...' He had the whole thing in his head," Frank said.

As usual, Spielberg was multitasking with a vengeance; when the crew broke for lunch, he would retreat into his tent and edit Amistad. "He's cutting Amistad on a Moviola, showing me clips from the film," Frank said. "It was like film school. I'd go in my trailer, rewrite scenes, then every once in a while, I'd come back out and watch him blow things up."

Spielberg was in heaven. He once said to a colleague, "I grew up with my mother and my sister. I loved making Saving Private Ryan, because it was a bunch of guys—it's all about male bonding!"

Although Spielberg was wound up, the atmosphere on the set was "all business," said Rodat. "Steven is surrounded by competent people, real professionals. He's clearly in control. People are not fooling around." No one can afford to, seeing as working for Spielberg means being able to think on your feet. Rodat recalled Spielberg preparing to shoot a scene with Tom Hanks and "trying to set up the shot, figuring out where he wanted Tom ... He said, 'I want the camera here.' He looked at the ground, there was a fake shell hole, four feet deep. Looking at it, he said, 'How can we put the camera in that?' Ten seconds later, five guys with shovels showed up and finished filling in the shell fifteen seconds before the camera started rolling. He never told them to fill in the hole"

The complexity and danger of the shoot added another level of intensity to an already ultraserious undertaking. "I remember a day when these burning guys came out of a landing craft," Rodat said. "It was really intense, like a dozen or so stunt guys wearing fire suits were in the landing crafts and then an explosion lights and all these guys are on fire all at the same time, with Tom Hanks in the foreground. It was an incredibly complex shot. One guy was assigned the fire extinguisher for each of the stuntmen, and everybody prepared for the shot all day long. It was beyond dangerous. You could've lost twelve people in one shot. Everybody was really serious. The stuntmen were focused.

"They did the shot, the fire control guys put out the burning stuntmen, finally the stuntmen raised their hands, said, 'OK.' There were maybe a hundred people there. A third of them were weeping. It was this weird combination of what happened at Omaha Beach and the depiction of it."

The filming of Ryan may have been intense, but the director was on comfortable turf here, especially coming off Amistad. World War II was a favorite subject that Spielberg had grappled with over the years, in 1941, Empire of the Sun, and Schindler's List. It was also the frequent terrain of one of Spielberg's favorite filmmakers, Lewis Milestone, whose fluid camerawork (in All Quiet on the Western Front, A Walk in the Sun, and Pork Chop Hill) the director admired and, to a degree, sought to imitate. Spielberg saw Saving Private Ryan as his own contribution to the genre, an important film for Americans and also for himself, as he considered it an homage of sorts to a man who aroused in him many conflicting feelings: his father, a World War II veteran who'd been a radio operator aboard a B-25 bomber during the Burma campaign. Spielberg's father had dropped out of his life when he was young, and never showed himself to be much of a fan of his son's earlier films. With Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg had a chance to fix his "daddy damage," as one person put it, once and for all.

Spielberg's partners at DreamWorks were less concerned about the motives, Freudian or otherwise, driving Spielberg. They just wanted the movie made and released. Coming off its inauspicious debut year, which was followed by another letdown in early 1998— Paulie, the movie about the talking parrot, grossed just $26 million—DreamWorks needed a swift turnaround. Katzenberg was putting the final touches on Antz and Prince of Egypt, but they wouldn't be ready until the end of the year. As for other live-action prospects, Deep Impact, an $80 million end-of-the-world thriller (director Mimi Leder's follow-up to The Peacemaker), was due out just before Ryan, in May. That film had been troubled, and Spielberg had confessed to one DreamWorks executive that it was sure to bring "more bad publicity" to the new company. DreamWorks—and especially Spielberg—was making a difficult adjustment to the new media environment it found itself in.

So concerned was Spielberg about Deep Impact —a screening of the film at Paramount, which was coproducing the movie, had been so disastrous that executives walked out mumbling "straight to video"—that he was taking footage home at night and coming back in the next morning with notes for Leder. Walter Parkes was also in on the rescue effort, working with Leder in the editing room and rewriting the film's final scene, a monologue voiced by Morgan Freeman. Even Geffen weighed in, giving suggestions to producer Richard Zanuck: "Go for the gut, go for the emotions!"

