Those Good Old Saturday-Matinee Serials Inspire This Year’s Perfect Summer Movie.
Sub-head in Time magazine, 15 June 1981
AFTER 1941, Belushi and Aykroyd went on to co-star in John Landis’s big-screen celebration of Jake and Elwood Blues, the blues-singing brothers from Chicago in black suits, hats and shades (but white socks) who had been their most popular creation for Saturday Night Live. Backed by Universal, The Blues Brothers began modestly, but news of Spielberg’s spending on 1941 drove Landis to paroxysms of competitiveness. A modest story of two guys trying to raise $5000 to save their old orphanage evolved into a car-chase comedy, the multi-vehicle pile-ups of which dwarfed both Sugarland Express and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Blues Brothers eventually cost $33 million – more than 1941. (Estimates of 1941’s cost varied. Spielberg set it at $26.5 million before re-editing and redubbing, but some guesses at the total expenditure went as high as $40 million.) Landis persuaded Spielberg to play a cameo – not inappropriately, he’s the clerk in the Cook County Tax Assessor’s office who accepts the brothers’ payment.
On 14 April 1979, Francis Coppola threw a combined fortieth birthday and Zoetrope tenth anniversary party at his Napa estate. As bands played, cheerleaders chanted ‘Francis has the power,’ and Coppola led his guests, who included Robert de Niro, Dennis Hopper, Wim Wenders and George Lucas, in shouting, ‘We will rule Hollywood! We will rule Hollywood!’ As his own modest first step towards this goal, Spielberg moved into Lucasfilms, a shabby converted warehouse of green-painted cinderblock across the road from Universal’s black glass tower.
Still convinced Belushi had a place in the hearts of American filmgoers, Spielberg, while editing 1941, sent him a script by Lawrence Kasdan. Born in Miami, the son of two failed writers, raised in West Virginia and Wisconsin, educated in Michigan, Kasdan was, like Spielberg and Lucas, more a citizen of the movies than of any actual city. A prolific and facile writer, he spent seven years as a prize-winning advertising copywriter in Los Angeles before deciding to break into movies with a calling-card script which, according to legend, he wrote during lunch hours on the lawn in front of the Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art. Kasdan saw ‘The Bodyguard’, about the romance between a rock star and the tough guy sent to guard her from a deranged fan, as a Steve McQueen film. However, McQueen and sixty-six other producers turned it down, mostly because its rock concert and Bel Air mansion settings made it too expensive. Kasdan responded with another script which even the most penny-pinching producer would find attractive. A romantic comedy strongly influenced by Howard Hawks, its main characters were a misanthropic Chicago journalist and an attractive ornithologist who fall in love while sharing a Wyoming cabin from which she’s observing a pair of eagles. Kasdan called it Continental Divide. Spielberg liked the script so much he sent it to Lucas at the end of 1977. Lucas promptly hired Kasdan to take over from an ailing Leigh Brackett on the second Star Wars film, The Empire Strikes Back.
In Continental Divide, Spielberg found the abrasive charm of his favourite Tracy/Hepburn films. If Belushi lost weight and kicked drugs, he could be excellent as the journalist. Bernie Brillstein agreed. Rumours of their interest sparked a bidding war, and Universal paid a delighted Kasdan $150,000, with a further $100,000 if the script was filmed.
Spielberg called a meeting at Coldwater Canyon with Kasdan, Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins. In 1979 Barwood and Robbins had launched a production company, Plotto, with Corvette Summer. Robbins directed, Barwood produced and both wrote this comedy about Mark Hamill searching LA for his stolen vintage Corvette, but the public saw it as a pale imitation of American Graffiti. Ned Tanen, however, would, if Belushi agreed, accept the pair as producer and director of Continental Divide at Universal under the same terms as I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Zemeckis and Gale’s second, more successful film, Used Cars; Spielberg must act as executive producer and promise to step in and direct if necessary.
Everyone in the house that night sensed that Continental Divide was the last chance for Barwood and Robbins, a team who, like Lucas’s writers on American Graffiti, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, and his USC director friend John Korty, seemed irredeemably consigned to New Hollywood’s also-rans.
Belushi arrived, drunk, with his wife Judy, and became drunker. He loved Continental Divide, he said. He recognised the main character, Ernie Souchak, as a version of columnist Mike Royko, whom he’d met and admired while living in Chicago and working with the Second City comedy troupe.
Then he turned to Robbins. What else had he directed? The atmosphere chilled as Robbins explained about Corvette Summer. The news that he’d made only one other film, and that a flop, infuriated Belushi. He began rambling about how he’d been bullied and patronised on Goin’ South by another inexperienced director, Jack Nicholson.
‘Jack treated me like shit,’ he snarled. ‘I hate him. If I see him, I’ll punch him.’
Spielberg was silent. Robbins looked in vain for a romantic lead in the stumpy, bloated actor. What actress would want to play opposite him? Had Spielberg’s instinct failed him, as it was rumoured to have done on 1941? After two hours, the Belushis disappeared into the night. The others sat around, disconsolate, while Spielberg apologised, and reassured them. Somehow, the film would be made, without Belushi if necessary.
In the wake of Close Encounters, Spielberg had been confident he could raise money on any project. Ironically, however, his very success proved a liability, as he found when he went round the studios with Continental Divide and his after-school film.
I said, ‘I can make this movie for $2.5 million. There’s three people in the entire cast. It’s a wonderful story.’ And they said, ‘We don’t want you for this kind of movie. There are a lot of directors who can do this as well as anybody… We want you to do a movie about the size of the World Trade Center. Utilise all the tricks, utilise all the effects, utilise all the sound stages, and here’s the money.’ And, on cue, a door opens and wheelbarrows come in with ten-thousand-dollar bills.
Spielberg and Lucas asked Kasdan to write Raiders. The story had changed radically since the partners’ sandcastle conference. Among other things, they’d ordered up Universal’s 1941 Don Winslow of the Navy, watched all twelve episodes – and been bored out of their minds. The direction of serial veterans Ford Beebe and Ray Taylor was flat, the characters cardboard. There was a striking contrast between the dismal acting scenes and the car chases and fights, artificially pepped up by shooting at eighteen frames a second and projecting the film at twenty-four: the famous ‘Western Eighteen’. It also became clear why serial heroes wore large fedoras pulled down over their eyes: it disguised the fact that doubles replaced them for most of the action. ‘These things sure don’t hold up after twenty-five years,’ Lucas said.
Privately, both Spielberg and Kasdan were pleased, since they loathed serials. When Spielberg quoted from a film, it was more likely to be an A-movie, like a Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn romance, of which there would be more than an echo in the love scenes of Raiders. Some scenes in the film would be based on serials, but many more would derive from fifties adventures like Journey to the Centre of the Earth, which prompted the rolling rock of the opening and the gimmick of a beam of sunlight revealing the position of the Well of Souls, and King Solomon’s Mines, the main character of which, white hunter Allan Quartermain, played by Stewart Granger, Indiana finally resembled. What Raiders and the later Indiana Jones movies most starkly recalled, however, is James Bond films, as if Spielberg, having failed to achieve his ambition one way, acccomplished it in another. Action never played as important a part in serials, which betray their genesis in radio by being prodigiously talky and humourless. But Harrison Ford’s lechery and ironic off-handedness under pressure, the sense of ‘making it up as he goes along’, are palpably derived from Sean Connery’s characterisation of Bond.
