The Sandcastle
Everyone’s lost but me.
River Phoenix as young Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
IN MAY 1977, two men sat on the beach in front of the Mauna Kea Hotel in Hawaii and built a sandcastle.
One was a stringy thirty-year-old with untrimmed beard and hair, round metal-rimmed Armani spectacles and nails bitten to the quick. His friend, three years older, had a beard too, but it was trimmed, as was his curly hair. Even in the heat of Hawaii, however, he wore gloves and a wide hat, to protect the skin of his face and hands, permanently sensitised by sunburn.
Watching them mould and buttress the walls of their castle, nobody would have guessed the two men were Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, the world’s most successful creators of mass entertainment. They looked more like college teaching assistants on a weekend getaway. Only the scale of their construction hinted at their imagination. This wasn’t a sandcastle but, as befitted their vision, the sandcastle, the size of a bathroom.
Lucas had yet to launch his career as a major Hollywood player. Spielberg, however, was already rich. His 1975 film of Peter Benchley’s shark thriller Jaws had grossed $458 million in worldwide sales, $260 million of that in American domestic box-office alone. His share, though only a fraction of the sum retained by the producing studio. Universal, had made him a multi-millionaire. His percentage of the film he had just finished, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, would bring his personal fortune close to $200 million. Yet while Hollywood film-makers less wealthy than he routinely swept around town in Cadillac stretch limousines, owned sprawling Bel Air houses, dined at fashionable restaurants like Ma Maison, Spago or Le Dôme, Spielberg lived frugally, drove a rented car and still dressed in baseball cap, trainers, jeans and a checked shin open at the throat.
The shooting of Close Encounters had taken him from Mobile, Alabama, to Madras in India, from the Mojave Desert to, at least in imagination, the Gobi in Mongolia, and from suburban Indiana to the fringes of outer space. At the end of what he wearily called ‘two blood-letting years of effects shooting and optical compositing’, however, he’d broken down. Through hours of shooting at clay pigeons with his friend, the director John Milius, he’d contracted the hearing dysfunction tinnitus. In the middle of dubbing the sound tracks, he lost, he said, his ‘sense of judgment and objectivity, but continued to make decisions, not all of them the right ones’. His devoted but distracted crew, preoccupied with getting the film finished for the November release date imposed by Columbia, suggested as diplomatically as possible that he take a holiday.
Spielberg joined Lucas in Hawaii, where he and his wife Marcia had retreated to wait for news of his new film, Star Wars, which had just opened. The trade paper Variety assured everyone that this juvenile space opera would flop. Instead, the audience figures phoned through daily to Lucas soon showed that it was the hit of the year, if not the decade. Enviously, his sometime mentor and now rival Francis Ford Coppola, chronically impoverished despite his success with The Godfather, cabled from San Francisco: ‘Send Money. Francis.’
Lucas and Spielberg chatted as they worked – mostly about future projects. Instinctively, Spielberg deferred to the older man. Lucas’s interest in history, his monkish temperament and long silences had earned him the reputation of a guru among the rowdy group of young directors journalists were already calling ‘New Hollywood’.
Heaping more sand on the walls of the castle, Spielberg wondered aloud if he might not attempt something mindless and undemanding next; an action adventure movie, like a James Bond film. He didn’t tell Lucas he’d already tried to win a commission from the British-based producer of the series, Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli, and been turned down.
‘I’ve got a better film than that,’ Lucas said. ‘Have you ever heard of the lost Ark of the Covenant?’
‘Noah’s Ark?’
‘No, no, no, no, no, not Noah’s Ark,’ Lucas muttered, adding a battlement. He explained about the Ark, the casket in which the Israelites carried the two tablets of the Ten Commandments given to Moses by God, Aaron’s rod, and a pot of the manna that had sustained them in the wilderness. In truth, it was almost as new to Lucas as to Spielberg. Bay Area writer/director Phil Kaufman, with whom he’d developed the idea, had suggested it. Kaufman’s orthodontist had told him about the Ark when he was nine years old, and the story left an indelible impression.
As the tide rolled in, Spielberg dug a moat. The castle won another twenty minutes of life. In that time Lucas outlined a plot for a movie he’d had simmering for almost four years.
The trigger had been an old poster of a movie hero jumping from a horse to a truck. It reminded him of the serial cliffhangers of the thirties and forties. ‘I started out by asking myself, “Gee, when I was a kid, what did I really like?”’ Lucas said later. His musings, and some brainstorming with Kaufman, had produced an archetype, a rapscallion archaeologist in a snap-brim fedora, leather jacket and three-day beard who carried a bullwhip and roamed the world, searching for lost cities and hidden treasure. In the film Lucas envisaged, the archaeologist would never be off the screen. Anybody else in the story – a buddy, a girl – would exist only for comic relief, or to provide someone for him to rescue. In a world where movie characters usually had feet of clay and convictions to match, this man would be an old-fashioned hero, faithful only to his own quirky code of honour. He christened the archaeologist ‘Indiana’, after his wife’s pet Alaskan Malamute. For a surname, he favoured something less exotic, like ‘Smith’.
Lucas had five plots on file. In the first, his hero would be hunting the Ark of the Covenant and trying to keep it from an occult-obsessed Hitler. Something stirred in Spielberg as he listened. He didn’t much like serials, but he could name a dozen films of the thirties and forties where stars like Robert Mitchum, Clark Gable or his personal hero, Spencer Tracy, appeared as a soldier of fortune in a leather jacket and greasy felt. Charlton Heston had worn an almost identical outfit in The Greatest Show on Earth, the first film he’d ever seen. On the set, Spielberg often wore a hat like Indiana’s himself.
More important, however, his internal barometer sensed a shrewd career move. With James Bond, he would be covering old ground. What Lucas suggested was, despite its roots in Old Hollywood, fresh, untouched. It was a risk, but a small one: the success of Star Wars had endorsed Lucas’s instincts.
‘I’d love to do that,’ Spielberg said carefully, ‘if you decide not to.’
‘I’m working with Phil Kaufman on this,’ Lucas replied, ‘but if you like, it’s yours.’ To Spielberg’s surprise, he added, ‘I’m not directing any more. I’ve retired.’ The success of Star Wars had inspired Lucas to make radical changes in his life and career. He was already planning a three-thousand-acre hideaway in a valley in rural Marin County, in northern California, near where he’d been born. Within this idealised nineteenth-century village, named Skywalker Ranch after his Star Wars hero Luke Skywalker, and protected from the modern world by prowling security guards, he could devote himself to reading history and the great Russian novels, experimenting with film technique, and producing films for others to direct. If he wanted company, he could buy it. He and Marcia were already planning to adopt a child. After they divorced, Lucas would adopt two more as a single parent.
As they continued to talk, the tide washed in from the Pacific, eroding their castle as New Hollywood was eroding the old. But its foundations, metaphorically, survived and endured. A month after the beach meeting, Spielberg had the film. In imitation of serials like Adventures of the Flying Cadets and King of the Rocket Men, they called it Raiders of the Lost Ark. It, and the innovative deal Lucas and Spielberg negotiated to fund it, became the cutting edge of a revolution in international entertainment and leisure, the effects of which have still fully to be assessed.