You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance…
Rod Serling’s introduction to the original Twilight Zone series
ON 5 MARCH 1982, John Belushi died in Bungalow Three in the grounds of the Château Marmont hotel in Los Angeles, his constitution of what Dan Aykroyd called ‘Albanian Oak’ toppled by an injection of cocaine and heroin. Inevitably 1941 and its problems were raked up by the press. Spielberg made no public comment and, while John Landis and his wife went to the funeral, he was absent – probably at the urging of Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall who, since E.T., were conscious of his image and the need to distance him from anything likely to mar it.
Damage had already been done, however, by his disputes with Hooper on Poltergeist. Rumours also circulated of arguments with Dee Wallace over her credit on E.T. Wallace complained about the secrecy on the set, which ‘almost got to the point of ridiculousness’, and it was suggested that Spielberg blacklisted her. Wallace neither confirmed nor denied the story, remarking only, ‘It would be sad if someone of such creativity and power could be so small. It doesn’t make sense to me – but then, stranger things have happened in Hollywood.’
The Oscars on 29 March offered Spielberg the usual disappointments. Readers was nominated for Best Picture, Photography, Art Direction, Sound, Original Score, Editing and Visual Effects. Spielberg received a Best Director nomination too, but the film won only Art Direction, Sound and Editing, the key awards going to the British Chariots of Fire.
Belushi was to have presented the award for Best Special Effects. Aykroyd stepped in, having promised the show’s producer Howard W. Koch not to mention his friend, but Spielberg felt the knife was being twisted in his wound when, before giving the statuette to Raiders, Aykroyd commented, ‘My partner would have loved presenting this award with me. He was something of a special effect himself.’
Koch winced. He’d particularly wished to avoid reminders of Belushi’s death on worldwide TV. The previous year’s ceremony had been delayed for twenty-four hours when President Reagan was shot on Awards day by John Hinckley, a besotted fan of Jodie Foster. Since then, the public had increasingly perceived Hollywood as a community of the obsessed and the addictive. Cocaine had ended the careers of directors like Hal Ashby (Harold and Maude, Being There), and Julia Phillips had blown her Close Encounters profits on the drug. Rumours also spoke of its widespread use on the set of Poltergeist. Coke and booze made the careers of actors like Richard Dreyfuss increasingly erratic. He’d already abandoned the role of the promiscuous, drug-using choreographer in Bob Fosse’s autobiographical All that Jazz, where Roy Scheider replaced him. In October 1982 Dreyfuss would wrap his Mercedes around a tree and be committed to a detox centre.
Even more damage had been done to Hollywood’s image by the Begelman affair, as widely publicised in Indecent Exposure, a best-selling blow-by-blow account by David McClintick, the Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the story. Traditionally, the film industry investigated its own crimes, held its own trials, buried its own dead. The trade press knew better than to dig too deeply into a scandal, or to publicise any that did come to light. However, after the Begelman case, which one writer compared to a Hollywood Watergate in its seismic effects on the film business, the chances of hiding anything from the press or public were severely reduced.
Of all people in Hollywood, Spielberg seemed the least likely to become embroiled in scandal. He no longer even drank coffee, let alone smoked pot, carrying bags of Roastaroma herbal tea everywhere. The roots of his strictness were evident at The Milky Way, the milk bar which his mother, with his help, had opened at 326 1/2 Beverly Drive in early 1981. Kosher was so strictly kept that diners were forbidden to bring food of any kind, for fear of compromising dietary rules.
Spielberg’s private life was cosily domestic. In August he told People magazine, ‘I think Kathleen and I will have kids. We’ve just been so busy with our careers that we haven’t dealt with each other on a marital basis. But now we’re thinking about it.’ His sole indulgence was to pay $60,500 at Sotheby-Parke Bernet in June for one of the three surviving prop sleds from Citizen Kane, a trophy of Old Hollywood which he proudly hung in his office.