But Geffen had bigger problems to worry about than tweaking a movie. He and Spielberg were in a tiff over Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden's best-selling novel. Spielberg wanted to turn it into a feature film and direct for Sony after Saving Private Ryan (Sony owned the rights and was eager to get things moving with Spielberg). When Spielberg said he wanted to make the film in Japanese with non-Hollywood actors, his own studio—i.e., Geffen and Katzenberg—balked, fearing another Amistad. But most troublesome was Spielberg's generous directing fee. (If the film was made, because of Spielberg's involvement, DreamWorks would come in as a cofinancier.) The situation wrought such tension that the three men stopped talking for a period. When word got out that trouble was brewing, one person inquired about the matter to Katzenberg, who said coolly, "We're handling it."

With relations between the partners fraying, rumors swirled that DreamWorks needed a bailout and saw one in Edgar Bronfman Jr., whose legacy at Universal was going down in the history books as one of the more painful. Since the especially undistinguished deal with DreamWorks, Bronfman had done his share of what many considered to be foolish deals. Not only had he sold most of Universal's domestic cable TV assets to Barry Diller's HSN Inc. (since renamed USA Networks), he had paid more than $75 million for half of the production arm of the fabled management company Brillstein-Grey, not seeming to get that it was the management entity, not the production one, that was worth something. Hollywood was shaking its head. Bronfman had cut Universal's chairman and CEO, Frank Biondi, out of the deal with Diller, only telling him about it afterward. As Universal faltered—the film division hadn't had a hit since The Lost World—Bronfman was unceremoniously firing key members of his management team, as well as the heads of marketing. The press was all over it. The worst came in May, when he shared with Connie Bruck his feelings about Hollywood, in a profile in The New Yorker: "It's a dumb town."

Hollywood might be many things, dumb among them, but it was never dumb on the record, never dumb in The New Yorker. Within days the d-word was swiftly redirected, at Bronfman in the Los Angeles Times.

One person who remained uncharacteristically mute was Geffen, who, it was perceived, was approaching that moment when it was time to cash in on his relationship with the beleaguered Seagram scion. Three years after DreamWorks had come to Bronfman's aid by signing a splashy distribution deal and delivering Spielberg, it was time for payback. As one executive told Bruck: "Everyone is saying the ultimate rescuer of DreamWorks is Edgar. He's like a piñata. Hit him and money comes out." The rumor even landed on the New York Post's page 6, where it was reported that high-level talks were going on between Universal, DreamWorks, and Barry Diller's USA Network about joining forces. Everyone denied the talk, and nothing came of it, but the idea that DreamWorks was struggling was not so far-fetched. With still little product to show for itself, DreamWorks had burned through more than a billion in start-up funds. There was talk of shuttering divisions, of making DreamWorks a little less multimedia empire, a little more plain old studio.

For the time being—until Katzenberg's promised animation engine kicked in— Saving Private Ryan looked like the company's best bet—or at least, it had. After the Friday-afternoon screening, Rodat called up his agent, Devra Lieb, of the Hohman, Maybank, Lieb agency, and said: "Dev. It's like—whoa."

Robert Rodat had first come up with the idea for a World War II movie in 1995, while spending the summer with his wife and children in the town of Keene, New Hampshire. That summer, when his wife gave him a copy of historian Stephen Ambrose's book D-Day: June 6, 1944; The Climactic Battle of World War II, he dug in. As Rodat read the Ambrose book, he became fascinated by the story of the Niland family, whose four sons went off to fight in World War II. As related by Ambrose, after three of the young men were killed, the Army organized a mission to rescue the fourth brother, so that not all of the Nilands would be lost to history quite so soon. (In fact, only two brothers were killed, a detail that Spielberg would correct.)

"I had just read one hundred pages describing furious violence, and all I could think of was: How did they snatch that guy out of there?" Rodat recalled. His next thought was, "Think of that poor bastard's mother," which was followed by, "Hey! I've got a mother." Now the story gained poignance. Sensing there was something there, he rattled off his ideas to his wife, finally asking: "Is this a movie?"

Rodat had first met Mark Gordon, a prolific television and film producer whose credits included both Speed films, when they'd worked together on a TV biopic about Jack the Ripper. Gordon loved Rodat's idea and promptly took it out to every studio in town. All passed except for Paramount, where Don Granger, an executive, loved it. "Stay here," he instructed Rodat after he'd finished his pitch, and left his office to grab John Goldwyn, Paramount's president of production. When Goldwyn—grandson of movie pioneer Samuel Goldwyn—heard the idea, he bought it on the spot.

Rodat turned in his first draft of the script to Paramount in January of 1996. Since the studio had first expressed enthusiasm in Rodat's pitch, however, it had bought two other World War II movies, both of which had major stars attached. Bruce Willis was interested in starring in Combat! Arnold Schwarzenegger was attached to On the Wings of Eagles. Paramount said that it wasn't going to make all three; Rodat and Gordon grew nervous.

