This chapter strategically adopts a biographical perspective, elsewhere marginalised in the book. The abysmal quality and peculiar circumstances of Twilight Zone: The Movie complicate this study’s auteurist rationale and crucially relate it to industry practices.
Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T.’s commercial strength facilitated Spielberg’s first project with Warner Bros. The studio owned an idea by the late Rod Serling for a feature based on his TV series, The Twilight Zone (1959–64), uncanny stories bundled into anthology episodes. A portmanteau movie similarly would comprise sections by four directors. A Spielberg connection already existed. Apart from enthusiasm for the programmes, many scripted by Richard Matheson who wrote Duel, Spielberg had directed two episodes (1969 and 1971) of Serling’s similar Night Gallery, including the pilot – Spielberg’s first TV project. Science fiction/fantasy was resurgent, following Star Wars, Alien (1979), Mad Max (1979) and Spielberg’s Close Encounters and E.T., while Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) demonstrated the mileage in old television properties.
Spielberg, with executive producer Frank Marshall, recruited key personnel. Once Spielberg and his friend and rival John Landis signed as co-producers, George Miller (Mad Max), already with Warner Bros., and Joe Dante (Piranha (1978), an effective Jaws spoof) completed the quartet. Warner Bros., delighted at wooing him from Universal/MCA, proposed releasing the project as Steven Spielberg Presents The Twilight Zone.
The movie was effectively an independent production bankrolled by Warner Bros. Spielberg and Landis, retaining their Universal offices, enjoyed freedom from everyday interference. Remembering the excesses of 1941 and Landis’s The Blues Brothers (1980), they determined to make this unorthodox arrangement work, apparently shooting ‘fast and cheap’ (Kilday 1988: 72). John Baxter records that Landis produced his segment and the prologue autonomously; ‘communications between the Landis and Spielberg offices were kept tenuous’ (1996: 254).
The best of times, the worst of times
With four massive hits and studios jostling for projects, Spielberg was riding high. On 23 July 1982, six weeks after release, E.T. became the fifth most successful film ever. But during the night catastrophe had struck.
Landis’s segment transports a bigot into situations where his racism rebounds: he becomes a Holocaust Jew, narrowly avoids a Ku Klux Klan lynching and comes under American fire in Vietnam. As filming concluded, special-effects explosions crashed a helicopter onto actor Vic Morrow and two Vietnamese extras, a girl and boy aged 6 and 7, crushing one and decapitating the others. Landis and four associates immediately faced manslaughter charges.
Investigations uncovered negligence and employment irregularities. Minors could work until 6.30pm, with extensions to 8.00pm granted only exceptionally. The disaster occurred at 2.20am. No work permits existed, nor teachers or welfare supervision. The children lacked Screen Actors’ Guild registration and nobody briefed their parents about potential danger. Within days Landis, his associate producer, a production manager and Warner Bros. were each fined $5,000 maximum penalty for ‘allegedly “flagrant” violations’ (Crawley 1983a: 146). Subsequently Landis and various others appealed against fines for 36 offences.
Reports that his first reaction was to ask whether Landis had a press agent besmirched Spielberg’s reputation (Kilday 1988: 72), although how any third party knew this is unclear. A witness further implicated Spielberg, claiming he was at the location at the fateful time, but later retracted. Spielberg – who authorities never interviewed concerning the incident – faced criticism for distancing himself from the repercussions. This is hardly surprising: he was co-producer and the event became cloaked in scandal as Landis faced possibly six years’ imprisonment. Studio lawyers mounted a coordinated defence campaign, while prosecutors threw the book at the accused. State and federal agencies, Hollywood craft unions, and aviation and film industry safety boards investigated individuals and companies involved in what the State Labor Commissioner termed an ‘obscene tragedy’. The cases dragged on, fuelling rumours and speculation, as each inquiry awaited the others’ conclusions (Crawley 1983a: 144). After unsuccessful plea-bargaining, whereby they would have admitted employment violations, Landis and co-defendants were acquitted of manslaughter nearly five years later following a highly publicised ten-month trial.
