PRIME MINISTER: Doctor Jones, the eminent archaeologist?
WILLIE: Hard to believe, isn’t it?
Dialogue from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
INCREASINGLY DURING 1983 and 1984, Spielberg came under the influence of Steve Ross, ‘a six foot three E.T.’, in his words, who embodied his image of the ideal heroic father he’d fumblingly tried to create with the Identikit dad on which Puck was based. In response. Universal, realising they had to roll out their big guns if they were to hang onto him against Ross, proposed a lavish ‘thank you’ for E.T. Remembering Spielberg’s pursuit of a bungalow, Wasserman and Sheinberg offered to build a headquarters for Amblin on the Universal lot at studio expense, and invited him to outline his requirements.
Until then, Spielberg had never shown more than a high-school student’s interest in where he lived and worked, but, after seeing the private estates of old friends like Lucas and Coppola, as well as new ones like Michael Jackson and Steve Ross, he was changing his mind. The building he outlined to Universal, however, was, despite its 25,000 square feet of floor space, still more tree-house than corporate headquarters. Almost as important as its offices, conference rooms and private cinema were the kitchen with its own garden, and a crèche and playroom for kids of the staff. Amblin, Spielberg announced, would be ‘like a Children’s Crusade of film-makers. The only way you can get into this company is if you haven’t made a movie before.’ Unconvinced that New Age could be yoked to Old Hollywood, Paul Schrader noted dourly that the Movie Brats were turning into ‘Movie Brats Inc.’
As Spielberg fiddled with the plans and Universal began bulldozing old bungalows to make room, Ross refused to surrender. Learning that Kathleen Carey had befriended a nine-year-old boy at the Holly Grove orphanage, he anonymously presented the home with VCRs, TV sets and other electronic gadgets at Christmas 1982.
Repeated visits to Ross’s Long Island home had already persuaded Spielberg that he should have an East Coast residence as well as one in Los Angeles, and probably a New York apartment too. For men like Ross, and for the New York intellectuals who made it their summer hideaway, East Hampton, the leafy village on Long Island, was intimately associated with émigré painters like Francis Picabia and Fernand Léger, who discovered it in the forties, and those of the New York School, notably Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, who’d followed them there. If its clapboard houses, groves of hardwoods and the tea-coloured expanse of Georgica Pond reminded Spielberg of any artist, however, it was Norman Rockwell, who set most of his paintings in such an archetypal semi-rural community.
Ross, hearing of a house coming on the market a few doors down from his own in East Hampton, purchased it through his company, confident Spielberg would take it off his hands. He did buy the 3.9-acre site from Ross in 1983, and started work with an architect on a design. New York writers and theatre people had regarded the Hamptons as their preserve for decades – Spielberg’s new house had been the summer residence at various times of Neil Simon, Kurt Vonnegut and screenwriter Peter Stone – but during the late seventies film people had supplanted them. Spielberg’s new neighbours were Alan Pakula, Michael Cimino and Sidney Lumet, and he had no compunction in levelling the old residence to build something more appropriate to his standing in this community. As a pied-à-terre, he also bought a double apartment in Donald Trump’s glitzy new Trump Tower in Manhattan.
Through Ross, Spielberg had met Clint Eastwood, Barbra Streisand, record producer David Geffen and, initially most impressive, Quincy Jones. Christened Quincy Delight Jones Jr, the composer/arranger was almost fifteen years Spielberg’s senior, and in every respect his antithesis. Black, Catholic, raised in Oregon as one of ten children, he was aggressively affectionate, hugging and embracing even relative strangers in extravagant expressions of affection. As a young man, he rocketed through two universities, supporting himself by playing jazz at night. While Spielberg was still howling in fright at Bambi, he was recording his first jazz album in Sweden. He wrote film scores, pursued his own racial agenda with works celebrating his African heritage, and worked with dozens of great artists, including Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Miles Davis. The pace caught up with him in 1974, when he had a massive stroke, but he bounced back, and by the early eighties was the close friend and adviser of Michael Jackson. Scarcely a night passed when Jackson didn’t call Jones, just to talk things over.
Among the things Michael wanted to talk about was E.T. Jones had helped negotiate the deal through which Jackson assembled his E.T. Storybook album for MCA. When Jackson’s regular recording company, CBS, sued MCA for $2 million over alleged loss of earnings for his new album, Thriller, as a result of the Storybook, Spielberg helped smooth the difficulty. By then he’d met Jackson, and been as awed as anyone by the charismatic young star. He visited his Encino estate, the grounds of which were furnished like a miniature Disneyland, and was startled by the lavishness of the singer’s private world. ‘If E.T. hadn’t come to Elliott,’ Spielberg said, ‘he’d have come to Michael’s house.’ The singer gave him a signed copy of the issue of Time magazine which featured him on the cover. Spielberg framed it, and hung it in his office. Jackson also asked Spielberg to direct the 3-D quadraphonic 70mm short film Captain Eo he was preparing for Disneyland. Spielberg initially agreed but, finding the singer wanted little more than a giant rock video, passed the job to Coppola, who needed the work.