"We were screwed because we didn't have a star," Rodat said. "Mark's attitude was, 'Look, we're going to get it made sooner or later; there's no way it's not getting made, but who knows how or when.' It didn't look good."

Gordon decided to take things into his own hands. He gave a copy of the screenplay to Carin Sage, an agent at CAA, and to a handful of directors. Richard Donner (Lethal Weapon) and Bob Zemeckis passed, but Rob Cohen, who was in postproduction on a film at Paramount, was interested. Over a dinner meeting, Cohen and Gordon enthusiastically discussed the script, and by the end of the meal, it seemed like an easy match.

But the next morning, as Gordon was about to call Cohen's agents to start negotiating, he received a call from CAA partner Richard Lovett. "Don't make an offer yet," Lovett instructed. "I can't tell you why, but we may have some big news by the end of the day."

Gordon was mystified. Twelve hours later, at eight o'clock in the evening, as Gordon was finishing up work at his office, Lovett called again. This time he was less coy. Tom Hanks, he said, was interested in Saving Private Ryan and wanted to discuss it over lunch. Lovett instructed Gordon to "make [Hanks] feel comfortable with the project. And don't tell anyone that he's interested." (CAA operates according to the belief that silence is always the best policy.) Gordon couldn't believe what he was hearing. Tom Hanks?

Over lunch, Hanks spoke thoughtfully about the lead character he would play: Captain John H. Miller, who, in the aftermath of the D-day invasion, leads a dangerous mission across enemy lines in France to find a soldier, Private James Ryan, after all three of his brothers have been killed in combat. Hanks talked about how the mission would have affected his character, and how he would understandably feel ambivalence toward Ryan, given how ungrateful he turned out to be, seemingly indifferent to the hardships that Miller and his troops had endured on their journey to find him. Hanks also said that if he were to play Miller, the character would have to be softened. He preferred a more nuanced soldier who was less defined by stereotypical macho ticks, like cigar chomping and hurling foul-mouthed orders at his underlings. He introduced the idea of a "citizen-soldier" as opposed to a born-and-bred Army man—someone who wasn't a career soldier and who, more than anything, just wanted the war to be over so that he could go home and resume his normal life.

Gordon listened attentively. Things couldn't have been going any better. Or so he thought. Suddenly, Hanks broke off his train of thought and said—"What would you think about Steven Spielberg directing this?"

Gordon didn't know what to say. "Well, yeah," he replied, struggling for words. Then he mustered up something more definitive: "That sounds like a good idea."

Unbeknownst to Gordon, Sage, who had given the script to Hanks, had also pitched the project to Spielberg, when he had come in to CAA for one of his update meetings. More typically, CAA agents met with Spielberg at Amblin; on the occasions when the director graced the stately premises of the agency's intimidatingly sleek headquarters, there was a big to-do. On those days, agents—who met with Spielberg around a conference table in a meeting room—were particularly well-versed in what projects were set up where around town and the ins and outs of the most interesting material. Of those projects, they selected one or two that Spielberg might fancy, and pitched them with relish and efficiency (everyone knew Spielberg had a short attention span), each taking their turn as they went around the room doing their best to wow their star client. Even so, no one was very hopeful—Spielberg famously never made movies based on pitches from agents. On Spielberg's most recent visit, Sage had brought up Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg listened quietly as she explained the narrative, smiling faintly. When she finished, he politely said that he would be sure to read the script.

Devra Lieb knew something was up when she was having lunch one afternoon with her partner, Bayard Maybank, and two Paramount executives, Michael Hackett and David Solomon, at Ca'Brea, an Italian restaurant in the Miracle Mile section of L.A. Both of the executives looked like cats who'd swallowed canaries—all atwitter, about what they wouldn't say.

"You have no idea what's going on," Solomon said, smiling. "When you go back to your office, call Mark Gordon."

"They were giddy, practically vibrating at the table," Lieb recalled.

Lieb did as she was told and dialed up Gordon, who said: "Dev, OK, who are the biggest actor and the biggest director?"

Lieb knew right away. Mission: Impossible had come out in May and grossed over $450 million worldwide. "Brian De Palma and Tom Cruise," she replied, referring to that blockbuster's director and star.

"No, you ass!" Gordon said good-humoredly.

"OK, who?"

Gordon paused. "Dev—Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks want to make Saving Private Ryan. DreamWorks and Paramount are going to make it. It's happening."