Meanwhile civil lawsuits cleared Spielberg, but the Directors’ Guild of America quickly reprimanded Landis for unprofessional conduct. The case became inextricable from general Hollywood debauchery, as allegations emerged on and off the record. A technician told newspapers of a similar incident wherein a camera crew perished only three months previously. John Belushi’s fatal cocaine and heroin overdose earlier in the year cast its shadow, amid allegations of stunt artists’ drug abuse on set, live ammunition discharged during filming at Landis’s location the night before the crash, and beer cans in the wreckage. Rumoured widespread cocaine use on Poltergeist reinforced such contentions. Against a backdrop of Reaganite morality and hugely inflated budgets that seemed extravagant when profits did not ensue, all this accompanied bankruptcy at Francis Coppola’s Zoetrope studios. Public-relations departments continued to struggle with Columbia production chief David Begelman’s embezzlement five years earlier of relatively minor sums (given his income) and consequent revelations (Laskos in Pirie 1981: 29). Highly public, chemically induced career burnouts included Close Encounters’ producer Julia Phillips and star Richard Dreyfuss, who during the Twilight Zone investigations was committed for treatment (Baxter 1996: 250). Mere association implicated Spielberg, who eschewed even coffee and alcohol: 1941 starred Belushi, as did The Blues Brothers, in which Spielberg appeared, both movies notorious for decadent self-indulgence. These connections, along with Spielberg’s extraordinary success and attendant wealth and power, arguably contributed to his failure at the Academy Awards as well as his subsequent move towards respectable adaptations.
Nonetheless Warner Bros. dissuaded Spielberg from ditching Twilight Zone as this could be construed as accepting guilt. The Landis episode, already filmed, survived largely intact but with no trace of the helicopter scene. This, by a grotesque irony, had been added, following the sole intervention by Warner Bros. executives, against Landis’s original intention. It was meant to soften his segment (the only one not based on a Serling episode), in line with the lighter tone overall, by redeeming his misanthropic protagonist with humanity, demonstrated by saving Vietnamese children from American attack. The trade-off was a budget increase for the helicopter and explosions. Spielberg abandoned his section, a macabre tale that would have involved children in night-time filming. Instead he quickly commissioned Matheson, who scripted the Dante and Miller segments, to rewrite a 1962 tale in which nursing home residents rediscover their childhood and abscond. The original’s writer and director, George Clayton Johnson, suggested changing the end. The characters, transformed mentally but restored to elderly bodies, resolve to remain and embrace ageing positively, instead of disappearing as children into the night, which after what had happened might have produced uncomfortable resonances. Warner Bros. stage-managed visits by top stars on Spielberg’s last day of shooting to demonstrate solidarity.
‘It’s in the can’
Spielberg’s segment, while technically adept, is a half-hearted, lacklustre affair, shot in six days (Crawley 1983b). In contrast to his customary involvement in many departments, the director avoided pre-production conferences, left the script supervisor to stage scenes and entrusted E.T.’s scriptwriter Melissa Mathison, hired pseudonymously for the final rewrite, with dialogue rehearsals (Freer 2001: 129).
Ostensibly illustrating the homily, ‘where there is no hope, there is no life’, ‘Kick the Can’ is fundamentally flawed. Stating the moral immediately, the voice-over renders the remainder largely redundant, leaving little to discover. The tale actually shows sparse interest in hope but concerns itself with make-believe and play. Generalisation to real life from this heavy-handed fantasy seems unlikely, although camera positioning aligns the spectator with the residents. Further problems include an overpowering score, which leaves little room for nuance or the audience’s own response, and the overstated dichotomy between the central premise and one character’s scepticism – embarrassing, as his objection to the preposterous avowals is fully justified.
There are nice incidental touches. Sunnyvale’s arched gateway suggests the entrance to Dante’s Hell (‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here’). During a dull and patronising lecture on ‘calcium for good strong bones and teeth’ one resident manually adjusts his dentures and another mashes his gums. Mottled light and leaf shadows play expressionistically over a character emotionally conflicted. Self-reflexivity occurs, albeit somewhat schematically. The rest-home lounge, sepia-toned and coldly lit, with dark polished surfaces and stained-glass windows providing the only colour, initially resembles a funeral parlour until the light turns gold under its newest resident’s influence, whom the narrator calls ‘an elderly optimist who carries his magic in a shiny tin can’. Cans of magic for Spielberg mean one thing: film – a metaphor repeated in The Terminal (2004) – and here the narrative again enacts regression, although its risible claims, whimsicality and perfunctory direction preclude Imaginary involvement. Spielberg’s ‘twilight zone’ is where darkened auditorium meets illuminated diegesis, self encounters scopic other, reality confronts dream, projection reflects image. Light restores life. The residents, rediscovering themselves and contemplating hitherto unrealised advantages of dotage, replace television quiz shows with gardening and picnics in the Technicolor outdoors. One even forsakes adulthood and literally flies away to the swashbuckling glamour of stage and screen, uttering pantomime speeches – and irritatingly misquoting Hamlet (indicative of the production’s coexistent carelessness and portentousness). The others remain, staring towards camera through diaphanous curtains. These inscribe the ‘solar wind’, metonym of his journey, and the figurative screen through which they – and the actual screen through which the audience – spectate; simultaneously surface and aperture to fantasy. This character and the inscribed director who motivates them earlier look out from the darkened interior, through a rectangular window, to the shining world of children’s play, while the latter draws up a seat to watch, and applaud, his projected scenario.
