HORROR VS. HOPE
Headline to New York Times report on the release of Poltergeist and E.T. 30 May 1982
MICHAEL EISNER and Jeffrey Katzenberg at Paramount gave Raiders red-carpet treatment. They considered a gala premiere in the art deco Avalon Ballroom on Catalina Island, thirty-one miles offshore from Los Angeles, but a few sneak previews in other cinemas, from the first of which Spielberg fled in panic after twenty minutes, made it clear the film needed no such kitsch promotion. (He didn’t see Raiders with an audience until forty-four weeks into its release, when he slipped into Hollywood’s Cinerama Dome, famous for its good projection and sound equipment.)
Paramount entered the film in the Cannes Festival and scheduled a US opening on 11 June 1981, plum date of the summer season. So positive was the word-of-mouth that, in the four days beforehand, shares of Gulf and Western, Paramount’s parent company, rose 2 1/2 points. Raiders also meant prosperity for Lucasfilm, which later produced two sequels, creamed millions in marketing and launched a Prague-based TV series, Young Indiana Jones.
Even more than Jaws, Raiders became a media event that spilled beyond the world of film. In April, NASA, alert to the importance of mythology in the space effort, invited Spielberg and Lucas to watch the Space Shuttle lift-off at Cape Canaveral. Links to other sf films and TV shows, in particular Star Trek, would follow. Not blind to the magnitude of the compliment, Spielberg treasured the NASA cap with which he was presented, and wore it often over the next few years for photo shoots.
In March, Spielberg was embarrassed by the revelation in the Los Angeles Times of his true age. A journalist sifting through the records of Cal State Long Beach noted that they referred to Spielberg as having been born in 1946. Spielberg’s press agent refused to respond, saying he would answer questions only about Raiders.
Imitating Raiders would become a cinema industry of its own. In 1983, Brian G. Hutton’s indifferent High Rood to China cast Tom Selleck in a role not unlike the one he’d lost to Ford. Richard Chamberlain played Allan Quartermain in a 1985 remake of King Solomon’s Mines that owed much to Raiders, including the casting of John Rhys-Davies, who played Sallah in Spielberg’s film, and followed up in 1986 with Allan Quartermain and the Lost City of Gold, an even more obvious pastiche. The 1985 Australian Sky Pirates and countless other films thrust action stars into fedoras and bomber jackets and despatched them in search of lost cities, temples, tribes and treasures. Indy even became an icon of one man battling and beating the forces of evil when he was adopted as a mascot by Phil Berman and Tim Gregory, two biochemists fighting to find a cure for AIDS. Almost in passing, Raiders also flooded the Ark market. When Richard Gere danced before the Ark of the Covenant in Bruce Beresford’s 1985 Biblical film King David, teenage audiences jeered, ‘That’s old stuff!’, convinced he’d stolen a concept invented by Spielberg.
So complete was the triumph of Raiders that Spielberg didn’t go on a national promotional tour. He used the time to catch up with Hollywood, the landscape of which, in two years, had changed dramatically. Disney was even closer to bankruptcy, financial and artistic, but Columbia, under Frank Price, looked healthy for the first time in years, and had begun to attract takeover bids from corporations looking to enter show business, in particular its eventual buyer Coca-Cola. Sleepy no longer. Universal seemed more and more an extension of its studio tour, now one of Los Angeles’s major tourist attractions. Instead of selling off his lot, Wasserman had extended the Universal theme park over almost every square foot of the 450 acres between the black tower and the Hollywood Hills.
In one of the most surprising developments, MGM was enjoying new vitality under an improbable president, David Begelman. After paying his debt to society at a substantial discount with a $5000 fine and the production of the documentary Angel Death, a tract against the drug PCP – ‘Angel Dust’ – he had the last two of his three years’ probation revoked and the remaining charges against him dismissed. Told by an accommodating judge, ‘You can go forward without the stigma of probation,’ he went into partnership with Freddie Fields as a producer, then, in December 1979, took over as president of MGM, with Fields also on the team.
With the skeleton of what would become Amblin Entertainment in place, Spielberg was anxious to wet his feet as a producer, and was searching for projects which, unlike the Zemeckis and Gale films, offered hands-on experience. With George Lucas and Kirk Douglas, he invested in Home Movies, a low-budget non-union film made by Brian De Palma with some of his students at Sarah Lawrence. United Artists grudgingly bought it, then put it out with the minimum of advertising. ‘They’re scared of little pictures,’ De Palma complained. ‘The bottom line is that they’d rather have a film that cost $5 million than a $300,000 picture, because anything that’s cheap takes on an onerous cast.’ It was a valuable lesson to Spielberg that a film needed all the resources of a major studio behind it in order to succeed in an increasingly competitive market.
Francis Coppola was making his Las Vegas musical romance One from the Heart in Los Angeles, and in February Spielberg went to watch him work. Abetted by his director of photography, Vittorio Storaro, who had designed an elaborate lighting system to ‘wash’ the set with colour at the touch of a button on a computerised console, Coppola had surrendered to the dizzy promise of the latest high technology, often directing from a video screen, and occasionally from his stainless steel caravan which the crew christened ‘The Silver Fish’. Spielberg acknowledged the promise of video, and agreed that one day all film-making might be digital, but it didn’t blind him to the emptiness of Coppola’s method and of the film itself, doomed to failure. (In August 1981, Paramount showed it to potential exhibitors, all of whom scorned it.)
Spielberg went on to San Francisco to meet with Lucas, who was about to suit the new Star Wars film, Return of the Jedi, and wanted to get the second Indy adventure moving before he did so. Having agreed a budget of $28 million, Paramount were already counting their profits. Although he was not entirely enthusiastic about repeating himself, Spielberg had agreed to direct it. He didn’t want someone else messing up the sequel, as had happened on Jaws.
He also felt a debt to Lucas, who had invested heavily – financially and emotionally – in the film. His divorce from Marcia had not only forced the wholesale division of his assets but left him depressed, and questioning his future. Living and working by the principles of the sixties, respectful of collaborators and benign towards the environment, had left him a virtual recluse struggling to make ends meet.
Since Lawrence Kasdan was making his first film as director, the erotic thriller Body Heat, which Lucas had privately helped finance (while insisting his name not appear anywhere on it), Lucas’s old friends from American Graffiti, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, were hurriedly called in to write what became Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Lucas’s first impulse had been to make a film as innovative as Raiders. Negotiations had been opened with the Chinese government to film scenes like a motorcycle chase along the Great Wall and the discovery of dinosaurs in a lost valley. However the Chinese refused permission to film on the wall, and inflated the prices for everything else needed to make the film. The Sri Lankan government was more amenable, so the location was moved there, with further scenes to be shot in India.
