Once again, Steven is surrounded by sharks and dinosaurs.
Tom Hanks, of the audience at the presentation of Spielberg’s American Film Institute Award for Cinematic Achievement, 4 March 1995
SPIELBERG WORE his honours lightly. The day after the 1995 Oscar ceremony, he was on line with Robin Williams, playing the video wargame Syndicate and hotly debating with him its merits in graphics and sound. The achievement of his greatest dream left him empty. ‘I have no idea what to do next,’ he said, ‘and, more important, I don’t care.’ He’d promised Kate to take a year’s holiday from directing, a break which, considering his personal fortune, estimated at $450 million, he could well afford. With Wasserman and Sheinberg, he visited the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Watching him stroll by, surrounded by the MCA retinue, a young game-player murmured to his friend, ‘Look, it’s God.’
During his year’s break, Spielberg had time to survey his future in a changing business. Hollywood politics were replicating those of the world at large. As blocs crumbled and great nations lost influence, smaller ones tried to seize power. MGM was gone, Columbia belonged to Sony, MCA to Matsushita. With Steve Ross dead, a struggle raged inside Time/Warner. Newly-powerful media entrepreneurs like Ted Turner manoeuvred for advantage, and while their interests extended into cable and broadcast TV, magazines, computer bulletin-boards and even books, their cockpit was often Hollywood.
Vanity Fair in October 1994 defined these arrivistes as ‘The New Establishment’. ‘Call them swashbucklers of the Information Age,’ said Elise O’Shaugnessy in her introduction to the piece, ‘or the highwaymen of the infobahn; they are the leaders of the computer, entertainment and communications industries whose collective power and influence have eclipsed both Wall Street and Washington.’ One of them was Spielberg. Others in the survey – Barbra Streisand, Mike Ovitz, Michael Eisner, Barry Diller, Oprah Winfrey and David Geffen – were either his friends or allies. A few more were about to impinge on his life, in particular Bill Gates of the software company Microsoft, and Edgar Bronfman Jr, head of the Canadian Seagram distilling company but ambitious to be a movie mogul. Significantly, Vanity Fair’s list didn’t include either Lucas or Coppola, once thought of as indispensable members of New Hollywood. The Three had become The One.
Many of those in the survey, including Geffen, Ovitz, Diller and Jeffrey Katzenberg, were part of an informal inner circle of power-brokers who met every year at Sun Valley for a few days of networking under the aegis of investment banker Herbert Allen, who was a close friend of Ray Stark and an adviser to most big showbiz corporations, including Matsushita.
For the piece, America’s most fashionable magazine photographer Annie Leibovitz shot these men and women with the appurtenances of their power David Geffen circled Los Angeles in his private jet, Ted Turner rode his ranch on a horse, Michael Ovitz sat alone in a viewing theatre and Michael Eisner in the Disney corporate suite, regarded sardonically by a man in a Mickey Mouse suit.
Spielberg posed at sunset in rolled jeans and denim shirt, spotless trainers at his side, dangling bare feet in Georgica Pond, East Hampton, the eyes behind his Armani spectacles fixed on an indeterminate future. It was a bucolic vision worthy of Norman Rockwell: Tom Sawyer in Middle Age. With his personal world now totally under control, Spielberg was turning his mind to the image to which he would adhere for the rest of his life. It was, unsurprisingly, East Coast, not Californian; not innovative but reflective, a little saintly. Not abrasively Lean-like, but genial, courteous yet remote.
In Hollywood’s fashionable restaurants, at Malibu, even on the white-water raft trips organised by major players like Jeffrey Katzenberg, the talk was always of Mike Ovitz. Everyone recognised him as the most potent threat to their power. The closed-mouth cat-like smile of the Universal Studios tour guide turned out to conceal sharp teeth. In a famous 1992 feud with the world’s highest-paid scriptwriter Joe Eszterhas (Basic Instinct, Sliver), Ovitz had belied his pussy-cat image by reputedly warning him that CAA’s ‘foot-soldiers’ patrolled Beverly Hills every day and would ‘blow out the brains’ of anyone who defied him.