Sherry Lansing, president of Paramount Pictures, received the news as she was driving home on a Friday evening after a long week at work. Lansing had been grappling with the battle of the World War II pictures (Spielberg's as well as the projects starring Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger)—what she considered a "high-class problem," considering that they were all strong scripts. But none had emerged as the front-runner. It was a quarter to seven as she was navigating the windy road up Benedict Canyon. Suddenly her phone rang. It was Lovett.

Lansing answered with her perennial cheerfulness.

"Sherry," Lovett began in his low-key but utterly businesslike manner. "How would you like it if Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks did Saving Private Ryan? How does that sound to you?"

"He said it, like, literally, Do you want the mustard or the ketchup," Lansing recalled. "I just said, Yeah, that'd be just fine."

"OK," Lovett replied succinctly. "Well, I think we can make that happen."

Indeed, he could, no matter what it took. Variety reported that CAA had been "moving mountains" to make Spielberg's and Hanks's deals. If Saving Private Ryan got made with the two stars, it would be as much CAA's accomplishment as anyone else's, seeing as it was the first film that the agency had "packaged" for Spielberg since Michael Ovitz had signed him as a client. (Although CAA technically only represented Spielberg, and not DreamWorks, the two were one and the same at the agency. "We had DreamWorks up the ass at CAA," said one former CAA agent. "It was 'Steven Spielberg said this, Jeffrey said that, David is killing us about that.'")

When Lansing arrived at her home, the phone was ringing. It was Jonathan Dolgen, Paramount's chairman. "Did you get the call?" he asked.

"It can't be real," Lansing said, by now beginning to realize what, exactly, Lovett's words had meant. "This can't possibly be true."

Lansing was accustomed to the protracted negotiations that were practically required when it came to landing stars on the caliber of Spielberg and Hanks and negotiating their contracts. There was no way a deal with either, much less both, could have come together so quickly and smoothly.

The next morning Dolgen called again. "It's true," he said. "David Geffen called me and asked how we could make the deal."

When Lansing finally allowed herself to believe the news, "You heard a scream so loud," she recalled.

To determine how the studios would divvy up domestic and foreign distribution rights, Geffen and Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone resorted to a coin toss at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Whoever won would receive the more desirable domestic rights. Redstone called "heads." DreamWorks called "tails." It was tails.

But for all of the cork popping over a Steven Spielberg—Tom Hanks production, the deal was less a cause for celebration in its nitty-gritty details, both for Paramount and DreamWorks. Both Spielberg and Hanks were demanding 20 percent of first-dollar grosses. To keep Ryan's budget down to a modest $65 million, Spielberg and Hanks were willing to lower their upfront fees, but they were standing firm on back-end. After a month of haggling between CAA and Paramount, the stars agreed to lower their back-end a smidgen to 17.5 percent each. Even so, the deal was better for the stars than for DreamWorks or Paramount, with 35 percent going out the door to the big names.

Over the summer of 1996, while Spielberg was in the Hamptons, a series of script "deconstruction" meetings was held with Spielberg, Rodat, and others. In one meeting, Rodat, Hanks, Parkes, and producers Gordon and Gary Levinsohn were gathered in Spielberg's home office in L.A., while Spielberg was videoconferenced in on a large TV screen from Long Island.

"What are the key outtakes?" Spielberg asked from three thousand miles away. What the director wanted to know was what scenes Rodat had tossed aside and discarded while writing.

Rodat cleared his throat before addressing the projection of Spielberg's face.

"Well," Rodat said, "I thought Miller should die."

In Rodat's initial script, Captain Miller, the character Tom Hanks would play, had died at the end of the movie. But Paramount executives had insisted that killing Miller off was too much of a downer. So Rodat had rewritten the ending so that Miller lived—a plot point he'd never liked.

"You bet he's got to die," Spielberg replied without hesitation, his voice crackling a little over the transmission.

Spielberg's words—which may as well have been sent down from the heavens accompanied by a thunderbolt—rendered Rodat ecstatic. On any movie, the director is God, but never more so than on a Spielberg film, where what Spielberg says overrides all else. With Miller taken care of, the conversation next segued to the title character, Private Ryan.

"I'd seriously considered that he was a prick when they found him and thought of spinning around on that, making the soldiers question their motivation," said Rodat. "But it ultimately didn't work for me. Ryan is supposed to represent America."

Tom Hanks weighed in with the notion that Ryan be incapacitated when Captain Miller finds him—a bandaged-up, mysterious figure, a "nonparticipatory MacGuffin," said Rodat.

During the discussion, in which everyone was throwing out ideas, "deconstructing and considering really radical things," Rodat said, Spielberg was the evenhanded moderator.