Lucas and his first collaborator, Philip Kaufman, had plotted the film in sixty two-page scenes, each building to a climax. Since neither Spielberg nor Lucas could write screenplays, however, Kasdan, accustomed to working alone and at white heat, spent a frustrating two weeks with the two of them and a tape recorder, fleshing out this skeleton, acting out scenes and wrangling over the character of Indiana. Lucas saw Indiana as a charming but untrustworthy womaniser: Cary Grant turned action hero. Spielberg imagined him more like Fred C. Dobbs, Humphrey Bogart’s seedy, unshaven and venal drifter from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Both character and story shifted towards adventure, and the twin aspects of Jones fused into the forties Bond clone of Indy.
From a hundred-page transcript of their conversations, Kasdan fashioned his script, which became one of Hollywood’s best-guarded secrets. With memories of the union and security problems on Jaws and Close Encounters, Spielberg agreed with Lucas that the film must be shot in Britain. By October, even before 1941 was previewed, their Welsh production designer Norman Reynolds was scouting locations. At La Pallice, just outside La Rochelle on France’s Atlantic coast, he found some submarine pens built by the German navy in 1942 to shelter the U-boats that harried Allied shipping. The concrete bunkers were larger than the biggest film studio in existence. The French navy, which now operated La Pallice as a coastguard base, rented them out for a long sequence, eventually only partly filmed, of a hidden Nazi base hollowed out of an island within which Indy, arriving on a submarine, finds jet planes and super weapons, creations of some Nazi genius. A freighter was brought from Ireland for the Bantu Wind in which the Ark is carried by the villain Belloq and the Nazis to a Greek island for the final apocalyptic opening of the Ark, and a full-size mock-up of a German submarine rented from the company making Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot. Reynolds also booked most of La Rochelle’s hotel space for a shoot that must, he stressed to Lucas, end before the town’s tourist high season in August.
In Tunisia, the sliver of Mediterranean Africa wedged between Algeria and Libya, similar arrangements were being made near Nefta, Lucas’s production headquarters for Star Wars. Abandoned trucks and the giant polystyrene skeleton of a bantha, one of the film’s monsters, still rotted in the desert, reminders of a catastrophic location shoot which, though plagued by sandstorms, icy winds, unseasonable rains and dysentery, had provided Lucas’s film with some of its most spectacular scenes. Despite his permanent sunburn damage, Lucas counselled Spielberg to shoot closer to the summer than he had, and to have all food flown in. In the end, neither provision would stave off disaster.
Over the months of 1941’s editing and the preparation for Raiders, Spielberg persisted with attempts to cast Continental Divide. Richard Dreyfuss refused the Belushi role. So did Peter Falk, Dustin Hoffman, Robert de Niro and George Segal. From Segal the script went to his California Split co-star Elliott Gould, who showed it to his ex-wife, Barbra Streisand. She toyed with turning the story on its head and playing the journalist – possibly with Robert Redford as the ornithologist.
Wearily, Barwood and Robbins dropped out. But Spielberg persisted. Why? A clue may lie in the story itself. The eagle expert is the classic New Age woman, independent, environmentally conscious, preoccupied with her work, and more in love with it than she ever could be with any man. The journalist is the reverse: urban, unattractive, antisocial. Though they have an affair, the two agree at the end to live apart, visiting one another as the mood takes them. It was a plot that reflected his relationship with Amy, whom he may have hoped would take the ornithologist’s role.
Voices had failed conspicuously, and their relationship took another step towards dissolution. His silent endearments at the Oscars had charmed her – ‘but he hasn’t done anything like that since,’ she complained petulantly to a journalist. ‘I guess he figures that should last a long time.’ She was thinking, she said, of working in Europe, perhaps with Richard Gere and Mick Jagger in Suffer or Die, a film to be directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (but which was never made). Would she ever let Spielberg direct her? ‘I know he’s an incredible movie-maker,’ she purred, green eyes gleaming, ‘but the kind of films he makes aren’t necessarily the kind I want to be in.’
1941’s first preview was set for Denver in October. John Williams’s martial score, reminiscent of one of Spielberg’s favourites, Elmer Bernstein’s music for John Sturges’s 1963 wartime prison-camp adventure The Great Escape, included a Star Wars-type march theme as brassy as the music for Close Encounters had been spare. ‘Too loud!’ complained the preview cards, as uniformly negative as those for Jaws had been the reverse. After another bad preview at the Medallion Theater in Dallas in late October, a location which had been lucky for Jaws and Close Encounters, Spielberg realised the ‘loudness’ had less to do with noise levels than the film’s barrage of action. It was too visually loud, too loud in character, in incident, especially in the opening forty-five minutes which set up its seven plots. As Joe Dante, Spielberg’s protégé and the director of Gremlins, would say concisely of films which relied too much on action and effects at the expense of character, ‘There was just too much stuff.’ And stuff, everyone realised with a sinking feeling, wasn’t something you could eradicate from 1941. It was stuffed with stuff. Take it out, and you had a pillow without the feathers.
Gala openings at eight locations across the country on 18 November were cancelled while Spielberg cut some of the longueurs and toned down the soundtrack, but still people complained. A charity premiere was set for 14 December at LA’s Cinerama Dome. The reaction was worse than anyone had feared. Marvin Goldman, influential chairman of the National Association of Theater Owners, dismissed the film as ‘overdone, overproduced, over-everything. It was like building a $1 million mousetrap to catch one mouse in the kitchen.’
On top of this, the seizure and imprisonment of American hostages in Teheran by the Khomeini regime had created a national sense of rage and humiliation. Nobody wanted a film that mocked American arms. Both studios tried frantically to bail out by accusing Spielberg of bad management and overspending. Asked by Variety if making 1941 taught him anything, he replied, ‘I learned not to invite Universal and Columbia executives and sales people to previews any more. Let them stay at home and watch Laverne and Shirley on TV. I’ll preview my pictures and make the changes.’
Though he claimed not to have read a single review of 1941, Spielberg also waded into the press, which nominated him as a scapegoat for other high-budget flops like Michael Cimino’s $36 million western Heaven’s Gate, about to bankrupt United Artists. He told the Saturday Review:
The press loves to design its own failures. Although nobody liked The Blues Brothers, nobody wants to admit that it’s going to do almost $60 million worth of business around the world. As for 1941, we need $60 million to get into the black and we’re about $11 million short. But based on TV, cassette, cable, and reissue money, Universal is confident that the film will make that $11 million. Still, the critics bury their heads in the sand and say, ‘How could this film do $50–$60 million when I gave it the worst review I’ve ever written?’ Believe me, Hollywood is not being crippled by $30 million movies.
He also insisted, controversially, that major directors had ‘earned the right to spend someone else’s money’, providing they used it to make a popular film. This was to become a refrain in Spielberg’s relations with the press, to which he was constantly required to justify the high cost of his films. As late as 1995, fielding questions from the public on CNN’s Larry King live, he insisted that ‘What did it cost?’ was the wrong question. Rather, one should ask, ‘Is it worth $7?’ – the price of a cinema seat.