Nobody doubted Ovitz could do just that, if he chose to. Through CAA, he spoke for most of Hollywood’s major stars and film-makers: Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty, Kevin Costner, Robert de Niro, Barbra Streisand, Michael Douglas, Sean Connery, Tom Cruise, Robin Williams, Sylvester Stallone, Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, Robert Redford, Oliver Stone, Barry LeVinson, Tim Burton, even Spielberg were all clients. Already a de facto producer, Ovitz assembled packages and sold them to studios, which refused the high price-tags at their peril. He had brokered the Sony and Matsushita deals and, in the case of Sony, turned down their offer to run Columbia. Now, as Lew Wasserman and Sid Sheinberg bickered with Matsushita over control of MCA, many speculated that the Japanese might install Ovitz as MCA/Universal’s next boss. For his part, Ovitz confessed to friends and advisers like Herb Allen that he was weary of the competing egos of the agenting business, and might look favourably on a change.
An anti-Ovitz coalition among the New Establishment evolved almost before its members realised it. At its heart was David Geffen, whose dislike and distrust of the CAA boss was an open secret. Jeffrey Katzenberg became part of it, not only because of his friendship with Geffen but because he saw Ovitz’s power as dangerous to the industry. Katzenberg also coveted Michael Eisner’s chairmanship of Disney – and Eisner was Ovitz’s best friend. Loyalty to Wasserman and Sheinberg, if nothing else, also persuaded Spielberg to oppose Ovitz. Nor did he want to find himself, as he had with Hook, reduced to just another component in a CAA package. Steve Ross had shown him his power and taught him something about using it. Though he remained dubious about committing himself to any organisation over which he didn’t exercise total control, Spielberg could see the value of entering an alliance to protect what he’d won, and to build on it.
With Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall now flourishing in their own company, management of Amblin passed to another married couple, Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald. Parkes, who coined the ‘Amblin U’ nickname for the operation, and whose association with Spielberg went back to the first days of the company, when it backed preliminary work on his script of Wargames, took over an enterprise which, at least figuratively, had burst its walls. Amblin’s permanent staff had swelled from eighteen in 1983 to more than sixty, Jurassic Park’s production team was hived off into trailers on the Universal lot, and a separate building, called Movies While You Wait, was built to house directors working on Spielberg projects, of which dozens were in development.
Animation, with its opportunities for total control, continued to preoccupy Spielberg. After Fievel Goes West, the Dinosaur feature We’re Back!: A Dinosaur’s Story and the series Family Dog had all failed, he moved Amblimation to Los Angeles, where he could keep an eye on it. Work continued on an animated version of the musical Cats, and live-action feature versions of Casper the Friendly Ghost (called simply Casper) and the sixties Hanna-Barbera TV series The Flintstones.
For TV, Amblin launched Tiny Toons, a feature project that metamorphosed into a series, and Animaniacs, which Fox began running with great success in 1994, but which transferred to Warners in 1995. Its main characters, Yakko and Wakko, the Warner brothers, lived with their sister Dot inside the water tower painted with the Warners shield that is the most visible landmark on its Burbank lot, and descended to engage with their friends in relentlessly self-referential adventures, often with precise relationships to the movie business. Hollywood and Broadway in-jokes abounded. In one episode, an unsuccessful ’toon star and his friend revenged themselves on two film critics, based on the popular TV reviewers Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. Lured to the premiere of Jurassic Park, the critics were crushed by a T. rex that stepped out of the screen and onto the front stalls, and for the rest of the episode were relentlessly blown up, mashed, doused and humiliated.
The main Amblin office now directed the massive marketing empire which pulled in a large part of Spielberg’s income, estimated at $70 million annually. His investments included the British racing stable of ex-jockey Simon Sherwood, 20 per cent of Dennis Hoffman’s Designer Donut chain, and a Los Angeles sub sandwich shop called Dive!, owned jointly with Jeffrey Katzenberg and a Chicago catering firm. Dive! Spielberged the eating experience. Every half hour, sirens sounded and the place exploded in a multi-media show. In 1995 a second restaurant, purpose-built this time, opened in Las Vegas, with half a cartoon submarine jutting from the facade, and glass walls down which water gushed during the show. Spielberg and Katzenberg announced imminent openings of six more, starting with one in Barcelona. ‘The Japanese are building east to west,’ joked Spielberg, ‘so we’re building in the opposite direction.’