"Steven was doing the Kennedy leader thing—asking questions but not making decisions," said Rodat. "He was letting us fight it out."

Afterward, Rodat went home and incorporated the notes in his script. The backstories of the secondary characters were scaled back, and the tone of the film became more earnest. In Rodat's initial script, the dialogue between the soldiers had been more flippant and irreverent—Spielberg wanted that gone.

"Talking to my father and the guys with whom he served, there was always a degree of black humor," Rodat said. "I was always struck by the odd combination between the seriousness with what happened to them and the lack of seriousness with which they talked about it. They were young men. I tried to capture that in the script."

In the new draft, "humor as an escape from anguish was used less. The spectrum of emotions became somewhat narrower," Rodat said.

A dose of Spielbergian sentimentality was also added via the two sequences that bookend the film, showing James Francis Ryan as an elderly veteran visiting the cemetery at Normandy with his family years after the war. The scenes were Spielberg's idea and were, he said, in honor of World War II vets. Parkes and Scott Frank had tried to talk Spielberg out of the prologue and epilogue, thinking they were unnecessary, but Spielberg felt strongly about their inclusion.

Parkes was also involved in shaping the script, and, as was his custom, he would board out the film on three-by-five-inch cards pinned up on a bulletin board (a process that drove some writers mad) to study the story and see how it hung together.

Spielberg's tendency is also to work with multiple writers, and in the fall, Frank Darabont, who'd written The Shawshank Redemption, was hired to do a rewrite of Rodat's script.

"Steven tends to use writers like paintbrushes," remarked James V. Hart, one of a number of screenwriters who worked on Spielberg's Hook. On that film, he said, "The joke was that everyone in town who had his fax number was writing for it."

Darabont spent several months on Saving Private Ryan, dramatically reimagining the script. Then, two weeks before Ryan was to begin shooting, in July of 1997, writer Scott Frank was brought on. "The mission for me was to delineate the characters—make one guy more religious, make one guy a writer," said Frank. "I was also executing various research odds and ends, story ideas that Steven had. During shooting, he would say he wanted a scene where they were all cleaning their guns, or where they were stepping on cow patties because they knew there were no land mines there. He comes up with tons of ideas while shooting."

Rodat also returned as things went into overdrive in the days before cameras rolled. "It was intense. Those were twenty-hour days. I was writing pages as fast as I could, sending them over [to Spielberg] every day."

Besides receiving notes from Spielberg, Rodat was also getting input from Captain Dale Dye, a retired Marine officer who'd served three tours of duty in Vietnam and who had been hired as a military consultant on Saving Private Ryan.

"He would send me these incredibly long, well-put-together tech documents, saying 'This guy wouldn't say that. This weaponry is wrong. This is the tactic in this case,'" said Rodat. "I was incorporating those and then talking to Steven constantly, maybe every night or two we'd have long telephone conversations, then I'd crank out more pages."

Meanwhile, Ian Bryce, whom Spielberg had brought onto the project as a line producer, had scouted locations in the U.K. and Ireland to fill in for the beaches of Normandy and the French countryside. It was showtime.

As Ryan gained steam, however, two people who were becoming marginalized in the process were producers Mark Gordon and Gary Levinsohn, who were learning what it meant to be part of a Steven Spielberg movie when you weren't part of the family. Although Gordon had been instrumental in getting the film off the ground, once Ryan switched into production mode, he was not included in the day-to-day making of the movie. Spielberg's chosen producer was Bryce. Bonnie Curtis, Spielberg's former assistant, also joined the film as a coproducer.

Gordon's being exed out came as a blow. According to one source, Gordon "desperately" wanted to be more involved in making Ryan; however, "that was not an option."

When Terry Press first viewed Saving Private Ryan, her reaction was along the lines of Rodat's. Holy shit. How am I gonna sell this baby? No one spoke for thirty minutes! There were virtually no women in the film! And the running time was nearly three hours—concerns she aired with her staff. No matter how brilliant, how artistically triumphant, this was no heart-warming M*A*S*H episode. On top of all this, Spielberg, in the aftermath of the Amistad debacle, was feeling particularly vulnerable. Having been stung by the press coverage on that film, his self-protection mechanisms were on high alert. Spielberg was always secretive about his films, and paranoid about footage being leaked early, but on Saving Private Ryan, he played it even more close to the vest than usual. Marketers working on the teaser trailer were only given a few frames of the film, along with some lines of dialogue and a shot of Tom Hanks. There was so little footage to work with that the teaser ended up being made in slow motion in order to eat up time.