These qualities and continuities with other Spielberg films are marginally interesting. Carnivalesque abounds: inversions – pensioners emulating children, children garbed as adults, assertions that ‘We’ll break the rules’, overturned attitudes towards ageing – and bodily emphases: toothlessness, old people’s underwear, and childlike sniggering and embarrassment when the lecturer informs residents they should enjoy sex ‘well into your eighties’. Lighting and sound so stylised that ‘atmosphere drips’ (Combs 1983: 282) and the life-transformation theme, with allusions to Peter Pan, recall E.T. and anticipate Hook. So also do intense performances from children, although directorial straining after charm in the guise of innocence mawkishly play into the hands of Spielberg’s most negative critics. Many reviewers noted the segment’s unintended closeness to self-parody.
‘If you believe, I can make you all promise to feel like children again’, is the central assertion; in this instance a Catch 22 that, frankly, insults. Light flashes off the can as it begins its magic. Discussion about how much better it is to see Halley’s Comet at eighty than at eight recalls Spielberg’s recurrent image of shooting stars. Highlights on the sceptic’s eyes as he wakens surrounded by children emphasise vision, recalling other moral tales with similar revelations (It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) or A Christmas Carol (1951)).
Foregrounded intertextuality occurs, obviously, in a television show remake. An on-screen TV highlights New Hollywood’s assumption of cinema’s intrinsic superiority. Here Spielberg scores an own goal. Many quiz shows are more satisfying and engaging than this 23-minute exercise, and considerably cheaper. While the original medium possibly sustained the story’s slightness, a movie’s disproportionate event status and production values cannot.
Casting a black protagonist anticipates The Color Purple, The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Amistad. While celebrity intertextuality draws on Scatman Crothers’ supernatural role in The Shining (1980), this magic-lantern man comes across as a representation verging on racist. Ironically, given the unsubtle message of Landis’s segment, blackness connotes magic; irrepressible optimism and dispensation of wisdom to white children regrettably recall an Uncle Tom (Combs 1983: 282).
Implications for authorship
Variety judged Spielberg’s contribution a ‘pencil sketch’ rather than ‘fully-painted picture’ (Perry 1998: 118). The movie’s triviality overall is anything but worth dying for. The screen romance pursued by Spielberg’s Lost Boy contrasts shockingly, even discounting the outcome, with barely school-age children’s subjection, after midnight, to blinding lights, a helicopter hovering 24 feet overhead, amid explosions and fireballs.
Although nothing linked Spielberg directly to the deaths, his reported behaviour, in the face of legal and media questioning, appeared ‘weak, evasive, almost infantile’ according to one biographer (Baxter 1996: 265). This undoubtedly solidified the emergent critical consensus that Spielberg’s work was childish and solipsistic. Journalists hardly helped, having to report something when met with non-cooperation, recounting how luxury cocooned him among acolytes and sycophants. He had, in fact, left for London immediately after shooting his section, to work on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. In Paris he visited the Cinémathèque Française with Truffaut, who shared his encyclopaedic knowledge and passion for film. However, the decision to distance himself from scandal and misdemeanour is understandable given his phenomenal commercial value; he had previously missed Belushi’s funeral during E.T.’s post-production. Every Spielberg film since Jaws, apart from 1941, was subject to ongoing legal action from claimants to profits, to the extent he could no longer even glance at unsolicited screenplays, and secrecy shrouded his productions.
Liability for the accident has implications for authorship. Landis laid claim in court to ‘aesthetic or creative aspects’ of filmmaking but insisted that specialists make final decisions about matters such as camera and actor positioning and helicopter movements (Farber & Green 1988: 196). Yet, Kilday (1988) argues, Warner Bros. executives had no active function in the production; Frank Marshall permitted Landis to go his own way; and the line producer was appointed by, and answerable to, Landis, while the assistant director, the camera operator and the pilot, among others, had expressed concern about the explosives. The point here is not to reopen a case settled judicially, but to note the control a successful director assumes and is granted. Crucial is the line between creative and ‘final’ responsibility. Despite Landis’s disclaimer, Spielberg composes most shots and often operates the camera.