In March 1982, Zoetrope had declared bankruptcy. Sombrely, Coppola remarked, ‘I probably have genius, but no talent.’ He asked friends to bail him out with personal loans of more than $1 million. Their understandable refusal left him so strapped that his home phone was cut off for more than a year. Coppola’s friendship with Lucas and Spielberg was hardening into rivalry. In public, however, Spielberg defended Coppola’s entrepreneurial flair, though often in ambiguous terms. Grandiose even in defeat, Coppola proposed, after watching the British director Jack Clayton film his script of The Great Gatsby at Pinewood studios outside London, that a consortium of himself, Lucas, Spielberg, Scorsese, De Palma and Michael Powell, Zoetrope’s ‘director in residence’, should buy this flagship of J. Arthur Rank’s empire. Sited in a mansion just outside London in grounds that provided backgrounds for scores of movies, including many of the Bond films, Pinewood boasted the ‘007 Stage’, the world’s largest. Spielberg put his name on the bid, which escalated from $3 million to $20 million but lapsed when Rank wouldn’t contemplate anything less than $30 million.
To Hollywood, Zoetrope’s collapse and the success of E.T. were twin indications of the tilt away from the personal films and maverick directors Coppola favoured and towards the consensus film-making of Spielberg. In a hurried effort to make up for having turned down E.T., other studios rushed out their own versions. Big-eyed, loveable aliens, and even robots, proliferated as the perception of science fiction film slid towards the juvenile. British director Brian Gibson, who’d been working at Zoetrope, saw the shift from up close when Coppola’s bankruptcy threw his project ‘The Tourist’ back on the market. One moment, he was sharing space at Zoetrope with David Lynch and Jean-Luc Godard; the next he was on the street. Clair Noto’s sensual script involving shape-changing aliens who, exiled to earth as to some intergalactic Siberia, gravitate towards the porn cinemas and S&M clubs of San Francisco, found a new home at Universal, with H.R. Giger, Alien’s designer, doing the decor and Hanna Schygulla set to star. But the day after E.T. was released, two men with cardboard cartons knocked on Gibson’s office door. They were the incoming occupants. The Tourist’ was never made.
Asked about his plans, Spielberg confirmed that he’d be directing Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in Sri Lanka and at Elstree, but not until April 1983. Before then, he had plenty of potential proposals, both as director and producer. They included a ‘secret project’ called ‘Worlds After’, which was being developed first as a novel, ‘Reel to Reel’, a backstage Hollywood musical written by Gary David Goldberg, and Always, for which Jerry Belson, author of the ironic satire on beauty contests, Smile, was updating Dalton Trumbo’s A Guy Named Joe screenplay into a film which, Spielberg said optimistically at the time, would be ‘my Annie Hall’. For TV, he was developing the eccentric domestic comedy Twister (not to be confused with Michael Crichton’s novel of the same name about tornadoes, which he bought in 1994), and, for Warners, a story called ‘Starfire’, plus three adventures from the Blackhawk comic book series. Brian De Palma also expected him to produce his next film, ‘Carpool’, which would explore his voyeuristic fascination with the rear-vision mirrors of automobiles.
Twister did become a succès d’estime for director Michael Almereyda in 1989, but except for Temple of Doom, Spielberg made none of these films. The fact suggests Spielberg’s lack of direction at this time, and his need for the focus and system that would be offered by the formation of Amblin. His immediate project remained The Twilight Zone. Initially he approached it with anticipation. As he accumulated power, Spielberg was driven more and more to recycle and, in the process, retrospectively rehabilitate the films and series he’d enjoyed as a child. His parents had been wrong: all that time staring at the TV hadn’t been wasted. He’d inserted clips of the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote into Sugarland Express and of DeMille’s The Ten Commandments into Close Encounters, as well as tributes to Disney in both that film and 1941. And if his signature is on Poltergeist, it’s in the glimpse of A Guy Named Joe running on the TV. Collaborators were often nonplussed by this rooting in the past. ‘A few years after Empire of the Sun,’ recalls J.G. Ballard, author of the original novel, ‘he rang me out of the blue and asked if I’d be interested in adapting a film called House on Haunted Hill.’ Ballard had never seen William Castle’s cheesy 1958 horror flick, with a trademark Castle gimmick, in this case ‘Emergo’, a plastic skeleton that popped out above the screen on a wire and gibbered over the heads of the audience. He declined the offer, but not all writers could afford such luxury. Most learned the Spielberg recipe. Wesley Strick, commissioned by Amblin to rewrite one of Spielberg’s favourite thrillers, J. Lee Thompson’s 1962 Cape Fear, admitted he ‘consciously styled it a bit for Steven Spielberg’s sensibilities. There were a lot of “movie movie” moments, and some cute touches of Americana… It was a bit antiseptic.’ When Martin Scorsese inherited the project, he ruthlessly weeded out all such references, in particular those in which the family of Nick Nolte’s rural judge, about to be terrorised by a man he’s railroaded into jail, join in a sing-song round the piano.