When Press asked Spielberg for another shot, the one where the Ryan brothers' mother, seeing a car winding up the road to her home, falls to her knees, evoking Andrew Wyeth's Christina, understanding that it's an Army official bearing the worst possible news, Spielberg refused.

As in her dealings with the director over Amistad, Press held her ground, knowing that if you argued your point cohesively with Spielberg, he often came around. "Steven, this is a movie about war. I guarantee, if you give me this shot, women will come. This is the mother's experience of what this—war—is all about. It's important people see this."

Spielberg and Press continued to butt heads, but eventually the director relented, and was pleased when, after the spot aired, he received a call from someone outside of DreamWorks, saying how great that scene was. But Press's work was just beginning. A much bigger issue she needed Spielberg to come around to was the idea that he needed to get out in the world and sell his picture. The film needed to be presented as something more than just a World War II movie; that would get the veterans in, but what about thirteen-year-old boys, the most sacred demographic of all? Press knew that nothing could sell Saving Private Ryan better than Steven Spielberg. She wanted him to go on the road and personally present the first forty minutes of the film to audiences. But Spielberg hated to campaign. Hated dealing with the press, and hated the idea that he had to sell himself or his movie. Not only did it not seem necessary (this was Steven Spielberg, not some kid from USC's graduating class), it was crass. Spielberg adhered to the philosophy that artistic works should speak for themselves, and hadn't taken a film "on the road" since Raiders of the Lost Ark. He despised the hype and the self-promotion.

When Press broached the subject, she was, predictably, shot down. And so she enlisted Marvin Levy, Spielberg's longtime press representative, as well as Katzenberg, in her cause. Finally, Spielberg gave in. He would go on the road for Private Ryan.

In May, two months before Saving Private Ryan was released, for the first time in a long while, the fates seemed to—at last—be smiling down on DreamWorks. Deep Impact, despite its laughable early screening, despite Spielberg's fears of disaster, was the company's first hit, grossing an impressive $140 million, thus beating the summer's most anticipated blockbuster, Godzilla.

The mood at the studio dipped once again in early July, when Small Soldiers proved a disappointment, grossing $54 million, spoiling Spielberg's dreams of a mega toy-merchandising opportunity. But then, suddenly, it was July 21, the night of the worldwide premiere for Saving Private Ryan at the Mann Village Theatre in Westwood, a grand, spire-topped 1940s Spanish-mission-style theater.

If ever there was a time for Spielberg to shine, and to signal the kind of turnaround that his studio was so desperate for, it was now. He seemed to know it. That night, wrote Peter Bart in The Gross, "was clearly Steven Spielberg's moment ... unlike other such events this summer, [it] had the pomp and excitement of a true celebration. This was a premiere that Hollywood insiders actually wanted to attend. All of the principal streets of Westwood were blocked off as hundreds of stargazers lined up for a glimpse of Tom Hanks, Sylvester Stallone, Rene Russo, Bill Paxton and others. In a tribute to Spielberg's charisma, more filmmakers were in attendance than at any premiere within memory—the likes of James L. Brooks, Rob Reiner, Oliver Stone and Penny Marshall."

Before the premiere, a private party was held at the Geffen Playhouse, where a grinning Spielberg found himself caught up in a whirl of congratulatory backslaps and air kisses. In between talk of World War II, he spoke about his new anticancer, fruits-and-vegetables-only diet, prescribed by Goldie Hawn. "You've got to squeeze and mix your own fruit juice," he advised. "You can't delegate that task to anyone else."

Spielberg, in top form, personally introduced the film. Though he looked his typical unassuming self, even slightly diminished standing before the crowd of fourteen hundred, his words negated any sense of smallness.

He began by saying that "D-day was nothing less than the pivotal moment of the twentieth century"; that it wasn't just about warfare, but about "saving Western Civilization."

And with that, the lights went down.

For DreamWorks, the lights effectively came up when opening weekend box-office grosses came in for Saving Private Ryan a week later. The film opened to an impressive $30 million. Over the next several weeks it would total an even more impressive $216 million in the U.S. Worldwide, it wound up making $481 million.

If Deep Impact had suggested an about-face, Saving Private Ryan confirmed a new dawn, both for DreamWorks and Spielberg. Validation was in the air. The studio's critics now faced a film that Janet Maslin, in the New York Times, called a "soberly magnificent new war film, the second such pinnacle in a career of magical versatility."

In Newsweek, David Ansen wrote: "Spielberg has taken Hollywood's depiction of war to a new level ... The truth is, this movie so wiped me out I have little taste for quibbling. When you emerge from Spielberg's cauldron, the world doesn't look quite the same."

