This is the primal genius of Spielberg… By now a billion earthlings have seen his films. They have only one thing in common. They have all, at some stage, been children.
Martin Amis. 1982
WITH INTELLECTUAL respectability at least in prospect following The Color Purple, Spielberg attacked the larger problem of his image, both in Hollywood and nationally. At Amblin, the company’s corporate standing was underscored, the playground element de-emphasised. There was no more talk of a ‘children’s crusade’. The free candy counter became a salad bar, with raw vegetables instead of M&Ms; E.T. would never have gone near the place. Aware that he was a prime kidnap target, Spielberg tightened security. Signs pointing to the building were removed, and a guard was stationed at the gate. In the wake of some damaging leaks about Spielberg’s difficult personality during the fuss over Twilight Zone, all new employees were required to sign a lifetime confidentiality agreement, swearing not to divulge anything seen or heard while working for the company.
A series of discreetly publicised donations during 1986/7 launched Spielberg II: The Sequel – sober, mature, responsible, with global, indeed galactic concerns. He donated $100,000 to Harvard’s search for life in space, funded the Steven Spielberg-Warner Communications Gallery in the new Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and gave $850,000 for a studio in the George Balanchine School of American Ballet in New York, a pet project of Courtney Ross. A $600-a-plate dinner thrown by the American Friends of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, at which Spielberg was honoured with its Scopus Laureate Award, raised $90,000 for a Steven Spielberg Scholarship to the university and for the Steven Spielberg Archives on its campus to house its collection of historic films.
With a personal fortune approaching $200 million, Spielberg could afford almost anything he – or Amy – desired. In 1985 they bought a 5 1/2 acre estate in the luxurious Los Angeles oceanside suburb of Pacific Palisades. Once the home of athletic silent-movie star Douglas Fairbanks Sr, it had belonged to David Selznick at the time he was making Gone With the Wind, and later to Cary Grant and his millionairess wife Barbara Hutton. Amy found the tile-roofed stucco house too small, so architect Harry Newman rebuilt it for $4 million as a 20,000-square-foot complex in Mediterranean style, with palm-shaded grounds that included a screening room and a guest house. Interior decorator Frank Pennino filled the house with Amy’s favourite New Mexican artefacts and early American antiques, interspersed with art deco pieces and some serious art: a Modigliani and a Monet, bought by Spielberg with the encouragement of Steve Ross, and somewhat out of phase with his twenty-five original Rockwells. Max (and his father) were given a ‘Hobbit Room’, inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy, with mushroom-shaped windows, a giant-screen TV, a soda fountain and a row of arcade-size video games. Spielberg moved his ‘Rosebud’ sled from the Amblin office, and hung it next to a coffee table where, under glass, original screenplays of Citizen Kane, Casablanca and Welles’s radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds were displayed.
Pressure to crown his rehabilitation with an Oscar had been growing ever since E.T., and in the run-up to the presentation of the awards on 24 March 1986, The Color Purple seemed the logical means for doing so. Others connected with the film were rolling their own logs too. Margaret Avery placed an excruciating advertisement in the trade press in the form of a letter to God in faux naīve Southern dialect. ‘I knows dat I been blessed by Alice Walker, Steven Spielberg and Quincy Jones. Now I is up for one of the nominations fo’ Best Supporting Actress alongst with some fine, talented ladies that I is proud to be in the company of.’ (Academy voters, connoisseurs of chutzpah, nominated her performance, but gave the statuette to Anjelica Huston for Prizzi’s Honor.) The Color Purple also received ten other nominations, putting it in competition for Best Picture, Actress (Goldberg), Supporting Actress (Avery and Winfrey), Screenplay, Cinematography, Costumes, Art Direction, Original Score, Best Song and Make-up. Back to the Future was in for Best Screenplay, Sound and Sound Effects Editing, and Young Sherlock Holmes for Visual Effects. For Spielberg himself, however, there was nothing. Most of the major nominations were shared among Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa, John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor and Peter Weir’s Witness.
Spielberg was on Steve Ross’s yacht when he got the news of the nominations. From there, both men authorised a Warner’s press statement which, while thanking the Academy for honouring Color Purple’s technicians and cast, confessed itself ‘shocked and dismayed that the movie’s primary force – Steven Spielberg – was not recognised’. That shock and dismay were general. Goldberg slated the 230 directors in that division of the Academy who shunned Spielberg as ‘just a small bunch of people with small minds who chose to ignore the obvious’. ‘Omission Impossible’ snapped the New York Post. Newsweek quoted an unnamed studio head: ‘The only thing I can conclude is that it’s personal jealousy and vindictiveness.’