Warners’ first impulse after it put The Twilight Zone into production had been to cash in on the success of Alien, Close Encounters and Star Trek: The Motion Picture by using a single story to carry the entire film. Staff producer Mark Rosenberg was assigned to find one strong enough to compete with these powerful fantasies but which, at the same time, remained true to Serling’s ironic and intellectual tone. The closest he came was Steve DeJarnatt’s Miracle Mile, in which a man in a diner on Wilshire Boulevard, in the middle of Beverly Hills’ art deco Miracle Mile business district, intercepts a panic telephone call revealing that a nuclear holocaust is imminent, and spends the film trying, unsuccessfully, to convince others. (It was filmed with moderate success in 1989, DeJarnatt directing.)
With Spielberg’s arrival, the idea of a single story was discarded. He preferred to recreate episodes from the TV series itself, updated and improved. Spielberg would direct one sequence himself, and co-produce the film as a whole. Terry Semel, delighted by his enthusiasm, even suggested it be called Steven Spielberg Presents The Twilight Zone, but Spielberg declined this honour.
John Landis was an obvious choice to collaborate, since both he and Spielberg loved the series and had spent evenings reminiscing about favourite programmes – occasions Landis would celebrate in the film’s prologue, where Dan Aykroyd and Albert Brooks do the same. Spielberg now felt he had more in common with the neurasthenic, bearded Landis than when he rejected him to write Jaws. In the furore over 1941, he’d nominated him as a film-maker on the same epic scale as himself and Coppola. ‘If we don’t take chances, who will?’ he argued when journalists accused him of splurging other people’s money. ‘If Francis doesn’t take his Machiavellian risks, and John Landis doesn’t exploit the success of Animal House with The Blues Brothers, and if I can’t try to make the noisiest movie of all time – without some degree of failure, you can’t move forward.’
An American Werewolf in London had restored Landis’s reputation, tarnished by The Blues Brothers. In its wake, CBS paid him $4.5 million to make a thirteen-minute video for the title track of Michael Jackson’s new album Thriller. Landis responded with a tribute to horror films, narrated by Vincent Price, that contributed substantially to the album’s worldwide success. (The clip for Jackson’s second hit. Bad, would be directed by Scorsese.)
Feeling himself on a roll, Landis was at pains to emphasise that he was his own man. Offered collaboration on Twilight Zone, he demanded total control of his own segments, which included the framing sequences linking each episode. Though technically working under executive producer Frank Marshall, he insisted on joint producer credit. His regular partner George Folsey Jr produced his contributions, which were shot by his preferred cameraman, Stevan Larner. Communications between the Landis and Spielberg offices were kept tenuous, a error that finally proved fatal.
Superficially, Joe Dante, whom Spielberg selected to make one of the episodes, was more tractable. The son of a New Jersey golf pro, he grew up in the same cultural isolation as Spielberg, losing himself in horror and science fiction films. In the seventies he and Allan Arkush had been the Corman studio’s entire promotional department. Corman gave Dante and Arkush a chance to direct Hollywood Boulevard and, in 1978, backed Dante in Piranha. His 1980 The Howling established his reputation and made a fortune, but like many other young directors, Dante found himself, in the midst of critical acclaim, down to his last $100 and forced to borrow from friends. He was so depressed that when a package arrived in the mail from Spielberg, he was convinced it had come to the wrong address. It contained the script of Gremlins, which he directed a year later.
The third director came from Australia. Film-struck Melbourne doctor George Miller had worked weekends in an emergency medical service, with his producer Byron Kennedy driving the ambulance, to finance his 1980 Mad Max, a low-budget fantasy of an anarchic future Australia where the roads are ruled by biker gangs and the only law is cops like Max Rockansky, a calm avenger in black leather, played by the young Mel Gibson. Warners financed Miller’s 1981 sequel Mad Max II: The Road Warrior, an even bigger hit.