Jackson, who would later christen his private estate ‘Neverland’, shared Spielberg’s enthusiasm for Peter Pan. Francis Coppola had planned a film about author J.M. Barrie’s troubled relationship with the Llewelyn Davies family who inspired the play. When Zoetrope collapsed, he offered the project to Paramount, who asked Spielberg if he’d like to direct it. Spielberg refused. He visualised a live-action version of the original play, retaining the fantasy of Disney’s cartoon but taking fewer liberties with Barrie’s work. Paramount thought they could accommodate this, especially for Spielberg and Michael Jackson, but it proved easier to say than do, since a dozen producers were jostling for control of the story.
Barrie had presented the copyright in Peter Pan, and the books and stories which followed it, to Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, which controlled them for fifty-two years. When this period expired in the late 1970s, Disney tried to arrogate the rights, only to be blocked by actor Mel Ferrer, who had his own remake plans. The Royal Shakespeare Company in London also mounted a revisionist stage production in 1982 which removed the whimsy accumulated over decades of pantomime versions and restored some of the original’s darkness. Undeterred, Jackson, Jones and Spielberg began work on a musical, with songs by John Williams to a book by Leslie Bricusse.
Meanwhile, Jones interested Spielberg in another musical. Unlike ‘Reel to Reel’, this would be set in the streets of Manhattan or Detroit and made cheaply. ‘We really want to do a no-holds-barred-dancing-in-the-streets-on-top-of-taxi-cabs motion picture,’ Spielberg said. ‘We’re working on the story right now.’ It never happened, though the project bears many resemblances to Alan Parker’s 1980 Fame, which celebrated the youthful exuberance of young singers and dancers in much the way Spielberg envisaged, complete with dancers on top of taxi-cabs.
In the wake of E.T., Old Hollywood struggled to make sense of Spielberg and to assess his importance in an industry that changed week by week. Studio bean-counters muttered about ‘non-repeating phenomena’. Maybe Spielberg and his kind were a flash in the pan. After all, the percentage of cinema tickets bought by teenagers in the US had peaked at 47 per cent in the late seventies and begun to slide. (By 1995 it would hover around 20 per cent.) Memories of 1941’s failure were still fresh, too. Old hands refused to accept that the interest and investment generated by film events like E.T. and Star Wars warped the traditional rule of thumb that out of any ten movies, one made money, two broke even, and the rest flopped. Wiser heads pointed out that Spielberg defied the rules. Only one of his films, Sugarland Express, had failed outright – 1941 would inch into the black with foreign and video sales – and the rest were the most successful in history. Exhibitors at least had no doubts. Teenagers might be staying away from other movies, but those of Spielberg and Lucas remained must-sees. When Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was announced early in 1984, the cinemas pledged a record $40 million in non-refundable guarantees, putting the film into profit before it was made, let alone released.
As he became aware of his new power, Spielberg initially hesitated to exercise it fully. Like Indy, he wavered between the roles of grave-robber and conservator, between fortune and glory, public adulation and private satisfaction. Nobody doubted after Jaws that he could be another engineer of mass-market hits like Victor Fleming, but the mantle of Kubrick and Lean seemed beyond his grasp. E.T., however, had whispered to him that he might achieve the greatness of all the film-makers he admired, not simply the more facile of them. At first he hadn’t been sure. The ease with which he pulled off his effects made him share the doubts of his critics about their validity. He believed E.T. to be a profound statement, but perhaps it was simply so skilful it fooled even him. Great communicator or consummate manipulator? In the twilight zone of Hollywood, not even he could tell. Gradually, however, Spielberg began seeking projects appropriate to the serious director he now felt he could become.
By example and precept, Steve Ross was teaching him the corporate game, confident that within a few years his protégé would be a major player. Before E.T., Spielberg shared Lucas’s dislike for boardroom manoeuvres, but Ross redefined his image of big business. ‘I had typecast what a CEO was,’ Spielberg said. ‘I’d never met one before, and I wasn’t far off, because I’ve met them since – and in my mind they looked like [they bought their clothes at the cheap chain store] J.C. Penney. And suddenly here was this older movie star.’
That he was beginning to enjoy his new authority became evident early in 1983. Just before leaving for Sri Lanka to shoot Temple of Doom, he and Harrison Ford, who would marry Melissa Mathison on 14 March, were flown to Las Vegas for the annual ShoWest exhibitors’ convention, during which studios traditionally unveiled their films to the all-important cinema owners. With them was Paramount’s top management and a contingent of creative people, including Jack Nicholson, Debra Winger and Martin Scorsese.
Michael Eisner’s subordinate at Paramount, Dawn Steel, whose first production success, Adrian Lyne’s frenetic dance movie Flashdance, hadn’t then opened, was seething. Not deemed sufficiently important to rate an all-important seat on the dais at the inaugural dinner, she’d been relegated to the floor with other lesser players. At the preliminary cocktail party Frank Marshall introduced Scorsese to Steel, almost an adoptive member of the Amblin group because her paternal grandfather had been a Spielberg.