Another anonymous executive countered that Spielberg ‘didn’t deserve’ an Oscar because he was ‘an extremely successful motivator of people’s emotions, but not a great cinematic director’. Columnist Martin Grove suggested the Academy appoint a panel to root out any ‘organised effort to dissuade voters from nominating Spielberg’ among its members. Foremost among the suspects in such a conspiracy was John Huston. It was his grizzled face that Newsweek featured as a possible beneficiary of Spielberg’s exclusion. Elsewhere, Huston growled to columnist Army Archerd that Spielberg ‘had had so much success, he can afford to miss a beat’.
Spielberg’s supporters on the Directors’ Guild chose him as Best Director in their awards, but everyone recognised this as a consolation prize. Pointedly, neither he nor any of the Color Purple producers attended the traditional lunch for nominees, and he refused to present the Best Actor Oscar – contending that some of the mud being flung at him might stick to the award. Despite its many nominations, The Color Purple was to win not a single statuette. On Oscar night, when Sidney Pollack got up to accept his Best Film award for Out of Africa, he paused in his walk to the stage to shake Spielberg’s hand. Backstage, the four hundred-strong international press corps which had applauded all the major awards greeted this one with silence.
Privately, Spielberg became convinced by his disappointment with The Color Purple that intellectual acceptance would elude him until a critic-proof project overwhelmed his detractors. When he found one in Schindler’s List, everyone connected with the film denied such low motives, but Thomas Keneally says:
He told myself and my daughter he delayed making this because he doesn’t think he gets a fair run from critics. He said that if anyone else had made The Color Purple or Empire of the Sun they would have been treated more kindly by the critics. He certainly sees [Schindler’s List] as a great opportunity, because he delayed in making it for that reason. He feels that if he’s treated fairly he could do very well out of this in terms of critical acclaim.
In September 1984, as Amazing Stories premiered, Variety had announced that Spielberg would film a non-musical Peter Pan in London the following March, without Michael Jackson. ‘Michael is a very close friend of mine,’ said Spielberg, ‘but he never was, and never will be, Peter Pan.’ The relationship between Spielberg and Jackson would become increasingly distant and troubled, especially after accusations of child molestation against the singer. In 1995 there was an open break when Jackson included praise from Spielberg on the liner notes of his double album History that raged against his hounding by the press and greedy litigants. Phrases such as ‘Jew me, sue me,’ even though Jackson later removed them from the record, offended many old friends like Spielberg, who repudiated his notes in the letter column of the New York Times, claiming they’d been meant for a ‘Best Of Michael Jackson’ album, not this tirade.
Before Peter Pan started shooting, however, Spielberg thought better of the project. The heir to David Lean had no business with fairy stories. A planned version of Tintin, the Belgian comic strip, also went on hold. As a producer, however, he was more involved than ever in films for children, especially animation. Don Bluth was at work on The Land Before Time, humanising dinosaurs even more than Disney had in Fantasia. This made him unavailable to work on Amblin’s most ambitious project. Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a co-production with Disney of Gary K. Wolf’s book Who Censored Roger Rabbit?. Extending the combination of animation and live action begun in Spielberg’s Amazing Stories episode The Mission, written by Menno Meyjes, in which a wartime bomber is saved when the cartooning waist gunner imagines a set of animated wheels for the crippled plane. Who Framed Roger Rabbit was a fantasy detective story set in a world where comic-strip characters – ‘Toons’ – co-exist with humans. Robert Zemeckis directed chunky English actor Bob Hoskins as the detective investigating the victimisation of a cartoon star and falling in love with his sultry chanteuse wife Jessica. Bluth nominated British animator Richard Williams to handle the integration. Spielberg, searching for ways to occupy Amy, had her dub Jessica’s songs.
With diminishing ratings, Amazing Stories stumbled through its first series, but it was obvious to NBC that the show was a loser, so it negotiated premature termination. It survived into the 1986/7 season, but only twenty-six films were made. Though it failed to catch the popular imagination, the series proved important to Amblin. The press compared it to The Twilight Zone and The Wonderful World of Disney, but its true role, in terms of Amblin’s development, was closer to the documentary short-subject series like Crime Does not Pay and The March of Time which studios in the thirties used as a training ground for new directors.
Eleven new directors and eighteen new writers were launched by Amazing Stories. Spielberg called it ‘an incubator to give kids a chance to practically test themselves as film-makers. It was like a USC campus project.’ Some of the new directors were ambitious friends of the company looking for a leg up, like Norman Reynolds, the production designer on Raiders, and cameraman Robert Stevens, director of photography on a number of episodes. Mick Gams started his directorial career with Life on Death Row, a moral fable about capital punishment in which a condemned killer is struck by lightning during a jail-break and becomes a healer. William Dear, a director of commercials who’d attracted Spielberg’s attention with a low-budget sf feature, Timerider, about a motorcyclist kicked back into the past, was given Mummy Daddy, a jokey episode about an expectant actor father, unable to escape from his costume as an Egyptian mummy, racing to see his wife give birth. The series also helped mend fences. Tobe Hooper did an episode, Miss Stardust. Kevin Reynolds made a programme. So did Matthew Robbins, and Robert Markowitz, who’d directed Amy in Voices. Spielberg also offered one to Francis Coppola’s son Gio, who had been his father’s assistant on Captain Eo, but he was killed in a boating accident before he could do it.