On 3 April 1994, the helicopter of Disney president Frank Wells crashed in Nevada’s Ruby Mountains while he was on a skiing holiday. The death of Michael Eisner’s closest ally within the company threw Disney into turmoil. Katzenberg made a strong play for his post, citing his production of Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin (dedicated to Wells) and the forthcoming The Lion King, which would put Disney decisively back on top of the animation world. Eisner temporised. He was in poor health, and in July 1994 entered hospital for a quadruple coronary bypass. When he emerged, he told Katzenberg he’d decided not to promote him. Instead, Joe Roth, architect of John Hughes’s hit 1990 comedy Home Alone, which launched the career of child star Macaulay Culkin, was being imported from 20th Century-Fox to share the studio’s creative management. The insult was unignorable. In August, Katzenberg resigned.
As news spread of his departure, Spielberg called from Jamaica, where he was staying with Robert Zemeckis. He tried to be consoling about Katzenberg’s future – which, given the executive’s lack of a large personal fortune and his long-time identification with Disney, was not promising. Quoting Christopher Lloyd’s last line from Back to the Future, Spielberg told him, ‘Where you’re going, you don’t need roads.’
‘Why don’t you guys do something together?’ Zemeckis shouted from the background.
‘We were teasing,’ Katzenberg said later of the suggestion, ‘but there was a moment when it went from a playful and fanciful idea to a great idea.’
He seized the hint like a life preserver and, within a week, pitched his plan to Spielberg. The two men already had a success with the Dive! restaurants. Now he suggested they start their own studio. As collateral, he offered his expertise, especially in animation. He could also deliver old friends like Gary David Goldberg, producer of Family Ties and other hit TV shows.
Spielberg was unconvinced. He was happy at MCA, and felt a personal loyalty to Sheinberg and Wasserman.
‘You were invited to leave Disney,’ he said, sensitive as always to the minute shifts in power by which Hollywood measures success and failure. ‘I have no reason to leave MCA.’
Kate too was doubtful. Much as she liked Katzenberg, she didn’t want Spielberg infected with his furious ambition and drive. The proposed alliance might have ended there but for a power shift inside MCA. Anxious to expand the company, Sheinberg and Wasserman asked Matsushita to approve the takeover of the innovative British-based recording company Virgin Records, plus the purchase of a TV network and the construction of a Universal theme park near Tokyo. Expecting a rubber-stamp acceptance, they were furious when the zaibatsu, paying back Sheinberg for his many sneering references to Matsushita, and his and Wasserman’s oft-repeated threat to leave the studio when their contracts expired in 1995, refused. When both men made the fourteen-hour flight to Osaka on 17 September to discuss the projects, Matsushita’s head Yoichi Morishita had underlings convey his decision, and only appeared at the meeting after two hours.
‘I don’t see any smiling faces,’ he said serenely. ‘I see you have been told.’
Seething, Sheinberg and Wasserman arrived back in Los Angeles to find the city alive with rumours that they were about to resign, and that Morishita might install Michael Ovitz to run the studio.
Suddenly Spielberg had a new incentive to think about leaving MCA. He got together again with Katzenberg, who had had his own second thoughts. Why not include David Geffen in the team?
’I’ve competed against David,’ Katzenberg said, ‘and I’m telling you, he has so completely put me away, so outclassed me in signing an act or a movie star or getting a script. We need him.’
Spielberg was unsure. From being his rival for Steve Ross’s affection, Geffen had become Ross’s outspoken critic. After selling his record company to WCI in 1985, Geffen was offended when Ross failed to tell him in advance of WCI’s plans to merge with Time/Life. Not only did he dislike being left in the dark; he missed an opportunity to make a large profit. When ownership in his company reverted to Geffen in 1990 and Ross tried to buy it outright, Geffen sold it instead to MCA for $600 million and moved his headquarters to the Burbank lot.
