‘What is it, Wendy?’ he cried again.
‘I’m old, Peter.’
J.M. Barrie. Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up
IN 1988, Tom Pollock, Lucas’s old lawyer and negotiator of their Raiders deal, became president of Universal. ‘One of the most important things I can do in this job,’ he told the press, ‘is to make sure Steven wants to work with us.’ Spielberg immediately signed to do five films for Universal. The first would be his Guy Named Joe remake, Always.
As often before when his emotional life soured, Spielberg had turned to the undemanding arms of an actress. She was Holly Hunter, the tiny (five foot two), vivacious star of Broadcast News, in which her role as the TV news editor torn between her high intellectual standards and the temptation of romance with William Hurt’s sports-reporter-turned-news-anchorman had won her an Oscar nomination, as well as both the New York and Los Angeles Film Critics’ Prizes. With her background in theatre, where she created the lead roles in a number of Beth Henley plays, including Crimes of the Heart, Hunter had more in common with Amy than some of Spielberg’s earlier actress romances – which, in the wake of the divorce, may have contributed to her appeal. The couple made no secret of their liaison, kissing and cuddling when Spielberg appeared on the TV show of British comedienne Tracy Ullmann, where he harmonised rustily with Ullmann on the Disney tune ‘It’s a Small World’. ‘Holly is the funniest, warmest, most loving girl I’ve ever met,’ he said. ‘We’ll see what tomorrow brings, but right now she’s the one for me.’ No doubt Amy got the message: Steve was doing just fine without her.
In Always, Hunter played the daughter-of-the-squadron role which had been Irene Dunne’s in the original. Victor Fleming’s A Guy Named Joe took place on US Air Force bases in wartime, a setting Spielberg initially tried to retain. After the negative reaction of British veterans to Empire of the Sun, however, he updated it to a group of aerial firefighters dumping water and fire retardant on forest blazes. Not that the differences are obvious. As John Goodman points out in the film, the airstrip in the woods with its A-26 Invaders and PBY Catalina flying boats has the air of a World War II base. All it needs to complete the picture is Glenn Miller.
The star pilot, Pete Sandich (Richard Dreyfuss), conforms to Spielberg’s model of the dysfunctional hero, obsessed with his technical proficiency but blind to the emotional needs of those close to him, in this case his girlfriend Dorinda, the base air-traffic controller. Not herself at ease in the real world, Dorinda is another Spielberg tomboy, seldom seen out of a flying suit, hopeless at cooking but well able to fly and drink along with the pilots.
Pete can joke, charm, flirt, dance and sleep with Dorinda, but not declare his love. At the beginning of his last flight, he gets the words out, but they’re drowned by his engines. A few minutes later, his plane explodes while saving his best pal, Al. If you love something too much, Spielberg seems to be saying, you will lose it.
Pete is returned to the world by a spirit guide named Hap. The first idea had been to have Dreyfuss wake up on a basketball court in a burned-out forest, shooting baskets with a long-dead uncle. The forest remained, but Hap became Audrey Hepburn, who gives Dreyfuss a haircut and some sisterly advice. Afterwards, they stroll through a field of grain – already, wrote critic Quentin Curtis, ‘wading in corn’.
Pete’s role, she explains, is to shepherd Dorinda through her grief and into the arms of his fated replacement, a hunk named Ted. Initially unable to wrench free of his feelings, Pete does what he can to impede the romance – little enough, since he is both inaudible and invisible to the living. He can only communicate by transferring vague hints or feelings, or through mediums like an old hermit whom Ted meets when he makes an emergency landing at an abandoned rural airport.
After bumbling about, doing more harm than good, Pete returns to Hap for clarification. She then explains he was mainly supposed to say goodbye to a pining Dorinda – difficult for someone in his incorporeal state. Still later, he receives yet another explanation: that he’d been sent back solely to rescue her when her plane crashes at the climax. The original script ended on the basketball court, with Pete, duty done, inducting yet another new arrival into his imprecise duties in the hereafter. In the released version, he simply fades away, much as the film was to do.
The vividness of the impression left by Roberts Blossom as the hermit at the airfield emphasises the vacuum at the heart of Always. Characters at the periphery make the greatest impact, like Marg Helgenberger as Rachel, the good-natured mechanic doomed to play second string to Dorinda, and John Goodman’s Al Yackey, a performance of extraordinary physicality by this winning comic. By contrast, former rodeo rider Brad Johnson, in Dorinda’s words ‘all twisted steel and sex appeal’, plays Ted with charm school ineffectiveness. Nothing, from putting him in spectacles to having him resuscitate a stricken bus driver, can redeem his Chippendale/Wonderbread blandness.
The little that does work in Always is visual: the opening shot, of two drowsy fishermen on a lake diving in terror from their boat as a PBY appears out of nowhere to gulp a new load of water; the base bachelors, in a homage to John Ford’s They Were Expendable, paying awed court to Dorinda when she descends in her new ‘girl clothes’; Al being clumsily strafed by Ted with retardant as he watches student pilot practice from under an umbrella on a bluff; the incident at the abandoned airfield, where Pete’s telepathic transmissions, garbled by Roberts Blossom, are fed back as exhortations to Ted to do just what Pete least wants him to do – return to the base, and Dorinda.