Spielberg already admired the Mad Max films and, when he met Miller and Kennedy in 1981, liked their creators. Miller, bearded, soft-spoken and reclusive as George Lucas, left executive decisions to the brash, technocratic Kennedy, who had visited Hollywood in the seventies and returned a convert to the new American cinema, its mythomania and wealthy teenage audience. In particular Miller shared Lucas’s fascination with anthropologist Joseph Campbell, author of the classic study of narrative, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Both Mad Max films fed on Campbell’s theory that all heroes had their roots in the tribal shaman. The idea to offer Miller an episode of Twilight Zone came on the spur of the moment – ‘Hey, George Miller’s in town. Let’s get him to do one,’ as one observer put it – but it was to generate the film’s most effective segment.
Scripting Twilight Zone proved harder than directing it. Serling had written eighty-nine of the 150 TV shows. The rest were adapted from their own stories by writers like Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson or George Clayton Johnson. Beaumont was dead, and as Johnson was a wild-eyed, white-haired, famous eccentric on the science fiction scene, Spielberg turned to Matheson to update three episodes, widening their scope and beefing up those horror elements which the teenage audience enjoyed best. As a sweetener, his old collaborator on Duel received a share of the profits.
Matheson’s Nightmare at 20,000 Feet had been one of the series’ best episodes. Few viewers forgot recovering mental patient William Shatner being driven comprehensively crazy by a maniacal gremlin eviscerating the engine of the plane in which he was flying home. Dante was given It’s a Good Life, Jerome Bixby’s much-anthologised story of a boy super-mind who kidnaps travellers to populate his infantile paradise. Any who try to escape or protest at the unrelieved diet of hamburgers and candy, or the endless cartoons on TV, are wished away to a worse hell, turned inside out, or forced to stare eternally at a raving TV set, robbed of a mouth with which to scream.
For his own contribution, Spielberg chose The Monsters are Due on Maple Street, a Serling original in which formerly good neighbours are turned against one another by a series of inexplicable power failures. Rumours, fanned by the local teenage sf fan, that aliens have landed, lead to riots and anarchy. At the end, two extra-terrestrials watching from a nearby hill congratulate one another on the ease with which humans can be manipulated, and summon an invasion force. Spielberg may have meant the troubled story as an attack on those adults in his adolescence who mocked his obsessions. If so, he was to be disappointed; The Monsters are Due on Maple Street, which was to have ended the film, would never be made.
Early in June 1982, Landis delivered the untitled script of his episode, which he had adapted from an old short film screenplay of his called ‘Real Scary’, to both Amblin and Warners. The following Saturday, 12 June, Terry Semel called a hurried meeting at his home. Spielberg wasn’t available, E.T. having opened the day before, but both Semel and script supervisor Lucy Fisher articulated their strenuous objections. Landis, unsentimental at the best of times, had poured all his misanthropy into his story. His main character, Bill Connor, who loathes Jews, blacks and Asians, leaves a bar after a near-brawl with some blacks to find himself transported to Nazi Germany as a Jew, then to America’s deep South as a victim of the Ku Klux Klan, and finally into a Vietnam firefight as an Asian. The script ended with Connor hauled away in a Nazi cattle-car to the gas chambers, his cries unheeded.
Landis insisted, rightly, that he’d respected Serling’s format and style. Not only was the racial theme a Serling favourite: a number of episodes had shown villains given their comeuppance in alternative worlds. There were even parallels with an episode called A Quality of Mercy, in which an American soldier about to wipe out a Japanese platoon is forced to relent when he and its commander briefly swap personalities. Ironically, however, Landis’s astringent contribution now contrasted starkly with the affectionate pastiche of the rest. Semel and the others persuaded him to give Connor some ‘humanity’ by adding a scene to the Vietnam sequence in which he rescues two children from a helicopter attack. In return, Landis was promised a budget large enough to let him blow up an entire Vietnamese village, the kind of violent set-piece he relished.
