Steven Spielberg (102 page)

T
HE
disenchantment Spielberg anticipated in his new working arrangement as a Paramount employee quickly came to pass. It was not long into 2006 when he and his DreamWorks partners found themselves fighting studio executives over their annual funding allotment, which they managed to get increased from $300 million to $400 million, and over the issue of credit. Paramount squabbled with DreamWorks about how to promote their joint
productions and how much prominence each label should have. However petty that may have seemed, it was an issue that went to the heart of power in Hollywood and touched a raw nerve for a filmmaker who had surrendered a large part of his independence and felt he was being treated with a lack of respect. As a result, Spielberg experienced a “rude awakening” in his first six months at Paramount, the
Hollywood Reporter
observed. Tensions escalated when David Geffen thought Paramount chairman and chief executive officer Brad Grey was taking too much credit for the DreamWorks musical
Dreamgirls
. It was obvious to Hollywood observers and the financial community that this shotgun marriage didn't have a future.

The films DreamWorks made for Paramount were an eclectic bunch, as ever, but despite the intramural friction, they were of somewhat higher overall caliber (with some notable exceptions) than the slate DreamWorks had turned out in its final throes of independence. The potpourri of DreamWorks/Paramount films included the overwrought, overly contemporary-feeling adaptation of Richard Yates's 1961 novel
Revolutionary Road; The Kite Runner
, a subtly rendered, heartbreaking story (from the novel by Khaled Hosseini) of a young Afghan writer tormented by his betrayal of a childhood friend; the sometimes gripping but often mawkish story of a Los Angeles
Times
reporter befriending a mentally ill homeless man,
The Soloist;
and a witty and knowing, if repetitive, spoof of Hollywood war movies,
Tropic Thunder
. DreamWorks also made a pair of offbeat musicals:
Dreamgirls
, with its sensational Oscar-winning performance by Jennifer Hudson enlivening uneven, self-indulgently flashy direction by Bill Condon, and Tim Burton's
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
, stylish and haunting, if excessively explicit in its ghoulishness, muting the black-comic aspects of this Stephen Sondheim adaptation. And then there were such lowbrow excursions as the gimmicky and infantile, yet occasionally engaging, family comedy
Hotel for Dogs;
Eddie Murphy playing a morbidly obese black woman for cheap and stereotypical laughs in the appalling
Norbit
; and, most egregiously, the Michael Bay action fantasy
Transformers
and its sequel,
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
.

When Bay returned to his alma mater, Wesleyan University, in 2007 to show the first
Transformers
to film students, one of them asked what statement the director intended to make with the film. “Statement?” replied Bay. “Guys, seriously. It's about giant robots.” Bay's remark disarmingly captured the frank mindlessness of his film about Hasbro action toys magnified to gargantuan proportions.
Transformers
sets up its premise entertainingly but then indulges its special-effects action gimmickry with moronically relentless excess. Its blockbuster box-office gross amounted to $700 million worldwide, a figure surpassed by its far more hyperkinetic, bloated, and incoherent 2009 sequel. Such unrelenting assaults on the senses kept the bills paid at
DreamWorks
, but lowering himself to that level tarnished Spielberg's name when his credit as executive producer appeared onscreen. In earlier times, Spielberg fostered the careers of such gifted and original directors as Joe Dante and Robert Zemeckis, but his indulgent patronage of Bay at his most unrestrained
(David Denby of
The New Yorker
called him “the stunningly, almost viciously untalented Michael Bay”) signals a disheartening willingness to pander to the worst tendencies in modern cinema. If that is the price, is it worth being a mogul?