Pete reluctantly learns to say goodbye at the end of Always, but in ambiguous terms. As a sop to equality of the sexes, Dorinda (rather than Ted, as in the original) flies the final heroic mission, saving a group of firefighters (changed from the children of earlier versions) by water-bombing their way to safety. But a ghostly Pete remains with her in the cockpit, and it’s he who forces her to save herself when she ditches in a lake. He’s cut her loose, but only after proving she can’t survive without him.
Spielberg had intended Dorinda to go off with Ted at the end of the film, but on the basis of Brad Johnson’s tepid performance, not to mention the continuing bond with Pete which the script is unable to sever, his role in Dorinda’s future was downgraded from lifetime love to brief diversion, not unlike Hunter’s own relationship with Spielberg.
While the publicity sold Always as a ‘romantic fantasy’, its emotional tone is sombre, appropriate to a man in retreat from a damaging emotional experience. Spielberg said that Pete’s presence as an unheard, unseen figure in the middle of emotional incidents reflected his own isolation as a child, when he watched his parents failing to communicate. The original had, he said, been only the second film, after Bambi, to move him to tears. A Guy Named Joe, he remembered, ‘taught me how to make love to a woman [and] stuck with me all those years, and when I grew up and was short of girlfriends I used to think about it.’ Given the sexual jealousy, impotence and isolation which pervade Always, however, it’s more likely that Spielberg was replaying the last painful months of his marriage.
Reviewing A Guy Named Joe, in which Irene Dunne retains a comradely distance from Ted, played by Van Johnson, critic James Agee isolated the most disturbing element of the story, but agreed that, given the sexual innocence of forties Hollywood, it couldn’t be shown. ‘Pete and the audience are spared what might have happened if she had really got either frozen or tender with Mr Johnson, while Pete looked on,’ he says. Amplifying this in a later review, he reflected that as ‘the jealousy of a living lover for a dead man made one of Joyce’s finest stories [i.e. ‘The Dead’, in Dubliners], the emotions a ghost might feel who watched a living man woo and cajole his former mistress seem just as promising to me… but to make such a film – above all at such a time as this – would require extraordinary taste, honesty and courage.’
Always circles this thorny theme, but loses its nerve. Spielberg has Pete watch in disbelief as the undomestic Dorinda fakes a home-cooked dinner for Ted, sees her resistance begin to crumble as Ted inveigles her into dancing, and agonises when they kiss, but at the last moment ‘their’ song oozes out on the stereo, and the moment passes in which he might have had to watch them make love. That night, Pete lies alert and adoring beside a sleeping Dorinda and pledges eternal but sexless love, like an Arthurian knight, while she composes shopping lists in her dreams. Is this Spielberg’s vision of the perfect domestic relationship – with the sexes simply reversed?
At the National Jamboree in Arlington, Virginia, Spielberg, once a fumbling Boy Scout, was presented with the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award by the National Council of the Boy Scouts of America, which had recently, inspired by him, instituted a cinematography merit badge. ‘It was the highlight of 1989 for me,’ he said. ‘The best memory from the entire year.’
The rest was depressing. Always was sickly from the start, in need of constant doctoring. Ninety-four-year-old composer Irving Berlin refused permisssion for his song ‘Always’ to be used as a theme. He ‘had plans’ for it, he said. Director Henry Jaglom also chose the same title for his low-budget comedy of a reconciliation with his ex-wife which would be released the same year. Spielberg contemplated calling his film ‘I’ll be Seeing You’, since he was now thinking of this forties ballad as Pete and Dorinda’s special song. Poor reaction at previews persuaded him, however, that the tune dated the story too much. He kept Always as his title but replaced the song with ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, which The Platters had revived and turned into a hit in 1959, the year he made his first boyhood film.
Always opened on 22 December to tepid reviews which made Tom Pollock wonder if his early faith in Spielberg was misplaced. It also inaugurated his tenure as boss of Universal on a low note. Things weren’t to improve. Traits like sharing the lifestyle of the film-makers he’d once represented by living out of town and commuting to the studios in a van fitted with the latest in information technology, a travelling ‘electronic cottage’, marked Pollock in some eyes as trivial and indecisive. Even though he was technically in charge of production, Universal remained the studio of Lew Wasserman and Sid Sheinberg, now Hollywood’s senior statesmen and major international players in the changing world of media.
If only because it was a Pollock project, nobody was in a hurry to embrace Always. When it was chosen for the Royal Command Performance in London in March 1990, Spielberg, Dreyfuss, Hunter and Goodman all pleaded pressing commitments elsewhere. Pollock and Brad Johnson were left to carry the can with Her Majesty in what one British paper called ‘an unprecedented snub to the Queen’ but which was more a rebuke by Hollywood of Pollock and his administration.
Spielberg had other things on his mind. The romance with Holly Hunter which had complicated the shooting of Always – after being coached a dozen times in a kiss, Dreyfuss acidly suggested to Spielberg that he demonstrate what he had in mind – didn’t survive post-production, and by the start of 1990 he was back with Kate Capshaw. During their separation she had adopted Theo, an African-American boy, and by March she was pregnant with Spielberg’s first daughter, Sasha, and undergoing instruction prior to being converted to the Jewish religion. There was no more public discussion of money. Whatever arrangements had been made remained blessedly private.
