Steven Spielberg (57 page)

Milius's A-Team Productions had a deal to produce movies for MGM, and Zemeckis and Gale were hired to write a World War II movie titled
The
Night
the
Japs
Attacked.
Although objections from Japanese-Americans forced Milius to change the title (temporarily) to
The
Night
the
Japanese
Attacked,
the script offered something to offend virtually everyone in its broad lampooning of anti-Japanese hysteria among Los Angeles residents in the early days of the war. Spielberg changed the title to
The
Rising
Sun
and, finally,
1941
.

The two Bobs began hanging out with Spielberg and Milius on Thursday nights at the Oak Tree Gun Club in the Newhall Pass north of Los Angeles. Milius had introduced Spielberg to the sport of skeet shooting, a male-bonding ritual for Milius and his fellow Hollywood gun enthusiasts. “There are numbers of gun owners—collectors, hunters, sport shooters—in the film community, plus many more who keep firearms for protection,” National Rifle Association spokesman Charlton Heston, also a friend of Milius's, wrote
in his 1995 autobiography,
In
the
Arena.
“I suspect, in fact, that there are more filmmakers who are closet gun enthusiasts than there are closet homosexuals. Steven Spielberg has one of the finest gun collections in California, but never refers to it, and never shoots publicly. Can you imagine the most famous filmmaker in town worried about his reputation?”

Spielberg, who had learned to shoot from his father while growing up in Arizona, still visits the Oak Tree Gun Club. “He's a darn good shot,” says club member Robert Stack, himself a world-class target shooter. “He has terrific reactions. Clay target shooting is a very subtle, highly sophisticated sport; it takes a lot of nerve. He shot some very good scores.”

Evenings with the boys at the Oak Tree Gun Club also involved a stop along the way at a hamburger joint called Tommie's. “Steven had this cheap Super-8 camera,” Milius recalled, “and he had all these films of us eating at Tommie's and covering ourselves in chili and throwing up on the car, doing Bigfoot imitations, wonderful stuff. Great howling mad evenings out there at the range, out of which came
1941.
”

In his only partly tongue-in-cheek introduction to a comic-book version of the movie, Spielberg wrote, “I was immediately attracted to [the script] because of its highly illiterate nature—it appeared to have been written by two guys whose only excursions into literature had been classic comics. My initial instincts were not far off: I subsequently learned that the sole writing experiences of the authors had been spray-painting the walls of public buildings with profanity and ethnic slurs. I continued to read their first-draft screenplay at a local junk-burger dive in the San Fernando Valley. Moments of the script were so funny that I vomited from laughter. It was this feeling of nausea that I felt moved to translate into cinematic imagery.”

R
ETURNING
to Los Angeles from five weeks of rewriting
1941
on the Mobile location of
Close
Encounters,
the two Bobs began work on a script satirizing Beatlemania. The first of many films Spielberg has produced without directing,
I
Wanna
Hold
Your
Hand
follows six New Jersey teenagers journeying to New York City in February 1964 to take part in the frenzy surrounding the American TV debut of the Beatles on
The
Ed
Sullivan
Show.
While borrowing unabashedly from
A
Hard
Day's
Night
and
American
Graf
fiti,
Zemeckis and Gale tempered their nostalgia with sly insinuations about the repressed sexual hysteria underlying American teenagers' obsession with the long-haired Liverpudlians.

Spielberg set up the movie with Sid Sheinberg, who agreed to let Zemeckis make his directorial debut at Universal. I
Wanna
Hold
Your
Hand
was filmed on studio back lots for a modest $1.6 million in late 1977, with a cast of mostly unknown young actors and with doubles used to stand in for the Beatles. “Steven would come down to the set a lot when we were shooting,” Gale says, “and he'd make suggestions to Bob about how to block the scene. He'd say, ‘Here's how you can play all this in one shot.' Boy, it was great,
because Steven was so good at that. He would quietly make a suggestion to Bob, or Bob would say, ‘Steven, help me out here.'”