The most memorable DreamWorks productions in this period, by contrast, resulted from Spielberg's backing of an older director who shares his classical approach to cinematic style. Spielberg was a producer on the ambitious pair of films Clint Eastwood directed about Iwo Jima, told from the perspectives of both sides of the grisly World War II battle.
Flags of Our Fathers
, based on the moving book by James Bradley and Ron Powers about Bradley's father and the other men who raised the American flag on Mount Suribachi, deals less with the battle than with the way the flag-raisers were exploited for propaganda purposes on the home front and had their lives distorted in the process. That theme, with its echoes of Howard Hawks's
Sergeant York
(1941), was unusual enough, but far more audacious was
Letters from Iwo Jima
, an intense, claustrophobic look at the desperate fight to the finish by the Japanese from their subterranean caves. Concentrating on the anguished commander, General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), and his attempts to sacrifice himself and his men with honor, the film is based on his book
Picture Letters from Commander in Chief
. It has an almost entirely Japanese cast, plays in Japanese with English subtitles, and makes no concessions to American war-movie conventions or commercial expectations.

Eastwood, whose brisk efficiency as a filmmaker outpaces even Spielberg's, made the two films back-to-back, shooting the island battle scenes in Iceland. Released jointly by Paramount and (outside the United States) Warner Bros. in the fall of 2006, the pair of films were critically praised and moderately successful commercially. The DreamWorks deal with Paramount guaranteed DreamWorks free creative rein on films with budgets under $85 million; the Eastwood films cost a relatively modest combined total of $74 million, $55 million of that for
Flags
. Spielberg's patronage of his seventy-six-year-old colleague showed DreamWorks at its best, producing distinctive, thoughtful films that would have had a hard time finding a home elsewhere in Hollywood.

Shortly after joining Paramount, Spielberg staged a major talent raid on his rejected suitor, Universal. In February 2006, he hired Stacy Snider, who had served as chairwoman at Universal since 1989, as his new head of production at DreamWorks. She and Spielberg had first worked together when she was the production chief of Tristar Pictures and he was developing his 1998 Amblin production
The Mask of Zorro
. Their rapport on his projects at Universal, where he had hoped they would work closely if GE had bought DreamWorks, led him to persuade Snider to leave her powerful post to become chief executive and co-chairman of the DreamWorks imprint (sharing the latter title with Geffen). Spielberg claimed that Snider had “a unique combination in a film executive in that she recognizes a need to make commercial movies, but she also aspires to make art.” With Snider running the daily creative affairs
of the company, a duty once shared by Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald, who were spending more of their time producing, Spielberg was protected from some of the more onerous burdens of being a mogul.

S
PIELBERG
showed a certain detachment from Hollywood reality in June 2006, barely three months after completing his deal with Paramount, when he gave an impolitic interview on a cable TV talk show hosted by prominent film industry players Peter Guber and Peter Bart. Spielberg said that Paramount executives “know they were the second choice. I waited at the altar for GE to buy DreamWorks.” He regretted that though he and his partners had reached a “handshake deal” with GE, “They could never make the numbers work.”
Daily Variety
commented that Spielberg expected
DreamWorks
would “operate as an entirely separate entity from Paramount Pictures” and that it would “retain its independence.” Spielberg declared on the talk show, “Gail Berman is running Paramount Pictures, and that's separate from DreamWorks Pictures. And that's something we're trying to get the town to understand. Stacey Snider is running DreamWorks Pictures.” Five months later, Spielberg wishfully declared, “Paramount treats us as we like to see ourselves, as an independent film company.”

Such statements were hardly calculated to smooth over troubled feelings between feuding Paramount and DreamWorks executives. They may have been part of Spielberg's game plan to defy his new owners by throwing around his considerable weight. But the ploy backfired. What the town understood, to the contrary, was that such declarations of independence by Spielberg were consistently being rebuffed by his new masters. The growing bitterness of their relationship eventually became public knowledge; Paramount's Brad Grey was described by film industry reporter Kim Masters as “a mortal enemy” of DreamWorks. After things fell apart,
Daily Variety
wrote, “Spielberg and Snider thought they were a satellite company working alongside Paramount—even serviced by the studio on some level. But Grey made it clear that he considered DreamWorks to be not a sibling company but one of several labels answering to him, like MTV Films or Paramount Vantage. Furthermore, Spielberg took issue with the fact that he was not paid a salary for the day-to-day running of DreamWorks with Snider.”