It must have seemed to Spielberg that everybody was making a movie but himself. Kate had achieved her most effective role to date opposite Michael Douglas in Ridley Scott’s Black Rain, playing a Tokyo bar hostess, a characterisation of icy control. Frank Marshall, who’d cut his teeth shooting second unit for many Spielberg films, was directing the thriller Arachnophobia, for which Spielberg acted as executive producer and also filmed some sequences. Early in 1991, Marshall officially and amicably left Amblin, leaving Kathleen Kennedy behind in the newly-created job of head of production. It was understood she would follow him to their new company.
Another neophyte director, Tom Stoppard, was filming Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in Yugoslavia. Sean Connery had bought himself out of the role of the Player King the year before following a throat cancer scare, and Richard Dreyfuss replaced him. Stoppard and Spielberg were now friendly enough for Stoppard to ring him when he had a tricky directing problem.
Brian De Palma was shooting Bonfire of the Vanities, a project about which Spielberg continued to have doubts. Hollywood executives in general were in no hurry to censure corporate sharks, who were, in some cases, their friends or at least business acquaintances. Spielberg visited De Palma on the set a number of times, leading to some embarrassing moments that underlined their relative standing in Hollywood. The Warners restaurant was closed to De Palma when he tried to order a late breakfast, then abruptly open again once the manager glimpsed his companion, Spielberg. When the film was finished, it was rumoured that Warners had asked Spielberg to re-edit it in secret.
On 8 March, Spielberg and De Palma attended the banquet at which the American Film Institute presented its Lifetime Achievement Award to David Lean. For once the recipient was not, as Hitchcock and John Ford had been, so ill that he could barely do more than acknowledge the applause. Instead a testy Lean lashed out at the assembled film-makers for producing rubbish, and sequels to rubbish. Spielberg, as producer of Back to the Future 1, 2 and, eventually, 3, and Gremlins 1 and 2, had more reason to reproach himself than most, but he joined vigorously in the standing ovation.
A number of projects were announced as Spielberg’s ‘next film’. Dawn Steel, now an independent producer, did a deal to remake La Fracture du Myocarde, a French film by Jacques Fansten, as Cross My Heart. The plot, about a boy who covers up his mother’s death for fear of being sent to an orphanage, seemed flimsy, but Universal, TriStar and Disney all made offers on the back of a rumour that Spielberg wanted to direct a ‘little’ movie. With his sister Anne, he discussed a film with a theme close to home. He said:
It’s about a brother and sister growing up, and it’s really about when a brother and sister reunite after many years of estrangement and try to make up those lost years in the forties – the years they lost in their twenties… I think it’s a bittersweet film. It’s probably the closest my sister and I both have come to talking much about each other and then making that public, which is always embarrassing.
Two more ideas came from Michael Crichton. Both he and Spielberg shared a dislike of anodyne medical shows – Spielberg since his days directing Marcus Welby and The Psychiatrist at Universal. Crichton proposed a hard-hitting super-soap set in the Emergency Room of a big-city hospital. Spielberg was tempted, and E.R. remained with Amblin, from which it emerged in the 1995 TV season as a hit NBC series.
‘We were talking about changes [to E.R.] in my office one day,’ says Spielberg, ‘and I happened to ask [Crichton] what he was working on… He said he had just finished a book about dinosaurs, called Jurassic Park.’
The idea of genetically engineered dinosaurs had been with Crichton since 1981, when he’d tried to write a screenplay on the subject. In the intervening years, other writers had picked up on the growing evidence that dinosaurs weren’t the ancestors of our reptiles, cold-blooded and slow-moving, but fast, hot-blooded precursors of birds. In particular, the 1984 novel Carnosaur by John Brosnan, writing as Harry Adam Knight, explored the idea so effectively that Roger Corman zoomed in ahead of Spielberg with a 1992 movie version.
Crichton had revived his script again in 1989 while his wife was pregnant and he, like many expectant fathers, began to stockpile stuffed toys. Some of those he bought were dinosaurs, which resonated with memories of a speculation by George Poinar, of the University of California’s College of Natural Resources in Berkeley, that dinosaur DNA might be recovered from the bellies of mosquitoes preserved in amber. The screenplay quickly metamorphosed into Jurassic Park.
‘You know,’ Spielberg said, ‘I’ve had a fascination with dinosaurs all my life, and I’d really love to read it.’ He read the proofs, was as gripped by the story as millions would be when the novel was published in 1990, and offered to buy the movie rights for Jurassic Park before Crichton’s agents put it out for competitive bidding.
‘I’ll give it to you if you guarantee me that you’ll direct the picture,’ Crichton said.
Spielberg stalled. Even so persuasive a concept as cloning dinosaurs and turning an island off the coast of Costa Rica into a prehistoric theme park posed fundamental problems for him, most particularly in the character of John Hammond, the eccentric entrepreneur who floats the project.