In his darker moments, however, Spielberg was furious about the failure of 1941, blaming it on friends and collaborators who’d failed to warn him he was going off the track – though, on past evidence, he wouldn’t have heeded them. John Williams, he said, had ‘overwritt[en] over my overdirection over Zemeckis and Gale’s overwritten script.’ It would be years before he acknowledged his responsibility for 1941. ‘Until then,’ he said in 1982 of the disaster, ‘I thought I was immune to failure. But I couldn’t come down from the power-high of making big films on large canvases. I threw everything in and it killed the soup. 1941 was my encounter with economic reality.’
Emotional reality too was about to descend on Spielberg. In July Variety had announced that Amy would play Ophelia opposite Richard Chamberlain’s Hamlet at LA’s Ahmanson Theater between 12 October and 24 November, after which she and Spielberg would marry. In the meantime she took a role in Jerry Schatzberg’s Honeysuckle Rose shooting in Texas. Country singer Willie Nelson played, in effect, himself, an ageing musician falling in love with a beautiful young guitar player (Amy) and abandoning his wife. Not for the first time in the movies, life imitated art, and Amy began an affair with the grizzled, ponytailed but seductive Nelson.
Unaware of what was happening in Texas, Spielberg planned his usual week’s holiday in Hawaii, this time with Amy, to coincide with the release of 1941. He’d intended to return a week later to direct an episode of ABC’s TV sitcom Laverne and Shirley, produced by his friend Penny Marshall. Ratings for the show were falling off and the producers had decided to move the setting from Milwaukee to California in a bid for a bigger market.
The rejection of 1941 was so extreme that Spielberg suggested to Amy they take a three-week holiday in Japan and get married there. She told friends before they left, ‘I’ll be pregnant by April. We can’t wait to start a family.’ But it was on the flight that their relationship ended explosively – whether over her infidelities, her resistance to the idea of marriage or his to having children nobody can, or will, say, though years later Amy said she’d decided to wait until her thirties before settling down. ‘I thought I would be missing out on something.’
A distraught Spielberg returned to Los Angeles alone, with both his professional and private life in ruins. ‘The wonder child of Hollywood,’ gloated journalist Ben Stein, ‘was now spoken of in sneering tones at studio commissaries as a wastrel, a man who had seen his best days before he was thirty, [someone who] could not be trusted to bring in a picture at anywhere close to the promised budget.’ Even Arnold Spielberg, who was still working in electronics around San Francisco and with whom he remained regularly in touch, had no comfort. ‘I hated 1941,’ Arnold told him. It was the last straw. ‘Don’t talk to me, Dad,’ Spielberg said wearily.
Far worse, however, was Amy’s rejection. It had hurt him, he told friends, more than anything since the divorce of his parents. ‘Life has caught up with me,’ he sighed to Leo Janos in Cosmopolitan. ‘I’ve spent so many years hiding from pain and fear behind a camera. I avoided all the growing-up pains by being too busy making movies. I lost myself in the world of film. So right now, in my early thirties, I’m experiencing delayed adolescence. I suffer like I’m sixteen. It’s a miracle I haven’t sprouted acne again.’
He responded to his rejection, as to all things he disliked, by decreeing that it didn’t exist. Continental Divide was abruptly dropped. He sold his rights to Tanen, who was still eager to do the film with Belushi, but not with Matthew Robbins. ‘When all of us were off doing other things, and our backs were turned,’ Spielberg said, ‘[Tanen] immediately put Michael Apted into the picture… I was contractually bound to be executive producer if I wasn’t the director, so the name went along with the movie.’ British director Apted started shooting on the $11.5 million production in October 1980, just as Spielberg did the last pick-ups on Raiders. Belushi starred opposite Blair Brown, but made no great impression as a leading man.
In adolescence, film-making had dissolved loneliness and despair for Spielberg, and it would do the same now. One’s emotional life was eaten away too by the pressures of film-making, but that was a small price to pay. Later, he would try to pass off the crash of his first major relationship as a trifling incident in a life devoted to work.
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. By the time Jaws was in theatres, I was already deeply into production on Close Encounters, and by the time Close Encounters was released I was deeply into production on 1941, and before 1941 was over I was severely into pre-production on Raiders of the Lost Ark. So I never had the chance to sit down and pat myself on the back or spend my money or date or go on vacation in Europe. I just haven’t done that… because I put my movie-making ahead of some of the results. I thought if I stopped, I would never get started again, that I would lose the momentum… of being interested in working. I was afraid that if I stopped I would be punished for enjoying my success by losing my interest in working.
Those who knew Spielberg recognised the evasions in this statement. He had his share of sexual relationships, albeit transitory ones. And he could, and did, exult in his success. Among his friends, Spielberg’s interest in the box office of his films was notorious. ‘Steven was the one who ran out to buy the trades,’ John Milius said. ‘He was always talking about grosses.’ Julia Phillips writes of driving him around the cinemas of Westwood after Close Encounters to see the crowds, and videotaping the long lines of patient punters.
Columbia were pressing for ‘Night Skies’, the promised low-budget sequel to Close Encounters, so Spielberg, still in shock, started auditioning screenwriters. Kasdan would have been the logical choice, but Lucas had hired him to write the second Star Wars film. The Empire Strikes Back. Instead Spielberg gave the project to John Sayles, a lanky New York psychology graduate who was earning a reputation for imaginative low-budget scripts. Spielberg had liked Piranha, which Sayles wrote for the King of the Z Movies, Roger Corman, in which killer fish ravage Texas. After Joe Dante filmed it, Universal wanted to sue, but Spielberg, who rated the film the best rip-off of Jaws to reach the screen, persuaded them not to bother. He also kept an eye on Dante, whose career was to flourish with his help.
To direct, he proposed a couple of maverick newcomers. One was Tobe Hooper, a young Texas film school graduate who’d made a name with a blood-boltered low-budget piece of rural Jacobean horror, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Christened ‘The Citizen Kane of Meat Movies’, it catapulted him into a Hollywood career and lifestyle.
Another was Ron Cobb. Born in Burbank, Cobb had become popular with anti-establishment cartoons for the Los Angeles Free Press before drifting towards fantasy art. After drawing for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Famous Monsters of Filmland, he fought in Vietnam, and returned to become friendly with film people like John Milius and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon. Though a brilliant visualist, Cobb shared the eccentric lifestyle, though not the right-wing politics, of Milius, who nevertheless called him, approvingly, ‘a pipe-bomber’. There was no denying Cobb’s design skill, however. He worked on John Carpenter’s Dark Star and spent two and a half years in London on the version of Alien to have been directed by Alex Jodorowsky. Many of his designs were used in Ridley Scott’s eventual film. His intricately realised creatures and space ships also impressed George Lucas, who used some of them in the Tatooine cantina sequence that became one of Star Wars’ most popular moments.
Mavericks like Hooper and Cobb hardly fitted into Spielberg’s universe, but as he would acknowledge later, his personal problems had grievously skewed his judgement. In the same confused state of mind he hired Rick Baker, one of John Landis’s oldest friends, to design a group of aliens which worked better than Carlo Rambaldi’s puppets in the original film.