As they chatted, the banquet manager called for everyone to follow him to the dais. When Steel lagged behind, Spielberg turned and asked, loudly enough to embarrass the Paramount management, ‘Dawn, aren’t you sitting with us on the dais?’ The gesture didn’t get Steel her coveted spot in the limelight, but she won a useful consolation prize. After ten minutes, Scorsese left the dignitaries to join her. A few weeks later, they were living together.
In this rich medium, alliances grew like crystals, transcending race, education, fortune. The seeds of Spielberg’s 1994 alliance with David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg as ‘DreamWorks SKG’ were planted in these often casual encounters. Geffen, who was close to Sandy Gallin, personal manager of Michael Jackson and Neil Diamond, both of whom had dipped their beaks into the profits from E.T., was also one of Steel’s closest allies in the film business. ‘Not only did David befriend me [in the early eighties],’ Steel says, ‘but he also befriended Jeffrey Katzenberg.’
The three made improbable confederates. Steel had launched her business career in 1975 with a mail-order company, Entrepreneuse Enterprises, to sell phallic Amarylis flowers with the rubric, ‘The Penis Plant!’, and toilet paper decorated with the ochre-and-green colours and ‘GG’ emblem of Gucci. Katzenberg, the personification of Budd Schulberg’s hustling producer Sammy Glick from the 1941 novel What Makes Sammy Run?, was the son of a privileged Manhattan family. He’d dropped out of New York University to gamble in the Bahamas, from where he’d been ejected for trying to shade the odds at blackjack by counting cards. He gravitated to movies as assistant to Barry Diller, the ABC executive who commissioned Duel, from whom Eisner hired him away.
Steel’s lawyer Sid Davidoff described Katzenberg as ‘four feet ten inches, ninety pounds soaking wet, a pit bull, tenacious as hell’. The height and weight were slightly off, but the rest was accurate. A mountain-climber and white-water rafter, his energy was legendary. The first time she met him, says Steel, ‘I saw him run up the stairs, run into [studio head Frank] Yablans’ office and then run out of Yablans’ office down the stairs. I thought, This guy’s like the Roadrunner. Beep. Beep.’
Geffen, Katzenberg and Spielberg, Steel, Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones, wove in and out of one another’s orbits like captive moons, dominated always, however, by the gravitational pull of Steve Ross. Geffen and Katzenberg in particular became intimates. ‘These two are probably inseparable today,’ said Steel in 1994, ‘and they have a relationship as peers, but Jeffrey was not David’s peer when their relationship started.’ Geffen, like Steel, came from the same East Coast background as Katzenberg (and Spielberg), and had also, like them, dropped out of college, but there the resemblance ended. The archetypal New Yorker, untidy but always in style, and effortlessly rich from pop music, Geffen floated above the daily grit of the film business – literally so on occasion, in his private jet. The 1981 drama about lesbianism in big-time athletics, Personal Best, was his first outing as a film producer, and the last for five years, though after that he would emerge as a studio owner and major Hollywood player.
Changes were taking place in Spielberg’s private life too. The relationship with Kathleen Carey had cooled as she became more involved in her job, and early in 1983 she decided to leave him. Spielberg confessed:
I cried for the first time in ages. The human being in me was pouring the tears out. But the doggone film-maker in me ran to the other room, grabbed my Instamatic, and took a picture of myself in the mirror. I had to have it on record.
He didn’t cry for long. During the run-up to starting Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in Sri Lanka on 8 April 1983, he had a brief relationship with Barbra Streisand, an almost mythical alliance of titans more credible in a Jackie Collins novel than in real life. The affair may have had a more quotidian basis, since some people credited Spielberg with helping Streisand with her long-time project to direct and star in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yentl. From Streisand, he took up with Kate Capshaw, who had played in Best Defense, the film Huyck and Katz wrote, and Huyck directed, before Temple of Doom, and who was being considered to play the lead in the new film. Born Kathy Sue Nail, the green-eyed blonde Texan had graduated from the University of Missouri with a master’s degree in learning disabilities, and taught school for a while before, following the birth of her daughter Jessica, deciding on a career in showbusiness Starting as a model for the Ford agency in New York, she broke into TV commercials, then graduated to soap operas like Edge of Night, and in 1982 launched a feature film career in Hollywood with A Little Sex, playing the aggrieved wife of philanderer Tim Mathison.
Capshaw was aggressive, giggly and, to some of Spielberg’s friends, wearingly hectic, but he liked her shiksa vivacity, and she was soon his companion as well as a front-runner for the role of Willie, the nightclub singer in Temple of Doom. Capshaw, for her part, had decided that he was her man. Like a dog that recognises her own puppy by its smell, she knew, she said, simply from sniffing Spielberg, that they were destined to be together.
Shooting on Temple of Doom was delayed until after the Oscars on 11 April 1983. For once, the nominations made it hard to imagine Spielberg would fail to win handsomely. E.T. was in for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Sound, Best Score (for which Goldsmith’s Poltergeist music was also nominated), Best Editing, Best Visual Effects and Best Sound Editing. The competition included Sydney Pollack’s comedy Tootsie and Constantin Costa-Gavras’s political thriller Missing, about an American father searching in Chile for his political activist son, apparently the victim of a death squad.