In part, Hammond was inspired by Crichton seeing Fantasia again, and reflecting on the contradictory character of its maker. ‘Where’s the other side?’ he asked himself. ‘The evil Walt Disney?’ Hammond is his answer, a reckless obsessive determined, as was Disney, to impose his child-like vision of nature on the world. Crichton’s dinosaurs are extensions of Hammond’s twisted psyche. But Spielberg was himself too much a product of Disney to see dinosaurs as the poisoned creations of an unhinged mind. He preferred them to be simply behaving naturally when they turned on their keepers. ‘Animals do what these animals do,’ he argued. It was permissible for Hammond to be misguided, but he shouldn’t be evil.
There were other problems in adapting the novel to the screen. A cliffhanging plot – will escaped velociraptors make it to the mainland and rampage across the world? – and some stock characters, in particularly Hammond’s grandchildren, the boy a talky computer nerd, the girl an obnoxious whiner, always sneezing or screaming at the wrong time, betrayed the book’s screenplay origins. However, in the relationship between his central characters, Grant, the middle-aged palaeontologist, and his assistant Ellie Sattler, Crichton had played against formula, making them colleagues with no sexual interest in one another – a problem for Hollywood, which still demanded a clinch at the finale. Other drawbacks included the book’s lengthy polemic against uncontrolled genetic engineering, most of it articulated by mathematician and chaos theoretician Ian Malcolm, who exists mainly for this purpose. If the film was to inveigh against genetic pollution, it would have to do so in action and images, not words.
While Spielberg procrastinated, Crichton’s agents put the book out to other companies, fanning their ardour by dropping the fact that Spielberg was also interested. Fox bid, thinking of it for Joe Dante. Warners saw it as a Tim Burton him, and Sony thought it would suit Richard Donner. But Sid Sheinberg, convinced it was a natural Spielberg project even if Spielberg was not, snapped it up for $2 million, with an additional $500,000 to Crichton for a first-draft script.
Spielberg’s interest in Jurassic Park was complicated by the continued presence of Schindler’s Ark in the wings. It had been in preparation for eight years, and people were getting testy, not least the book’s author. Thomas Keneally had already agreed to rename the book Schindler’s List to satisfy his nervous American publishers, Simon and Schuster, who felt the word ‘ark’ might be taken as a suggestion that Hitler’s victims had connived at their destruction by meekly ‘going in, two by two’ to the ovens. Now he was wondering what had happened to the film. Encountering journalist Richard Brooks on a plane en route to interview Spielberg, he snarled, ‘Steven Spielberg, eh? Well, tell him I’d like to know what is happening to my script. He asked me to do a film script ages ago, but I never get an answer from him or anyone else in Hollywood. It’s infuriating.’
There had been many times during the eight years when Spielberg would have been happy to be rid of the project. Periodically Poldeck Pfefferberg, who first got Keneally interested in Schindler, would ring Spielberg from his bag shop. ‘I’m seventy-four years old,’ he complained. ‘I’m not getting any younger.’ In 1985 the Polish government sent an envoy to Spielberg to ask when shooting would start, and offering its assistance. Unlike Warsaw, Krakow had not been razed by the Nazis, the representative explained. Schindler’s factory still stood. So did his home. And though a monument had been erected on the site of the Plaszow camp, there was an identical quarry just half a mile away…
All this was acutely embarrassing. Spielberg had visited Poland and gone to all the sites of the story, but still he wasn’t ready. Among other problems, Keneally’s screenplay, even after two drafts, didn’t work. If ever two people were on different wavelengths, it was Spielberg and the Australian-Irish-Catholic Keneally, who employed a Jesuitical equivocation in damning the director with faint praise.
The screenplay compared to a novel is like a comic strip. But I don’t use the term pejoratively… We poor benighted novelists like to think that people who gross so much per day, like Spielberg, have to have an ultimately vulgar imagination. But I don’t think that’s the truth. Spielberg told me he saw Schindler as the third little pig in the Three Little Pigs story. Now, in a way, that’s a laughable image, but in another way it’s a grand focusing. It’s not a bad image to write from, to pare down the complexity of a life like Schindler’s to the clarity of a hundred-minute script. But I thought to myself: ‘That’s why you, Spielberg, are such a success – because in popular culture you’re able to reduce everything to a fundamental one-line piece of mythology.’
In desperation, Spielberg offered the project to Sydney Pollack, who asked Tom Stoppard to write a script. But Stoppard passed. Tom Pollock then tried Kurt Luedtke, the Oscar-winning adapter of Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa. As a German, he might clarify the elusive character of Schindler. Luedtke spent four years on the project, but never got past the first act, unable to explain why Schindler, the cynical womaniser and rampant capitalist, had decided, literally overnight, to exhaust his fortune and energy on saving his workers. The failure deeply upset Luedtke and left Spielberg in despair. If so respected a writer couldn’t ‘lick the story’, perhaps nobody could.