The conflicts at MCA had also persuaded Geffen, a loner by nature, that an alliance with Katzenberg and Spielberg would protect him from any radical changes inside the corporation. Spielberg too had taken soundings, and found a surprising unanimity among financial advisers. A studio which institutionalised the advances made by New Hollywood could well be a good thing, both for the industry and its principals. Chemical Bank agreed to advance a $1 billion line of credit against an initial $250 million put up by the trio as seed capital – no problem for Geffen or Spielberg, but for Katzenberg a commitment that mortgaged him for eternity. A ritual visit was paid to Lew Wasserman to outline their plans. Once he approved, it remained only to think of a name and make the announcement.
On 28 September, Geffen, Katzenberg and Spielberg were in Washington DC as guests of Bill Clinton at a dinner for Russian president Boris Yeltsin. After the banquet, Geffen, an intimate of the Clintons, slept over in the Lincoln Bedroom while Spielberg and Katzenberg returned to the Hays-Adams Hotel, opposite the White House, to continue planning the new studio. By 1.30 a.m., they’d decided that, name or no name, they must announce their plans. They rang Geffen.
‘Come over here now,’ Katzenberg said.
‘How do I get there?’ asked a sleepy Geffen.
‘Call a taxi.’
‘You can’t call a taxi in the White House,’ he protested. At 6.30 a.m., he rang for a White House car and was driven to the hotel. After a brief discussion, he concurred with his partners that it was time.
A press conference was called for 11 October. Editors were told to hold space on their front pages. Ovitz was in the crowd that gathered to hear the news and, afterwards, Michael Eisner rang each of the partners separately to congratulate them. From first discussions to announcement, the alliance, known informally as ‘the dream team’, had taken seven weeks to form.
For the next month, little else was discussed in film circles. Was the trio about to take over MCA from Matsushita? Would other independents join them? Would they go public and issue shares? Was Amblin to be absorbed into the new company? What exactly would it produce? Where would the money come from? And what the hell was the thing to be called?
Some of these questions were soon answered. Wary of losing control, the trio vetoed ransoming themselves to shareholders. Instead, one-third of the company would be sold to individual corporate investors in return for $900 million in operating capital. As for the programme, twenty-four feature films would be released before the end of the decade. No titles were mentioned, except for an animated feature based on the Old Testament, which was to metamorphose into the TV series Genesis, fronted by journalist Bill Moyers. Within a year the group announced its backing for a film produced by Mick Garris from a script by Preston Sturges Jr, whose father had written and directed some of Spielberg’s favourite films. Rumours also suggested that the trio might take over the next three Star Wars films, but as late at August 1995 George Lucas was claiming cagily that no discussions had taken place.
The division of power in the new group was spelled out in detail. Geffen would run the music division and Katzenberg manage the day-to-day running of the film studio. Spielberg agreed that Amblin would eventually become part of the new company, but for the moment he promised to honour all his commitments, and reserved the right to direct for anyone he chose. Given the six or seven films he owed under contracts to MCA/Universal and Warners, it could be some time before he made anything for his own company. On 10 October 1994 he announced Amblin’s purchase for $2.5 million of an original script by Michael Crichton and his wife Anne-Marie, Twister, about scientists who track tornadoes. Wary as ever, Spielberg was keeping the door to independence open a crack.
The name, ‘DreamWorks SKG’, conflating the ‘dream team’ label and the initials of the three principals, was unveiled in early 1995. The cumbersome result of countless meetings, it proved, like a cadavre exquise confected by the Surrealists, with each person contributing to a drawing of a body without looking at what the others had drawn, to resemble nothing and satisfy nobody. Spielberg, however, was as proud as a new father – or a freshman president. In a slip of the tongue at the press conference, he referred to ‘our new country’, a concept he liked so much he began to call DreamWorks ‘our sovereign state’.