Baker had raised the ape suit to the level of high art in the 1976 King Kong. Dino de Laurentiis originally commissioned a thirty-foot robot, but the mechanical monster never worked, and appeared only in one brief long shot. For the rest of the film, Baker’s expressive anthropoid did the acting. Busy preparing John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London, Baker set up a ‘Night Skies’ unit in the same building. Imagining from Spielberg’s description that he wanted something grim and violent, he visualised an sf version of Sam Peckinpah’s bloody symphony of rape and rural slaughter, Straw Dogs. His aliens were appropriately scary and, while costing a lot to engineer, would, he was certain, shock the audience at least as much as Bruce the shark had.
In April 1980, Variety published details of Columbia’s slate for the next year. The tone in which it publicised the still-unnamed ‘Night Skies’ might have been chosen to infuriate Spielberg. He would be expected to ‘confer’ with the studio, said production head John Veitch, adding, ‘Steven is not a one-man show.’ The report went on, ‘[Frank] Price noted he was not overly concerned with working arrangements with Spielberg in light of recent experiences on Col-U co-production 1941. “Frankly, 1941 was good experience for Steven,” Price said. “I think it will be a while before he tackles another broad comedy, but his record in suspense, which this film is, is hard to equal.”’
During 1980, Kathleen Carey, a slight thirty-two-year-old divorced magazine editor with curly blonde hair, became Spielberg’s full-time companion. As calm as Amy was mercurial, she encouraged Spielberg to read more, and to take time off to enjoy his success. ‘She has taught me that there is life after movies,’ he said. With memories of his awkward cohabitation with Amy, Spielberg and Kathleen lived apart, but on weekends they settled into domesticity, Kathleen keeping him supplied with pizza and Haagen-Dazs ice cream, and sitting through film screenings and schmoozing sessions with old pals. Friends believed that, in the long term, Kathleen represented the greatest hope for Spielberg’s teenage persona to develop into adulthood. By the summer, however, though he and Kathleen remained a couple, he was seeing actresses again, among them Valerie Bertinelli, eighteen-year-old brunette star of the TV series One Day at a Time, the more experienced Barbara Hershey, and Debra Winger, who was to become a long-term friend. Despite gossip, Spielberg shrugged off the relationships as ‘brother and sister’ associations that ‘never got past the hand-shaking stage’.
Amy, changeable as ever, was less happy with independence. Her first film after the break-up was Joel Olianski’s The Competition, in which she played a piano virtuoso opposite Richard Dreyfuss, who had a chance to exorcise his long-time crush on her. At the end of 1980, rather than going into a new film, she opened on Broadway as Mozart’s skittish young wife Constanze in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. Next door, the Royal Shakespeare Company was playing David Edgar’s adaptation of Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby. One of its leads, Emily Richard, had joined the New York cast in part to recover from the trauma of a stillborn baby. She recollects:
The two theatres shared a corridor, so I would bump into Amy from time to time. We didn’t get to know one another until we were both at some sort of reception backstage. We started to chat, and I told her about losing the baby. Then I started to cry. Amy began to cry too. She said, ‘I’m not going to let anything stand in the way of having a family.’ So there we both were, in a corner, crying into our drinks.
Despite 1941, Spielberg was now perceived as one of the few directors of New Hollywood fit to wear the mantle of a studio head. He was flattered, but not surprised, to be approached to take over various studios, among them Disney. For years he’d watched the machinations inside Disney as the founder’s nephew Roy Disney, the group’s largest single stockholder, and Walt’s son-in-law Ron Miller, who ran the lucrative theme parks and kept the company churning out cheap children’s movies while it coasted on revenues from selective re-releases of classics like Snow White and Fantasia, vied for control.
In 1979, weary of the animation department’s domination by the so-called ‘Nine Old Men’ who had degraded the studio’s traditional excellence with xeroxing and other cost-cutting techniques, its best young director, a mild-mannered but perfectionist ex-Mormon missionary named Don Bluth, had walked out with sixteen colleagues to launch his own studio. Spielberg admired Bluth’s stand, not to mention the quality of his work, and would later become his financial backer.
Desperate to recapture the youth market Disney had lost to Jaws and Star Wars, Miller, who’d become president and chief operating officer in February 1980, approached Spielberg to take over as head of production, releasing exclusively through their Buena Vista network. Spielberg was interested and opened negotiations but, as he might have guessed from the reaction to Bluth’s departure, Miller would brook no independence; nor would he agree to share profits with Spielberg. He also feared that Spielberg might have designs on the studio’s traditional characters. It was an item of faith within Disney that Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck were inalienable, unchangeable, eternal. All incoming executives were warned, ‘Don’t fuck with the mouse!’
In this air of mutual suspicion, discussions didn’t last long. Instead of installing a wunderkind, Disney decided to make its own run at the youth market, producing the video-game sf story Tron, which made extensive use of computer animation. It also funded Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked this Way Comes, which Spielberg had been interested in directing. Both flopped, exacerbating still further the crisis in the Magic Kingdom.
Spielberg was evolving his own vision of a film studio, one which had little in common with the oligarchy of Disney. He admired the atmosphere of Lucasfilm. ‘George has a fully staffed company of great people,’ he told Rolling Stone, ‘the kind of people you’d like to take home to dinner and be friends with for the rest of your life.’ But Lucas’s management style was resolutely hands-off. Except for broad policy, he took little interest in business. Spielberg was different. Disappointments with delegation had convinced him he needed day-to-day control. ‘Steven is an expert in micro-management,’ says David Puttnam, who had a chance to watch him at work when he was briefly head of Columbia. ‘He needs to know what’s going on at every moment on every project in which he’s involved. That, and some very good advisers, is the basis of his success.’
In Spielberg’s ideal company, the rigour of this structure would be disguised in an atmosphere of familial congeniality. His team would protect him from unpleasant decisions as his mother and sisters had done, and allow him to pursue his fantasies in tranquillity. For a while, he’d found this calm in the Malibu home of the Phillipses, but they had abandoned him. Their replacements would need above all to be loyal to him personally, irrespective of what studio paid the bills.
With Raiders, Spielberg found his ideal lieutenant in one of Lucas’s foot-soldiers who became its line producer. Personable and outgoing, a college athlete and skilled amateur magician, Frank Marshall was as much a contrast to Spielberg as Brown was to Zanuck. He also bridged Old and New Hollywood. His father was a composer and arranger for, among others, John Ford, but Marshall had entered movies with New Hollywood director Peter Bogdanovich on Targets.
‘We had practically no money,’ Marshall reminisced of those days, ‘so we had to do everything. And it was non-union, so not only did I act in [Targets], but I helped build sets, I did a little shooting, I ran around, I drove cars. I got to know every facet of how a movie gets made.’ Old Hollywood disliked such disregard for demarcation and the pecking order, but New Hollywood demanded it. By the lime of Nickelodeon in 1976, Marshall was credited as associate producer. When Bogdanovich decided to take time off after that disaster, Marshall worked with Martin Scorsese on his The Band concert documentary The Last Waltz and for Walter Hill before joining Lucasfilm.
The other component of the future management team came from 1941. Kathleen Kennedy, the production secretary who had proved her loyalty in battle with Belushi, transferred to Raiders as Spielberg’s personal assistant. She became the linchpin of Amblin, a synthesis of secretary, lieutenant and young sister, with a legendary ability to charm people without compromising Spielberg’s tough business methods. In time, Marshall and Kennedy became lovers, then husband and wife.