Later, Martin Scorsese became interested in Schindler. For a time it seemed to Spielberg that having Scorsese make the Elm as an Amblin production would solve all his problems. He’d see it on the screen, but without the frustration and possible failure of doing it himself. Stuck in bed with ’flu, he read the book again and underlined all the passages he felt essential. After discussing the changes with Keneally, who had taken a Californian teaching position, Spielberg sent the marked copy, at Robert de Niro’s suggestion, to Steven Zaillian, who’d adapted Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings. Penny Marshall had made a sentimental but successful film from the script about a catatonic brought back to consciousness by a miracle drug, only to slip back again into coma. In the film, de Niro and Robin Williams had done little to address the moral complexities of using this medication, nor to plumb the character of Sacks, whom Williams showed as a genial nerd. All the same, Zaillian had at least succeeded in turning an uncinematic subject with unglamorous characters into a hit movie, so perhaps he could also resolve the questions raised by Schindler’s List. The two of them took a trip to Poland together, and Zaillian started work.
By this time, Spielberg’s imagination had been caught by plans for a remake for Universal of another adolescent enthusiasm, J. Lee Thompson’s 1962 movie Cape Fear, about an ex-convict revenging himself on the small-town judge who had railroaded him into prison. Robert Mitchum had been an emblem of silent malevolence, every father’s nightmare, and the ending, where Gregory Peck takes the law into his own hands, impressed Spielberg powerfully.
Wesley Strick had written an interesting screenplay, and when de Niro showed some interest in playing the villain, Spielberg’s instincts as a producer overrode his normal territoriality. Strick and Spielberg went to New York to talk to de Niro. ‘He seemed interested,’ said Strick, ‘though he hadn’t really committed. He got Marty [Scorsese] involved. He and Steven together sort of twisted Marty’s arm – relentlessly, from what I gather. In fact, they staged a reading of the script in New York, for Marty’s benefit, which I attended.’ Spielberg relinquished Cape Fear to Scorsese and de Niro, but not before extracting their promise that the judge’s family would survive the film, giving Universal that sine qua non of box-office success, a happy ending. Scorsese reassured him they’d live. ‘Well, then you can have anything you want up to that point,’ Spielberg said.
With Scorsese now working on Cape Fear, Spielberg found himself with Schindler’s List once again on his desk. He discussed it as a possible next film with Tom Pollock, but Universal was in no hurry to back another Empire of the Sun. The market had also been bombarded with World War II films like Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance mini-series, the controversial Holocaust, Sophie’s Choice and Claude Lanzmann’s monumental documentary of the Holocaust, Shoah, which was to leave an indelible impression on the eventual film of Schindler’s List.
Many people also felt there were better directors to film the book. Billy Wilder made a pitch, citing his impeccable credentials: he’d fled Berlin in 1933. ‘He made me look very deeply inside myself when he was so passionate to do this,’ Spielberg said. ‘In a way, he tested my resolve.’ Fred Schepisi, Australian director of Roxanne and Plenty, well-oiled at a party, also told Spielberg he was ‘the worst person to direct this film’ ‘You’ll fuck it up,’ he said, ‘because you’re too good with the camera.’
‘He was right,’ Spielberg acknowledges, ‘quite right, but he inspired me to do the film myself, the way I ended up doing it.’
While Sony basked in the honeymoon of its marriage to Columbia, Mike Ovitz brokered a similar deal in mid–1990 for Matsushita to buy MCA/Universal for $6.6 billion. The sale left Wasserman and Sheinberg fabulously rich – Wasserman collected $327 million, Sheinberg $120 million – but still in charge of the studio, under Matsushita management. Out of loyalty to Sheinberg, who had been deeply humiliated when his eldest son Jonathan, himself a producer, blabbed about the deal to friends, bringing charges of insider trading from the Securities and Exchange Commission, Spielberg, increasingly regarded in the business as Sheinberg’s surrogate son, soft-pedalled his opposition to the red sun rising above Hollywood’s horizon. ‘We can be jealous of the Japanese,’ he said, but we’ve got to give them credit for turning out great cars and great entertainment tools like VCRs and television sets.’ They were also pioneers of high-definition TV, which he saw as the wave of the future. The Matsushita sale, however, was to prove a disastrous misalliance. Wasserman and Sheinberg continued to act as if they still owned Universal, sniping periodically at Matsushita, which swiftly decided it had been sold a pup and began looking for ways to get out.
Over on the old Columbia lot, Sony had not yet lost its optimism. At the end of 1990, Ovitz approached Spielberg with an offer. Akio Morita was anxious to launch his new studio with a lavish vehicle for Christmas 1991. Paramount’s Peter Pan project, so loaded with turnaround costs that no studio would touch it, had drifted for years. Now at last someone could see a reason for taking it on. Ovitz proposed it to Spielberg as the first big Sony film. Money, he implied, was no object, and he could take his pick of CAA’s clients for the cast.
After five meagre years, the prospect of a near-guaranteed hit tempted Spielberg. And there was no doubting that Sony was prepared to pay. Having spent $100 million on refurbishing Burbank, tens of millions more were being invested in films like Hudson Hawk, Bugsy and Geronimo, all doomed to be expensive flops. While Jon Peters sent empty Falcon jets to London at $30,000 a time to pick up his girlfriend, and gave her and his ex-wife executive positions, Peter Guber was also trying to drum up interest in a Sonyland theme park.
The trough beckoned, but still Spielberg was uneasy. Though Guber and Peters were the creative force at Columbia Sony, studio management was in the hands of his least favourite executive, Frank Price. Ovitz reassured him: the film could be produced though Columbia’s sister company TriStar, now run by Spielberg’s old friend and ex-agent Mike Medavoy.