The experience of Phil Joanou, who directed two episodes and was launched on his feature career by them, was typical of the newcomers who benefited. Just out of USC, he’d made a short called The Lost Chance Dance. Spielberg heard about it, ran a cassette on the Warners executive jet en route to New York, and rang him.
‘Can you meet with me next week in Los Angeles when I get back?’ he asked. ‘Is that convenient?’
‘Any time in the rest of my life is convenient,’ said an awed Joanou.
When he met Spielberg, Joanou confessed he’d admired Jaws so much that he took a still camera into the cinema, photographed every shot, recorded the soundtrack, then reassembled the film on his wall so he could play it over whenever he wished.
‘I don’t know if you should tell anyone about that,’ Spielberg said. ‘They’ll say, “That’s interesting, and did you have a little shrine to Steven in your room? With candles?” ’
‘Actually, there was only one candle,’ Joanou admitted with embarrassment.
Amazing Stories was also the kitchen garden of Amblin. Interesting scripts were extracted and used as the basis for features. The Mission indirectly inspired Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Brad Bird and Tim Burton’s animated Family Dog became the pilot for a later series. Impressed with Mummy Daddy, Spielberg backed William Dear in Harry and the Hendersons, a comedy about a family who encounter Bigfoot in the woods and bring him home. With Garris, Spielberg also rewrote his own script Grammy and Gramps and Company, about a group of inner-city oldsters menaced by developers who are befriended by flying saucers. Extensively revised by various hands, including its eventual director Matthew Rob-bins, it became Amblin’s feature *batteries not included. Clint Eastwood’s ghost story Vanessa in the Garden rehearsed some of the necrophiliac preoccupations of Always. When his mistress and model Vanessa, played by Sondra Locke, is killed in a coach crash, Edwardian painter Harvey Keitel finds that she can return to life in any situation in which he has painted her. As long as he continues to show her in his canvases, they can be together. If he paints them together in bed, they can even make love. After a triumphant gallery show (attended by Leah Spielberg, in an outrageous hat), Keitel, well supplied with paint and canvases, embarks with his imaginary muse on a grand tour of Europe.
Some people implied that Amblin was not always especially discriminating about where it found ideas. They cited parallels, for instance, between Eric Luke’s screenplay for Explorers, which Joe Dante released through Paramount in 1985, and the story, credited to Spielberg, of Fine Tuning, which Bob Balaban directed in the first series of Amazing Stories. Brian De Palma wryly acknowledged, ‘Secret Cinema [Paul Band’s first film, made in 1977] played on a double bill with my second feature, Murder à la Mode. I liked it so much, I was on a plane with Steven Spielberg and I told him the story. He used it in an Amazing Stories’ – with, to be fair. Bartel again directing.
Praiseworthy as it was in its insistence on feature-film production values at a time when technical standards in TV were declining. Amazing Stories never satisfied either the fans, who wanted more sensation, or the critics, who demanded more weight. Morally and intellectually, the series hovered in a twilight zone which its model had avoided. Rod Serling, the heir of Saki and the master of the ironic fantasy John Collier, had relished ironies, biting off his final summaries with clenched jaw muscles, like someone crunching a cyanide capsule. Spielberg, however, in Amazing Stories as elsewhere in his work, seldom resolved anything. Some stories in the series were fables, ending with a magic ring or phantom train carrying its cargo of disaster into someone else’s life. Others, like Life on Death Row, in which jailers execute killer Patrick Swayze, only to see him revived by his newly-acquired ability to heal, posed Talmudically unsolvable problems, the story bequeathing the dilemma to another group of decision-makers, like an endless game of Pass the Parcel.
Empire of the Sun was a shrewd choice for Spielberg’s next film. It straddled the worlds of science fiction and popular culture which he knew well, but trespassed also on the complexities of adolescence. It would, he told the New York Times, be ‘a movie with grown-up themes and values, although spoken through a voice that hadn’t changed through puberty yet’. The ‘voice’ he referred to was meant to be that of the young hero, Ballard’s alter ego Jim Graham, but he might have been talking about himself.
Ballard, who was always careful to describe his book as a novel rather than autobiography, had re-ordered the events of his childhood for dramatic effect. The real Ballard was eleven when he was interned by the Japanese after Pearl Harbor with his parents, but in the book he’s separated from them, and survives in the camp on his wits. He’s taken under the wing of Basie, American head of a black-market gang, and doesn’t meet his mother and father again until the end of the story, by which time his affection for the Americans and admiration for the Japanese and their chivalric codes has transformed his character.