Missing was thought too weighty and controversial for Academy voters. Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi likewise seemed a long shot after the success of the British Chariots of Fire the year before. But in the most studied insult imaginable, E.T., the most successful and best-loved film in Hollywood history, was fobbed off with the Music, Special Effects and Sound Editing Oscars alone. Almost everything else went to Gandhi, even, to general astonishment, the Best Costume award. (‘For what?’ demanded columnist Rex Reed. ‘Wrinkled sheets, burlap sacks and loincloths?’) Attenborough was honest enough to be embarrassed by the obvious snub to Spielberg. As he went up to accept his Oscar, he paused to give him a consoling hug.
In public, Spielberg shrugged off the rejection. ‘Look, we tried our best,’ he joked. ‘We stuffed the ballot boxes. We just didn’t stuff them enough.’ In the Los Angeles Times, he surmised that people felt the film had already won so many awards it didn’t deserve more. Privately, however, he was deeply hurt, a fact he hid from his closest colleagues. It was a different matter with relative strangers. Jerry Goldsmith, who hadn’t seen him since Twilight Zone and assumed that, like others connected with that debacle, he had ‘ceased to exist’ for the director, was astonished to get a call on the night following the awards ceremony.
‘Can I come around?’ Spielberg asked.
He arrived a few minutes later with his current cocker spaniel, Chauncey, and poured out his sense of hurt to a sympathetic but disconcerted Goldsmith. ‘My wife came home and found us sitting there alone,’ recalled the composer. ‘It gave her quite a shock.’
Goldsmith’s child took a fancy to Chauncey, so Spielberg later sent around a cocker puppy, a typically thoughtful gesture.
Why this sudden urge for rapport with someone he barely knew? Not so difficult a question to answer, perhaps. Spielberg would have deliberated, even if only in his subconscious, on the eagerness with which Hollywood scrutinised the acts of the powerful, and the advantage a friend might later take of any intimacy. The composer was older, and himself a loser in the same awards – though ironically to E.T. If Spielberg had spent weeks winnowing his acquaintances for someone, neither equal nor competitor, subordinate nor intimate, in whom to confide, he could hardly have chosen better than Goldsmith.
On 18 April 1983 Spielberg began shooting Temple of Doom in Sri Lanka while the second unit did the early car-chase through the streets of Macau. The two units would join up at Elstree. Aside from Capshaw and Ke Huy Kuan, an Angeleno new to movies who played ten-year-old Short Round, most of the casting had been done in England. Veteran Indian actor Roshan Seth played the oily prime minister of the evil palace, and David Yip, whose TV series The Chinese Detective had made him one of the few Asian actors to win fame in Britain, was Wu Shan, Indy’s confederate in the opening nightclub scene who’s shot before he really gets going.
Temple of Doom was even more extensively storyboarded than usual, and Spielberg arrived in Sri Lanka with albums containing four thousand images drawn up by Ed Verraux, Joe Johnson and production designer Elliot Scott. Reviving an idea he’d used on Sugarland Express and Raiders, he’d also had Scott model the Maharajah’s mine, its rollercoaster-like railway line and the ore crusher where the villains meet their doom. He used these seventeen-inch maquettes and half-inch figures to plot out a sequence that duplicated all the vertiginous effects of a carnival ride.
The script had the usual in-jokes. Paramount’s logo is moulded in grey metal on a giant gong, another homage to Gunga Din, which opens with a similar image. Dan Aykroyd, forgiven for his lapse at the Oscars, has a cameo as Weber, the officious dispatcher at Shanghai airport who puts Jones and his party onto a plane loaded with live chickens, and piloted by two henchmen of the villain. Spielberg also reprised the scene from Jaws where Brody’s son imitates his father; here it’s Short Round taking on Jones’s worried gestures, underlining the degree to which Indy, Willie and Short Round, whose parents, in a foreshadowing of Empire of the Sun, were killed in the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, constitute a family.
After three weeks in Sri Lanka, where Elliot Scott built the village of lost children and the rope bridge on which Indy has one of his most taxing battles, the crew moved to India, and a fateful meeting for Spielberg. Amy Irving was playing an Indian princess in Peter Duffell’s TV mini-series based on M.M. Kaye’s romantic best-seller The Far Pavilions. Spielberg, ostensibly scouting locations, arrived in a light plane on their set. The years of separation from Spielberg had not been kind to Amy. Her career hadn’t ignited as she’d hoped, either on Broadway or in Hollywood. The Far Pavilions, a British production with a cast of minor stars, was a substantial comedown even from her Hollywood films, none of which had been a hit. Nor had any white knight appeared to sweep her onto his charger and present her with the child she’d tearfully confessed to Emily Richard, backstage at Amadeus, she so desired. Her thirtieth birthday was approaching and, with it, some important decisions, both biological and professional. In their light, Spielberg looked much more attractive than he had a few years before.
‘We saw each other across the runway,’ Amy said later, ‘and by the time we came together, I knew.’