In those days, Spielberg disclaimed any ambitious plans to act like a mogul or to supervise his own slate of projects with other directors. “My own theory about producing is, I'll produce films that I would have otherwise directed,” he said in 1980. “… Movies slip away—you can't do everything. But I like to
think
I can do everything, I
want
to do everything.”

The production of the charming, energetic I
Wanna
Hold
Your
Hand
went smoothly, and though it was not a box-office success, the film gave Spielberg the gratifying experience of testing his hand as a producer while giving a break to another young director. Spielberg's first mentor, Chuck Silvers, had asked him to remember to put something back into the industry once he became successful. Spielberg was doing just that.

S
PIELBERG
planned to take a few weeks from preproduction on
1941
to knock off a low-budget comedy about children,
After
School,
from yet another script by Zemeckis and Gale. The impetus for the project (sometimes referred to by Spielberg as
Growing
Up
) came from François Truffaut, whose view of Spielberg's true talents was diametrically opposed to the conventional Hollywood wisdom. Truffaut was celebrated for his films with children, including
The
Four
Hundred
Blows
and
Small
Change.
While acting in
Close
Encounters,
Truffaut frequently urged Spielberg to make an American equivalent of
Small
Change:
“You must make a movie about keeds. You must stop all this big stuff and make a movie about keeds! If it's the last thing you do!”

Summoning the two Bobs, Spielberg said, “I want you guys to write a movie I'm really passionate about—about kids.”

“Great, Steven,” they replied. “What about 'em?”

“That's it,” Spielberg said. “Kids.”

According to Gale, that was the extent of the guidance they received on the subject from Spielberg.

After talking with Spielberg in February 1978,
Variety
claimed that the film would be “a personal story of his own young adulthood.” In fact, Zemeckis and Gale were drawing from
their
adolescent experiences. “Zemeckis and I being the renegades we are—certainly we were more so then—we thought that to make it really interesting, it should be rated R, and we wrote it that way,” Gale says. “We swore like truckdrivers when we were twelve. A lot of kids do that, and we thought that would be the way to go. It was the classic nerds-against-jocks story. The nerds had a dogshit bomb on a radio-controlled car.” Spielberg found their concept amusing and provocative. “I don't want to make a movie about children that's dimples or cuteness,” he said. “… It's my first vendetta film: I'm going to get back at about twenty people I've always wanted to get back at.”

Shooting was to begin that May for Universal, with a budget of only $1.5
million. Spielberg planned to use a cast of unknowns between the ages of eight and fourteen, shooting in a semi-improvisatory fashion and letting the kids contribute their own experiences to the screenplay. The writers set
After
School
in Zemeckis's hometown of Chicago, but Spielberg shifted the locale to his far more sedate hometown of Phoenix. Before preproduction could begin in earnest, Spielberg got cold feet about the screenplay. “I think it was a little too much for Steven,” says Gale. The turning point came when Spielberg asked cinematographer Caleb Deschanel to shoot
After
School.
Deschanel “read it and hated it. He said, ‘This is disgusting.' Steven didn't really have a focus on what
After
School
was going to be. The movie that he really wanted to make about kids turned out to be
E.
T
.”

Spielberg explained his decision to drop the earlier movie about kids by saying, “I hadn't grown up enough to make
Grouting
Up
.” But he ruefully admitted a few years later, “I wanted to do a little film—not
Annie
Hall,
because I haven't met my Annie Hall yet, but a small film, an intimate film. They said, Anyone can make a little film, we want you to make big films. It was capricious of me, but I agreed…. I plunged into [
1941
] with such wild abandon that I didn't really focus on the story I was telling, to know whether it was funny or simply stupid or whether the film was getting too overblown.… On about the hundred and forty-fifth day of shooting, I realized that the film was directing me, I wasn't directing it.”

