Steven Spielberg (49 page)

According to Joe Alves, Spielberg had proposed scrapping the existing script for
Jaws
2
and dealing with the mass attack by sharks in 1945 on sailors from the USS
Indianapolis,
the story recounted by Robert Shaw in
Jaws.
Howard Sackler, who wrote
Jaws
2
with Carl Gottlieb, previously had suggested basing it on the
Indianapolis
incident, but was overruled by Sheinberg, who said, “That's a different kind of shirt than we want to wear.”
§§
  Whether or not Spielberg would have been able to change Sheinberg's mind, it was the director's scheduling demand that proved decisive. “[W]e couldn't wait that long,” Brown explained. “We had a cast and crew and contracts and a release date.” Universal reapproached Fields, but the Directors Guild of America would not give her a waiver to direct the film, so the job went to Jeannot Szwarc.
Jaws
2
ran into many of the same production problems as the original, but its commercial success in 1978 led to two even tackier, more pointless sequels,
Jaws
3-D
(directed by Alves, 1983) and
Jaws:
The
Revenge
(directed by Joseph Sargent, 1987).

The most lasting impact of
Jaws
on Hollywood was in helping bring about what has been called “the blockbuster mentality.” Before
Jaws,
it was rare for an important film to open in several hundred theaters simultaneously. But that was what Universal originally planned to do with it. “Universal had planned a mass-saturation blitzkrieg campaign in more than 1,000 theaters,” Spielberg told
The
Hollywood
Reporter
in the week after the opening. “I don't think then that Universal knew what it had on its hands.” But after the second preview in Long Beach, Universal scaled back the planned initial break to 409 theaters and “began handling the film with kid gloves,” Spielberg said. The publicity and word of mouth had a steamroller effect, making
Jaws
not only a national fad, like hula hoops in the 1950s, but a national event. As a result, studios began opening films more and more widely, and eventually it was not unusual for a potential blockbuster to open simultaneously on two thousand or even three thousand screens, backed by advertising expenditures of commensurately gargantuan proportions.

The blockbuster mentality made Hollywood concentrate its resources on fewer and more expensive films. Most film critics and historians believe that trend has had a serious impact on the overall quality of films made in Hollywood in the last twenty years. Spielberg and George Lucas, whose films
have dominated the list of biggest box-office hits, have seen their critical reputations suffer as a result. In part, Spielberg and Lucas were simply being blamed for their popularity, for in America's traditionally puritanical dichotomy between art and entertainment, a popular artist is automatically and unfairly suspected of not being an artist. But more serious questions, ones that would haunt Spielberg's career after
Jaws,
were posed by film historian Peter Biskind in his 1990 essay “Blockbuster: The Last Crusade.” Biskind argued that Spielberg and Lucas, with their high-tech, massively popular “aesthetic of awe,” had helped “reduce an entire culture to childishness…. To infantilize the audience of the sixties and empower the audience of the seventies, to reconstitute the spectator as child, Lucas and Spielberg had to obliterate years of sophisticated, adult moviegoing habits…. The blockbuster syndrome probably started with
The
Godfather
in 1972 and got an added boost from
Jaws
in 1975 but really took off with
Star
Wars.
Once it became clear that certain kinds of films could reap immeasurably greater returns on investment than had ever been seen before, studios naturally wanted to turn the trick again, and again, and again: enter the Roman-numeral movie, product of the obsession with surefire hits. Blockbusters were expensive to make, and the more they cost, the safer and blander they became, while the smaller, riskier, innovative projects fell by the wayside.”

S
PIELBERG'S
own personal fortunes were greatly changed by
Jaws.
His directing fee under his Universal contract was “very meager” compared to what another director might have been paid for the film, Zanuck says, and the studio initially “refused to give him any percentage at all,” but before the film was released Spielberg was granted 2.5 percent of the net profits. Spielberg's agent at ICM, Guy McElwaine, also renegotiated his contract with Universal in July 1975. The new four-picture contract for Spielberg and his Amblin' production company
¶¶
obligated Spielberg to direct two more films for the studio by 1981, but provided that he also would receive a share of the profits.