But Geffen, naturally, summed up the significance of Saving Private Ryan more sagaciously than any film critic. The film, he said, meant, "We don't have to take any shit for a while."

Maybe. But the reality under the glowing reviews and strong box-office numbers was a bit troubling. Because of Spielberg's and Hanks's generous deals, and the fact that revenues were being split with Paramount, DreamWorks only received about $40 million of the film's true net—or close to what DreamWorks had put up to make the film. It would not be the first time Spielberg's profits would outsize those of his studio.

Eight years after buying the old Jack Warner estate in Beverly Hills, Geffen finally moved in. Having done the heavy lifting of schmoozing investors and getting DreamWorks up and running, he'd returned to a more comfortable autopilot setting. He was spending time with John Seabrook, who was writing a profile of him for The New Yorker; hanging out with Bill Clinton, who was finding in Geffen a more hip Hollywood host than Lew Wasserman. The two men had grown so close that, on a recent trip to L.A., the president had asked to stay over at Geffen's Malibu home. Geffen hadn't been able to put him up, so he'd offered him Katzenberg's pad, just a few houses down the beach, instead. After the sleepover, Clinton had called Geffen and said, "How come Jeffrey's house is so much nicer than yours? I thought he was the one who doesn't have any money." Geffen had replied: "Well, 'broke' is a Hollywood term!"

But Geffen's relationship with the president of the United States was no different than his relationships with everyone else in his life. The ever-critical mogul was starting to see flaws in Clinton, weaknesses. When the Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994, Geffen felt Clinton was to blame, and he was disheartened by the president's "don't ask, don't tell" stance on gays in the military. But what really pushed him over the edge was the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which broke in January of 1998, and which "drove David up the wall," according to a source. In Clinton, Geffen was beginning to see a man who was not being led by his convictions, who was more about political expediency than a real belief in the issues, and who was putting his own interests before those of the country. And to Geffen, whom friends describe as a "political purist," an uncompromising idealist, there was nothing worse. Geffen still stood staunchly by Clinton, publicly saying that Clinton's private life was his own business, and raising more money for him than anyone else on the Left Coast—nearly $20 million during his time in office. But there were signs that the honeymoon would not last.

Geffen's new home was the new focus of Geffen's always-searching life. The sprawling property, tucked among a sea of freshly planted sycamore trees, was what the $80 million animation studio in Glendale—also ready to be inhabited—was to Katzenberg. This personal castle, with its neoclassical columns, sweeping staircase, art deco screening room, billiard room, gym, pine-paneled library, and collection of Pollocks, Rauschenbergs, and De Koonings, represented a passage of sorts—a physical upgrade from mogul to king. Jack Warner's office and dressing room had been left completely untouched; in the latter room, Warner's hairbrushes and tonic bottles were lying on a table, as though the new owner were expecting a ghost.

Geffen seemed comfortable. The company was doing better, so he proudly showed off his new home to friends and began hosting dinner parties there, inviting former superagent Sue Mengers, Barry Diller, and even manager turned producer Sandy Gallin, a close friend with whom he'd been in a year-and-a-half silent feud. On a professional level, Geffen's new address meant that he was less present at DreamWorks, where, during the company's start-up years, he had been at least a semiregular presence, often seeming to enjoy being in the thick of things as the company got up and going. But Geffen's new home was his new headquarters. He took all of his meetings, even with DreamWorks executives, there.

As Geffen retreated into his personal quarters, the perception of him as a godfather figure, of someone who stage-managed from afar, grew. Nine times out of ten, sources asked to describe Geffen's role in the company gave some variation of: "He's the behind-the-scenes guy—he swoops in and hammers out the deals, fixes the problems." Most executives at DreamWorks, even those at a high level, could count on one hand the number of times they had ever even seen Geffen over the course of several years.

On days when Geffen actually showed up at his DreamWorks office, a ripple of excitement and intrigue was sent through the employee ranks. However the rich man's role might be described, it was clear that he had no interest in being the "hands-on" guy. In The New Yorker, Seabrook observed: "Geffen's job at DreamWorks did not seem to take up an inordinate amount of his time." With Katzenberg putting in all the sweat equity, Geffen was free to "work with investment bankers, play devil's advocate, and float."