By the end of 1994 the group was already shopping for real estate, pursued by half a dozen counties and Chambers of Commerce, all eager for this money-spinner to alight in their tax area. They decided finally on Howard Hughes’s old aircraft factory at Playa Vista, a hundred-acre site on which the trio planned to build twenty sound stages, restaurants, schools and 13,000 homes sited on an artificial lake. ‘We are hoping that productions that would have gone to the 007 stage in Pinewood,’ said Geffen, ‘will now stay here’ – casting doubt on Spielberg’s promise to support European cinema. The idea of taking over MCA had only briefly attracted the three. The studio carried too much dead wood, too many reminders of Old Hollywood. And what position, if any, in the new enterprise might Wasserman and Sheinberg occupy? Instead, the trio had informal discussions with Matsushita, proposing that DreamWorks distribute some of its products through MCA in return for a promise that Wasserman and Sheinberg remain in power.
In November 1994 Morishita asked Herbert Allen to fly to Osaka and advise Matsushita on their MCA options. In January 1995, the Japanese company authorised Allen to sell off 80 per cent of MCA. In April it passed to Seagram’s Edgar Bronfman Jr. At the official signing ceremony handing MCA over to Bronfman, Ovitz, though he technically represented Matsushita, sat down opposite Morishita, next to Bronfman, while Allen, still dressed in the cowboy boots he’d been wearing on his ranch, stood out of the way, looking fondly from afar at the deal he’d helped bring about. To many people, it seemed as if Hollywood had once again seen off a foreign rival.
One of Bronfman’s first acts was to negotiate a distribution deal with DreamWorks He joined a long queue. ABC had already signed a production contract for $100 million in programmes. In March 1995, Paul Allen, the reclusive co-founder of Microsoft with Bill Gates, paid $500 million for an 18 per cent share of the company. A few days later. Gates put up $30 million, half the start-up capital, for DreamWorks Interactive, a subsidiary to make CD-Roms and other computer-related products. In May, the Korean company One World Media, part of the giant Samsung empire, pledged the final $300 million.
Disney couldn’t sit by and watch such a radical realignment in the power structure, particularly one which placed the architect of its greatest recent hit films in the camp of a competitor with potentially unlimited resources. In the summer of 1995, it paid $19 billion for the media empire of Nebraska financier Warren Buffett. This included the ABC TV network and the ESPN cable sports channel. And to run the new operation, Michael Eisner, in a secret meeting on a forest trail near Aspen, Colorado, offered the job of Disney chairman to Mike Ovitz. Hardly a leaf had fallen before the news of his acceptance was all over Hollywood, and the jockeying for power began again.
Even working only part time, Spielberg was pushing ahead with half a dozen projects at Amblin. The Lost World, Crichton’s sequel to Jurassic Park, was in preparation for Universal. British novelist Fay Weldon was writing Assault on Bel Air, a screenplay about the LA riots. Bruce Robinson, author of the successful comedy Withnail and I, was developing a script, and Carrie Fisher adapting her story Christmas in Las Vegas. Other projects included Carnival, an animated version of Leslie Caron’s 1953 film Lili; Douglas Carter Beane’s play To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything!, Julie Newmar; a feature based on the British sf series Doctor Who; another about Zorro, directed by Mikael Solomon, Spielberg’s cameraman on Always; and Up River, a new novel by William Harrison (The Rollerball Murders). In every case, Spielberg’s involvement was hands-on. To Harrison, he suggested a climax with more action, and the author not only rethought the ending for the script but for the novel as well. Spielberg also bought The Bridges of Madison County, Robert James Waller’s unexpected best-seller about a romance between a photographer and a rural housewife which her family discover only after her death. Widely tipped to direct it, he passed it to Bruce Beresford, but eased him out, with some resentment on Beresford’s part, following a better offer of Clint Eastwood as both director and star. Even then, however, his control remained. He asked Eastwood and composer Lennie Niehaus to extend the song ‘For All We Know’ from a love scene between Eastwood and Meryl Streep into the succeeding scene where her children, via a letter, are discovering the liaison. Hearing the song, he reasoned, audiences would understand that the children had learned something new about their mother.
