Steven Spielberg (56 page)

I
MET
a real heartbreaker last night,” Spielberg told Julia Phillips while they were working on
Close
Encounters.
The “heartbreaker” was Amy Irving.

The twenty-two-year-old actress, whose curly-brown-haired, sloe-eyed, high-cheekboned beauty masked an intense and fiercely ambitious nature, had recently returned to California from dramatic studies in London when she met Spielberg in 1976. The daughter of TV producer-director Jules Irving, former artistic director of New York's Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center, and actress Priscilla Pointer, Amy was of Russian-Jewish ancestry on her father's side and Welsh-Cherokee on her mother's, but she was raised as a Christian Scientist. She was the niece of Universal TV executive producer Richard Irving, who had worked with Spielberg on
The
Name
of
the
Game.
Amy grew up on the stage in San Francisco and New York and felt somewhat alienated when she followed her parents to Hollywood. “When we were in San Francisco, Los Angeles was a dirty word to us,” she admitted. “I never in a million years thought I'd ever be in television or films. I always thought I was going to be a struggling stage actress.”

But with her three-year stint completed at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, Amy found herself unexpectedly in demand in Hollywood.
After playing a few TV roles, she tried out for the part of Princess Leia in George Lucas's
Star
Wars.
Although she was passed over for the more hard-edged Carrie Fisher, Amy caught the attention of director Brian De Palma, who was conducting the audition jointly with Lucas in order to find actresses for
his
next movie. De Palma offered Amy her first movie role, as the sweet-natured high school girl Sue Snell in
Carrie.
Since he “had a feeling Amy and Steven would like each other,” De Palma also sent her to audition for the role of Richard Dreyfuss's wife in
Close
Encounters.

“I was much too young [for the role], and Steven said so right away,” Amy recalled three years later. “We just sat and talked for a while. It was a month before I saw him again. That encouraged me, however. If he'd been one of those directors who immediately asked an actress out for a date I'd be very worried today; in fact, I'd probably insist on sitting in on all his auditions.”

Their second meeting came at a small dinner party arranged by De Palma during the shooting of
Carrie.
Steven reminded Amy of her father, who was also a “wonderful, boyish man, a real hard worker—gifted with a silly sense of humor.” She soon moved out of her Laurel Canyon house and into Steven's “bachelor funky” digs nearby. Later described by director Robert Markowitz as having “an icy exterior but a high degree of sexuality teeming beneath the surface,” Amy would spend the next four years living with Spielberg in a passionate but often turbulent relationship.

A few months after they began living together, they moved into a lavish new home Steven bought in Coldwater Canyon, close to the Beverly Hills Hotel. “The house that
Jaws
built,” as they called it, marked a considerable step up the social ladder for Spielberg. “Steven had this huge, huge house—eight or nine thousand square feet, it must have been,” screenwriter Bob Gale recalls. “He was proud and embarrassed at the same time to have a five- or six-bedroom house. What was he going to do with all this? He said, ‘You know, I thought about it. I could either take my money and have it invested and every month I could look at numbers in a book or on a sheet, or I could live in it. So I decided I should live in it.'”

Steven and Amy shared the house with a cook and a cocker spaniel, Elmer; two parrots, named Schmuck I and II after Steven's boyhood pets in Arizona; and, briefly, a monkey who could not be housebroken. Elmer made appearances in
The
Sugarland
Express,
Jaws,
Close
Encounters,
and
1941,
and one of the parrots was trained to croak the five-note interplanetary signal from
Close
Encounters.

Spielberg worked at an elaborate customized desk with built-in telephone, radio, tape recorder, and (befitting his growing sense of privacy) a security television monitor and a paper shredder. The five-year-old house had a fancy screening room where Spielberg, Amy, and their friends watched 35mm prints of movies borrowed from the studios. He also relaxed by listening to his collection of movie soundtrack albums and by playing
Space
Invaders
and other state-of-the-art video games.

If all that wasn't enough to keep him occupied, “There was a television in
just about every room of that house, and there was always a television on,” reports Gale. “He'd have a conversation, and out of the corner of his eye he'd be watching television and see something and get excited about it. He'd make a note, ‘Find out the name of this actor or who directed this commercial.' He was always thinking about what he was seeing and filing it away.”

Amy did not find it easy to accommodate to Steven's hyperkinetic, high-powered lifestyle or to the publicity spotlight that went with it. Since she was just at the beginning of her career, and he was already phenomenally successful, she naturally felt in his shadow. While growing up, she had become tired of hearing herself described as “Jules living's daughter,” resenting people's assumptions that whenever she won a part, it was because of her father. Now she faced the same problem all over again, but on a much bigger stage. “I don't want to be known as Steven's girlfriend,” she already was telling the press in 1978. They did not work together during their first four years as a couple, in part because Amy wanted to ensure that whatever success she attained was her own.

She felt overwhelmed, at first, by Steven's creative abilities. When she saw
Close
Encounters,
she was moved to tears, both by the beauty of the images and, she said, “by the beauty of Steve Spielberg's soul. He disclosed things none of us ever imagined.” But by 1979 she had developed more mixed feelings about his work. “I know he's an incredible moviemaker,” she said, “but the kind of films he makes aren't necessarily the kind I want to be in.”

During that period, De Palma put Amy into another surreal horror film,
The
Fury,
and Robert Markowitz directed her in
Voices,
a love story in which she played a deaf woman who teaches hearing-impaired children.
Voices
was not a commercial success, and while her reviews were respectful, they did not win her the separate identity she craved. She suffered because she “wasn't secure enough to have some people think I owed my career to Steven.” Steven, for his part, still had to overcome his lingering resistance to growing up and assuming the responsibilities of a husband and father.