Much of the material in the story given to Huyck and Katz was left over from Raiders. Lucas restored a number of stunts dropped from the first film, including one in which Indy escapes from a pilotless plane by pressing a rubber boat into service as an improvised parachute. There are some self-homages too, in one of which Jones, faced by twins of the masked swordsman from the first film, goes for his gun, only to find the holster empty. John Williams would also re-use much of the original Raiders music.
Consistent with Lucas’s mood, however, the new film has a darker and more strident tone. Set in 1935, earlier in Indy’s career than Raiders, it begins, as usual, in the middle of another adventure, with Indy in a Shanghai nightspot, christened ‘Club Obi Wan’, after Alec Guinness’s character in Star Wars, negotiating with gangster Lao Che and his two sons to exchange a gigantic diamond for the ashes of a long-dead emperor. In the ensuing double-cross and brawl, Indy and his sidekick, a ten-year-old Chinese street kid, nicknamed Short Round, find themselves on the run with Willie Scott, a nightclub singer who was favouring the audience with ‘Anything Goes’ in Mandarin when the fight broke out. Escaping from the pilotless plane and sliding to safety in India, they are pressed, in another airing of Spielberg’s Peter Pan fascination, into rescuing village children stolen by a death-worshipping cult to work in its mines and provide victims for human sacrifice. Indy, Short Round and Willie penetrate the boy maharajah’s palace and free the children after a chase through the tunnels on ore carts.
Wanting truly evil villains for this film, not simply the well-mannered Nazis and suave Belloq of Raiders, Lucas took a leaf from a favourite film of Spielberg’s, George Stevens’s 1939 version of the Rudyard Kipling poem ‘Gunga Din’, and resurrected its villains, the Thugs. A sub-group among devotees of the goddess Kali, the Thugs practised ritual strangling – Thugee – as a form of worship. Silent and anonymous, travelling the roads of India, murdering travellers and burying them with their ritual pickaxes, the Thugs kept their sect and practices secret for centuries. Renaming them ‘Thugees’ (or, in some versions, ‘Thuggies’), Temple of Doom transformed them into repositories of noisome rites from a number of belief systems: Aztec cardiectomy, Hawaiian volcano sacrifice, European devil worship. Critics would complain that the film seemed set in a sort of Third World theme park, with a new race, creed and colour around every corner.
Huyck and Katz would need to write three major drafts to incorporate the hefty list of requirements imposed by producer, director, stars, the studio, exhibitors and censors. As his price for participating, Harrison Ford demanded better billing, more money and fewer distractions from his character than in Raiders. His eventual credit, ‘Harrison Ford starring in…’ made his the first name on the film. He also wanted to do more of his own stunts, a decision that had disastrous results. To reduce competition for the limelight even more, the omnicompetent Sallah and Brody were dropped for the admiring Short Round, named for the Korean kid in Sam Fuller’s 1951 The Steel Helmet.
Spielberg too demanded alterations. Turned off independent women by his clashes with Karen Allen, he wanted Indy’s companion to be a blonde bubblehead who spends most of her time squealing and complaining; the very mirror image of the feisty Marion Ravens wood. Her model was the shrill blonde Betty Hutton, who starred in the first film he ever saw, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth. To underline his contempt for the character, he took a leaf from Lucas’s christening of Indiana Jones for his wife’s dog and called the character ‘Willie’, after one of his own spaniels.
The most pressing piece of unfinished business in Spielberg’s life was the Close Encounters sequel ‘Night Skies’, which had now become an embarrassment. John Sayles, reflecting Spielberg’s gloom when he commissioned the screenplay, had created a script close to John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk, where settlers in the War of Independence battle the British and their bloodthirsty Indian mercenaries. The chief of the alien group was named ‘Scar’, after the Indian who kidnaps John Wayne’s niece in The Searchers. Rick Baker had followed the same brief, producing aliens which, as promised, were more cunningly engineered than those of Close Encounters, but also more frightening.
Recovered now from Amy’s departure and the failure of 1941, Spielberg found it hard to imagine he ever wanted to make so bleak a film. ‘I think I must have taken leave of my senses,’ he admitted. He turned down both the script and the designs. Sayles accepted philosophically, but Baker was furious, particularly after Spielberg questioned his $700,000 costs and suggested he’d spent too much time working for John Landis on An American Werewolf in London, and not enough on his project. When Spielberg described the new alien he now had in mind, a genial character he’d christened ‘Puck’ who resembled the figures who emerge from the mother ship at the end of Close Encounters, Baker reportedly stormed out, telling him, ‘Call Rambaldi!’ He later found himself locked out of his make-up lab, which contained, as well as his ‘Night Skies’ materials, all those for American Werewolf. Spielberg did contact Rambaldi, but the Italian requested nine months to design Puck. Spielberg gave him six, and when he delivered Baker charged that the result incorporated some of his ideas.
Yet another strike, this time of the Directors’ Guild, threatened Hollywood in 1982, and studios were stockpiling films. Universal reminded Spielberg of the four still outstanding on his old contract, and offered him Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked this Way Comes, about the threatened invasion of a small town by a sinister circus and its ringmaster, which is foiled by two boys and the father of one of them. Peter Vincent Douglas, one of many small independent producers with a Universal ‘first look’ deal, had developed the novel for his father Kirk to play the ringmaster. Spielberg liked Bradbury’s book but, given his dislike of working with stars, it’s unlikely he ever seriously considered making a film with the egotistical Douglas. Ultimately he turned it down, after – according to the irritated star – keeping him waiting for a year, but Bradbury’s folksy small-town vision and the idealised father hero stayed with him.
Surgeon/novelist/director Michael Crichton was making a reputation with high-concept science fiction thrillers, a few of which, in particular The Andromeda Strain, had succeeded as films. Jerry Goldsmith, who scored the adaptations of Coma and The Great Train Robbery, believed that Crichton and Spielberg, whom he’d come to know as a friend, were natural collaborators. ‘I tried for years to get them together,’ says Goldsmith, ‘then finally they met without any help from me. And then I never heard from either of them again.’
Their introduction was engineered by Brian De Palma, who was interested in Crichton’s new book, Congo, an African adventure about the rediscovery of King Solomon’s legendary diamond mines, guarded by a tribe of feral gorillas. Frank Yablans had bought the novel for Fox, and for three months Spielberg and De Palma dickered with Fox and Universal about a version to be produced by Spielberg and directed by De Palma, before giving up in frustration. Spielberg angrily blamed Hollywood. ‘A deal is a work of science fiction,’ he told Time magazine. ‘I wasted three months learning how not to make one. Eventually, Brian and I walked away. The whole “movie game” is just one more useless experience.’ He also tried to set up a film of William Goldman’s creepy novel Magic, about a ventriloquist haunted by his own dummy, but Richard Attenborough beat him to it.