Nor were Spielberg's filmmaking priorities a comfortable match with Paramount's. In 2006, Spielberg declared his intent to make more small-scale prestige pictures than DreamWorks had before, a move he seemed to consider a perk of working for a studio with deep pockets. He said, “I would love to go off and make a picture like
Capote
or George Clooney's
Good Night, and Good Luck
.” One of the projects Spielberg considered directing at Paramount was
The Trial of the Chicago
7, from an Aaron Sorkin script about the circus-like trial of anti–Vietnam War activists on charges stemming from protests around the time of the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention. Although DreamWorks managed to push a few of its prestige projects past its Paramount overlords,
those films did not prove as award-worthy as the ones Spielberg had cited as role models, and such a goal did not win favor with a studio focused, like the other Hollywood majors, almost entirely on the bottom line. To Paramount, the most attractive component of the DreamWorks deal was not its ability to make a high-minded film such as
The Kite Runner
or
Revolutionary Road
but the lowbrow
Transformers
franchise.
Daily Variety
noted in 2008 that when Paramount bought DreamWorks, “analysts thought Viacom had overpaid for the mini-major. But it soon became clear that Grey had brokered a better deal than anyone had anticipated. For famed dealmaker Geffen, seller's remorse set in quickly. DreamWorks pics boosted Par to No. 1 in market share with $1.5 billion in 2007”—buoyed in part by the hefty grosses of the initial movie about giant robots.

It was not long before Spielberg and his partners began looking longingly at their early-exit clauses. Geffen left first, in October 2008. Spielberg's contract with Paramount was to expire in 2010, but he had the right to terminate it by the end of 2008. By the middle of that year, DreamWorks was actively shopping around for another home.

W
FTER
the emotional ordeal of
Munich
and the beating he took in the media for making it, Spielberg took three years' break, mostly concentrating on being a mogul, before returning to his primary occupation as a director.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
(2008) perfectly exemplified his willingness to make an occasional “movie by popular demand.” Fans of the Indiana Jones saga had been clamoring for years for a follow-up to
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
, even though that 1989 film had ended pointedly with Harrison Ford riding into the sunset. The increasingly complex careers of Ford, Spielberg, and producer George Lucas made it harder for the three to agree on any one of the numerous storylines bandied about in the subsequent decades. Finally, Ford, who realized better than anyone else that as a man in his sixties he was stretching the limits of credibility for an action hero, persuaded his collaborators to compromise their disagreements over a story that Lucas was intent on filming.

“I thought we'd just barely got by in
Indy III
because the MacGuffin [story gimmick] had always been the problem,” Lucas recalled. “I felt we'd patched together something [a search for the Holy Grail] to make it seem interesting, if not compelling, but the story with the father [played by Sean Connery] carried the movie. So I said, ‘I think we've played this thing out.'” But when Ford appeared in Lucas's television series
The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles
in 1992, Lucas found that “the obvious suddenly dawned on me: If I did it when Indy was older, I could have it be in the 1950s. And if I did it in the '50s, maybe we could change that into a '50s movie—and what is the equivalent of a 1930s Saturday matinee serial in the '50s? Science-fiction B-movies. I thought,
Hey, that could be fun
. The obvious thing was Earth versus the Flying Saucers, so I thought, That's the MacGuffin: aliens.”

But for years Spielberg resisted returning to one of his trademark genres. He finally gave in to the prodding of Lucas and the influence of the last of a series of screenwriters on the Paramount project, his reliable “closer” David Koepp. The déjà vu feeling was turned to the film's advantage as the director approached
Indy IV
as a nostalgic exercise in self-parody. Spielberg's advanced tendencies toward postmodernism, genre parody, and stylistic reflexivity became the
raison d'être
of this highly stylized romp through his moviemaking past, set in the year he became a filmmaker (1957) when he made his takeoff on the train wreck in Cecil B. DeMille's
The Greatest Show on Earth
. The boy who became known in Phoenix as “Cecil B. DeSpielberg” has never lost his fondness for the genre conventions of that period, and in
Indy IV
he gives full vent to his childlike love of elaborate chase scenes, jungle derring-do,
ghoulish
horror, scary insects, alien visitations, and ingenious mechanical gizmos and special effects.