Part of his godfather role, one that did take up an inordinate amount of time, was the business of advising—and not just Katzenberg and Spielberg, but a horde of other artists and executives who found themselves in a pinch or otherwise were in need of steely, remorseless guidance. One such person was George Michael, who in April was arrested for demonstrating "lewd" behavior in a public restroom in a Beverly Hills park. Although Michael hadn't been happy with DreamWorks' handling of his last album, Older, he knew there was no one better at crisis management than Geffen. Indeed, Geffen orchestrated a public relations offensive, arranging for Michael to appear on Maria Shriver's news program Dateline NBC a few days after the incident. More significantly, Michael had decided to finally come out and admit that he was gay. The singer's career had been built on the image of a hunky ladies' man who wore tight jeans and who understood, as he wrote in his song "Freedom '90," "But when you shake your ass / They notice fast." The admission could potentially hurt his following, making his decision to talk truthfully about his sexuality all the more meaningful. In the end, Michael ended up ditching the date with Shriver in order to break the news faster on CNN. But even so, Geffen had once again come through for a friend in need, business squabbles momentarily forgotten.

Older wasn't the only struggling DreamWorks Records release. By 1998, only two of the label's releases had gone platinum— Older and the original cast album for Rent. And only one other, Chris Rock's Bring the Pain, had sold more than five hundred thousand units. But despite its sluggish sales, the label was faithfully living up to DreamWorks' promise to put art first. Indeed, Michael had been the only big-name, blatantly mainstream signing. After its first wave of signing alternative, left-of-center acts, Geffen's label kept up the serious-seeming feel, securing artists such as the Eels, Henry Rollins, Rufus Wainwright, and Elliott Smith, who'd gained acclaim (and an Oscar nomination) for songs that appeared in the film Good Will Hunting. They were artists unlikely to become huge stars, but their music, often critically acclaimed, inspired dedicated cult followings. With Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker, this was all that mattered. DreamWorks wasn't putting pressure on its artists for immediate monster albums. True to the old strategies, the company looked to be thinking long-term, second, third, or even fourth albums. In 1998 such thinking was an anomaly. As the record business was consolidating, coming under increased pressure from corporate parents, the music business was all about the instant hit.

One music veteran who, fearing the wrath of Geffen, spoke on condition of anonymity, summed it up. "Lenny and Mo's thing was to develop artists, and it ran counter to how the industry was thinking. The new attitude was: concentrate on today's hit today; worry about tomorrow, tomorrow. It was incredibly short-range thinking."

The contrast between the attitude at DreamWorks and other labels was so bold as to be almost unfathomable. "DreamWorks was so blatantly artist-friendly that everyone was looking at them like, you can't keep this up. When are you going to sign the straight-out hit band?" said one manager. Still, DreamWorks stuck to its guns. One band, Ours, discovered and signed by Michael Goldstone in 1997, did not release its first record for DreamWorks until 2001.

Nurturing, however, meant spending, something that DreamWorks Records was doing rather freely. There were the requisite perks (people at Geffen Records referred to DreamWorks Records as "Snack Works" due to its well-stocked pantry), and also the money that went toward backing and promoting artists who were not—yet, anyway—producing hits. In many ways, DreamWorks was spending along the lines of a major record label, even though it was only releasing a quarter, or less, the amount of records that majors typically release.

By the fall of 1998, Geffen was concerned about just how freely money was flowing, and he brought in Jim Walker, the former CFO of Geffen Records, to look after the label's finances. One of the first things Walker did was cancel the annual Christmas party, earning him the nickname "the Grinch" among employees. But when Ostin's wife, Evelyn, heard about the change in plans, she arranged for the festivities to be held at the label's offices, paying for the catering herself. Walker also clamped down on business expenses, assigning budgets to projects and instituting overall cutbacks.

"There was less crazy spending," said one former employee. "We stopped spending ridiculous amounts of money on projects that didn't deserve it."

Fiscal extravagance aside, Ostin and Waronker's focus on quality—and doing whatever it took to achieve that quality—won the label praise for its integrity and taste, and in 1998, three DreamWorks re-leases—Smith's XO, Wainwright's eponymous debut, and the Eels' second album, Electro-Shock Blues—were singled out by veteran music critic Robert Hilburn. Writing in the L.A. Times, Hilburn called Smith's album "one of three absorbing collections from DreamWorks—a run that suggests label chiefs Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker are recreating at DreamWorks the same kind of focus on quality artists and long-term career building that they used in the '70s and '80s to make Warner Bros. the world's most respected label."

Hilburn called Wainwright a "singer-songwriter with a musical vision elegant enough to embrace Noel Coward and Cole Porter"; the Eels were "a Los Angeles rock band whose songs offer the kind of unflinching look at desolation and death that is at once harrowing and inspiring." But even Hilburn couldn't help but ask, "Will a focus on careful career development still pay off in a pop world that, from conglomerate board rooms to radio station programmers to consumers, seems interested only in the short term?"