Spielberg found consolation and a welcome at MGM. David Begelman’s apparent revival of its fortunes would turn out to be illusory. His production slate (Buddy, Buddy, All the Marbles, Pennies from Heaven, Whose Life is it Anyway?, Yes, Giorgio, Cannery Row) was a catalogue of flops that prefaced the studio’s sale to Kirk Kerkorian, leading to its amalgamation with UA and eventual extinction, but for the moment he exuded his usual urbane confidence. ‘The sense of poised dynamism he wore like his cashmere sports coats,’ said UA executive Steven Bach, ‘was so persuasive it seemed to dispel a near decade of doldrums. Culver City became Deal City almost overnight.’ Begelman told Spielberg that, notwithstanding any existing relationships with Columbia, Paramount or Universal, he would be welcome at Metro as an independent producer. They signed a deal – with one non-negotiable requirement. Spielberg demanded – and got – the office once occupied by Louis B. Mayer’s ‘genius boy’ producer Irving Thalberg.
Ever since her discussions with Spielberg in Tunisia the year before, Melissa Mathison had been at work on the new script of the lost-alien-on-earth story, bringing her drafts to the Marina del Rey apartment where he was editing Raiders. She and Spielberg spent hours discussing revisions next to an open tape recorder. Three rewrites transformed ‘A Boy’s Life’ into E.T. and Me, and then E.T: The Extraterrestrial.
The plot of E.T. is so transparently simple, even naive, that one can hardly credit the years of thought that went into it. In fact, it’s the distillation of Spielberg’s decade of loneliness in adolescence. Ten-year-old Elliott, living with his divorced mother, older brother and younger sister in an upstate Californian town, reflects the teenage Spielberg in Scottsdale. When an alien botanist, part of a long-lived space-faring race — he’s supposedly nine hundred years old – is left behind by a spaceship fleeing nosy locals, Elliott lures him to the house with candy and hides him among his stuffed toys, turning him into a companion who won’t patronise him as do his brother’s friends.
Elliott becomes the beneficiary and victim of Puck’s most distinctive characteristic, an ability to empathise. The alien’s chest literally lights up at moments of high emotion, revealing his pulsing heart, and he can transfer power through the touch of one glowing finger. Soon they are sharing feelings. When Puck samples beer for the first time, both feel drunk, even though Puck is at home and Elliott is studying biology at school. Asked to kill and dissect a frog with the rest of his biology class – as Spielberg had himself been – Elliott is reminded so much of his new friend by the trapped creatures that he releases them, and, reeling with compassion, plants a kiss on the lips of his favourite little girl in the class. In an excruciating evocation of adolescent sexuality’s mingled lust and embarrassment, Spielberg cuts to the girl’s feet in strapped shoes twisting, perhaps in delight but more likely in revulsion, among the squirming frogs.
But Puck’s empathetic ability is also his weakness; separated from his own kind, he languishes and almost dies. Inspired by a comic strip, he persuades Elliott and his brother to help him build a transmitter so he can ‘call home’. They cobble one together from junk but, in the process, alert the leader of those hunting him. Captured by this man, known only as Keys’ because of the bunch that jangles at his belt, Puck appears to die, but is resurrected, apparently by Elliott’s love. In a sustained final sequence containing some of Spielberg’s most memorable images, the kids carry Puck to his forest rendezvous with the returning spaceship, eluding Keys by sailing over his head on their bikes, borne by Puck’s telekinetic power.
Almost as soon as he finished Raiders, Spielberg explained to Columbia’s Frank Price that he’d changed his mind about ‘Night Skies’. He described E.T., expecting him to accept it in exchange. Not surprisingly, however, Price turned it down. In the conventional wisdom, children’s films – and this was surety one – were notoriously risky. Other studios were no more enthusiastic about this suburban fantasy, but in January 1981 Universal accepted it, mostly to preserve their relationship with Spielberg, which they valued at more than the $10 million the film would cost. Price’s refusal so angered Spielberg that he decreed the executive should ‘cease to exist’. Given the motility of studio heads, there was always the chance Price might transfer into a position of influence over some future project, so Spielberg specified in every contract that he would never have to work under him again. He was to be glad of this when, in the game of musical chairs that is Hollywood’s management structure, Price became president of Universal.
Spielberg offered ‘Night Skies’ to Begelman at MGM under the same terms as he’d proposed to Columbia. He would produce the film but not direct it, leaving that to a talented newcomer. To avoid compromising E.T., he changed the story radically, transforming the malign presences which besiege the family from aliens to ghosts. ‘Night Skies’ was dropped as a title; the film would eventually be called Poltergeist.
That Spielberg should create the blackest of all his films at the same time as his sunniest indicates his divided state of mind at this period. Stung by gibes that, while others in the Brats group, especially Scorsese, were making more profound films while he stuck with comedy and adventure, he insisted that he wasn’t out of touch with the spirit of left-handed endeavour the Star Wars films called ‘the dark side of The Force’. ‘I’m working on my dark side,’ he told journalist Dale Pollock defensively, ‘really I am. I’m working on it every day.’ Each day of facing his demons made him, however, feel older, wearier, more desperate. This period of his life, he said later, was so tormented that his pubic hairs turned grey.
Throughout Poltergeist’s tangled making and acrimonious aftermath, Spielberg insisted the film was his idea, based on experiences like the ghostly phone call to Leah from his dead grandmother and the terrified fantasies of his time in Cincinnati. Thelma Moss, the psychic researcher who inspired the character of the compassionate investigator Dr Lesh, played by Beatrice Straight in the film, loyally but improbably insisted that ‘as far back as 1976, his research folks were meeting with me.’ Tobe Hooper, the credited director of Poltergeist, has a different story, and one which rings truer to Spielberg’s habit of acquiring projects already launched by other directors.
After Spielberg pulled out of ‘Night Skies’, Hooper moved to Universal to direct The Funhouse. To his delight, he was assigned the old office of Robert Wise, who made The Haunting. In Wise’s desk was a book about the malicious spirits called poltergeists which manifest themselves in showers of stones or frogs, noises, flying objects and general mischief. Hooper took it for an omen. He insists that he proposed a psychic thriller about poltergeists to Spielberg and that they collaborated by mail on a treatment while Spielberg was in London on Raiders.