With each point of
Jaws
worth more than a million dollars, Spielberg became a wealthy man at the age of twenty-eight, though not on the scale of Zanuck and Brown, who shared about forty points in the film; Zanuck said he made more money from
Jaws
than his father, Darryl, made in his entire career in the movie business.
Close
Encounters
producer Michael Phillips says Spielberg “still feels that, in principle, two [and a half] percent was too little for his contribution [to
Jaws
].”

More important to Spielberg than the money he made for
Jaws,
however, was the creative freedom the movie bought him: “It was a free ticket for half a dozen rides.” The immediate leverage it gave him was to convince Columbia Pictures to keep increasing the budget on
Close
Encounters
at a time when
that studio was in precarious financial condition. “After
Jaws
,” recalls Phillips, “the money spigots opened.”

Spielberg's newfound success also brought with it a new level of anxiety, for he found that people kept asking him, “How are you going to top
Jaws?”
But, said Phillips in 1977, “Steven is a
mensch.
The only change in him is that he's stronger now and better able to get what he wants. His values are the same. He could have had his head turned by the success of
Jaws,
but all it did was give him more toys to play with. The interesting thing now is that he's still maturing as a person. He's mastered his craft. I think his films will change now as his experience deepens. In other words, he's only going to get better.”

U
NLIKE
most of the science-fiction movies Spielberg grew up watching,
Close
Encounters
of
the
Third
Kind
takes a benign view of human contact with extraterrestrials. The aliens in Spielberg’s film don’t carry ray guns or threaten to blow up the Planet Earth. They aren’t fire-breathing creatures with horns and tentacles, but childlike figures with spindly limbs, large craniums, and shy, beatific smiles. They are emissaries of goodwill, communicating through a dazzling display of light and music. And they are received in similar spirit. Spielberg’s optimistic vision of interplanetary contact marked a radical departure from the Cold War xenophobia that characterized most sci-fi movies in the 1950s, when fear of space aliens served as a metaphor for America’s phobia about Communism.

The Jewish filmmaker who grew up thinking of himself as an “alien” in Middle America, and whose family was not far removed from its immigrant roots, gravitated toward the point of view of the outsiders in
Close
Encoun
ters,
seeing their arrival and influence in only the most positive, transforming light. Spielberg often has been accused of romanticizing suburban conformity, but
Close
Encounters
paints a harsh picture of the dull, repressive midwestern community where the UFOs make their first appearance. Municipal
power repairman Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss)
*
yearns to escape from his Muncie, Indiana, surroundings to share the company of fellow “aliens.” Roy’s “whole belief structure is shattered,” Spielberg commented.“… He had to go through … I guess you could call it a ‘socially dislocating awakening’; and without this cultural shock there is no way he would have been ready or capable or willing to step on that ship and leave the parameters of our astronomy.”

Close
Encounters
and
Schindler
’
s
List
form contrasting yet complementary thematic bookends in the trajectory of Spielberg’s career to date.
Schindler’s
List,
Spielberg’s most powerful confrontation with reality, depicts the cruelty with which the world too often treats those it considers “alien,” and yet, while facing this bitter fact, the film still manages to find a solitary ray of hope.
Close
Encounters,
Spielberg’s most spellbinding dream of the transcendence of mundane reality, celebrates the potential for universal brotherhood, while offering in its purest form what the director called “my vision, my hope and philosophy.”

T
HE
origins of
Close
Encounters
trace back to Spielberg’s experiences watching a wondrous meteor shower with his father as a young boy in Phoenix. The film germinated in his mind throughout his adolescence, when he absorbed vast quantities of science-fiction books, movies, and TV shows, and watched the desert skies over Camelback Mountain through his front-yard telescope.

Two seminal cinematic memories from childhood stood out in Spielberg’s mind when he began work on
Close
Encounters
in the 1970s. The first was the image of the mountain from the terrifying “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence in
Fantasia.
The second was a soothing memory from another Disney movie: the song “When You Wish Upon a Star,” performed in
Pinoc
chio
by Cliff (Ukulele Ike) Edwards as Jiminy Cricket. “I pretty much hung my story on the mood the song created, the way it affected me emotionally,” Spielberg said. “The mountain became the symbolic end zone of the movie, and everything danced around that.”