Tom Stoppard wasn’t surprised to find Harold Becker, the film’s original director for whom he’d written his screenplay, suddenly out of the picture, and the project now with Spielberg. Trying to set up a film of his own play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead with Rocky producers Robert Chartoff and Irving Winkler, and watching Terry Gilliam floating his script for the sour futuristic fable Brazil, had educated him in the twists and turns of the movie business. He even doubted Empire would reach the screen at all, given that Warners had set Becker and Shapiro the task of budgeting the film under $25 million.
On their visit to Shanghai, Stoppard and Becker had found that while the mansions once occupied by Ballard and his parents sail stood, fourteen or fifteen families now lived in each house. Since the architectural style was identical with that of English towns like Sunningdale, however, these scenes could easily be shot in or near London. The internment camp could also be recreated, in Spain. But there was no substitute for the Bund, Shanghai’s pre-war business district, still largely intact. As Ballard says:
The architecture of the camp was not an integral part of the experience of the people who lived in the camp, whereas the architecture of Shanghai, these great western banks, Midland Bank Classical, rolling down the Bund for two miles, absolutely expressed the peculiar nature of this city, the greatest city in China, created not by Chinese but by the British, the Americans and the French, a city created by my father and people of his generation.
Shanghai is an important presence in the novel. Jim is forever hovering between his dreams of East and West; he’s infatuated with the Japanese, but at the same time he can see the great apartment towers of the French Concession. He’s obsessed with American cars which fill the streets of Shanghai and with the American style of life. The Chinese form a sort of ghostly background, as they did in my youth. I think it had to be established that the Shanghai created by the Americans and Europeans was a Western city, not a Chinese city with pagodas and so forth.
Norman Reynolds, once again production designer, was sent on another world trip, checking out possible alternatives to Shanghai like Buenos Aires, Liverpool, Vienna, Stockholm, Lisbon and Vienna. He found nothing sufficiently convincing, so Amblin knuckled down to horse-trading with the Chinese government. After the debacle of trying to set up a China shoot for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Universal fully expected years of negotiation, but by mid–1986 Amblin had won permission to shoot for twenty-one days in the spring of 1987. The China Film Co-Production Corporation and the Shanghai Film Studios would guarantee ten thousand extras, and police to keep them under control; everything else would have to be imported.
Spielberg and Amy were so plainly besotted with their young son that more footloose friends complained they seldom talked about anything else. ‘Max is the centre of our world,’ Amy said. ‘Every night we have dinner with him and the whole evening is about whether we’re going to watch a film with him, and what time the bath will be and who is going to tell the story.’ The classic doting father, Spielberg changed nappies, played games, bought gifts, even took his boy to the office. When Don Bluth delivered An American Tail, Spielberg arranged for Max, then eighteen months old, to host the premiere. A cinema marquee in Back to the Future 2 featured Jaws 19, directed by Max Spielberg.
In December 1986, as a birthday gift to Spielberg, Amy promised to take six months off and become what she called, without much enthusiasm, ‘a location wife and mother’. It was an easy promise to make. Even after Yentl, nobody was in a hurry to offer her interesting roles. She complained, ‘I started my career as the daughter of Jules Irving. I don’t want to finish it as the wife of Spielberg or the mother of Max.’ Apart from a role in the TV film Anastasia and another beside her mother and stepfather in a version of Rumplestiltskin written by her brother David – Spielberg vetoed Max’s appearance in the film – she’d had few offers, and when one did come, like the chance to recreate her Broadway role of Mozart’s wife Constanze in Milos Forman’s film of Amadeus, she had to turn it down because it would mean six months in Prague.
The tensions always implicit in their relationship began to surface again. In particular Amy resented Spielberg’s pained reaction when she flirted with other men. Pleased with her ability to seduce, she enjoyed exercising her sexual appeal on their friends and guests, to Spielberg’s embarrassment and anger. Matthew Robbins recalls:
It was no fun to go over there, because there was an electric tension in the air. It was competitive as to whose dining table this is, whose career we’re gonna talk about, or whether he even approved of what she was interested in – her friends and her actor life. He really was uncomfortable. The child in Spielberg believed so thoroughly in the possibility of perfect marriage, the institution of marriage, the Norman Rockwell turkey on the table, everyone’s head bowed in prayer – all this stuff. And Amy was sort of a glittering prize, smart as hell, gifted, and beautiful, but definitely edgy and provocative and competitive. She would not provide him any ease. There was nothing to go home to that was cosy.
After Christmas, Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, now married, flew with Spielberg to London and checked into the St James’s Club. Spielberg still hadn’t met Ballard, but the author dined with Kennedy and Marshall. ‘I liked them very much,’ he said. ‘I felt the book was in the best possible hands.’ Initially he’d been horrified to hear that Stoppard was writing the screenplay. ‘It seemed to me like putting Oscar Wilde to work writing the screenplay of Moby-Dick. In fact I was completely wrong.’