She and Spielberg celebrated her birthday with a candlelit dinner à deux. Almost immediately, their relationship revived, to the chagrin of Kate Capshaw, who was dumped unceremoniously but forced to swallow her anger and keep working for her ex-lover. By June 1985, Amy would have a child. Kate, however, was not to be so easily ejected from Spielberg’s life.
Doom’s line producer Robert Watts had hoped to film many scenes in the Rose Palace of Jaipur in the Indian state of Rajasthan, but the local government, scandalised by the script’s horror-comic character, demanded so many changes that he and Lucas decided suburban London would be safer. The Pankot Palace was built on the backlot at Elstree, and elephants hired from European circuses.
By the time Harrison Ford arrived in London, the mileage on his clock was beginning to register in his performance. Riding elephants in Sri Lanka had already strained his back and, as he began his stunts, a painful and deteriorating spinal condition manifested itself. British doctors diagnosed a ruptured disc. Ford flew back to California for treatment while Spielberg shot around him. Rather than risk surgery, surgeons injected Ford’s spine with a solution derived from green papaya, a well-known meat tenderiser. Used in concentrated form, it dissolved the herniated cartilege, and Ford was back to work within six weeks.
One result of the delay was that a large gathering in a hall in the north London suburb of Camden, arranged and announced some weeks before as an end-of-shoot ‘wrap’ party, became a ‘getting-to-know-you’ mixer for the actors and crew who would continue to work on the film for weeks. Spielberg arrived with Amy on his arm, the first intimation to many that she had returned to his life. Clearly in high spirits, he won everyone over with his charm.
He startled David Yip, who had never met him, by coming over to the actor almost immediately and saying, ‘David, you must be wondering what’s going on.’
‘And for ten minutes,’ says Yip, ‘he talked to me about the film and what he was going to do. It was amazing. He either has an extraordinary memory or he’s incredibly well-briefed.’
The following week, Yip started work in the Club Obi Wan sequence, an unrepentant repeat of the dance-cum-brawl in 1941. Indy is trading a giant diamond for an urn containing the ashes of a Chinese emperor, but an extra object is introduced when the three gangsters with whom he’s dealing poison his champagne, and demand both the jewel and the ashes in return for a vial of antidote. In the resulting shoot-out, Yip is killed and the jewel and antidote fly across the floor, to be lost in a welter of balloons, dancing feet and spilled ice-cubes.
Spielberg shot the sequence for three days, assembling the action, as usual, to a mental plan. By this time, the script was beginning to crumble from repeated changes, many of them dictated by Ford’s back. Spielberg stopped shooting a number of times, called for a typewriter and wrote new lines on the spot. At night he was on the phone to John Milius, who dictated dialogue from Los Angeles.
On the third day, with the club half-demolished, Spielberg arrived on the set and announced, ‘Let’s go back to the scene at the table. I know how to do it now.’ When the assistant director pointed out that the table with its revolving ‘Lazy Susan’ centrepiece had been irretrievably smashed, Spielberg calmly told him to find another one, and for half a day reshot the by-play with jewel, urn and vial until even the dumbest teenager in Oatmeal, Nebraska could grasp it.
It was hard for Spielberg to keep his mind on the film. In June, Twilight Zone: The Movie opened across North America to hostile reviews. At the same time, John Landis and four others were indicted on charges of manslaughter. Two days later, a woman from the US Embassy arrived at the St James’s Club where Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy were staying, and where two suites had been turned into cutting rooms for Temple of Doom. She tried to serve Marshall with a subpoena to appear at the trial, but was told he would be busy all that day. In fact a Mercedes limo was even then speeding him to Gatwick airport, from where Amblin’s private jet flew him to Paris. He never did testify in the case.
Back in Hollywood, Joe Dante was also shooting Gremlins, which Spielberg, technically at least, was producing, though, after the problems of Poltergeist, he remained at arm’s length from the film. There had been wrangles enough during pre-production. First-time scenarist Chris Columbus’s comedy about malevolent entities that take over the small town of Kingston Falls one Christmas was inspired by the years he’d spent living in a decrepit New York loft while attending film school. He had nightmares of mice nibbling his fingers as they dangled over the edge of the bed, and channelled his distaste into the film’s villains – cuddly big-eyed creatures that metamorphose into monsters when exposed to water or fed after midnight. Even Dante was alarmed by the violence of Columbus’s original script, in which, among other things, the gremlins decapitated the hero’s mother, sending her head rolling downstairs.
Columbus equated the gremlins with man’s misuse of technology. They’re inadvertently unleashed by well-meaning inventor Hoyt Axton, whose gadgets always malfunction disastrously. When an ancient China-man arrives at the end of the film to remove the last gremlin from the ruins, he chides Axton, ‘You do with this what you have done with all Nature’s gifts. You are not ready.’