Lucas’s decision to shoot Raiders of the Lost Ark in Britain cut costs by half. Elstree studios on the fringes of London suburbia had been an ideal headquarters for Star Wars, and by the spring of 1980 all its seven stages and most of its twenty-seven acres were occupied by Raiders. These were historic premises. Here Alfred Hitchcock shot Blackmail, the first British talkie, in 1929, and Stage Fright in 1950. David Lean, Michael Powell, even Ronald Reagan had passed through – Reagan to make The Hasty Heart in 1948. On the backlot rotted a mountain of grey-white vinyl, all that remained of Moby-Dick from John Huston’s disastrous 1956 version of Melville.
Elstree had been bankrupt when Lucas rescued it with Star Wars. Now it was seldom idle. As Raiders geared up, Stanley Kubrick, who’d bought a mansion in nearby Borehamwood, was winding down his protracted production of Stephen King’s The Shining. There was a near-disaster when one of its stages, among the loftiest in Europe, and used for the main lobby of the Outlook Hotel, burned in the last few days of Kubrick’s tenancy, but Lucas rushed through repairs and even raised the ceiling to accommodate the Well of Souls where Indy and Marion discover the lost Ark guarded by four giant black statues of jackal-headed Anubis and thousands of snakes.
Elstree’s large stages weren’t the only attraction of a British location. Another strike by the American Screen Actors’ Guild had just begun, bringing most production in Hollywood to a halt. UK actors and technicians also worked for less, and British unions, unlike the American IATSE and Teamsters, would rather make life more comfortable for their members than shake down a production for every penny. The British government also offered tax incentives to visiting producers, even when, as with all the Indiana Jones films, Spielberg and Lucas edited and shot their special effects in the US, and imported most key personnel. An exception to this rule was Raiders’ director of photography, Douglas Slocombe, who’d shot everything from Ealing’s comedy classics The Lavender Hill Mob and Kind Hearts and Coronets to films for Joseph Losey, Roman Polanski and Fred Zinnemann. Raiders would cement Slocombe’s special relationship with Spielberg, forged during the Indian sequences on Close Encounters.
The combined imaginations of Kasdan, Lucas and Spielberg had pushed the story of Raiders well beyond its initial inspiration in the Saturday-afternoon serials. Indiana now had a lover, Marion Ravenswood, the feisty, resentful daughter of an old colleague and competitor. First seen managing a drinking den well above the snowline in Nepal, she’s less than pleased to see her old flame when he comes looking for a clue to the location of the Ark, an amulet that was part of her father’s collection. Also on its track are some Nazi agents, including Toht, a giggling looka-like for Peter Lorre, and Belloq, an urbane Frenchman who is Jones’s equal, indeed master, in tracking down rare artefacts. Indy, however, has his helpers too: a scholarly colleague, Marcus Brody, from the college where he teaches archaeology, and Sallah, ‘the best digger in Egypt’ as well as a vital guide once they locate the city of Tanis, where the Ark lies buried under centuries of sand.
Almost every broad-shouldered actor in Hollywood had been tested for Indiana, including John Beck, Tom Selleck and Harrison Ford. Selleck emerged as the front runner. Indy had to be a ‘jock jester’, a fighter who could be funny at the same time. Selleck’s rugged build, thick black moustache and wide grin, not to mention a modest price-tag, made him ideal. Ford had none of Selleck’s self-confidence. After Star Wars, he’d played second leads in films like Heroes, Force Ten From Navarone and the comedy western The Frisco Kid. His only starring role was as last-minute replacement for Kris Kristofferson in a wartime London romance, Hanover Street, and that flopped. Reluctantly he’d agreed to play Han Solo again in The Empire Strikes Back, but only if his character could be made ‘more dashing’.
The fact that Spielberg and Lucas called him back for more tests convinced Ford he had the role. In fact, both of them were unsure. Kasdan’s wry script made the part a long reach for Ford, and they opted finally for Selleck. But news of the decision leaked before Spielberg could break it to Ford or close the deal with CBS, who had Selleck under option while they waited for reaction to the pilot of Magnum P.I., its new Hawaiian detective series. Ford read first in Variety that he hadn’t been chosen after all, and was furious. When Magnum, which premiered in December 1980, proved an immediate hit, CBS locked Selleck up tight. Lucas and Spielberg were forced back to Ford, who was unforgiving.
Spielberg, by previewing his visual conception of the character, based on some drawings of Ford as Han Solo by comic-book artist Jim Steranko, convinced him that Raiders promised leading-man status. Even so, the actor insisted on rewriting his part. In addition, he exacted a hefty 7 per cent of Raiders’ net takings as his fee. (Ironically, Spielberg could have used Selleck after all: the actors’ strike held up shooting on the first episodes of Magnum.)
Spielberg always imagined Amy as Marion Ravenswood. He offered the part to Debra Winger, who turned him down. After that, having overpaid for Harrison Ford, he started looking for bargains. Publicist Jeff Walker remembers being in Spielberg’s office while he shuffled through a folder filled with pictures of models clipped from magazines, telling an assistant, ‘Call her in… Her too…’
However Amy’s late and, for Spielberg, unfortunate replacement, at least in terms of good relations on the set, was Karen Allen, whom he’d noticed playing a small role in Animal House. Though freckled, red-headed, green-eyed and gentile, Allen had much in common with Amy: New York background, ambitions for the stage rather than film, and a short temper. Spielberg did his best to transform her into Amy, blotting out the freckles and darkening her reddish hair, but the temper remained.
For the rest of the cast, he shopped in Europe. After flirting with making Sallah an agile little Arab, and interviewing actors like Kavork Malikyan for the role, he decided instead on someone larger than life and chose John Rhys-Davies, a burly Welshman with a booming voice. Ronald Lacey became Toht, and Denholm Elliott Marcus Brody.
Truffaut’s success in Close Encounters tempted Spielberg to consider another Frenchman for Belloq. Initially he wanted Jacques Dutronc, the singer/songwriter who’d appeared in some films by Claude Lelouch. But Dutronc, rangy and laconic, a drinking and fornicating pal of self-destructive rock star/actor Serge Gainsbourg, couldn’t be pinned down, so he turned to Italian Giancarlo Giannini, who was close to being signed when Spielberg saw the BBC’s TV film Death of a Princess, about the execution of a Saudi princess for an illicit affair, and was impressed by the performance of British actor Paul Freeman. Freeman, passing through Hollywood on his way back from Belize, where he’d been playing in the film of Frederick Forsyth’s novel about mercenaries. The Dogs of War, dropped in to Lucasfilm to meet Spielberg and Lucas, and was cast on the spot.
Three months later, Freeman was on his barge, taking a romantic holiday on the Home County canals with a new girlfriend when he glided past a lock cottage and saw a chalked notice leaning against the wall. ‘Will Paul Daneman on the Ripple Vale Ring Your Agent.’ Even allowing for the confusion of his name with that of another actor, he knew that Spielberg had reached out for him.