“W
E
realize now that no one in his right mind would have tackled our story,” Zemeckis said after
1941
finished shooting. “But we didn't reckon on Steve.” Outwardly, at least, Spielberg seemed like one of the sanest young filmmakers in Hollywood of the late seventies, even one of the squarest. Yet part of him wanted to fit in with that era's “wild and crazy” humor, typified by John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and the rest of the
Saturday
Night
Live
crowd. “I must say that there's a part of me, in my nice, conservative life, that is probably as crazy and insane as Milius and the two guys who wrote that script,” Spielberg said in a 1996 documentary about the making of
1941.
“… I really thought it would be a great opportunity to break a lot of furniture and see a lot of glass shattering. It was basically written and directed as one would perform in a demolition derby.”

Much as Spielberg would like to claim a truly anarchic spirit, more likely it was his lifelong need to seek protective coloration through conformity that resulted in what he acknowledged was the “total conceptual disaster” of
1941.
While not about to surrender enough of his self-control to embrace the self-destructive drug lifestyle of Belushi and so many other young people in show business during the 1970s, Spielberg nevertheless was uncomfortable seeming too far out of step with his generation.
Time
magazine aptly summarized
1941
as “Animal House Goes to War.” An elephantine postmodernist farce about World War II whose large cast featured Belushi and Aykroyd, it broadly satirized anti-Japanese hysteria in Los Angeles during the
week following Pearl Harbor. Spielberg borrowed Belushi and Tim Matheson from director John Landis's 1978
National
Lampoon's
Animal
House,
and Landis himself played a small part as a motorcycle messenger in
1941.
With its crude sexual innuendos and equally witless attempts at social satire,
1941,
as Ron Pennington of
The
Hollywood
Reporter
observed, “makes
Animal
House
look like a highly sophisticated comedy.”
*

The clash of styles and sensibilities was obvious from the first day of shooting. “This is not a Spielberg movie,” the director kept saying to himself. “What am I doing here?”

Zemeckis and Gale had come across the little-known story of “The Great Los Angeles Air Raid” and the events leading up to it while doing research for
Tank
at the downtown Los Angeles public library. “Although
1941
is based on actual incidents that took place in southern California during World War II,” Gale wrote in his novelization of the screenplay, “in many cases the truth has been modified, embellished, or completely thrown out the window in the interests of drama, entertainment, cheap sensationalism, and getting a few laughs.”

The facts were these: On the night of February 22, 1942, a Japanese submarine lobbed about twenty shells at the oil fields on the coast of southern California, twelve miles north of Santa Barbara. The shells did little damage. One hit an oil well derrick a quarter mile from the beach, and a fuse from an unexploded shell injured an Army officer trying to disarm it a few days later. Nevertheless, the attack was the first on the American mainland by a foreign enemy since the War of 1812. Nearby Los Angeles went into a heightened stage of alert. Two nights later, shortly after 3:00
A.M
., the sky over the city was filled with ack-ack rounds from antiaircraft guns for forty-five minutes when unidentified enemy planes were thought to be spotted over the coastline.
L.A. AREA RAIDED
! screamed the
Los
Angeles
Times
in an extra edition on February 25.

Although it never was determined exactly what set off the initial barrage—probably an errant weather balloon—Angelenos reacted in an orgy of unrestrained panic. All over the city there were phantom enemy aircraft sightings, and it was incorrectly reported that four enemy planes were shot down over the city. Exploding shrapnel from 1,440 rounds of antiaircraft ammunition rained down on houses as people cowered inside for shelter or dashed madly around the darkened streets. One man was injured by an exploding shell, and five people died of heart attacks or traffic injuries during the blackout resulting from the imaginary “air raid.”

William A. Fraker, Spielberg's cinematographer on
1941,
witnessed the event as a young signalman on a Coast Guard transport ship in San Pedro Harbor. To Fraker's eyes, “It was all so exquisite. My mouth hung open for
the entire time. We couldn't believe it was happening. From San Pedro to Malibu it looked like the Fourth of July. We didn't think the war could have come this far.”