The subject of Peter Pan troubled him too. He had grown up with the fable of the boy who wouldn’t grow up. To many, it seemed the central metaphor of his life and career. For twenty years, he evoked it – in E.T., Kick the Can from The Twilight Zone, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Empire of the Sun. He had worked actively on the Michael Jackson version, then Stoppard’s.
Now, however, as the chance came to make it, he hesitated. As he’d said in 1988, he no longer felt an identification with Pan or his milieu. He also found the character difficult to focus on. Peter’s sexlessness, which had led to him usually being played on stage by women (and which probably underlaid the character’s appeal to Michael Jackson), posed problems of identification. Asked point-blank if he was Peter Pan, Spielberg replied, ‘No, no. I think my mom is the quintessential Peter Pan. She even looks like him. Seriously.’
Despite the sanitised versions made by Disney and presented on stage as Christmas pantomime fare, Peter Pan was fraught with problems. New biographies had revealed Barrie as sexually impotent and obsessed with his mother. He may even have tried to stunt his growth in order to remain as child-like as possible. Peter Pan, which he wrote in 1904, is a minefield of psychosexual obsessions.
In the original play, Peter is a little London boy who escapes from the real world the day he’s born and hides in Never Never Land, an island inhabited by fairies and children who died at birth or who have fallen out of their prams and been forgotten by their nannies. The boys live in a tree-house, all sleep in the same bed and dress in the skins of bears. Protected by his friends the Picanniny Indians, and helped by the fairy Tinkerbell, Peter leads them in battles against the pirate Captain Hook.
Occasionally he returns to London where, disconsolate that his parents have forgotten him, he makes friends with Wendy Darling and her two younger brothers, luring Wendy back to Never Never Land to become his and the Lost Boys’ mother. Wanting a mother too, Hook and his pirates kidnap Wendy. Peter rescues her, and in despair Hook throws himself into the sea. A crocodile bites off his hand and thereafter follows him, hungry for the rest. Wendy returns every day – a year to her – to clean Peter’s house, tuck the boys in and tell them bedtime stories. But as she matures, she can no longer communicate with Peter. Some of the boys return with her to London, grow up and forget Never Never Land. Peter however remains locked in his fantasy, an enduring metaphor of the flight from adult reality.
Barrie continued to embroider the story until his death in 1937, turning it into a novel in 1911 and even a film script for Paramount, never shot. Never Never Land’ was shortened to ‘Neverland’, and Peter became progressively more bloodthirsty. He killed fourteen pirates, cut off Hook’s hand and fed it to the crocodile, which had swallowed a clock and thus gave warning of its approach. In recompense, Hook, the character with whom Barrie himself identified, and whom he played in charade versions of the story, was given a loveable sidekick named Smee.
Hollywood finally ‘licked’ Peter Pan by transforming it into an entirely different story.
In the early eighties, the young son of neophyte screenwriter James V. Hart had asked, ‘Dad, did Peter Pan ever grow up?’
‘Yes,’ thought Hart. ‘Peter Pan did grow up. We all did. We all ended our childhood, we became lawyers, bankers, movie producers, moguls, accountants. Wall Street bankers. We stopped believing in those things we believed in as children. An hour later we had our story.’
Hart visualised the adult Peter as Peter Banning, a tycoon in thrall to his mobile phone, taking calls in the middle of his daughter’s school play (Peter Pan, of course) and too busy to make his son’s Little League final, where he misses the crucial score. His life as Pan is totally forgotten.
Wendy is a nonagenarian philanthropist still sheltering an aged Tootles, one of the rescued Lost Boys, who has never recovered from the loss of Neverland. When Hook hears Banning is in London to attend a banquet in her honour, he kidnaps his son and daughter, determined to lure him back to his childhood haunt for a showdown.
In Peter’s absence, the pirates have swelled to a mob, while the Boys have developed into a multi-ethnic tribe run by ‘The Pan’, at the moment a skateboarding New York street kid named Rufio. With Tinkerbell’s help, Banning relearns the skills of imagination that allow him to fly, takes over the tribe and rescues his kids from Hook, who has almost seduced Banning’s son over to his side.
Hart sold the script to director Nick Castle, whose major credit was The Lost Starfighter. Castle took it to producers Craig Baumgarten and Gary Adelson. Once Spielberg showed some interest, however. Castle was out, and the script quickly passed to Sony and CAA, where Dustin Hoffman read it, and further changed the emphasis by playing down Peter’s role and building up the one on which he had his eye – Captain James Hook. Spielberg, claiming that he knew nothing of Castle’s involvement, and that he was ‘horrified’ to discover it, left Medavoy to cut a deal that defined ownership and cleared the air. In a complex trade-off, TriStar bought everyone’s rights, including those of the Great Ormond Street Hospital’s nominee producer, Dodi Fayed. Baumgarten, Adelson, Fayed and Hart (who gets co-screenplay and co-story credit) are all listed as ‘executive producers’ on the complete film, now called Hook. Castle was fobbed off with joint credit for original story.