Freeman arrived next day at Elstree. An arcade-size Asteroids video game had been installed in the office of co-executive producer Howard Kazanjian, earmarked for Spielberg. He was playing it when Freeman entered. Throughout the early spring of 1980, Spielberg spent any spare time at Elstree riveted to the Asteroids screen. There was a special Tightness to his choice of what novelist Martin Amis, to whose 1982 book about video games Invasion of the Space Invaders Spielberg wrote an introduction, classed as ‘one of the most mystical of the video games’. ‘On the charcoal grey screen,’ Amis explained, ‘spectral boulders roll and tumble. You are the tiny triangle in the middle, firing bombs or “photons” in repeated salvos of four. When you hit a boulder, it breaks in two. When you hit half a boulder, it breaks in two too.’
Asteroids might have been a metaphor for Spielberg’s problems with his career and his life. As he cracked each obstruction, more appeared. Emotionally bruised by the break-up with Amy, he brooded. His deficiencies in caring and sharing nagged at him. When Jim Steranko praised him as someone with ‘the sensibilities of an action director’, he cavilled. ‘Essentially I’m a love story director, but nobody’s aware of that except me. In several years, when I start making very small pictures, people will say, “Yeah, but didn’t he also make an action picture called Raiders of the Lost Ark?”’
Freeman knew none of this, though he sensed that Spielberg was distracted He’d had to wait for his Hollywood interview too, while Lucas and Spielberg lay on the floor, playing with that year’s hottest audio toy, Sony’s portable Walkman, and Kathleen Kennedy fed them cassettes.
Raiders was only Freeman’s third film, but he knew that an emergency summons usually meant second thoughts. Perhaps he’d been replaced, as he himself had replaced others. ‘It didn’t really matter to me one way or the other,’ Freeman recalls. ‘1941 had just flopped, and people were wondering if Spielberg was really so great.’ But when they went into his office it wasn’t exactly the role Spielberg discussed.
‘I just wanted to know what you planned to do about this French accent,’ he said.
Relieved, Freeman slipped into Standard Broken English. ‘I zort I would do zumzing like zis.’
Spielberg smiled, and said, ‘Great. Well, that’s fine then.’ He had no more questions.
Despite motor-mouthed technicians and inquisitive tabloids, nobody at Elstree knew much about Lost Ark Productions or its movie. Lucas had imported his own management team, some of whom, like Kazanjian, had graduated with him from USC. British left hands had no idea what Hollywood’s right hands were up to. Why, demanded actors forced to change in the toilets, had all the dressing rooms been fitted with industrial-strength padlocks and large bathtubs, but without plumbing? Nobody on the Elstree staff had the slightest idea.
Freeman, since he would appear in the first scenes shot, knew the plot, though most didn’t, not even Karen Allen. Auditioning actors only saw their own pages. Bill Hootkins, a heavily-built London-based Texas actor with a megaphone voice, hadn’t been shown more than his own lines either, but since he played Major Eaton of US Military Intelligence, who briefs Indiana and Brody in the second reel, they contained the entire story. On the night of his casting, he rang a friend.
‘I’m in the new Spielberg film,’ he announced conspiratorially.
‘What’s it about?’
‘It’s the Bible,’ Hootkins replied slowly, as if realising its improbability for the first time, ‘with Nazis!’
Harrison Ford meanwhile fretted about the script. Such anxiety was to become more pronounced as his stardom increased. A later director, Philip Noyce, called him an ‘anal [actor], incredibly intelligent and detail-oriented, [who] worries tremendously about every scene and situation’. For all his physical magnetism. Ford had a limited range. Attempts to broaden his appeal beyond action/adventure exposed his threadbare technique, dismissed by one critic as a ‘small but familiar repertoire of apologetic shrugs, hesitations and lopsided smiles’.
Ford had joined Spielberg on the flight from Los Angeles to London early in June, and they went through Indy’s part line by line, refining and simplifying. Anything smacking of doubt or intellect was replaced by wisecracks and sight gags. When Marion ruefully notes, as she undresses Indy to treat his wounds, ‘You’re not the man I knew ten years ago,’ his response, ‘It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage,’ was a Ford contribution. So was his response when Sallah enquires about his plans as the Ark is whisked away from under their noses en route to Cairo in a Nazi truck: ‘Don’t ask me. I’m making this up as I go along.’
Like the shark in Jaws, and Spielberg himself, Indy only functions when he’s in motion towards a well-defined goal. This momentum, maintained inexorably by Spielberg, kept everyone from questioning a script that, even more than Close Encounters, made little sense. The opening sequence, in which Indy penetrates an ancient but efficiently booby-trapped Peruvian temple to snatch a tiny gold idol, is a tour de force of technique, but a moment’s thought must suggest that the traps would only work with a system of hydraulics and photo-electric cells, beyond even the most inspired Inca engineers. The clue to the position of the Ark in buried Tanis is contained in an amulet which must be placed on top of a rod of specific height and erected in a scale model of the city within Tanis itself. Only then, and only as the sun shines through the gem in the amulet, will the position of the Well of Souls be revealed. But why should the inhabitants of Tanis need a scale model of their own city in order to locate the Ark?
As the story rolls on, such inconsistencies accumulate. When, in the endless switching of the Ark from hand to hand, Belloq snatches it from the Bantu Wind, in which Indy is trying to carry it away from Egypt, and transfers it to a submarine, Jones throws himself into the sea, clings to the sub deck, and is next seen on the other side of the Mediterranean, climbing ashore, damp but unharmed, after presumably having been hauled hundreds of miles, much of it underwater. (Spielberg shot, but didn’t use, a scene of crowning improbability in which Indy lashes himself to the periscope with his whip.)
No matter. The Indiana Jones films offer a child’s vision of a world where narrative logic surrenders to the vision of the moment. And Indy himself, especially after Ford and Spielberg finished defining him, was the perfect inhabitant of that world, an invulnerable Peter Pan, half god, half child. The adult of Raiders is Belloq. It’s he who understands the importance of the Ark (‘It’s a radio for talking to God!’), and who articulates the philosophy of archaeology to an indifferent Indy. Marion to Indy is less a lover than a tomboy playmate. Only Belloq responds to her femininity, offering her (in yet another improbability, though a charming one), in the middle of the Egyptian desert, a smart dress, high heels and serious attempts at seduction.
The ten-hour airborne conference would be all the direction Ford received, or needed, on Raiders. Thereafter, he directed himself.
‘Steven would say, “What are you going to do this time, Harrison?”’ recalled Bill Hootkins. ‘Steve would watch the camera rehearsal, say “Fine,” and Ford would do it.’
Hootkins had worked with Ford before, on Hanover Street. Playing opposite him in a moment of high pathos, he conceived an admiration for his pragmatism. ‘Hanover Street was only his second main lead, and this was one of his biggest scenes. I asked, “You want me to back up a bit on this, or pump it up a little to get you into it?” And Ford is the only actor who ever had the guts to say to me on a major scene like this, “Don’t worry. It’s only make-believe.”’
The sets were quickly completed, and Elstree staff found out what the baths were for when two thousand snakes arrived from South America. Spielberg flew to La Rochelle to shoot the sub pens and on to Tunisia for the desert excavations, both of which had to be done before high summer. Paramount’s penalties meant that even a day over schedule could be disastrous. Urgency was added by the fact that delays on the second Star Wars adventure, The Empire Strikes Back, being directed by Irvin Kershner, had severely overstretched Lucas film. Lucas’s deal with Twentieth Century-Fox on Star Wars guaranteed him 77.5 per cent of the film’s income after the studio had covered its costs, but while he would eventually be $100 million richer from the two films, at the moment he had an acute cash-flow problem.