Amy felt herself treated as a “second-class citizen” in a status-conscious industry town consumed with talk about moviemaking and box-office grosses. “Our social life was going out to dinner with studio heads,” she complained. Like Steven's former girlfriend who met him during the making of
Sugarland
Express
but ultimately went back to Texas because she couldn't share his obsession with movies, Amy quickly became frustrated by Steven's single-minded absorption in his career. “Steven has trouble with a level of intimacy,” his longtime producer Kathleen Kennedy has said. “He gets close to people to a point, and then it begins to break down, because I don't think Steven is always comfortable communicating his feelings. His inability to trust very many people creates a certain amount of personal loneliness for him. But I also think it comes from just wanting to be by himself and be close to some creative, inanimate world he can live within, rather than deal with the real world and real people.”

While making
Close
Encounters,
Steven publicly admitted he had no time
to do anything but “eat, shoot your movie, plan your shots for the next day, sleep, and forget women.” When Amy visited him on the Mobile location that summer, he confided to Julia Phillips, “I wish she hadn't come. She keeps crying and I keep wanting to say, ‘Don't you understand, I'm fucking my movie.'”

T
O
follow the personal epiphany of
Close
Encounters,
Spielberg considered several projects, including a pirate movie he had been developing for Twentieth Century–Fox with screenwriter Jeffrey Fiskin. Spielberg described it as a sixteenth-century action yarn “in the old Errol Flynn tradition,” about a love triangle involving a woman and two half-brothers, a peasant and an aristocrat. He dropped the project after Universal's 1976 pirate movie
Swashbuckler
sank without a trace.

Spielberg came much closer to directing a comedy-drama about Negro leagues baseball players,
The
Bingo
Long
Traveling
All-Stars
and
Motor
Kings.
The Motown-Universal film was based on the 1973 novel by William Brashler and adapted by
Sugarland
Express
writers Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins. When the director originally hired for
Bingo
Long,
Mark Rydell, dropped out because of a disagreement over budget limitations, Universal offered Motown the services of Spielberg, then in postproduction on
Jaws.
Spielberg was enthusiastic about the project, but as producer Rob Cohen explained, “The trouble was that as
Jaws'
opening got nearer and nearer, Steve became less and less available. We were set to begin shooting within about a month of that, and there were a million things to be done. We couldn't postpone production because we had a play-or-pay deal with James Earl Jones, so we simply had to have another director.” Spielberg was succeeded by another former Universal TV director, John Badham.

Spielberg's youthful fondness for
The
Twilight
Zone
was reflected in his interest in William Goldman's novel
Magic,
a spooky tale about a ventriloquist controlled by his dummy. Reminiscent of the 1962
Twilight
Zone
program “The Dummy” with Cliff Robertson, as well as the Michael Redgrave episode in the 1945 British thriller
Dead
of
Night,
Magic
was a project Spielberg coveted before Richard Attenborough was hired to direct the United Artists release. “I had talked to Robert De Niro about playing the part that Anthony Hopkins wound up playing,” Spielberg recalled. “… I had it in my mind how I would have made that film, and I thought it would have been pretty good. After a year had gone by, and Dickie's film opened in theaters [in 1978], I went to see the picture and realized that it was a hell of a lot better than what I would have done.”

Spielberg also considered directing a live network TV production of Reginald Rose's teleplay
Twelve
Angry
Men
with a cast of both men and women. In his senior year at Saratoga High, Spielberg had worked on a stage production of the jury drama, which was first presented on CBS's live
Studio
One
series in 1954 and was made into a 1957 film (titled
12
Angry
Men
) by
director Sidney Lumet. In the end, however, Spielberg was seduced by the prospect of working with two young comedy writers whose motto was “Social Irresponsibility.”

I
N
1973, a USC film school class visited Universal for a prerelease screening of
The
Sugarland
Express.
Afterward, student filmmaker Robert Zemeckis asked Spielberg to watch his black comedy
A
Field
of
Honor,
about a newly discharged mental patient driven to a murderous rampage by exposure to the everyday violence of American society. “[M]y God, it was spectacular for a film student in his early twenties to have made such a picture with no money, with police cars and a riot and a lot of crazy characters … all dubbed to Elmer Bernstein's score for
The
Great
Escape,
”
Spielberg said later. “I saw that picture and I said, ‘This man is worth watching.'”

Following their graduation from USC, Zemeckis and writing partner Bob Gale wrote TV scripts for Universal and collaborated on two unproduced feature screenplays. One was
Tank,
about a group of dissidents who steal a Sherman tank from a National Guard Armory and threaten to blow up a Chicago building to protest the actions of oil companies.
Tank
tickled the fancy of writer-director John Milius, who recalled that Zemeckis and Gale “came in my office at Goldwyn, and they were just crazy, they were just raving wild men.”

“Boys,” growled Milius, “this script has a healthy sense of social irresponsibility. I applaud that.”

The burly, bombastic, yet genial Milius was an unabashed war freak who loved to goad Hollywood liberals with his retro politics, which were somewhere to the right of John Wayne's. “I just absolutely hate liberals and people who are civilized,” Milius proclaimed in a 1975
Daily
Variety
interview with the author of this book. Spielberg had a clipping of the article delivered to Milius's office, attached to a wooden carving board with a hunting knife stuck through a piece of raw, bloody meat.