For his part, Stoppard was even less sure of his role in this now vastly-expanded project, and in particular of his ability to work with Spielberg. Yet after some preliminary sparring the echt-American Spielberg and the brilliant, haughty Czech émigré, with his archetypally English love of cricket, London and its intellectual life, and his passion for the intricacies of his adopted language, became friends, to the extent that Spielberg asked Stoppard to act as Amblin’s informal script editor. For a year after Empire of the Sun, the playwright read and commented on every project considered by the company. He also wrote yet another Peter Pan screenplay, which was never produced. Stoppard taught Spielberg something about precision in language; from Spielberg, the playwright gained a sense of narrative and the seductive impact of romance. ‘I’m quite unsentimental,’ says Stoppard of his collaboration with Spielberg on Empire, ‘but Steven knows how to let the emotions out. My ending was cool. His was warm.’
Stoppard’s script, with a few Menno Meyjes additions, radically redefined Empire of the Sun. Ballard’s Shanghai was a city of the imagination. It belonged with the ruined futures of his novels, a surrealist world of deserted office buildings, drained swimming pools filled with debris and empty streets prowled by predatory warlords. For Spielberg, however, Shanghai became David Lean’s London, and the story a modern retelling of Oliver Twist, with Jim as the abandoned waif and Basie as Fagin, half surrogate father, half employer, who both educates and corrupts him. Scavenging among the abandoned mansions from his headquarters in a rusting freighter on which he once served as steward, and running his network of toadies from behind a giant circular window that looks out on the camp as if on the entire world, Basie is like a deity to Jim: Life magazine and Norman Rockwell made flesh. Stoppard says:
Steven’s principal interest was in one axis in the book. In the book, Jim is really the centre of a wheel with a number of spokes, principally towards the English doctor. But Steven was really fascinated with the relationship between Jim and Basie. in Steven’s mind it was connected with other stories of boys coming under the formative influence of experienced men: Captains Courageous, for instance, which he often mentioned.
In particular, Spielberg responded to Jim’s chivalric vision of the war. To Jim, technology, especially that of aircraft, embodies a mystical power. The Japanese and American pilots are technocratic knights, sanctified by their machines. He reaches up to the nose of a Zero like a supplicant touching some holy statue, and greets the arrival of Mustangs over the camp with a delirious ‘P-51! Cadillac of the skies!’ When the atomic bombs explode over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he sees the sky light up and is seized with a transcendent vision: God in the Machine.
Spielberg again cast in London. One of his first choices was Emily Richard, the actress whom Amy had met backstage at Amadeus and to whom she’d confided her ambitions to have children. Richard was six months pregnant, but so anxious to play Jim’s mother that she kept her raincoat on for the interview and sat with a large handbag in her lap.
Nigel Havers, who had played one of the British athletes in Chariots of Fire, was the idealistic Dr Ransome, and Miranda Richardson the long-suffering Mrs Vincent who lets Jim share her and her husband’s cramped quarters. Comic Leslie Phillips had a rare serious role as Maxted, a wealthy pre-war friend of his parents whom Jim meets again in the camp. The part of Basie went to John Malkovich. Jim Graham (Ballard’s own first names) was an unknown Londoner, Christian Bale, and almost a lookalike for Anthony Wager, the young Pip of David Lean’s Great Expectations. In the tradition of child performers, Bale was no plaster saint, but Ballard for one approved. ‘He was like the character of Jim – a not-very-nice little boy.’
To process the children considered for Jim, and to read opposite them, Marshall hired a young Irish actor, commandingly tall, with a rumbling baritone voice and a phenomenal sexual aura, named Liam Neeson. He’d been Gawain in John Boorman’s 1981 Excalibur, and had played in The Bounty, but at the time he was living with the actress Helen Mirren and working as a house-painter. At the end of the sessions, Spielberg anointed him with the sign that a performer had been noticed. He told him, ‘We’re going to do something special some day.’
After the near-scandal of the previous year, the governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, if not all its members, were ready to recognise Spielberg. The fact that he hadn’t released a film in 1986 was no barrier, since some of the honours within its gift required no endorsement from the membership. Bypassing the Old Hollywood bloc among the directors who detested Spielberg, the Academy offered him the Irving Thalberg Award, presented since 1937 for ‘a consistently high level of production achievement’. As an admirer of Thalberg, Spielberg accepted eagerly, not only as a belated acknowledgement of his standing but as a means of wiping away the last stains of Twilight Zone.
His appearance at the podium on 30 March 1987 was a public-relations coup. Its apparent spontaneity disguised extensive behind-the-scenes management. Richard Dreyfuss’s introduction listed every film in Spielberg’s professional career – except The Twilight Zone. (Landis, still awaiting trial for manslaughter, was in the audience, but he and Spielberg didn’t speak.) Marilyn and Alan Bergman, Oscar-winning composers of ‘Windmills of my Mind’ and ‘The Way We Were’, helped Spielberg write the speech which he hoped would rehabilitate him in the eyes of the Academy. While he spoke, the bust of Thalberg kept toppling, so he rested his hand on it – as if fearing, some people joked, that the Academy would change its mind at the last moment and take it back.