The Bridges of Madison County was a commercial success, as was the film of Crichton’s Twister in 1996. However, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything!, Julie Newmar flopped, and even Twister, despite doing well at the box office, attracted accusations that the direction of ex-cameraman Jan de Bont. Hollywood’s acknowledged expert in fast-paced car-crash thrillers after the success of Speed two years before, had disguised unconvincing special effects. ‘Steven Spielberg Presents’ had ceased to be a guarantee of quality and taken on, in the eyes of many, a tone of gimcrack sensationalism.
In November 1994 Spielberg launched the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. He explained:
When I was making the film in Poland, at least a dozen Holocaust survivors journeyed there using the film as a cushion to find closure with their nightmare. They showed up, and often through tears began telling us their stories. I kept saying to them. ‘Thank you for telling me, but I wish you could say this to a camera because this is important testimony.’ I asked them if they’d be willing to do so, and they all said yes.
Within a year, the foundation had ninety full-time staff in nine offices around the world. They filmed interviews, maps, documents and photos, computerised and recorded them, cross-referenced, on CD-Rom. ‘If you want to find out about where people slept,’ said one of the team, ‘what they ate, the kinds of latrines used, you type in a certain word – like “latrine” – and it takes you to exact points in interviews where people talked about it.’
$6 million of Spielberg’s profits from Schindler’s List were funnelled into the Righteous Persons Foundation which disbursed them to Jewish charities, artists and writers. It also funded projects like Synagogue 2000, an attempt to update and streamline Jewish religious observance. One of the first recipients was the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Spielberg pledged $250,000 towards its restoration. In 1996, it announced its first donation outside the USA; ₤65,000 to the University of Sussex to back a centre for German-Jewish Studies. After coaxing $1 million or more each from the Lew Wasserman Foundation, Time-Wamer, NBC, Sony and Barry Diller, Spielberg unexpectedly went on the East Coast celebrity fund-raising circuit, showing himself at Manhattan and Hamptons cocktail parties to solicit contributions from financiers like George Soros. Over the next seven to ten years, Spielberg told them, he hoped that the foundation would hand out more than $40 million.
Spielberg’s escutcheon, however, suffered an embarrassing stain in October 1995 when Dennis Hoffmann publicised their 1968 contract over Amblin’, and, claiming he’d been cheated out of the profits of a possible Spielberg feature, sued him for $33 million, his estimated gains from such a film. It was a sum he would have no trouble raising, should he choose to pay, since Forbes magazine in 1996 found that Spielberg was the United States’ second largest show-business earner after talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, his combined personal income for the previous two years totalling $150 million.
Early in 1995, Spielberg was offered, in the centennial year of the cinema, an honorary Cèsar, the French equivalent of the Oscar. It was a controversial gesture by the French, in the light of his statements about French ‘protectionism’ at the time of the GATT talks. Spielberg had already back-pedalled, however, claiming to have been misled by the Hollywood studio lobby and the White House’s mouthpiece on film policy, Jack Valenti.
On 25 February he stepped into the spotlight at the Théâtre de Champs-Elysées in Paris to face the gratin of French showbiz. The award was presented by Claude Lelouch, director of A Man and a Woman, who set the tone of the evening by assuring Spielberg that there was only one part of his films he didn’t like: the words ‘The End’. Spielberg smiled down at the front row which Kate shared with Gregory Peck and Jeanne Moreau, both also recipients of honorary Cèsars. The rest of the audience beamed back.
Stumbling through a list he took from his pocket, he thanked the French film-makers to whom he owed, he said, a debt of gratitude. Beginning with Jean-Luc Godard (whose influence on his work not even the most alert critic had noted), he cited twenty-nine others, from the Lumière brothers and George Méliès to Claude Lanzmann and, of course, Truffaut, whose advice about storytellers needing to live a life he quoted with obvious sincerity. ‘Many of my films have been devoted to the craft of the imagination,’ he went on, ‘but I think because of Schindler’s List and my wife Kate and my five children, I was able for the first time to leave form behind to live as a film-maker should.’ He ended with a controversial promise to ‘a country that is fighting for its cultural identity. I would like to say,’ he told his audience, ‘I will fight right along with you.’