Apparently without Hooper’s knowledge, however, Spielberg also approached America’s most successful horror writer, Stephen King, to script the film. They had an amiable lunch, after which King departed for England, leaving his publisher to negotiate a deal on his behalf. Doubleday, King says, ‘asked this incredible amount of money to do the screenplay. This is for somebody who had never done a screenplay that had been produced.’ MGM – and Spielberg – refused to pay it. ‘I got a letter from Spielberg saying he was really unhappy that it turned out this way.’ On reflection. King wasn’t sorry – and the later history of Poltergeist probably made him even less so. ‘Spielberg is somebody who likes to have things his way,’ he told the sf and fantasy film journal Cinefantastique. ‘Really, as far as writing, it would have been the experience of working with him and watching him work – I could’ve used that. But in the end, I would’ve been hired help.’ Spielberg and King flirted with working together on a film for the next decade, but never found the right subject. Universal bought the novel The Talisman, co-written by King and Peter Straub, on the understanding that Spielberg would direct it, then cooled their heels waiting for him to commit. In 1994, King proposed a ghost story of his own and he, Spielberg and writer/director Mick Garris met at Spielberg’s East Hampton house for a week-long conference, but again they couldn’t agree, though in 1996 Garris would land the plum project of remaking King’s The Shining.
At MGM, which had put Poltergeist on the 1981 summer schedule at a modest $9.5 million, Spielberg, Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy dug in with their team, now expanded to include Marvin Levy, who, after working on publicity and advertising for Used Cars and 1941, had left Columbia to join Spielberg. Unsure as yet in the role of producer, Spielberg wasn’t ready to gamble with either his reputation or his bank balance, so a new company, Extra Terrrestrial Productions Inc., was formed to make the film. If it flopped, ETP Inc., its liability limited, could fold, writing off its deficit. Any time total independence looked momentarily attractive, he needed only to recall the mess into which Coppola had fallen in trying to go it alone.
Even in these early days of Spielberg’s emergence as a producer, however, the secrecy that was to mark Amblin Entertainment already operated. The press complained that both cast and crew had been sworn to silence, that office phones were unlisted, and that MGM staff had been instructed to deny that Spielberg was even making a movie there. Behind the scenes, however, deals were already being made in the company’s name. James Kahn’s novelisation of the Poltergeist script, published by Warner Books in May 1982, would be among the first of many products to bear a credit to Amblin’ Enterprises. (The apostrophe was dropped the next year.)
Spielberg’s office furnishings at MGM included three arcade-sized video games, a gift from Steve Ross of Warners, which also owned the video-game manufacturer Atari. Spielberg had met the silver-haired and cultured Warners CEO through his long-time friend Terry Semel, Warners’ production head, and had immediately fallen under the spell of this consummate manipulator.
Ross belonged in the movies. Born of a poor Jewish family in Brooklyn, he used his charm, cunning and mathematical skill to insinuate himself into the mortuary business of Eddie Rosenthal, whose daughter he married. Noting that the firm’s limousines were idle at night, he began hiring them out. This pushed the company into parking lots and car rental, areas controlled by organised crime. Ross, however, made his accommodation with the Mob, with whom he was to be on cordial terms until his death in 1992, and built on his power to move into show business, buying Warner Brothers in 1969. The smell of his early associations clung, however. ‘Steve is Mafia,’ snapped a former president of Time Inc. after Ross merged the prestigious publishing firm with Warners in 1988 to create the world’s largest entertainment conglomerate.
Ross was an anthology of opposites. Always a high-stakes gambler, and fascinated by the secret of ‘counting cards’ at blackjack, he affected at the same time an aristo’s ease with culture, buying expensive art deco antiques in Paris and making friends of local artists, including Willem de Kooning and his wife Elaine, who lived near his house on Long Island.
Yet he found show business and its people fascinating, filling his parties with celebrities and competing with the eagerness of a fan for the most reclusive of them. Most of them reciprocated, in particular Spielberg. ‘Steven was a young man, in his early thirties,’ Terry Semel reminisced, ‘with no business sophistication. He found Steve, who was so much older, so fascinating. Steve Ross was into things we knew only a little about – art, planes, homes.’ Their relationship was cemented when Ross revealed that It’s a Wonderful Life was his favourite film.
Ross resolved to lure Spielberg from Universal/MCA. He was helped by Spielberg’s hostility towards both Ned Tanen and the man who succeeded him as president, Frank Price. Late in 1981, when Semel became president of the movie production division of Ross’s corporation, he offered his friend almost carte blanche to make a Warners film. He and Semel reviewed the roster of projects. They never got past a feature version of The Twilight Zone, the rights to which Ted Ashley, former head of the studio and once Rod Serling’s agent, had bought from the writer’s widow Carol. Spielberg was instantly enthusiastic. He saw it, however, not as a single story but as a film of episodes – and, what’s more, remakes of episodes from the original series. Semel agreed. Who argued with the director of Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark? To the well-concealed chagrin of Sid Sheinberg, Spielberg signed a contract to divide his future productions between Warners and Universal. In the corridors of the black tower, serious thought was given to finding an incentive that would keep the company’s hottest director from slipping through their fingers completely.
After marathon auditions for E.T., Spielberg ditched his original choice for Elliott when editor Ed Warschilka Jr sent him a reel of a film he was cutting, Raggedy Man, about a boy growing up with an absent father. A ten-year-old San Antonio boy named Henry Thomas played Sissy Spacek’s son, and Spielberg decided his tentative spunkiness exactly fitted his vision of Elliott. As the boy’s young mother, he’d wanted Shelley Long, later the mainstay of the TV series Cheers, but Long, with conspicuously poor judgement, preferred to do Caveman with Ringo Starr. Dee Wallace, the heroine of the Joe Dante/John Sayles werewolf drama The Howling, replaced her. Peter Coyote would be the enigmatic Keys, and Drew Barrymore, daughter of John Drew Barrymore, the youngest member of the theatrical dynasty haunted by alcohol and drugs, Elliott’s little sister Gertie.
The six-year-old Barrymore auditioned by telling Spielberg about the punk band in which she played. She gave him the name of the band, its drummer, its bass player. Afterwards, Spielberg asked her mother, Ildiko Jaid, herself an actress, ‘Has she toured with this punk group?’ ‘She has no punk group,’ Jaid explained wearily, already sensing the self-destructive temperament that, within a decade, would turn Drew from moppet to drug-addicted raver.