Sony and Ovitz welcomed the new high-concept Hook, and in particular its scope, worthy of a great zaibatsu. ‘we got Spielberg!’ exulted Peter Guber. ‘That’s like being blessed by the Pope.’ He was right to be confident. One investment house estimated Hook must gross $200 million to make a profit, but given the advance video and broadcast TV sales, merchandising profits, foreign sales and exhibitors’ guarantees, Hook would, like many Spielberg films, be in the black before shooting started. Even if he never finished it, insurance would cover Columbia’s loss. It was every studio head’s dream, the sure thing.
At the end of 1990 Sony announced its multi-star cast: Robin Williams as Peter, Julia Roberts as Tinkerbell, and of course Hoffman as Hook. Only Sir Richard Attenborough evaded Spielberg: he was too busy directing Chaplin to play Tootles. Michael Jackson no longer figured in the equation, nor did John Williams’s songs, though a couple crept into the film, along with echoes of Jackson in the character of Rufio, genetically Hispanic/black/punk.
Richard Dreyfuss offered to play Smee, but Spielberg was too canny to allow two such giant egos as Dreyfuss and Hoffman in the same scenes, and chose Bob Hoskins from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Asked if he was chagrined, Dreyfuss snarled, ‘I’m not just jealous of Hoskins. I’m even jealous of Julia Roberts as Tinkerbell.’
After seeing her in Lean’s A Passage to India, Spielberg cast eighty-four-year-old Dame Peggy Ashcroft as Wendy. When she had to pull out because of back trouble, Frank Marshall asked costume designer Anthony Powell, then in New York for Hoffman’s fittings, to suggest someone.
‘How about Maggie Smith?’ Powell said, loyally proposing a friend, and letting it drop in passing that she’d played Peter on stage in 1973. ‘How old is she now?’ Marshall asked.
‘Oh, I dunno,’ waffled Powell. ‘She must be in her early nineties now. Ninety-one… ninety-two.’
Smith got the role, and was more than credible in it. She was fifty-eight at the time.
Above anything, Hook needed to be big. ‘We all have expectations for Neverland,’ Spielberg said, ‘so we needed to put our heads together to create a Neverland that you could believe in, that would look like Neverland and not just Laguna Beach.’ Eventually he decided this could only be achieved by creating the entire fantasy element of the film on sets: except for the opening sequences in California, all of Hook takes place inside.
The budget was set around $40 million, most of which Spielberg, Hoffman and Williams would cream under the deal crafted by Ovitz which gave them 40 per cent of the film’s gross income. Julia Roberts worked for a flat – and fat – $2.5 million. Great Ormond Street Hospital received $300,000, plus net- not gross – points, which, under the system of ‘rolling breaks’, was tantamount to nothing at all. ‘We don’t expect it to make millions,’ the hospital administrator agreed phlegmatically.
The sets were by Brazil’s Norman Garwood, with the aid of ‘visual consultant’ John Napier, suggested to Spielberg by David Geffen. Napier designed the 1982 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Peter Pan and also conceived the eye-filling staging for Nicholas Nickleby, Cats, Les Misérables and Miss Saigon. The practical solidity of his sets brings the film closer to stage than screen, but it’s more like a Disneyland ride than either. A skateboard track winds through the tree-house of the Lost Boys, which is riddled with secret panels and tunnels, as is the pirate headquarters. A complex of galleons, docks, store-rooms and Hook’s sumptuous apartment, it’s a Victorian stage entrepreneur’s wet dream of trapdoors and reversible staircases.
Hook spilled over nine stages at Culver City, including, to Spielberg’s great pleasure. Stage Twenty-Seven, where the Emerald City scenes of The Wizard Of Oz had been shot. There simply weren’t enough performers to fill this vast space, so the pirate crew swelled with 150 extras drawn from the roughest end of Hollywood (and corralled separately from the high-priced talent when not on camera), and augmented still further with well-disguised cameos: Quincy Jones, rock musician David Crosby, even Glenn Close, lost in an impenetrable beard. In the London scenes, Phil Collins did a brief bit as a policeman.
Once Spielberg took on Hook, the script was further rewritten by his informal advisers. ‘Steven tends to use writers like paintbrushes,’ says James Hart. ‘He wants this writer for this, this writer for that.’ Carrie Fisher was credited with Tinkerbell’s feisty dialogue, which turned the fairy into an improbably jealous suitor for Peter. In the most embarrassing scene of an often profoundly shame-making film, Tink magics herself to full size, slips into a Barbie-doll ball dress and makes a pass at her old playmate. Robin Williams, a sexless performer on screen, normally expresses his enthusiasms for women, as for everything else, in a flood of improvised comedy. He should have responded with an extended riff on this abrupt and deeply, if unintentionally, comic transformation. Instead, as through the rest of the film, he stands dumbfounded, then retires in dismay. Spielberg admits that suppressing Williams’s comic invention was a fundamental error. ‘I should have released Robin and let him go wildly in all directions. I contained Robin.’