After Rolling Stone condemned Landis’s role in the calamity (Sullivan 1984), 16 top directors signed a letter endorsing the distinction he drew. Equally eminent directors argued otherwise. William Friedkin averred, ‘If you take the credit “A John Doe Film”, you’re saying to the world, “I am responsible for everything you see”’ (Farber & Green 1988: 225). While, as Charles Tashiro argues, Twilight Zone’s particular circumstances demonstrate the difficulty of generalising about ‘a system that seems to be a collection of exceptions’ (2002: 28), the case provides empirical evidence concerning authorship, which, far from conclusively, illuminates an abstract and widely misunderstood question.
If nobody was responsible, Tashiro suggests – a logical conclusion from the acquittals and subsequent reduction of Health and Safety penalties to $1,350, just $450 per victim – the deaths must have resulted from Divine Will; a convenient legal fiction but not an answer materialist critics can accept (2002: 35–6). Hence, he argues, blame lies not with individuals but structurally, in the industry’s political economy. The Dream Factory has ceded to a prevalent belief, persistent even among studio workers, that film permits individual expression.
Market forces and agents’ and producers’ strategies impose constraints, restricting which projects filmmakers hear about let alone which are packaged, then green-lighted. Auteurism, understood in the industry, and popularly, in terms of choice and individualism, underpins and provides an ideological rationale for how money circulates and where it ends up: ‘Had The Twilight Zone Movie [sic] been a hit, it would have enhanced John Landis’s position in the industry and raised his critical reputation’ (Tashiro 2002: 28). Spielberg, moving on, further accrued power through ongoing commercial success that secured future employment and critical attention. One reward, only for those at the apex, but significant in validating the free expression ideology, was continuing ability to choose projects – provided they were potential blockbusters or did not compromise the blockbusters he had to make to counterbalance potential failure. Financially, however, such failure became increasingly unlikely. While reviewers and critics could be hostile, repeating a famous name ‘eventually becomes self-confirming’; according to this view, ‘It is, finally, not achievement that creates authorship but advertising’ (Tashiro 2002: 29). Ease with which fingers pointed at individuals in the Twilight Zone case confirms the ideology, while its evaporation under forensic scrutiny suggests it is illusory.
The reality, Tashiro suggests, is a system whereby executives cultivate the myth of the artist to distract from their own activities and provide scapegoats for error: someone else’s creative temperament to blame if productions over-run or audiences do not materialise. Executives pay themselves enormous salaries from distribution, exhibition and copyright ownership, while blaming labour costs for escalating budgets. They make excessive demands on staff flexibility and loyalty, while hiring and firing at whim, often contravening employment laws, knowing that thousands are queuing to do the job for even less in hope of a lucky break. The influence of craft guilds, representing technicians, support staff and performers, is limited to threatened or actual disruption during disputes and does not extend to production decisions. The talent and their agents lack budgetary control and have limited say over whom they work with. Tashiro summarises:
If a film is a success, all share in the rewards, including the otherwise ghostly executives poised to consume the fruits of productive labour. If a film is a failure, or if a fatal accident occurs on the set, only the artists are blamed. Their careers are put at risk, while the executives move to another studio. (ibid.)
Successful players therefore start their own production companies to claim control. As Spielberg had at Universal, they may contract for several projects, mutually advantageous in that they gain artistic freedom on some while the studio keeps top talent from its rivals and trades on anticipated income. Power players also negotiate upfront payments because, as Tashiro bluntly puts it, ‘they expect the studios to cheat them out of their fair share of any profits’ (2002: 32). Janet Wasko notes, however, that ‘incredibly complex definitions for the point at which a film begins making a profit’ (2003: 98) and ‘extremely wide variation in terms’ when participations are calculated ‘can become unbelievably confusing’ (2003: 97). Spielberg and some of his associates nevertheless derive extraordinary riches from such arrangements because their profitability has raised them onto a par with executives whose careers they have saved. The studios need them more than they need any particular studio, so they move around, searching for the best deal – and indeed become executives on their own projects, a process that for Spielberg culminated in co-founding a new studio, DreamWorks SKG, in 1994. That being the case, unlike their employees or their studio-era predecessors, they enjoy freedom within the parameters of blockbuster filmmaking – which is to say total creative freedom, in that their incomes, their abilities, their contacts and their bankable names would enable them intermittent pursuit of any projects they wished.
As Twilight Zone demonstrates, however, auteurism implies more than creative freedom. Most people, free to do what they want with pen and paper, cannot equal a Shakespeare sonnet or a da Vinci sketch. Nor is quality dependent on individual vision, as many studio-era classic movies show. Nevertheless, ‘Kick the Can’ by most measures disappointing, clearly possesses stylistic and thematic qualities that mark it unmistakably as Spielberg’s piece.