On paper, Raiders needed eighty-five shooting days, but Lucas asked Spielberg to do it in seventy-three. They axed much of the action and dialogue, and scaled down many sets. The Nazi super-weapons which Indy was supposed to find in the submarine pens at La Pallice disappeared, and the experimental Flying Wing aircraft in which the Ark was to have been flown from Tunisia to Berlin (before Indy blows it up) shrank from four engines to two. Ron Cobb had enjoyed elaborating Toht, giving him a Strangelove-like mechanical arm with a machine gun firing through his forefinger, but this too was ditched, the only reminder a running gag in which Toht, having rashly snatched up the crucial amulet in an early scene without realising it was red hot, carried its impression in scar tissue on his palm – an image that made more sense when the hand was plastic. In consolation, Spielberg gave Toht a gadget invented for Christopher Lee’s Nazi submarine officer in 1941. An object of chains and steel rods that looks like a torture instrument but is actually a collapsible hanger for his leather coat, it got no reaction for the humourless Lee, but Ronald Lacey’s snigger as he whips it out won him one of Raiders’ best laughs.
Four artists storyboarded the new slimline script. ‘I just got it right down to the bones,’ Spielberg said, ‘right down to what I absolutely needed to tell the story I wanted to tell. On Raiders I learned to like instead of love. If I liked a scene after I shot it, I printed it. I didn’t shoot it again seventeen times until I got one I loved.’ When he displayed any doubts, Lucas told him quietly, ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark will be the summer’s biggest film.’ How did he know? Lucas just said, ‘Trust me.’
Paul Freeman arrived in La Rochelle on a Sunday morning, and was delighted to find himself in a good hotel with a four-star restaurant. He was told to relax; Spielberg would see him later in the day. Noting that the restaurant offered a fourteen-course seafood lunch, Freeman settled down to a treat. ‘None of the Americans were eating,’ he says, ‘but after a while one came in and said, “Steven will see you now.” I said, “I’m still on course number three.” From time to time, they’d come back, but we didn’t get together until later in the afternoon.’
It was his last chance for a peaceful meal. On Monday, the film began to roll. ‘I’ve never seen a camera crew so flat out,’ Freeman said. ‘You’d see them asleep with their faces in their lunch. [Spielberg] was running between shots, and shooting it like a TV film – thirty set-ups a day sometimes. The camera crew couldn’t keep up. They were exhausted.’ Rather than lose time by cutting during a complex take, Spielberg would sometimes just yell directions. ‘I had to get used to people talking during a shot,’ says Freeman. ‘In the middle of the action, Spielberg would call, “Paul, look over here!” It wasn’t what one was used to.’
The pace told once they moved to Kairouan in Tunisia. Spielberg heeded Lucas’s warnings about local food, for which he had no taste anyway, and ate almost entirely out of tins, in particular Harrods’ canned spaghetti. But avoiding the local tap-water was almost impossible in such heat. Most of the crew and cast caught amoebic dysentery; second-unit director Michael Moore dangerously so. He was shipped back to the States, and Lucas took over his job.
Then Ford succumbed, a fact which, fortuitously, gave the film one of its biggest laughs. Confronted by scimitar-wielding giant Terry Richards in the casbah. Ford was supposed to fight him, sword against bullwhip, but when it came to film the sequence, he was too sick to even stand upright. Instead he just looks at Richards in exasperation, pulls a revolver and shoots him dead.
Lucas was around for three weeks of the nine-week London shoot, two weeks of the five in Tunisia, and throughout the shooting at La Rochelle and in Hawaii. Many assumed he was simply keeping an eye on his investment, but some detected a more complex role, as a lightning-rod to deflect resentment from Spielberg, especially in Tunisia’s 130-degree heat. When a group of young German tourists gave effective improvised performances as Nazi soldiers, Lucas turned up with pages of dialogue for a new scene to involve them, and spent a day shooting it. Paul Freeman says, ‘I suspect he was giving we performers a message: “Look, acting’s not so hard. Anyone can do it.”’
Freeman came to know Spielberg well during the Tunisian locations. ‘Steven and I used to have lunch together – because sometimes I was the only person on the set who was talking to him. Harrison often got pissed off, mainly because of the speed he was working.’ They went for strolls in the desert, during which Spielberg reminisced about Arizona, excursions with his father and hunts for scorpions.
Ford, estranged from his wife Mary, was involved with screenwriter Melissa Mathison. A close friend of Kathleen Kennedy, Mathison came from London, where she’d been working, to join him in Tunisia. Kathleen Carey also briefly visited Spielberg. Mathison, not very happily, had worked for Coppola on the scripts The Black Stallion and The Escape Artist, both stories with boys as main characters, and Spielberg, feeling lonely, told her about ‘Night Skies’ and the long-delayed ‘Clearwater/Growing Up/After School’ project, which he was now calling ‘A Boy’s Life’. In his mind, the two had been growing together into a story of a friendship between a lonely suburban kid, as he had been, and a lost alien who became the sort of uncritical companion he’d searched for in vain through his childhood.
‘I kept thinking about… where the story was going,’ Spielberg said, ‘and I asked Melissa if she would care to sit with me and let me test this out on her. So we sat down, and I told her the story, and she wept.’
Afterwards Mathison grabbed his arm and shook it. ‘You have to make this film,’ she told him urgently.
Her suggestions about the script, informed with feminine compassion, impressed Spielberg, and he asked her to try her hand at the screenplay that would become E.T. To his surprise, she refused. Writing for the changeable Coppola had been a torment, and she was thinking of giving up screenwriting altogether. But during a car ride from Nefta to the location at Sousse, Ford and Spielberg pressed her. Weakened by dysentery, she couldn’t refuse. Throughout the shooting, she and Spielberg spent every spare moment discussing the story. She started work on the script in October 1980; E.T. would go before the cameras almost a year later to the day, and be released nationally the following June, a tribute to the white heat at which Spielberg could work.
From Tunisia, the unit flew to Hawaii for the eleven-minute opening ‘teaser’ which Hollywood execs had been convinced would cost too much to film. ‘It’s not part of Raiders at all,’ Spielberg admitted. ‘It belongs to the film that comes before it – Raiders of the Lost Fertility Idol, if you like.’ But the sequence respected the spirit of the serials, which always began with a brisk reprise of the previous week’s cliffhanger. It also established Indy’s grave-robbing skill and his rivalry with Belloq. And its gadgetry set the tone of the film with comic-book energy. British actor Alfred Molina found himself thrust into an unlikely characterisation as Satipo, Indy’s Peruvian guide. New to film, he was almost scared off for life when, for the first shot of his career, the spider wrangler furnished his back and shoulders with hairy tarantulas the size of saucers.