Throughout June, persistent rumours had again linked Spielberg with the ailing Disney studios. Its film revenues were plunging, from $34.6 million in 1981 to $19.6 million in 1982, and heading for a $33.3 million loss in 1983. The animation department had never recovered from Don Bluth’s walkout with its best young artists in September 1979. Tron, Disney’s computerised animation/live action sf story, had been so bad that, after a preview, Ted James, analyst for Montgomery Securities, urged his clients to sell their Disney stock immediately.
Initially the studio had been interested mainly in using Spielberg’s and George Lucas’s films as the basis for new Disneyland and Disney World rides. When both directors said they’d had better offers from Universal, Disney upped the ante. On 28 June, the New York Daily News announced that Spielberg had been offered the job of head of production, and that he was inclined to accept, claiming he was tired of Universal executives reminding him about 1941. At Disney, said columnist Marilyn Beck, ‘he would have almost complete autonomy and the run of the lot’.
Disney sang to Spielberg like a siren. Pinocchio, Dumbo and Bambi had formed his character. They were integral to his mental landscape. In business terms, the studio was just as seductive. Even in decline, the Disney name carried enormous prestige, and its market of middle-class sub-teens was exactly the same as his own. Disney also owned half a dozen projects that interested Spielberg, among them Peter Pan, and had picked up Kirk Douglas’s project to film Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked this Way Comes.
The studio desperately needed someone like Spielberg. But both Card Walker, the president, and Ron Miller, the head of production, were leery of ceding Walt’s Magic Kingdom to an outsider. Nor was Walker convinced that Spielberg had the ‘Disney spirit’. He conceded the merit of E.T., but cavilled that, had it been a Disney film, profanities like ‘penis breath’ would never have been permitted.
Even while he negotiated with Spielberg, Miller cast around for someone else. One of his first choices was Michael Eisner, the innovative head of Paramount who had been the only executive with vision enough to take on Raiders. Eisner was interested. He was close to the end of his effective life at Paramount. His subordinates, especially Jeffrey Katzenberg, his head of production, and Dawn Steel, were showing their teeth and demanding more power. Both were beginning to make their own alliances, in particular with record producer David Geffen, who was systematically building his Hollywood power-base before launching into movies. But Eisner had no intention to going to Disney with his hands tied. He asked Miller if he could run the theme parks too. Miller shook his head: divide and rule had been the foundation of Disney management for decades, and to try and change it would split the company. When Eisner temporised, Miller broke off negotiations and hired Dennis Stanfill, head of Fox when Star Wars was made. Confident that the dour Stanfill, who proudly rated himself a businessman, not an artist, would be ineffective, Eisner and Spielberg watched Disney’s fortunes slide, and waited for their moment.
With directors in place for Twilight Zone, attention turned to the format. Most people found it hard to visualise the series without Serling’s black-suited presence. The vaults contained some Serling introductions that had never been aired, and for a while Spielberg toyed with using special effects and overdubbing to have Serling introduce the movie, a device he would employ by proxy when Tom Hanks shook hands with John F. Kennedy in Robert Zemeckis’s 1995 Forrest Gump. Burgess Meredith, a regular in the series, was finally hired to speak some Serling-like voice-overs. To jog the memories of those who didn’t know the series, a Landis prologue was added, with Dan Aykroyd and Albert Brooks whiling away a night drive across the desert recalling old TV shows. The shock ending has Aykroyd transformed into a fright-wigged monster. Aykroyd also returns at the end of Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, where he’s the ambulance driver taking a raving John Lithgow to hospital.
Sensing that his audience wouldn’t be interested in the ironies and subtleties of the Serling versions, Spielberg wound up the pace and temperature of the film. Matheson inflated It’s a Good Life to accommodate Dante’s Expressionist interior for the supermind’s house and some shrieking animated monsters that erupt from a TV set. He also wrote in roles for Kevin McCarthy, a regular in the series, and Billy Mumy, the boy in the original episode. Despite these gestures, Carol Serling didn’t care for the treatment of her husband’s work:
Rod’s stories were about people. They weren’t about space-ships and green-eyed monsters… The movie, on the other hand, placed an emphasis on special effects. How could it be otherwise with Spielberg? That was antithetical to Rod’s original intentions. Take the Joe Dante episode. [It] has these wonderful special effects. But I don’t know that they improve the story.