While he cast E.T., Spielberg was also at work, though less publicly, on Poltergeist. On paper, the Hooper/Spielberg treatment for Poltergeist seemed bland. Out of the blue, the white-bread suburban family of ace real-estate salesman Steve Freeling is assaulted by ghosts. At first playful, then malicious, they invade the house which, it emerges, a penny-pinching developer (and Steve’s employer) has built on an old graveyard, without first removing the corpses. Finally the most militant of the unquiet spirits abducts five-year-old Carol Anne via a TV screen and holds her in some fifth-dimensional maze, the gateway to which is her bedroom closet. When psychic investigators fail to retrieve her, the family calls in Tangina, a plump, diminutive, self-important but effective medium who recovers the little girl by sending her mother into the maze to retrieve her.
Though set in Southern California’s imaginary Cuesta Verde, not far from Richard Nixon’s home town of San Clemente, the story, with its tract houses puddled in a green valley, its run-of-the-mill parents, including a tousled wife in shorts who smokes a clandestine joint upstairs while her husband snores in front of the hissing TV, a copy of Ronald Reagan’s memoirs in his hand, their jumpy son, half-grown, frightened of everything from the clown doll lurking under his bed to the tree outside the window, has Cincinnati and Spielberg’s childhood all over it. The film rounds up his fascination with TV, as well as all his fears of the toys in his own bedroom, and the terrors he visited on the hapless Anne, Sue and Nancy when he locked them in closets.
With Stephen King out of the picture, Spielberg assigned the screenplay to Michael Grais and Mark Victor, two young screenwriters who attracted his attention with an unproduced script, ‘Turn Left or Die’, about air-traffic controllers. He should, as with E.T., have hashed over the story with them in front of a tape recorder until everyone shared the same vision. But that would have put his signature all over it, something which, in his new role as producer, he was anxious to avoid.
Inevitably, however, the Grais/Victor script didn’t satisfy him, and, in a frenzy of what he (though probably not James Joyce) thought of as ‘stream of consciousness’, he rewrote it, scribbling a hundred pages over five white nights. ‘I couldn’t write alone,’ he said, so Kennedy and Marshall moved into his house with him. Each morning, he read them his night’s work, and they threw in their ideas or urged him on. Then he showed what he’d written to Hooper, ‘who hung round with me while I was writing that draft’. This comment set the tone for Hooper’s role. In this, as in most choices about cast and crew, Hooper was firmly sidelined. He nominated special-effects technician Craig Reardon to build the monster which emerges from the closet to repel the investigators, but Spielberg rethought the concept and, rejecting Hooper’s approved model, chose instead an early sketch which Reardon felt was less effective. Industrial Light and Magic built the gaping creature, christened The Esophagus’.
Spielberg chose the cast and crew, and, in a further display of territoriality, also wrote the shooting script and started Ed Verreaux on the storyboards. Though he’s the credited director, and ‘A Tobe Hooper Film’ receives a full panel, it became increasingly hard for anyone, even Hooper himself, to believe he controlled Poltergeist.
When the storm broke over the film, many wondered why Spielberg hadn’t simply fired Hooper and taken over the direction himself. But there were persuasive legal arguments against this. The Directors’ Guild barred any producer, except under the most extreme circumstances, from taking director credit on a film prepared by someone else; too many unscrupulous money men were ready to step in and claim a film as their own. Nor could a director shoot two films at the same time; some directors would over-commit themselves simply for the money. Had he worked on Poltergeist and E.T. concurrently, Spielberg would have transgressed both rules.
In his insistence that the original treatment was all his own work, Spielberg may have been influenced by the growing flood of claims, all disproved, from religious visionaries and unsuccessful screenwriters that Raiders plagiarised ideas submitted to ICM or Paramount years before. His well-publicised assistance to young directors and writers attracted hundreds of projects a week, though an increasingly defensive Spielberg would soon follow larger companies in refusing all unsolicited material. After that, wannabees took to lurking by the gates of his home and flinging scripts into his car. Even so, Poltergeist, on the hallowed principle of ‘Where there’s a hit, there’s a writ’, attracted a $37 million suit from actor Paul Clemens and writer Bennett Michael Yelin claiming Spielberg cribbed it from their 1980 screenplay. Director/writer Frank DeFelitta also detected resemblances to The Entity, then in production (and starring Spielberg’s sometime companion Barbara Hershey).
To confer a distinct identity on Poltergeist, Spielberg chose new collaborators. None of the cast, including Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams as the parents, Oliver Robins as their son Robbie and Heather O’Rourke as Carol Anne, had worked with him before, though Dominique Dunne, who played the eldest girl Dana, was the daughter of John Gregory Dunne’s brother Dominick. Michael Kahn would as usual cut the film, but cameraman Matthew Leonetti, who’d worked on productions as disparate as Breaking Away, Raise the Titanic and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, was new, as was production designer James H. Spencer from Sylvester Stallone’s hit boxing drama Rocky, whose work was integral to recreating Spielberg’s idealised suburbia. Spencer was to enjoy a long association with Spielberg productions via Twilight Zone: The Movie and Gremlins. Instead of John Williams, Spielberg asked Jerry Goldsmith to write the music. The two men had become friends. At a dinner in December 1981 where the Composers’ and Lyricists’ Guild presented Spielberg with an award for advancing film music, he said that had he not directed films, he would have studied music and composed for them.
It will probably never be known with absolute certainty who really directed Poltergeist. It has joined a small group of films, including the 1942 Journey into Fear and the 1951 The Thing, which, though signed by one director, bear the indelible stylistic trademarks of another. Orson Welles had intended to direct Journey into Fear, and even took a small role in it, but bequeathed the project to Norman Foster while he went to Brazil to make It’s All True. Yet, in defiance of all evidence to the contrary, the film looks and sounds like Welles’s work. The Thing is also palpably a film by Howard Hawks, with all his trademark male bonding and overlapping dialogue. Nevertheless, Hawks insists that it was directed by his editor Christian Nyby, who desperately wanted a screen credit, and it’s Nyby’s name that appears on the screen.
Of the shooting of Poltergeist, Craig Reardon was quoted in Cinefantastique as saying, ‘Tobe Hooper was always there, but the film was essentially guided by Steven’s strong hand. As he said in an interview, Steven wants to do everybody’s job as well as they do, but concedes that he needs help.’ Many of the actors, however, insisted that Hooper was in charge. In writing the music, Goldsmith recalled, ‘I worked only with Steven. One day Hooper came into a screening and sat down. Steve just ignored him, and after five minutes he got up and left.’ His estimate of the shooting: ‘Hooper said “Action” and that’s the last thing he did.’ But, in fairness to Hooper, Goldsmith was never on the set. Frank Marshall articulated the official Amblin version. ‘The creative force on the movie was Steven. Tobe was the director and was on the set every day. But Steven did the design for every storyboard and was on the set every day except for three days when he was in Hawaii with [George] Lucas.’