This struck some listeners as absurd, given that films like Jurassic Park were, in their eyes, the very productions strangling the French industry. Of the $913 million earned by Jurassic Park by 1995, $556 million came from sales outside the US. Yet few could have been surprised, especially those who knew something of cinema’s past. The history of the US is a history of cultural invasion and acquisition in which the cinema has traditionally played an active part. Before World War I, US consulates in China and Japan distributed American feature films as vehicles of political and social propaganda. Paramount and MGM bought up the bankrupt German cinema in the twenties, and invaded that of Britain and the Commonwealth in the thirties by gaining a monopoly of theatres and reserving them for Hollywood product.
Historically, Steven Spielberg and his films were inevitable. The McDonald’s movie, the Coca-Cola cinema, mass-marketed to a waiting world, was ‘an idea whose time has come’. Like Communism, the very strictness of its parameters may carry the seeds of self-destruction, but for the moment its continued success seems certain. Morality is on the side of an embattled Europe, but the profits lie elsewhere. And cinema is, above all, an organism whose medium is money.
What is Steven Spielberg’s role in the new world order he has done so much to create? In its terms, he has nowhere else to go. Making more millions and winning more Oscars will prove nothing, either to himself or to the world. Historically the likelihood is that he will decline into a restless seeker of an achievement sufficiently great to top those already to his credit, and that, like his models David Selznick and David Lean, he will fail. Just as there could never be another Gone With the Wind or Lawrence of Arabia, there can be no more Schindler’s Lists.
The alternative is honourable retirement and acceptance of his role as an icon of the mass market: a Jonas Salk if he manages his image well, a Colonel Harland Sanders if he doesn’t. And if he should wish to retrieve his critical reputation by returning to the concise, economical style of what most people agree are his best films? The irony is that he has helped create a market where it has no place. For someone of such prodigious facility, this realisation in particular must be galling.
In assessing Spielberg’s life as he reaches his fifties, one can’t escape the parallels with those two archetypal American failures-in-success. Jay Gatsby and Charles Foster Kane. Coffined by the lives they have created with their labours, both listlessly wander their mansions. Their obituaries are already on file.
Welles, Spielberg and Fitzgerald fell victim, as did Gatsby, to the heartless scope of America, and what, in one of The Great Gatsby’s most moving passages, Fitzgerald calls Americans’ ‘capacity for wonder’. Americans are born with a hunger for novelty and divertissement which can never be satiated, and anyone who tries to do so exhausts himself in the effort. Kane and Gatsby with their lavish parties, like Spielberg and Welles with their films, gave themselves to their audience totally, and were devoured for their pains.
Their reward was a brief epiphany, a sense that, for a few years, they were at one with an ideal America. For an instant, its landscape and the works of those who inhabited it came briefly into focus, revealing visions so electric that they could enchant the world.
Just once, Spielberg and Welles shared an identical vision. In 1940 Welles and Herman Mankiewicz were writing Citizen Kane in a house in the Hollywood hills. Actor George Coulouris visited them, and Welles took him out onto the terrace. ‘And we saw the whole city lit up,’ Coulouris recalled. ‘The war was on. “Look,” he said, “one of the few cities in the world with the lights on.” Then he described Citizen Kane to me, outlining the whole story, standing there with the stars above and the lights of Los Angeles below.’
More than thirty years later, Spielberg, on his way back from the Phillipses’ after a brainstorming session with Paul Schrader, stopped on Mulholland Drive, perhaps only a few yards from the house where Welles had worked, draped himself dizzily over the bonnet of his car and, staring at the inverted web of light that was the San Fernando Valley, was seized by a presentiment of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, unaware that Welles too succumbed to the vision of order and optimism embodied in the lights of his adoptive city.
For Spielberg in 1973, the empire-builder and tycoon has not yet emerged. The pleasure in delighting others remains intact. He is simply, again to borrow a passage of Damon Knight, ‘the isolated spark of consciousness, awake and alone at midnight… the grown-up child who still remembers, still believes’. At that moment, facing, as Gatsby had done, the special promise of America and sensing he could fulfil it, Steven Spielberg seems at his best.