Spielberg, increasingly in thrall to technology, had no wish to produce a tract against it, nor against suburban values. From the outset, he told Dante and Columbus that he visualised Gremlins as something less like a satire and more an apocalyptic fable in the school of Hitchcock’s The Birds, low-budget but realistic, shot in Utah or Oregon under authentic snow. Dante argued that real locations would render the puppet gremlins ridiculous. The story demanded stylisation. He saw it as a subversive It’s a Wonderful Life, and persuaded Spielberg to let him shoot it on the Warners lot, in a Kingston Falls not too far from Capra’s Bedford Falls, recreated in the image of Norman Rockwell – and Spielberg: its one cinema is even offering a double bill of Watch the Shies and A Boy’s Life. He also had the star gremlin designed in the warm browns of Chauncey the spaniel. ‘I know which side my bread’s buttered on,’ he joked sardonically. Dante’s delight in misrule was never more effectively on show, but Spielberg remained nervous about the film, and unconvinced of its prospects for success.
The multitude of problems that faced Spielberg when he returned to Hollywood later in 1983 would have relegated lesser men to a rest home. Most visible was his revived relationship with Amy, which startled his friends. For once, news hadn’t travelled fast, and the first many of them knew of her return was when Spielberg brought her to music-recording sessions for Gremlins. Those who’d regarded Kathleen Carey as a more desirable partner looked on Amy without warmth.
Amy was appearing in Shaw’s Heartbreak House on Broadway, and Spielberg flew to New York every weekend to be with her. ‘He watches me on stage,’ she said, ‘and I feel this energy of support come out of the audience. He’s a sucker for me.’ Anxious to appear a changed man, Spielberg began to take an interest in theatre, independently booking them seats for four shows in a row. ‘Wow, did you do all this on our own?’ Amy asked disbelievingly, which cannot have done much to bolster his confidence.
Builders had already sunk foundations for the East Hampton house, but after the break-up with Kathleen, Spielberg halted construction. The house, he decided, risked becoming too much like a Beverly Hills mansion, and inconsistent with the Hamptons’ history. When work recommenced, it was under Amy’s influence. Steve Ross, quickly recognising a kindred spirit in her, and a route to Spielberg, introduced them to Charles Gwathmey of Gwathmey Siegel and Associates, among the country’s most fashionable architects. Within a year, Gwathmey had hauled a late-eighteenth-century barn from New Jersey and reassembled it on Spielberg’s site. With this foundation – an architectural ‘quote’, said Gwathmey glibly, as Spielberg’s films were filled with quotes – he began the new house.
At the same time, Amblin Entertainment became a fully functioning private corporation, exclusively controlled by Spielberg and his subordinates, and he moved into the new headquarters Universal had built for him, with office space for thirty people. Amy’s influence on the design was profound. The couple had toured her beloved New Mexico, taking more than five hundred Polaroids. These inspired a two-storey building in south-western style, slightly tapered, with burnt-pink adobe-look walls, built around a central courtyard with fountains. MGM producer Peter Bart spoke for many when he called it ‘a Santa Fe modern palazzo’. Another visitor thought it ‘an architectural fantasy [which] bears little relationship to the buildings nearby: industrial boxes housing sound stages and production offices’. John Milius tagged it ‘the biggest Taco Bell in the world’, then, lapsing into a parody of the portentous commentary to the News on the March report on Kane’s mansion Xanadu in Citizen Kane, ‘Its cost? No man can say.’ Sid Sheinberg could. Universal put a book value on the building of $3.1 million, though later estimates, taking the cost of real estate into account, plus the continuing expenses of upkeep, which it also bore, were closer to $6 million.
A low adobe wall divided the building from the rest of the studio. Pressed into the clay was the silhouette of Elliott on his bike flying across the face of the full moon with Puck in a milk-crate on the handlebars. The image had become so famous that Spielberg adopted it as Amblin’s trademark. The grounds were landscaped with fruit, olive and palm trees, and with beds of yellow daisies, lawns and ponds filled with multi-coloured Japanese koi, soon to become a Hollywood enthusiasm. (Amused by their rhythmic mouth movements, Spielberg recorded the fish on video and matched the tape to excerpts from Madama Butterfly.) A kitchen that doubled as communal dining room served organic meals to the staff and their children, while the less health-conscious could snack on Oreo cookies, M&Ms and other candy, all free. There was a carpeted dog run, a basketball practice court, a barbecue pit, a tanning area.
Inside, there were no straight lines, no sharp corners. Even the beams were slightly rounded. The decoration favoured Navajo rugs, pre-Columbian pots and quarry tiles. Ceremonial Indian garments were framed in the entrance hall, next to movie posters. An open fire burned in Spielberg’s first-floor office, which had two walls of windows looking down on the courtyard, and a tree-house ceiling of intertwined deep red salt-cedar branches from Santa Fe. His Citizen Kane sled was on display there, along with a call-sheet and a storyboard from Welles’s film, and the original of Norman Rockwell’s painting The Connoisseur. Opposite his desk, set into a wall next to alcoves for more rare Indian pots, was a portrait of Amy. And in case anyone forgot the source of these riches, framed cartoons about E.T. decorated one wall of the waiting area, and in the garden a willow shaded a wishing well from which jutted the gaping head of Bruce the Great White Shark.