His 1964 rough draft for
Close
Encounters,
Firelight,
seemed to vacillate on the question of whether a meeting with alien kidnappers was something to be feared or something to be welcomed. Perhaps it was Spielberg’s youthful ambivalence toward his own ethnic identity, and his resulting tendency to identify more with the dominant culture, that was keeping him from fully accepting the “alien” within him. According to producer Michael Phillips,
Spielberg still seemed somewhat conflicted on the subject in the preliminary stages of work on
Close
Encounters:
“I think my biggest contribution was to convince Steven that the aliens would be friendly. He wasn’t sure that, dramatically, you could have a climax of the meeting of these two species based on the sense of wonder alone. I remember arguing a great deal, saying, ‘If they were this advanced, they wouldn’t come to squash us. Would
we
?
If we found lower life on Mars, would we enslave it or would we give help to it?’ But he got into it, and went beyond it, and came up with this cornucopia at the end. That’s why I think
Close
Encounters
is like
The
Day
the
Earth
Stood
Still.”
Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., on the other hand, questioned the innocent optimism of
Close
Encounters:
“[H]ow can we be so sure that a civilization sufficiently in advance of our own to put its spaceship on Earth will regard us with any more consideration than white intruders from Europe regarded the Indians of the American continent, the blacks of Africa, or the primitive peoples of the South Pacific? … Let us pray that the future dreamed of in this humane, attractive, brilliant movie turns out to be right.”

Like
Firelight,
but on a far more sophisticated level,
Close
Encounters
is an eclectic compendium of sci-fi movie motifs and archetypes. Its closest affinities are with the handful of movies that departed from the Cold War norm by depicting space aliens as relatively benign, including
The
Day
the
Earth
Stood
Still
and
It
Came
from
Outer
Space.
One of Spielberg’s favorite sci-fi writers, Arthur C. Clarke, also was a major influence; both Clarke’s 1953 novel
Childhood’s
End
and his story “The Sentinel,” the source of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 classic film
2001:
A
Space
Odyssey,
deal with aliens helping earthlings reach a higher plane of spiritual evolution. Somewhat more covertly, Spielberg also drew from his favorite films in other genres. Although he credits Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins with suggesting the plot about a kidnapped child, Spielberg evidently was inspired by the treatment of that theme and some visual elements in John Ford’s Western
The
Searchers,
which he watched twice while on location for
Close
Encounters.
Spielberg also echoed the scenes of family tension in Frank Capra’s
It’s
a
Wonderful
Life.
He has noted that the theme of “ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances” (as François Truffaut’s ufologist character puts it in the film) gives
Close
Encounters
affinities with both Capra and Hitchcock.

“During
Close
Encounters,
Steven used to see one or two movies every night,” cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond recalls. “Every night he was watching movies and getting more ideas. They had storyboarded everything; we had four sketches to do every day. Then Steven would see a movie and we would add sketches—suddenly four sketches became five we had to do, and five became six. One day Steven was complaining to the crew, ‘Gotta shoot fast.’ Earl Gilbert, an old, experienced gaffer [head electrician], said, ‘Steven, if you would stop watching those fucking movies every night, we would be on schedule.’”

C
LOSE
Encounters
melds such purely fictional storytelling elements with the extensive post-World War II reports and folklore about UFO sightings. The modern “flying saucer” phenomenon dates from Spielberg’s infancy, when Kenneth Arnold reported sighting nine bright saucerlike objects over the Pacific Northwest in June 1947. The possibility of visitors from other planets stimulated an extraordinary mixture of fear and anticipation, especially among baby boomer children prone to fantasizing.

Spielberg’s desire to escape into otherworldly fantasy was especially acute. In his 1959 book
Flying
Saucers.
A
Modern
Myth
of
Things
Seen
in
the
Skies,
Carl Jung suggested that a belief in UFOs stems from “an
emotional
tension
having its cause in a situation of collective distress or danger, or in a vital psychic need.” The Cold War and collective anxieties about the dangers of nuclear war helped stimulate that tension in Spielberg’s formative years. It may not have been coincidental that the widespread revival of interest in UFOs during the early 1970s occurred at a time when the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal were causing an unusually high degree of “collective distress” in the American psyche; Spielberg’s 1973 pitch of
Close
Encounters
as dealing with “UFOs and Watergate” suggests that such a connection existed in his mind. His family problems during adolescence and difficulties finding social acceptance among his peers also stimulated his fantasies of extraterrestrial contact. Another psychiatrist who has studied the UFO phenomenon, Kenneth Ring, noted that when a child from a dysfunctional family learns “to dissociate in response to the trauma,” he is “much more likely to become sensitive to alternate realities.”