He began by praising veterans like Cecil B. DeMille, William Wyler, Ignmar Bergman, Federico Fellini and Robert Wise, whom he labelled as his ‘heroes’. The calculated gesture was meant to reassure Old Hollywood that he was one of them, not just an engineer of diversions for mindless teenagers. He went on:
Most of my life has been spent in the dark. Movies have been the literature of my life. The literature of Irving Thalberg’s generation was books and plays. They read the great words of great minds. And I think in our romance with technology and our excitement at exploring all the possibilities of film and video, I think we’ve partially lost something that we now have to reclaim. I think it’s time to renew our romance with the word.
Leaving this promissory note to be redeemed later, he left immediately for Shanghai.
The location shoot on Empire of the Sun was a logistical tour de force.
Boeing 747s were chartered to fly lights and camera equipment, authentic pre-war American cars, Japanese tanks, plus the usual canned and preserved food. The Chinese government had outlawed rickshaws, so fifty of them had to be built and men trained to pull them. Nobody talked any longer about $25 million ceilings, and the film would eventually cost $35 million.
China daunted and exhilarated the crew, and Spielberg. Neither Frank Capra nor David Lean had never commanded such a mob of extras, nor addressed so gigantic a canvas. Faithful to Spielberg’s Dickensian vision, Allen Daviau shot Shanghai like Limehouse, the Chinese quarter of nineteenth-century London. It’s a city of evening windows glowing gold, bare trees, mansions looming from the fog. The misty river littered with the rusting hulls of freighters belongs in the opening of Bleak House. Determined to rival Lean, Spielberg shot a number of Zhivago-like set-ups copied from contemporary photographs: corpses of Chinese defenders littering rooftops above the main streets, beaming platoons of Japanese posing in the midst of chaos.
Even with strict crowd control, the mobs sometimes got out of hand. Shooting the scene during which Jim is separated from his parents in the panic after Japanese warships bombard the city and the army marches in, Emily Richard, still weak after the birth of her child a few weeks before, was knocked sprawling. In an instant, everyone froze, and a team of assistants swooped to pick her up and carry her to safety. Spielberg hurried to her side. Sensing her emotional fragility, he sat down beside her and said, ‘Let’s talk about our babies.’
From his wallet he took photographs of Max, and for ten minutes they chatted about children. Over his shoulder, Richard could see the first assistant director staring at the silent crowds of extras and, for Spielberg’s benefit, pointing significantly at his watch. They didn’t start shooting again, however, until she’d recovered.
The Chinese extras were docile, and painfully honest. Emily Richard was as impressed as anyone to find that, though all were issued with clothing and props, not one item was stolen during the entire shoot. By contrast, the cast and crew picked up so many souvenirs that their chartered 747 couldn’t get off the ground when it tried to return to Europe Some members of the crew had silk carpets and entire sets of porcelain. Richard herself nursed a large um. A second plane had to be chartered for the loot, and the flight of the first to London took thirty hours, with frequent slops for refuelling.
In April 1987, production moved to Spain, where the camp had been built near Jerez. This was hallowed ground for anyone who loved cinema, since half the epics and westerns of the previous two decades had been shot here. One could top a hill over which Charlton Heston had strode in El Cid and scuff up left-over bullet casings from Lawrence of Arabia. Rainstorms delayed construction for five weeks, so Spielberg returned to the US, where the Twilight Zone case finally came to trial in May. While there was wide and sensational coverage in the papers, the outcome was never in doubt. Landis had consulted ace defence lawyer Alan Dershowitz, and finally retained James Neal, a Watergate prosecutor who’d successfully defended the Ford Motor Company against charges of criminal manslaughter. In a time-honoured Hollywood strategy, Neal’s team overwhelmed the jury with technical evidence. Debris from the explosion could have disabled the helicopter, it was suggested, or its tail rotor may have delaminated in the heat. In either case, Neal argued, it was hardly negligence not to foresee a million-to-one chance. On 29 May 1987, Landis and the other defendants were acquitted.
The fact that Spielberg was never called upon to testify disturbed many in Hollywood, even among his friends. Did the ability to create a convincing artificial world mean that one was free then to retreat into it, absolved of all responsibility? Such a cavalier attitude to crime by the Hollywood hierarchy was to backfire on them in the nineties, when many showbusiness personalities were targeted by blackmailers, tabloid journalists and unscrupulous prosecutors, challenged by their apparent invulnerability.
Steve Ross was under attack at Warner yet again, this time over a new ten-year contract which would make him one of the highest-paid corporate officers in the world. His enemies on the board decided to make the annual general meeting of Warner Communications Industries the occasion of a proxy fight with which they hoped to oust him or at least curtail his spending.