To assume that Poltergeist, with its many stylistic similarities to Spielberg’s other work and references to themes that had preoccupied him and would continue to do so, was entirely someone else’s work would be to credit Hooper with an inspired act of pastiche, and one he never repeated in his subsequent erratic career. The most credible theory holds that Hooper directed the performances, Spielberg the action, and that they collaborated, often to the frustration of Hooper, on complex sequences which combined acting and special effects.
The tendency has been to divide the film into ‘Hooper scenes’ and ‘Spielberg scenes’ on the basis of their degree of violence. The sunny domestic moments must be Spielberg’s, of course, while Hooper is plainly responsible for the steak that, slug-like, inches moistly along the kitchen counter, or the psychic investigator’s hallucination when, as he washes his face, the flesh sloughs away like clay into the basin. However, the evidence doesn’t support this. Spielberg conceived the film’s most terrifying sequences, the attack of the animated tree and the emergence of the monster from the bedroom closet, both of which spring directly from well-documented childhood memories. He also bears some responsibility for what look like typical ‘Hooper’ images. As Craig Reardon was preparing the gelatine face to be shredded, Spielberg said, ‘Hey, I want to do that!’ and it’s his hands, not Reardon’s, that rip the flesh down to the skull. Saint Steven has his devils too.
Poltergeist, Spielberg had promised, would be his ‘revenge on TV’. The omnipresent tube is the first thing one sees in the film. When Carol Ann toddles down the cranked metal staircase that will become a route for the ghosts and stares into the fizzing grain of the screen, her calm conversation with ‘the TV people’ and her triumphant ‘They’re here!’ resonate with the feelings of every child who ever imagined another world at a tangent to his or her own.
The rest of the film is a canter through his enthusiasms. Bits of Something Wicked this Way Comes join leftovers from ‘Something Evil’, ‘After School’ and ‘Growing Up’. The film also owes something to a 1962 Twilight Zone based on Richard Matheson’s short story ‘Little Girl Lost’, where a child rolls under her bed and into another dimension. There are hints of The Wizard Of Oz, and Vincente Minnelli’s Halloween sequence in Meet Me in St Louis where tiny Margaret O’Brien fights her dread to throw flour in the face of the neighbourhood ogre, a scene Spielberg paid tribute to in E.T., just as he would allow Joe Dante a few years later to make a revisionist gloss on It’s a Wonderful Life with Gremlins. He may also have already read Chris Columbus’s script for this film. A violent comic fantasy about furry pets metamorphosing into gibbering imps which overrun a Capra-esque country town, it has many affinities with Poltergeist.
The storm over Poltergeist was not long in breaking. First, in May, the MPAA’s Classification and Ratings Board gave it an ‘R’ certificate, barring children. Spielberg had already removed some of the script’s worst moments, including a spider attack on the psychic investigators. (He also cut a final image where, after Steve Freeling shoves the TV out of the motel room where the family has taken shelter, the set rolls off down the balcony of its own volition. Even without this hint that Tangina’s exorcism hasn’t been entirely successful, and the ghost remains lurking in the machine, MGM still produced two sequels.) He strenuously defended the rest, however, flying to New York with MGM chairman Frank Rosenfelt to demand a Parental Guidance certificate for the film rather than the Restricted that would have barred it to everyone under eighteen. In the face of such heavy pressure, the Board acquiesced. ‘I don’t make “R” movies,’ Spielberg muttered afterwards.
It soon became clear, however, that he must accept that his films had become darker, more violent and less suitable for sub-teen audiences. After shooting finished on Jedi, Lucas took a Hawaiian break, and Spielberg took a few days off from shooting Poltergeist to join him and build their ritual sandcastle. Lucas showed him the final script of Temple of Doom. The last third, which would take place in the sect’s subterranean temple and in the mine, was obviously going to be controversial. After setting up his idealised family of Indy, Willie and Short Round, the film shows it all but destroyed when Indy, fed a narcotic by the priests of Kali, turns into a monster who assists in the near-sacrifice of Willie. When she’s suspended over a pit of molten flame, it’s Short Round, the surrogate Steven, who drags his ‘father’ back to sanity.
By pushing film closer to the violence of comic strips, Lucas had put himself and Spielberg on a collision course with the censors. The fact made Spielberg nervous. He valued his squeaky-clean image, and while acknowledging that the Kali sacrifice scenes reflected his own vision of the family, he agreed that he wouldn’t want any ten-year-old to see them. Lucas argued that their audience had become more hip since Raiders, accustomed to horror, eager for sensation, and Spielberg was persuaded. For added evidence, there was the enthusiastic early reaction to Poltergeist, which Begelman believed, rightly, would be one of the big hits of the 1982 summer season. (In fact, it was the only profitable film made at MGM during his tenure.)
Spielberg agreed with Lucas to start shooting Temple of Doom in April 1983, and Robert Watts, elevated to producer, with Kathleen Kennedy as associate, was sent on an Asian tour looking for locations.
Spielberg returned to the set of Poltergeist, and a mounting furore over its authorship. By now, rumours of battles on the film had become public. Hooper himself avoided interviews, then issued conciliatory statements that Spielberg’s interventions delighted him. The truce ended when Hooper saw the final prints. The credits allocated Spielberg joint producer credit with Frank Marshall, sole authorship of the original story and equal screenwriting credit with Grais and Victor. MGM issued trailers in which Spielberg’s name as producer appeared in type double the size of Hooper’s. It also widely released promotional footage showing Spielberg directing scenes, and publicity photographs of Spielberg outlining his vision with authoritative gestures to an apparently dutiful Hooper.
Confronted with Hooper’s complaints, Spielberg was unrepentant. ‘Tobe isn’t what you’d call a take-charge sort of guy,’ he said. ‘He’s just not a strong presence on a movie set. If a question was asked and an answer wasn’t immediately forthcoming, I’d jump up and say what we could do. Tobe would nod agreement, and that became the process of collaboration.’ Hooper responded angrily that he’d done ‘fully half’ of the storyboards, and exercised effective control on the set. The Directors’ Guild intervened on his behalf, demanding $200,000 in damages and withdrawal of the offending trailers. This was bargained down to a $15,000 fine and pulling the trailers in the LA and New York areas only. The DGA also mentioned ‘broader issues of dispute… between the producer/writer and the director’, without being more specific. In June 1982, as part of the settlement, Spielberg published a full-page open letter to Hooper in Variety praising his ‘openness in allowing me, as producer and writer, a wide berth for creative involvement, just as I know you were happy with the freedom you had to direct Poltergeist so wonderfully’. The device fooled nobody, but Hooper, powerless in the face of Spielberg’s influence, was forced to eat crow. His career never recovered.