Before the building went up, Spielberg had been expansive about his plans for fifteen to twenty Amblin productions, each funded at $15–$20 million. Once installed, however, he became more cagey. He said contentedly:
Amblin insulates me from Hollywood, and that’s why I love it. I don’t have to play the musical studios game. I don’t have to go to people. They come to me. What makes me a good businessman is that I always make other people pay for my movies. I never spend my own money.
His attitude to Universal became increasingly offhand as he learned to play it off against other companies eager to woo him. Asked in 1993 what Universal expected from Amblin, he said, ‘Everything! They expect to get everything first, but, of course, they don’t… I have no obligation to Universal, really, unless you want to look at this wonderful building and apply the word “guilt”.’
Some in Hollywood, like David Brown, sneered at the new tycoon’s unwillingness to spend a cent on the promised new productions. ‘He works like he’s paying the rent,’ said Brown, who persisted in doubting his old protégé’s omniscience. For almost everyone else, however, Spielberg had become a sort of guru, regarded with a near-holy awe. Not for nothing was the Amblin building known in some quarters as ‘The Vatican’. In 1983, John Landis inserted a scene in Trading Places where commodity trader Eddie Murphy is asked in a crowded restaurant about his opinion on the market in winter wheat. Instantly every table falls silent and the diners crane towards him, ears flapping. Spielberg’s position was not dissimilar. ‘When Steven Spielberg hires you,’ says Mick Gams, one of his team on the TV series Amazing Stories, ‘all the people who wouldn’t even read your scripts find them brilliant.’ Another director recalls, ‘I’ve been to screenings where all the studio executives are sitting in the front, and Spielberg’s alone at the back. And when the film ends, they turn around to look at him and see what they should think about it.’ A story circulated around Hollywood of an unsuccessful producer who noticed Spielberg sitting alone on the beach at Malibu, contemplating the sunset. When he got up and left, the other slid into the hollow he’d vacated.
Spielberg’s endorsement of a project was the next best thing to a guarantee of profit, and studios competed for it furiously. Cultivated by Terry Semel and Steve Ross, his near-symbiotic relationship with Warners continued and prospered, until he was referred to as ‘our brother’ in the studio’s inner circles.
Joe Dante, having become friendly with producer Peter Guber during Gremlins, was offered Jeffrey Boam’s script for Innerspace, in which a tearaway ex-astronaut is miniaturised and injected into the body of a feckless supermarket clerk: Dean Martin in the body of Jerry Lewis. Guber took the package to Warners, but had heard nothing until Spielberg casually told Dante that he was about to produce the script, with Robert Zemeckis directing. Dante protested to Warners.
‘What can we do?’ an executive responded. ‘If Spielberg wants to take it to Zemeckis…’
‘But you offered it to me!’
‘Well, yeah,’ shrugged the executive, ‘but now that Steven’s got it…’
The message was obvious. Spielberg finally let Dante direct Innerspace for Amblin, but the unpleasant taste remained.
Michael Crichton had a similar experience. After Spielberg’s failure to float Congo with De Palma, the writer suggested it as an Indiana Jones episode. He pointed out that one of the book’s most original inventions, a baby gorilla given the power of speech through a computer strapped to its back, was a perfect foil and sidekick for Indy.
‘Steven… thought [the talking gorilla] could be done with a mechanical ape,’ Crichton recalls. ‘But I said that you can do that with E.T. because we’ve never seen anything like him, but everyone knows what a gorilla looks like – and if it looks fake, you’re dead. It’s in every scene.
‘He said, “Well, I’ve had a lot of success with mechanical animals.” I replied, “You sure have! I’m not going to argue with you, Steven, but I think you have to look carefully.” And the next thing I knew, he wasn’t doing the picture. So that presented a tremendous problem back in those days.’
In fact, the project was discussed at Lucasfilm, but Lucas preferred all Indy’s adventures to be based on new stories. Congo would finally be made in 1994 for Paramount by Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, by then an independent producer/director.
Since the joint release of E.T. and Poltergeist had done nothing to injure either film, Spielberg and Lucas decided to issue both Temple of Doom and Gremlins in May 1984. Spielberg demanded absolute authenticity for all foreign versions. French, Italian and Spanish slang was used in the backchat between the gremlins. In the German version, they even sang authentic German beer-drinking songs in the bar.
The first cut of Temple of Doom was predictably violent, with a booby-trapped underground chamber with a descending spiked ceiling, human sacrifice, during which hearts are pulled out of living chests, and a palace banquet where guests gorge on bugs and monkey brains, but Lucas felt it still needed additional horrors. More violence was added, and the banquet scene augmented with some even more loathsome dishes: giant bugs filled with grey slime, milky soup swimming with bloody eyeballs, and ‘Snake Surprise’, a python stuffed with wriggling baby eels. (The added scenes are easily identified, since Ford doesn’t appear in any of them.)
After the retakes, Spielberg and Michael Kahn fined down the film to 118 minutes, every one of which moved with the speed of the final rollercoaster ride through the Maharajah’s mine. It was easier to understand than Raiders, but, perversely, this imposed a yammering energy that left audiences exhausted. By building Raiders in brief episodes, each with its climax and a respite before the tension built again, Kasdan had paced that film, but Huyck and Katz worked to a different and more agitated drummer. Where 1941 had been too loud, Temple of Doom’s machine-gun incident was too fast. Spielberg inserted pauses for laughs and toned down some effects, but the film would always give the impression of febrile motion.