One result of reining in Williams was to give Hoffman’s devil all the best tunes. Once the film got going, the actor employed Malia Scotch Marmo, whose script for Lasse Hallström’s Once Around with Dreyfuss and Holly Hunter was highly regarded, to rewrite Hook, whom he visualised as a bucktoothed Boston Brahmin with overtones of right-wing commentator William Buckley Jr. Some people compared his accent and style to a mix of Ronald Colman and James Mason, others to British comic Terry-Thomas. Critic Michael Coveney saw the ‘gap-toothed, laboriously posh-vowelled rollicking swordsman with a gleaming silver mitt’ as ‘the ultimate cultural revenge on generations of English actors both flaunting their educated manners in Hollywood and adopting phoney American accents on the stage’, but it’s more likely that Hoffman, not for the first time, let his imagination get out of hand. The character he hung on Hook was the greasiest kind of ham.
Nothing about Hook was cheap and, since Sony seemed anxious to make their debut as splashy as possible, the cost continued to climb until it hovered around $75 million. There were no special disasters – simply the gradual erosion of a budget under the trickle of second thoughts. The sole major glitch was occasioned by Julia Roberts. As shooting approached, the star, who’d just had her biggest hit as an improbably innocent prostitute in Pretty Woman, collapsed from ‘exhaustion’. Abruptly calling off her marriage to actor Kiefer Sutherland, she flew to Ireland to see her new lover (and Sutherland’s former best friend) Jason Patric. Spielberg contemplated filling the role with Kim Basinger or Michelle Pfeiffer, but Roberts finally reported for work. Since her contract had run out, however, Sony negotiated a new deal for $75,000 a day, and left the insurance companies to wrangle over who paid. Roberts did most of her scenes against a blue screen, which allowed them to be slotted into the film later by the special-effects wizards at ILM. A special make-up man was paid ₤2000 simply to keep her feet clean.
Hook, though technically a closed set, was the production to visit. Akio Morita toured the stages with his entourage, and was impressed, but painter David Hockney found the project grotesque, a creation without style, without imagination, that traded on sheer size. The exercise of technique in a vacuum produced nothing. Zero multiplied by seventy million remained zero.
Even Spielberg began to doubt. Each day he came on the set, he faced the nagging question, ‘Is this flying out of control?’ The year before, Jeffrey Katzenberg had circulated a twenty-eight-page memo to his staff at Disney suggesting it was time to ‘blaze a path away from unreasonable salaries and participation deals’. Made in the shadow of scandals that racked American business, the film looked like being a valedictory for an era of Hollywood excess now ended. ‘Maybe Hook is going to be the last show I put on,’ Spielberg mused. ‘A lot of my movies in the future are going to have to scale down.’
Not even this personal caveat prepared him for the miserable reviews Hook earned when it opened in 2197 theatres across the country for Christmas 1991. It grossed $14 million on its first weekend – not enough for a film that, if one took the costs of publicity and distribution into account, needed to make $200 million to break even. ‘It has to rake in another $14 million this weekend,’ said one exhibitor morosely. ‘If it doesn’t, there’s a big problem.’
Variety found the film ‘messy and undisciplined’, while loyally pointing out that it ‘splashes every bit of its megabudget… onto the screen’. Exhibitors who’d paid a fortune were assured ‘major hit status seems guaranteed’. Less partial critics were more savage. Many compared the him to the glutinous Technicolor confections the Lost Boys dream up to throw at one another, or a giant frosted cake that induced sugar shock. ‘By the time this overstuffed epic comes to its conclusion,’ said Newsweek, ‘you feel like you’ve been watching the dance of an eight-hundred-pound elf.’ Others were reminded of an amusement park ride. ‘Peel away the expensive special-effects surface and there’s nothing but formula,’ wrote the Washington Post. For once, Spielberg ignored his rule and read the critics. ‘Steven took it hard,’ says one insider. ‘Even my kids took it hard.’
In the self-critical moral climate that followed the junk-bond scandals of Wall Street, the ultimate responsibility for Hook’s failure was much-discussed. Many took the obvious route of blaming Spielberg for parading his pre-adolescent fantasies in public, but if there is a genuinely collaborative film in his career, an affirmation of his faith in consensus, it’s Hook. He had refused the cup half a dozen times, but someone always passed it back. And once he accepted its particular mix of stars, money and expectation, the project assumed a life of its own over which he had little control.
He could console himself that the film, as anticipated, at least covered its costs on worldwide release. By early 1994 it had made $119.7 million in domestic rentals and $179.8 million overseas – respectable figures, but disappointing in the light of the original high hopes. It was nominated for five Oscars, all technical, but won none. Analysts had been almost hoping it would fail, as a corrective to the inflation that was driving production costs into the stratosphere. ‘What the industry needs,’ said one expert, Mark Manson of the investment house Donaldson Lufkin and Jenrette, while the film was still shooting, ‘is for Hook to bomb so Sony can say “That’s enough; we’re not going to do this any more.”’
The failure did colour the company’s relations with Hollywood, but not enough to drive them out. For the next four years Sony haemorrhaged money and credibility as it struggled in a business determined to exclude it. In 1993 it plunged $124 million in the red on Lost Action Hero, an Arnold Schwarzenegger adventure which they’d hoped would save the film division. When it didn’t, they began to negotiate to get out. Another foreigner had been put in his place – and Spielberg, in a roundabout way, was responsible.