At Indian Hills, outside LA, Landis and George Folsey built a Vietnamese village on an artificial lake. Peopling it proved more difficult. Vic Morrow, waning star of the successful World War II war-drama TV series Combat, was eager to play Connor, but the children posed a problem. Californian Labor Commission rules demanded a welfare officer on the set at all times if children were used, and forbade working after 8 p.m. Even if the Commission approved, the Screen Extras’ Guild, through which all non-speaking artists had to be hired, would never agree to placing children in a simulated firefight. Folsey and Landis decided to go illegal. Six-year-old Renee Shinn Chen and seven-year-old Myca Dinh Le were hired for $500 each, payable in cash, and the shooting scheduled for late July.
Spielberg left day-to-day management of Twilight Zone to Frank Marshall. It was Marshall who signed the $2000 cheque for petty cash presented to him on 20 July by George Folsey. Warners’ production manager for the project, James Henderling, referred it to Ed Morey, head of production. Many suspected the money was to pay non-union child actors, but Bonne Radford, then Amblin’s accountant, later its head of animation, insisted no children were to be used in the scene. In the face of this denial, Henderling co-signed Marshall’s cheque.
Spielberg always insisted he knew nothing of these arrangements, and nobody could ever place him at Indian Hills on the night of 22/23 July when Landis shot his firefight. The one witness who claimed to have seen him there later agreed that he could have confused him with Marshall, who was present, along with Carol Serling, when the Bell UN-IB helicopter, flown by Dorcey Wingo and with stunt men Gary McLarty and Kenny Endoso firing machine guns from the open doors, descended on the village.
As they flew over the huts, special-effects technician James Camomile ran a nail along the line of electrical contacts that connected a 49.5 volt battery to explosives all over the village. Half a dozen reasons were offered to explain what followed. Some charges were accidentally triggered in reverse order. It was suspected that the huts had been excessively spiked with gasoline. Wingo’s inexperience as a movie pilot was mentioned. He lost control as he flew into a mushrooming ball of flame. As Vic Morrow and the two children floundered into the shallow lake, the helicopter crashed on top of them. One skid crushed Renee Chen to death, and as the craft sagged, its rotor decapitated Morrow and Myca Le.
Old Hollywood had long experience of dealing with such disasters. Little had changed since 1935, when the Warners special-effects department built models of a stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway and a car wheel that helped lawyer Jerry Geisler persuade a jury that director Busby Berkeley hadn’t been drunk when he crashed his car and killed three people, but was rather the victim of a rare technical fault – an argument eerily echoed at the Twilight Zone trial.
While George Folsey assembled a legal team in expectation of criminal charges, Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy hurriedly left Los Angeles for their holiday home in rural Idaho. Marshall returned two weeks later, and even played a cameo in Nightmare, as the ground engineer who discovers the damage done by the gremlin. After that, he disappeared for Europe, allegedly to scout locations for Temple of Doom. He didn’t return for months.
Before he left, he emphasised to Warners’ publicity vice president Robert Friedman that, if only for the sake of the studio’s investment in future productions, Spielberg’s name must be kept free of scandal. This stance, tailored to Spielberg’s preference for denial, became both Warner and Amblin policy. Phone queries were blocked. Magazines like Cinefantastique which published pictures of the fatal shoot were purged from Amblin’s press list. If journalists raised the subject of the deaths in an interview, Spielberg refused to respond. Agitatedly waving his hands as if erasing them and their questions, he left the room. It was three years before he spoke about the case, and then it was to deflect the blame. ‘No movie is worth dying for,’ he told the Los Angeles Times in April 1983. ‘I think people are standing up much more now than ever to producers and directors who ask too much. If something isn’t safe, it’s the right and responsibility of every actor and crew-member to yell, “Cut!”’ The statement seemed to imply that the victims were somehow responsible for their own deaths.
Spielberg’s first impulse had been to drop out of the film altogether, and he explored the possibility with Warners, but Semel insisted he abide by his contract. Without his name, the project was worthless. Though he remained, Spielberg took little active interest, except to scrap The Monsters are Due on Maple Street which, with its night-time violence, looked disagreeably like Landis’s story. He replaced it with a soft-centred George Clayton Johnson episode, Kick the Can, set in a retirement home. One inmate, fearful of senility, proposes a midnight game of kick the can, bullying everyone but his oldest friend into playing the childhood game. When the friend returns with the home’s supervisor, they find the whole group transformed into eight-year-olds. The friend begs to be included, but too late, as the new kids run off into the night.