Although Spielberg was careful to call himself an “agnostic” on the subject, the fact that his interest in UFOs only increased as he reached adulthood suggests that his “vital psychic need” to believe in such phenomena was still intact and undiminished. And he realized that he was not alone in having such a need: “I knew that if this film was to be popular it wouldn’t be because people were afraid of the phenomena, but because the UFOs are a seductive alternative for a lot of people who no longer have faith in anything.” In his
“Close
Encounters
of
the
Third
Kind”
Diary,
cast member Bob Balaban reported that on the night of July 22, 1976, during location shooting in Alabama, “some people thought they saw a UFO over the hangar. By the time Spielberg and the rest of us ran outside to look, the lights had disappeared.” Spielberg, however, recalled initially being convinced that he
had
seen his first UFO that night. “When I found out later that it was only an Echo satellite,” he said, “I was as depressed as I’ve ever been.”

Soon after Spielberg finished shooting the film, John Milius took him to actor Robert Stack’s duck-hunting lodge near Colusa in northern California. There had been reports for months of UFOs being sighted in the nearby buttes, and Spielberg, Stack recalls, was eager to see one. Late one night, when they were all in the cabin, Milius reported seeing a UFO outside. Spielberg stayed up the rest of the night with Milius, hoping for an encore. The caretaker on Stack’s property, Bill Duffey, later told them brilliant lights
had flown over that night and “lit up the entire orchard, sixty-five to seventy acres. They hung there and dropped pieces like tinfoil.” Duffey said that he had jumped into his car to pursue the UFOs, which he claimed made chugging sounds, like a washing machine. “I’ve done research,” Spielberg replied, “and that’s not the sound they’re supposed to make. It should be a solid humming sound.”

Continuing to hope for a sign of extraterrestrial life, Spielberg donated $100,000 to The Planetary Society in 1985 to make possible its META (Mega-channel Extraterrestrial Assay) system using a Harvard telescope to scan the skies for possible radio signals from distant civilizations. After throwing the switch while holding his infant son, Max, Spielberg said, “I just hope that there is more floating around up there than just old reruns of
The
Jackie
Gleason
Show.
”

S
PIELBERG’S
technical advisor on
Close
Encounters
was the prominent ufologist Dr. J. Allen Hynek. For many years, Hynek was scientific consultant to the U.S. Air Force and its Project Blue Book on Unidentified Flying Objects. A professional astronomer, he initially was asked by the Air Force “to weed out obvious cases of astronomical phenomena—meteors, planets, twinkling stars, and other natural occurrences that could give rise to the flying saucer reports then being received…. For years I could not accept the idea that a genuine UFO phenomenon might exist, preferring to hold that it was all a craze based on hoaxes and misperceptions. As my review of UFO reports continued, and as the reports grew in number to be of statistical significance, I became concerned that the whole subject didn’t evaporate as one would expect a craze or fad to do.”

Considered a professional debunker by UFO believers, Hynek later admitted, “To put it bluntly, the Air Force was under orders from the Pentagon to debunk UFOs.” Hynek broke with the Air Force in the late 1960s because he “could no longer, in good conscience, keep calling everything ‘swamp gas.’” Founding the Center for UFO Studies in Evanston, Illinois, he cautiously emerged as an agnostic, if not a true believer, on the subject of UFOs and extraterrestrial contact.

It was in his 1972 book,
The
UFO
Experience:
A
Scientific
Inquiry,
that Hynek originated the term “Close Encounters.” He defined Close Encounters of the First Kind as those in which “the reported UFO is seen at close range but there is no interaction with the environment (other than trauma on the part of the observer).” In Close Encounters of the Second Kind, “physical effects on both animate and inanimate material are noted.” Close Encounters of the Third Kind are those in which “the presence of ‘occupants’ in or about the UFO is reported.” People who report such encounters, he wrote, “are in no way ‘special.’ They are not religious fanatics; they are more apt to be policemen, businessmen, schoolteachers, and other respectable citizens.”