By mid-July, the crew was back at Elstree and gearing up to shoot the Well of Souls. Reptile wrangler Michael Culling had accumulated a few boas and cobras for featured roles, but most of the snakes were harmless striped grass snakes imported from South America, augmented with two thousand rubber fakes. Only Ford and Karen Allen, or their doubles, would need to confront the cobras, and then only through glass. Still, the actors viewed their squirming co-stars nervously, particularly after Spielberg, seeing the scene for the first time through the lens, decided there weren’t enough snakes, and had 4500 more imported from Denmark.
Production manager Robert Watts beefed up safety precautions. Bill Hootkins says:
You’ve never seen anything like it. The doors of the stage were open permanently, and an ambulance was backed inside, with the doors open. Standing on either side were two enormous men in white coats, with a syringe of anti-venom in each hand. This stuff had been flown in from India, and turned out to be ancient. It would have been like injecting us with water.
Stanley Kubrick had moved his production office and cutting rooms to his nearby mansion, but a few people remained at Elstree, including his daughter Vivian, who was cutting her documentary about the making of The Shining. Helping her was one of Kubrick’s editors, Gordon Stainforth.
Stainforth remembers the mood at Elstree as initially congenial. Spielberg was driven out from the Athenaeum Hotel on Piccadilly every morning, early enough to drop in at the commissary for coffee and a word with the remnants of the Shining crew or the advance guard of Warren Beatty’s forthcoming Russian Revolution saga Reds. The day’s storyboards were on display. Performers were flattered to know Spielberg’s plans, though it also got any questions out of the way before expensive shooting time. For the same reason, he always filmed the first rehearsal of a scene, just in case spontaneity produced a unique performance. Once a week, he hosted a cast and crew party, for which the local MGM, Universal or Warner Brothers distributor contributed a print of some classic, often starring Spencer Tracy or other Spielberg favourites.
The gemütlich atmosphere evaporated once shooting started on the Well of Souls. ‘Vivian came into the cutting room one day crying,’ recalls Stainforth. ‘She’s a great animal lover, and she was very upset about the way the snakes were being treated. So I was dragged along to this stage to see what was going on.’
A floor of planks had been laid seven feet above the actual floor of the stage, and strewn with sand. This in turn was covered by a writhing reptilian carpet. Some snakes had fallen through onto the concrete floor below. Vivian was certain many more were being crushed by the feet of actors, stunt men or technicians. Stainforth thought most of the motionless reptiles were plastic, but acknowledges, ‘There were some dead snakes around; no doubt about that.’
‘Spielberg was up on some scaffolding actually lining up a shot,’ he recalls. ‘Vivian climbed up and said, “Steven, this is so cruel.”
‘Spielberg was looking terribly embarrassed by the whole situation. “Vivian, they’re being looked after fine,” he said. “If there’s a problem, we’ll look into it. We’re too busy to do it now.”
‘He was quite pleasant about it, but this was not nearly good enough for her. We went back to the cutting room, and Vivian picked up the phone and rang the RSPCA to complain about the way the snakes were being treated.
‘The whole film ground to a halt. It was closed down for a whole day. The guy in charge of the snakes was so angry, if Vivian had been a bloke, she’d have been killed. But the fact that she was a girl, and Kubrick’s daughter…
‘A couple of days later, I had the chance to go back, and the transformation was fantastic. They’d gone completely over the top. There was this row of plastic dustbins almost as far as the eye could see around the stage, and in the bottom of each one there was a little bit of straw and a leaf of lettuce, and each one had about three garter snakes. There were vast glass cases for the dangerous snakes, and about three doctors on hand in white coats.’
Kubrick himself came hot-foot to watch the fun. ‘When there’s a scandal like this,’ says Stainforth, ‘Stanley revels in it. He was positively buoyant. Of course he took Vivian’s side, and then there was a definite clash between Spielberg and Kubrick. And I remember Stanley puffing on his cigar, and saying with a grin, “Steve’s a jerk.”’
Karen Allen apparently agreed with Kubrick. Throughout the filming, her irritation with Spielberg had grown visibly. It wasn’t simply that, with her black hair and heavy make-up, she’d been turned into a surrogate Amy Irving, though this was frustrating enough. They also differed fundamentally in their attitude to screen acting.
When they met, Allen told Spielberg, ‘I’m from the Al Pacino school of acting.’ She had played Pacino’s girlfriend in the ambiguous study of sado-masochism. Cruising, and been angered, as had the cerebral Pacino, by director William Friedkin’s slashing of her role.
‘You’re going to get introduced to the Sam Peckinpah school of acting,’ Spielberg replied.
After this exchange, their relationship deteriorated. ‘Karen wasn’t particularly happy with the way Spielberg was working,’ Paul Freeman admits, ‘because she wanted to rehearse. She found it frustrating that she wasn’t able to explore her character and make it more immediate. During the movie she was always talking about how she was going to use the money to go back and set up a theatre company.’
Her anger increased during the Well of Souls sequence. Though stunt artists replaced her when Marion hangs over the pit and the statues collapse on her, there were more than enough anxious moments as she faced the snakes. ‘The pythons were really vicious,’ she complained. ‘They aren’t poisonous, but they bite and hold on. I always kept a close watch on them and if any of them got near my bare feet, I just turned around and walked straight off the set.’
Spielberg didn’t welcome such independence. Nor did he feel she was looking sufficiently agitated. ‘I threw snakes at Karen’s head,’ he admitted, ‘because I didn’t think she was screaming for real. I set her on fire. I tossed a tarantula on her leg. But I always kissed her, gently, after every take.’ It’s hard to know whether the vermin or the kiss aggravated her more.
Marion spends two of her biggest scenes, first in Belloq’s tent and, later, the final confrontation with the force of the Ark, bound to a post – in the first, gagged as well. ‘I know she very much didn’t like being tied up,’ acknowledges Paul Freeman. ‘In that thing at the end, when she was tied up for a long time, it freaked her out quite a bit. She didn’t like that. They had to make arrangements to stop and let her out, then shoot it again.’ In a business where rhapsodic tributes to directors are the norm, Allen has been acid in later comments about Spielberg. ‘Steve and I were not the best of friends,’ she said. ‘He looks at actors as part of the scenery. But I think he’ll grow out of that.’
Bringing in Raiders a week under its published schedule and well within budget was a prodigious feat of cinematic technique and a tribute to the power of pure will. And though Spielberg didn’t lack competent, indeed inspired collaborators, the creative achievement is almost entirely his. His casting worked superbly, and his subordinates, while seldom understanding exactly what he had in mind, delivered the effects he visualised.
When they didn’t, he could be coldly dismissive. The cast, who, unusually on a Hollywood film, were admitted to rushes, watched this happening. ‘Everyone on every film tells you that the rushes are great,’ says Paul Freeman. ‘Spielberg was the only director I ever heard say, “That’s no good. We’ll have to do it again.” Of course, it was almost always about something someone else had shot. But he was inevitably right.’
Every technical department of Raiders acknowledged that Spielberg’s vision never wavered. He was like a man mentally humming a piece of music he’d heard a thousand times before. His first cut was three hours long, but he quickly refined that to less than two hours. Once post-production started late in the autumn, it was John Williams who again provided the actual music, another march, heavy on the brass, that would be among the most imitated scores of all time. The advertising logo, with cartoon letters tapering from crimson at the top to cooler yellow, also became one of the most readily identifiable of all film emblems. The film in which Spielberg invested least of himself became his greatest hit.