Joe Dante had expected the entire film to be abandoned, and was surprised when Warners pushed him straight into It’s a Good Life. Most people credit him with pulling Twilight Zone together. ‘Without Joe, it would never have been finished,’ Jerry Goldsmith says. The rewrites to his episode, dictated by its shifting position in the film, are a microcosm of the confusion that surrounded The Twilight Zone. Jerome Bixby ended his original story with the superbrat’s tyranny continuing forever, but Matheson, having been told this episode would end the film, and wanting to offer some glimmer of a happy ending, closed his script on a slightly more optimistic note, with the house exploding and the boy’s latest catch (Kathleen Quinlan) walking away – only to be offered a lift by the demonic Aykroyd in the ambulance. After the Indian Hills disaster, the ending became almost sunny, with Quinlan persuading the boy to accompany her on a voyage of discovery and education. As they drive away, the wasteland blossoms.
Shooting started on Nightmare at 20,000 Feet on 5 November. The same day, a Teamster named Carl Pittman told the Indian Hills inquiry that he’d seen Spielberg on the set on the night of the helicopter accident in July. Nobody ever corroborated the story, which Pittman later withdrew, but the police politely asked Spielberg if he had any comment. In a brief letter, he denied he had been anywhere near the location. Then, as later, however, neither he nor Terry Semel ever gave depositions to defence lawyers, nor offered corroborating witnesses; their legal staff insisted they were too important to be bothered. Forced to focus on the small fry, prosecutor Lea d’Agostino pressed charges against Landis, Folsey, and unit production manager Dan Allingham, all of whom, along with Warner Brothers, had already been fined $5000 for breaching child labour laws. Special-effects supervisor Paul Stewart and helicopter pilot Dorcey Wingo were also indicted. The following year all were arraigned on charges of manslaughter. The politically ambitious d’Agostino told the press she wished it could have been murder.
George Miller finished his episode quickly and efficiently, but still Spielberg fidgeted. E.T. had been chosen for the Royal Command Performance and the whole team was going to London, an excursion that, in his present mood, appealed more than filming Kick the Can.
Hearing that Richard Matheson had been hired to adapt his story, a delighted George Clayton Johnson sent Kennedy and Marshall a new outline. Perhaps, he suggested, the children might not in fact run off, but opt to return to old age, though with new optimism and independence. He heard nothing more about it, but believes that, in the wake of the accident, Spielberg incorporated his ideas as a means of softening the film. Melissa Mathison, as ‘Josh Rogan’, rewrote Matheson’s script to make the leader of the home’s revolt a dapper Englishman named Agee with a Douglas Fairbanks complex. As Johnson suggested, the oldsters decide, after their midnight game, that they prefer decrepitude. Only Agee urges them to fly with him to a Never-Never Land of careless innocence and, when they refuse, goes alone.
Having seen veteran black performer Scatman Crothers in Kubrick’s The Shining while he was shooting Raiders at Elstree, Spielberg inserted him into Kick the Can as a chuckling magician named Bloom who moves from one old folks’ home to another, spreading the gospel of youth through play. The changes transformed a piece of Ray Bradbury-like whimsy into an evocation of another Spielberg preoccupation, Peter Pan. Despite this, Spielberg continued to take little interest in the film. He skipped pre-production meetings, delegating pre-production to Melissa Mathison and script supervisor Katherine Wooten. As the start date in late November approached, tension made him cantankerous. On the day after Thanksgiving, panic seized the office when it seemed he might be offered turkey for dinner two days running. A takeaway was demanded from his favourite Chinese restaurant, which, though it didn’t make deliveries, was persuaded to do so in deference to their client. Even then, one dish wasn’t to his liking, and the cry ran round the office, ‘Steven must have snow peas!’
Shooting began the following Friday. The whole episode was filmed in only six days under Spielberg’s perfunctory direction. More effort went into ensuring that the letter of the child labour laws was meticulously obeyed. Even the night scenes were shot ‘day for night’ on a sound stage to avoid keeping the children after 8 p.m. ‘His heart just wasn’t in it any more,’ said first assistant Patrick Kehoe. Secretary Kathy Switzer agreed. ‘He was just going through the motions.’