While Poltergeist was still being mixed and the music recorded during October 1981, Spielberg was at work on E.T., scheduled for June 1982 release. It was a visibly more personal film. John Williams was back in charge of the music, and Allen Daviau had been astonished to receive a call from Spielberg for the first time since Close Encounters. Spielberg praised his camerawork on William Graham’s comedy western Harry Tracy, Desperado. He sensed in the film the playful mysticism he wanted for E.T., and asked Daviau to shoot it, making good at last on his promise before he shot Amblin.
Not that Daviau was given much rope. Spielberg encouraged him to study Derek Van Lint’s work on Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and films like Apocalypse Now and Last Tango in Paris, lit by Vittorio Storaro, whom Spielberg rated the most gifted lighting cameraman in the world, despite his cranky theories. Storaro had been Spielberg’s first choice to shoot E.T., but the Italian, bitter about his experience on One from the Heart, for which American union regulations forbade him taking full screen credit, was returning to Italy to work with Bernardo Bertolucci again. Daviau and Spielberg also studied Edouard Manet, and the gaudy illustrations of Maxfield Parrish. Not noted for a strong personal style, Daviau dutifully absorbed all these influences, or tried to, confident that, in the end, Spielberg would operate the camera and set the tone.
Most of the film was made on interiors in the old David Selznick Studios, but Spielberg also took the unit to a Culver City high school, to the satellite towns of Northridge and Tujunga, and for six days further north, to Crescent City, for the forest scenes. Worried as ever that his story would be leaked and its impact diluted, Spielberg insisted, ‘E.T. does not stand for Extraterrestrial.’ Already at work on the marketing, he chose the alien’s long, wrinkled finger as the film’s most potent emblem, and commissioned Intralink Film Graphics to design the film poster. They were required to do so, however, without seeing any film. ‘Steven would look at what we were doing,’ said Intralink president Anthony Goldschmidt, ‘and say, “No, the fingers would be longer, and the skin would be a different colour.”’
Directing a cast of children brought Spielberg close to being a father, and left him eager for the first time to have a family of his own. However, he was guarded in speaking about his relationship with Henry Thomas and Drew Barrymore. He’d been stung over accusations after Close Encounters that he had taken insufficient interest in the progress of little Cary Guffey after the film. He later admitted, ‘E.T. made me yearn to be a father. I was a surrogate parent for ten weeks, and it was a great experience, like being with my old Scout troop.’ As Joe Dante, also unmarried and childless, said of his own work on the 1985 space adventure Explorers with an all-teen cast, ‘You see the kids more often than anyone else does, even their families. And they confide in you. It was really fascinating to see that all the pressures and fears that I had as a kid haven’t changed at all.’
Melissa Mathison had begun by visualising Puck as a creature so gentle that he’s closer to plants than to man. Early in her version, he takes counsel from tomatoes and artichokes in Elliott’s garden about whether or not to make contact with the humans and, when he does so, it’s by rolling back to Elliott’s feet not a baseball, as in the final version, but an orange. Spielberg wanted nothing so mimsy. As signposts, he had Mathison screen some movies that, to him, embodied the vision of childhood he wanted for E.T. They included Bambi, Charles Laughton’s film of Davis Grubb’s novel The Night of the Hunter, the psychopathic preacher of which mercilessly pursues two children after murdering their mother, The Blue Bird, Walter Lang’s version of Maurice Maeterlinck’s play, with Shirley Temple as the daughter of a poor woodcutter searching without hope for happiness in a dreamlike blue gloom, and Jack Clayton’s 1967 Our Mother’s House, from Julian Gloag’s novel about children who hide the death of their mother and set up their own loveless menage.
Aware that children are most impressed by what happens to children on screen, Spielberg concentrated on them to the virtual exclusion of adults, who are shot almost entirely from a child’s eye view. If he’d chosen to take François Truffaut’s advice about putting his own experience into his films, he could hardly have done so more effectively than with E.T. He was working with children, and dealing with subjects close to his heart: parenthood and family responsibility. He roughed out Puck’s features for Carlo Rambaldi by creating a collage which, to him, conveyed both the wisdom of age and the innocence of childhood. Learning a lesson from Walt Disney’s animators, who’d discovered that the most loveable faces were those closest to a baby’s, with wide eyes and a high forehead, he pasted onto the photograph of a baby’s unjudgemental face the eyes of poet Carl Sandburg clipped from another photo, and the forehead and nose of Ernest Hemingway and Albert Einstein. The result was a one-size-fits-all father figure without the censoriousness that comes with age. For Puck’s snuffling sounds, Spielberg used the calls of otters and other wild animals, though any intelligible words were recorded by actors, including, anonymously, Debra Winger, still one of Spielberg’s closest friends, who croaked his plaintive ‘E.T. call home.’ Spielberg also shot a five-minute cameo of Harrison Ford as the headmaster of Elliott’s school, but dropped it in editing.
E.T. shares with all Spielberg’s films from Something Evil onwards the theme of parental mortality, and an Oedipal disquiet at the absent father and sexually desirable mother. Elliott’s father is almost more present than the mother who remained at home. Young and pretty, she’s been robbed of maternity by her divorce. It’s the father to whom the children relate. They know, as she doesn’t, that he’s in Mexico with his new girlfriend, whom they familiarly refer to as ‘Sally’, and when they try to help Puck by building him a transmitter, both agree, ‘Dad would know what to do.’ Forced to compete for their affection, the mother has elected to be their pal. As a result they ignore her authority, sending out for pizza without permission, and cursing – Elliott’s insult ‘Penis breath!’ always drew a delighted gasp from teen audiences – while one of her eldest son’s friends playfully gooses her as she wanders around the kitchen in her robe while they play poker.
No serious science fiction writer would have given house-room to the tale Spielberg told in E.T. Even by the standards of the animal films like Lassie Come Home which it resembles, the story is sentimental and trite. Yet Josef von Sternberg was right to say that ‘the best source for a film is an anecdote’, and with E.T. Spielberg showed that he shared with John Ford the ability to invest sentiment and cheap humour with the dignity of a universal pronouncement. Suffused with Gothic melancholy and a poignant Freudian sense of loss, E.T. would send audiences weeping from the cinema. Even as hard a case as the novelist Martin Amis was moved. He wrote:
Towards the end of E.T., barely able to support my own grief and bewilderment, I turned and looked down the aisle at my fellow sufferers; executive, black dude, Japanese businessman, punk, hippie, mother, teenager, child. Each face was a mask of tears… And we weren’t crying for the little extraterrestrial, nor for little Elliott, nor for little Gertie. We were crying for our lost selves. This is the primal genius of Spielberg.