Dante showed his finished version of Gremlins to Spielberg, who still disliked the film’s misanthropy. Warners shared his doubts. In particular, they hated Phoebe Cates’s revelation, typical of the film’s abrasive vision of small-town American life, that she’s hated Christmas ever since, as a child, she and her mother discovered her father’s corpse, dressed as Santa Claus, in their chimney, where he’d died of a heart attack while trying to deliver gifts. Dante recalls:
That scene about daddy in the chimney was real controversial. It had been given to another character who was cut out, but I wanted it left in, so I gave it to Phoebe. But the studio, which hated the movie, said, ‘Of course that scene has to go,’ and I said, ‘I don’t think so. To me, this scene is the movie. The tone of this scene is the movie I wanted to make.’ They made a big stink about it, so I had to go to Steven. He had final cut. And he backed me up. But there was a lot of fallout from that scene.
The censorship board would have been happy to cut this and other sequences from Gremlins and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Lucas and Spielberg, however, backed by Warners and Paramount, who would see their profits slashed if the board imposed an adults-only certificate, badgered its members until they allocated a ‘PG’ rating. (Less lenient British censors made twenty-five cuts to Temple of Doom alone.) The films’ violence did nothing to harm them at the box office. By 1989, Gremlins had made a profit of $80 million in US domestic cinemas alone. Temple of Doom grossed $180 million in the same market. In the wake of the films, however, a new certificate was established, Parental Guidance – 13.
On 9 April, Spielberg accompanied Amy to the Oscars. For once, he had nothing in competition. Amy, however, was up for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Yentl, one of the few nominations the film earned. (Feminists picketed the ceremony, pointing out that 273 men had been nominated for best director since 1927 and only one woman.) Amy’s black velvet skirt from Ralph Lauren and antique black lace blouse were appropriately sombre, since she lost to Linda Hunt for her prodigious feat of playing a Chinese man in Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously.
Once again, Spielberg was under pressure from Amy to marry her, and once again, he was resisting. Some of the tension surfaced in the press. On 8 November a columnist had noted, ‘Amy Irving wishes Steven Spielberg would pop the question. So what did Amy get from the filmmaker for her birthday? A diamond necklace and diamond earrings. Try a ring next time, Steve.’
A month after the Oscars, Temple of Doom and Gremlins opened to the predictable furore. Gary Franklin, reviewer for LA’s KCBS-TV, claimed to be so sickened by Doom he couldn’t attend Paramount’s lavish lunch after the preview. In general, however, the film was greeted as a belated acknowledgement that teenage taste had changed, even if adults didn’t entirely realise it.
Writing in Vanity Fair about the importance of Temple of Doom and Gremlins in the changing social attitude to screen violence, Steven Schiff quoted from The Uses of Enchantment by the since-discredited guru of child psychology, Bruno Bettelheim: ‘Those who outlawed traditional folk fairy tales decided that if there were monsters in a story told to children, these must all be friendly – but they missed the monster a child knows best… the monster he feels or fears himself to be.’ Children were more ready to accept violence on screen than were adults, Schiff contended. ‘It’s useless to pretend… that Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom isn’t upsetting. And it’s useless to pretend… that the people it upsets the most are children.’ Joe Dante found the same to be true of Gremlins. ‘I never saw a child upset by the movie. I remember a screening at Warner Brothers when a woman got up and started dragging a screaming child out of the movie. I remember thinking, “Shit, this kid is really scared.” In fact the mother wanted to leave and the kid wanted to stay!’
To promote Doom, Lucas and Spielberg agreed to have their hand and footprints eternalised in cement in front of Mann’s – formerly Grauman’s – Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. Neither relished the event. When they stepped out of their burgundy limo in jeans, trainers and sports shirts, they were ninety minutes late and the quick-drying cement had begun to harden.
‘This is the greatest honour I’ve ever been exposed to,’ Spielberg said, ill at ease. Nudged by proprietor Ted Mann into saying something to ‘sell some tickets’, he went on awkwardly, ‘We had snakes in the last picture and bugs in this picture. But supposedly man’s greatest fear is public speaking, and that will be our next picture.’
At this point, Gary Franklin and his crew pushed to the front of the crowd and asked if Temple of Doom wasn’t too frightening for its audience.
‘Who do you think shouldn’t see this film?’ shouted the journalist.
‘I think everybody can see this film except Gary Franklin,’ Spielberg said shortly.
He and Lucas knelt down, pressed hands and feet into the cement and left in their limo, pausing only, like the canny merchandisers they had become, to scrape away the trademarks on their shoeprints. It would be some time before, metaphorically, Spielberg returned to this sleazy end of Hollywood with its whores, panhandlers and crazies. For the next few years he would breathe the rarefied air of Century City’s tower blocks, not the fumes of Hollywood Boulevard, rub shoulders not with cinema owners but CEOs, not TV journalists but Pulitzer Prize-winners.