The relationship between Ross and Spielberg had blossomed into a deep emotional attachment. Ross lavished his charm on Spielberg, inviting him and Amy on luxurious weekends, and even offering Leah a trip in Warner’s executive jet, the interior of which he had redecorated, in honour of her restaurant, with Milky Way candy-bar wrappers. A Wall Street Journal report on Spielberg included an account of him signing off from a conversation with Ross, ‘’Bye, I love you.’ Ross, who told friends he regarded the allegiance of showbiz personalities like Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, Paul Simon and Barbra Streisand as his ‘armour’, shrewdly included a copy of the article in a dossier he circulated to shareholders in support of his salary demands. ‘If Steven Spielberg is your friend,’ said Ross, ‘you count yourself blessed.’
Spielberg, unexpectedly dapper in a white suit, appeared at the AGM to make a pitch for Ross. ‘I am here because I felt compelled that the shareholders fully appreciate the driving force behind the company’s storybook success,’ he told them. Revealing that he had resolved to work for only two companies, MCA and WCI, he promised, ‘as long as Steve Ross remains skipper of this battlewagon, I will never leave my station.’ After this, he read a similarly enthusiastic letter from Clint Eastwood. He concluded. ‘There are thousands of creative people in my home town who second everything that Clint and I have just said. We really do love Steve Ross. We think Steve Ross is WCI.’
Ross retained control. In December 1987, he would ask the Warners board to authorise granting 200,000 options on Warners stock to Spielberg and 100,000 each to Streisand and Eastwood. Enemies charged he was paying off his showbusiness friends for their support, but doing so with company funds. David Geffen was particularly annoyed at this sign that Spielberg had supplanted him in Ross’s affection.
Back in Britain, Spielberg and J.G. Ballard met at last. ‘He was nothing like the Spielberg I’d been led to believe,’ says the writer. ‘He was being presented as a sort of suburban sentimentalist, and the man I met was nothing like that. The man I met was adult, had a hard, mature mind, was very thoughtful. As far as Empire of the Sun was concerned, he cut no corners. He certainly wasn’t trying to sentimentalise the book; quite the opposite.’
Spielberg tried to involve Ballard in the production. He asked him to speak the brief resumé which opens the film, sketching in the historical background. Ballard recorded it, but another voice was used. Instead he has a fleeting appearance as a guest at the fancy-dress party in Jim’s home. Initially, Spielberg offered him a costume of Roman armour, a subtle variation on the film’s chivalric theme, but finding that it was made of plastic, Ballard chose an outfit as John Bull.
After Spielberg’s assurance during the filming of Temple of Doom that they would work together again, David Yip had been confident of a role in Empire. When no call came, he asked his agent to check with Amblin. The agent rang back with the puzzling information that they were only using ‘real Chinese’ on the film. Yip, 100 per cent Chinese, protested, but the casting director insisted that, since they were shooting in China, they would hire only locals.
Convinced he had no hope of a job, Yip was surprised to be called some weeks later and told to fly immediately to Spain.
They met me at the airport and told me they were going straight to make-up, because Steven wanted to say hello and look me over. I remember arriving on the location. There were thousands of people, and I don’t see how he could have seen me come, but he turned around and said, ‘Oh, hi, David,’ and again you feel like a million dollars. It’s an amazing gift he has. You feel instantly at home.
It was only when the costume department began fitting him that he found he was playing the man known only as The Eurasian, an opportunist who, in return for helping interrogate downed American aircrews, is rewarded with looted furniture, cars and valuables, stored in a stadium. Yip played his scenes with tongue in cheek, amused that, as one of the few Chinese among thousands of Spaniards, he alone was cast as someone of mixed blood. Perhaps his lack of conviction showed, since his entire role remained on the cutting-room floor.
Undeterred by Spielberg’s minimum fee of $1 million to produce a film, plus 10 per cent of its gross income, Hollywood offered him most of its prestigious projects during the late eighties, whether appropriate to his talents or not. The flood didn’t stop just because he was on location in Spain finishing Empire of the Sun. Peter Guber sent him Tom Wolfe’s sprawling satire of the New York financial world. The Bonfire of the Vanities. Spielberg, weary of Significance, passed on it, and it went to Brian De Palma, arguably no less unsuitable as a director.
For almost two years, Dustin Hoffman had been fiddling with a film about an idiot savant and his hip brother, based on an original script by Barry Morrow. Originally visualised as two middle-aged men, the roles had been recast, at the suggestion of Hoffman’s and Spielberg’s agent Mike Ovitz, with Hoffman and Tom Cruise now playing the brothers. While Ron Bass rewrote Morrow’s script, Martin Brest (Beverly Hills Cop) was signed to direct. By this time, however, Ovitz was having second thoughts. Brest resigned, and the script passed to Richard Price (The Color of Money) and finally Michael Bortman (The Good Mother). Ovitz asked Spielberg if he was interested in directing the film, now called Rainman. Although Spielberg acknowledged Hoffman as ‘an icon’ with whom he was ‘hungry to work’, he remained as leery of stars as ever, especially those with Hoffman’s famous indecisiveness. He met Bortman but, after reading all the scripts, decided he preferred Morrow’s original. Leaving Hoffman to develop a screenplay with his long-time collaborator Murray Schisgal, Spielberg went back to Spain. The script still wasn’t finished when he returned, and as the deadline for the start of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade approached, he dropped the project, passing his notes to eventual director Barry Levinson.