The result appalled everyone, especially Johnson. ‘I was charmed in a couple of places…’ he said, ‘but the rest of it, making Scatman Crothers into the Tin Can Fairy or whatever… I called Richard Matheson and said, “What about all this? It’s the damnedest script.” He said, “Well, it’s got nothing to do with what I wrote.”’ Celebrities like Clint Eastwood and Debra Winger crowded onto the set of Kick the Can on the last day in a show of solidarity engineered by Semel and Ross, but Spielberg thought only of putting the Atlantic between him and this nightmare.
In Paris, François Truffaut spent the day with him, taking him through the Cinémathèque Française’s museum in the Palais de Chaillôt, like a dusty attic of film treasures. Nobody in Europe seemed very interested in the Twilight Zone disaster, but to keep himself at arm’s length from the press, Spielberg moved to the St James’s Club, a private hotel tucked away up a narrow cul-de-sac south of Piccadilly, with a side entrance inaccessible to paparazzi. It became his base for the five months during which he cast and prepared Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The art deco penthouse suite, eventually renamed for him, became, in his own words, his ‘home-from-home’ for the next decade. He installed, at his own expense, a new stereo system and a large TV and video-game player in the guest bedroom. Later he would edit Temple of Doom in two other suites and audition for Empire of the Sun in another. The view over the roofs of the West End towards Big Ben also inspired early scenes in Hook.
The hotel staff soon learned of Spielberg’s dislike of lifts and his inflexible rule never to accept packages, for fear of both bombs and unsolicited screenplays. They didn’t reckon, however, on the persistence of screenwriters. A large aquarium was delivered to the club and, on the assumption that Spielberg had ordered it, installed in his suite. Only later was it discovered there was a script in a waterproof bag on its floor.
Once he returned to the US towards the end of 1983, Spielberg reluctantly picked up the reins again on Twilight Zone. A tenuous line of communication was re-established with Landis, through which he conveyed his feeling that the opening episode, even without the firefight, was too long. Landis trimmed a few seconds. Jerry Goldsmith’s music did little to ameliorate the overall atmosphere of disillusion. Spielberg perfunctorily supervised the mix but, at the first screening, refused to watch Landis’s episode, and loitered outside until it was over. The parents of both dead children named him in their lawsuits, as did the daughters of Vic Morrow, but Warners’ lawyers effectively blocked the claims, and finally settled them out of court.
The Twilight Zone case damaged Spielberg’s image in the film community, less because of the deaths, for which he could hardly be blamed, than for his weak, evasive, almost infantile response to the questions posed by the press and the law. Spielberg seemed to be playing at life, insulating himself from reality by means of a team of acolytes, from whom he demanded absolute obedience. ‘Steven Spielberg,’ writes Hollywood historian Paul Rosenfield, ‘is shrouded by the most protective group of people in the club. He wants it both ways – he wants the creative stimulation of peers, yet he hires people who aren’t his peers, and they become his armour.’
An unnamed ex-employee said of Spielberg at the time:
Steven has surrounded himself with people who tell him that he’s God, and he believes he’s God. You have to understand you’re not dealing with adult, formed personalities. All these young directors are children, and they deal with problems like children. ‘I’m not talking to him any more!’ Steven’s basic way of dealing with life is, if I don’t like it, make it go away. And after making half a billion dollars, he can do that, in his own little world. After the Twilight Zone accident, John Landis happened to be one of the things he wanted to go away. It’s as if he was saying, ‘I don’t want to hear about the case. I don’t want to know about it. I don’t care if he’s guilty or not guilty. I’m playing in my back yard, and my back yard has E.T. in it. I don’t want to hear about children being killed.’
The situation was not to improve. Even as Spielberg was poised to accept his first personal Oscar for Schindler’s List in March 1994, another employee, forced to remain anonymous by the legal muzzle of the confidentiality agreement imposed on all Spielberg workers, described Amblin to the Los Angeles Times as ‘a very dysfunctional place emotionally because Steven is perceived as a deity. He’s not really the head of a company; he’s sort of a god. He’s protected at all turns from everything that will be unpleasant.’