At his Cannes press conference, Spielberg traded on the almost reverent atmosphere of the moment to reassure journalists that the film wouldn’t be mass-marketed. He almost sounded like a solicitous father when he told them, ‘It will go into six or seven hundred [cinemas] and then will roll out into more theatres as the summer progresses. It will be handled very carefully.’ (In fact this was almost the same release pattern as Jaws and Raiders.) He sounded less like the maker of E.T. than its custodian. ‘I made E.T. for us,’ he went on – meaning, most listeners believed, themselves, i.e. all right-thinking people. ‘I never thought of how it would be accepted, or how it would be in the theatres. I am the last person to predict any outcome for any movie that I’ve ever made.’
Others were not so diffident in their forecasts. Time described one ‘professional cynic’ emerging moist-eyed from an early screening to predict ‘$350 million’. He wasn’t far wrong. By the time it opened on 11 June 1982, following 450 special previews across America in the two preceding weeks, half the world wanted to see E.T. Puck, rueful, big-eyed, hammer-headed, wrinkled as an old boot, became an improbable icon. In a phenomenon other film-makers had experienced, notably Federico Fellini with his 1954 La Strada, where Giulietta Masina’s self-sacrificing and affectionate waif Gelsomina became the object of a national cult in Italy, the creature assumed near-mystical significance to millions. A book of Letters to E.T. would be published. The film had something for everyone. Environmentalists, to the anger of loggers in the area where Spielberg shot the film, took it as a plea for the preservation of the redwoods. Reading it as a parable of redemption and even resurrection by the power of love, one American preacher detected thirty-three parallels between Puck’s story and that of Christ, including one that compared his magic finger to that of God enlivening Adam in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes.
Everyone wanted a seat on this bandwagon. Instead of the usual hack-for-hire, well-regarded novelist William Kotzwinkle agreed to write the tie-in novelisation and picture book. Neil Diamond recorded a ballad tribute to Puck, ‘Turn on Your Heart Light’. Michael Jackson narrated an album called The E.T. Storybook which included another E.T.-inspired song, ‘Someone in the Dark’, by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, Oscar-winning composers of ‘The Way We Were’. The singer, who had his own print of the film, which he claimed to have seen fifty times, weeping on each occasion, asked to meet Puck, so a photo session was arranged with one of Rambaldi’s dummies.
‘He grabbed me, he put his arms around me,’ Jackson said ecstatically. ‘He was so real that I was talking to him. I kissed him before I left. The next day, I missed him.’
The little visitor also waddled onstage at the Hollywood Bowl in June 1982 to shake hands with John Williams after a concert that included the E.T. theme; Spielberg said it was like watching your own kid at his first recital. This appearance of a non-robot E.T. confirmed rumours of human operators. Small people Pat Bilon and Tamara de Treaux, and legless Matthew de Merritt, did some of the scenes in Puck costumes.
The sentiment surrounding E.T. blinded nobody, least of all Spielberg, to its power as a money-maker. Kathleen Kennedy received 6 per cent of the film’s net profits, a tribute to her management of what British TV commentator Marshall Lee summed up as a film designed ‘to pluck your heartstrings and pick your pocket at the same time’. Amblin was criticised in some quarters for exploiting their loveable little earner. Early forecasts predicted at least $1 billion from the film, and Amblin licensed thirty-three E.T. products, though Spielberg complained that 150 were marketed, mostly by pirates. He even attributes the film’s lack of success in the Oscars to this flood of tie-ins. People thought Amblin was over-exploiting what seemed to many a devotional film.
Companies which didn’t grasp the merchandising value of E.T. would regret it – as would some who overestimated that appeal. Because of secrecy about his appearance, dolls of Puck took months to get into the stores, by which time the fad had peaked. Originally Elliott was to have lured Puck to the house with denture-testing caramels called Milk Duds, but candy-coated chocolate M&Ms were substituted after Milk Duds’s manufacturer decreed that Puck’s appearance was ‘unappetising’. When M&M/Mars refused to co-operate in a massive pre-release sales drive of M&Ms for the film, Kennedy switched again, to Hershey’s little-known but almost identical Reese’s Pieces, which became Puck’s preferred candy, and that of E.T.’s audiences. It was Charlton Heston, president of the Screen Actors’ Guild, who foresaw where E.T.’s long-term profits lay when he commented, ‘Video cassettes may turn out to be the biggest prize package opened in Hollywood since sound came in.’ The worldwide sale of thirteen million copies of E.T. on video when Universal released it in October 1988 would be one of the studio’s – and Spielberg’s – greatest sources of profit. In 1989, Business Week estimated that Spielberg’s personal take from E.T. video cassettes alone exceeded $40 million.
After E.T. Steve Ross coveted Spielberg even more. As Terry Semel continued to negotiate on Twilight Zone, Universal, sensing Warners moving in on their turf, wooed the director too, shrewdly offering his girlfriend a job on their Backstreet record label.
‘They’ve hired Kathleen Carey,’ said Ross, slamming down the phone when he heard the news. ‘I don’t believe it. Now, what can we do?’
His answer was to seduce Spielberg with glamour. In the summer of 1982, Ross and his new wife Courtney entertained Spielberg, Semel and their companions over a four-day weekend at their Villa Eden near Acapulco. Spielberg was stupefied by the house, Ross’s collection of modern art, but above all by his movie-star style. ‘Steve to me was a blast from the past. He had silver-screen charisma, much like an older Cary Grant, or a Walter Pidgeon. He had flash. He was a magnetic host – eventually that became his calling card. And at Acapulco, he was the weekend.’
Charles ‘Skip’ Paul, head of Atari’s coin-operated-games division and later MCA’s general counsel, had already offered Universal $1 million as an advance on 7 per cent royalties for an E.T. video game, and been turned down. He was dumbfounded when, following the Acapulco weekend, Ross told him he’d done a private deal with Spielberg that guaranteed Universal $23 million in royalties. Nobody believed such a contract could yield a profit for Atari, and as its engineers struggled to digitalise E.T., this became evident. ‘It wasn’t a game,’ complained Paul, ‘it was a thing waddling around on the screen.’ Stores returned a record 3.5 million of the four million modules shipped. Another Atari game based on Raiders did no better. But Paul would later date Spielberg’s gradual defection from Universal to Warners from Ross’s apparently profligate deal on E.T. ‘Steve’s viewpoint was, so what if I overpay by $22 million? How can you compare that to the value of a relationship with Spielberg? And I think he was dead right.’