Amy joined Spielberg in Spain, but there was a nervous edge to her visits. With her promised six months’ sabbatical at an end, she was chafing to work again. ‘I tended to Max and lost out on roles to other flavours of the month,’ she complained later, ‘and I was going crazy.’ Director Joan Micklin Silver visited her in Spain with the script of Crossing Delancey, about an upwardly mobile New York Jewish girl and her romance, arranged through a marriage broker, with a pickle merchant from her old neighbourhood. Otherwise offers were thin, especially from Broadway, where her real ambitions lay.
Amy did the Silver film, but with ill grace. ‘[I had] a chip on my shoulder,’ she acknowledged. ‘I had a baby and lost my place in line.’ While she was shooting the film, she and Spielberg spent more time in the Hamptons than in Los Angeles. Spielberg was ill-at-ease, and uncomfortable with some of the new people lured to the house by Ross and Amy. Willem de Kooning, though already in the first stage of Alzheimer’s Disease, was still working, and Amy and Spielberg, along with people like Richard Dreyfuss, whose wife Jeramie – a nurse whom he’d met in his detox clinic – was now Amy’s close friend, met him and his wife Elaine at Ross’s home. Spielberg neither liked nor understood de Kooning’s work; the Hamptons house, furnished with Arts and Crafts pieces in oak, was mainly hung with folk art. De Kooning knew no more about movies. Dreyfuss once tried to explain the pressures of film-making, comparing it to painting on a railway line with a train approaching.
‘Why would you want to make films on a railway line?’ de Kooning asked.
Elaine’s biographer Lee Hall described their reaction to a Ross party at which Spielberg was also a guest.
Everything was quiet, conversation hushed, no arguments, and not much talk. At the end of the meal, they all went into a screening room and looked at a movie. Elaine was just amazed. She didn’t know that people lived like that. They were so rich, they had everything, they didn’t talk. This, to Elaine, was the strangest thing in the world. And, I think, not her idea of very much fun.
Amy loved the Hamptons, and would have been delighted to spend all her time there. Cosseting the egos of actors at Hollywood dinner parties and hiding her intellectual superiority wasn’t her style. ‘I felt like a politician’s wife,’ she said. ‘There were certain things “expected of” me that definitely weren’t me. One of my problems is that I’m very honest and direct. You pay a price for that. But then I behaved myself and I paid a price too.’ She was already looking for a way out.
Empire of the Sun, 152 minutes long, opened in December 1987. Stoppard and Ballard met for the first time at the Los Angeles premiere when they were seated one in front of the other.
‘Stoppard turned round,’ says Ballard, ‘and was shocked to find me there.’
Perhaps I should find another seat,’ Stoppard suggested diplomatically, but Ballard told him he was more than happy with his adaptation.
This was more than could be said for the public and the press. Many reviews compared the film unfavourably with Hope and Glory, John Boorman’s memoir of a British childhood in the Blitz that had an authenticity they felt Empire of the Sun lacked. ‘What surprised me,’ says J.G. Ballard, ‘and what I became aware of when I did a book tour around America before the film opened, and when I went to the premiere, was the degree of hostility of the American press towards Spielberg… Most of them seemed to have an almost knee-jerk negative reaction towards him. I remember someone saying, “Why did you allow him to film your book?” ’
Spielberg had hoped that his speech when accepting the Thalberg Award would have won him acceptance from Old Hollywood and from the critics, but it became clear during the release of Empire of the Sun that both viewed him as scornfully as ever. ‘I think Hollywood will forgive me once I’m fifty-five,’ Spielberg told Adrian Turner morosely at the National Film Theatre, London, in 1978. ‘I’m not sure what they’ll forgive me for, but when I’m fifty-five they’ll forgive me.’ In the hope of salvaging something from the disaster of his attempt at reconciliation, he backtracked on his pious statements in his acceptance speech for the Irving Thalberg. ‘Great words of great minds’ weren’t his sole interest, he insisted Plain speaking from decent folks could be equally profound. Any comments to the Academy also needed to be seen, he said, less as personal promises than exhortations to Hollywood in general. ‘I was talking about the future of the industry, and I was also talking to myself. I was sort of saying to myself, “You know, it’s time to stop balls from rolling, and spaceships from landing, and the light shows. It’s time to deal with what people say to each other when they have an emotional need to communicate.”’