Steven Spielberg (58 page)

This bizarre event might have provided the framework for a corrosive satire of wartime jitters and racist anxieties on the homefront. One can easily imagine what Preston Sturges might have done with the story, lampooning the sheltered gullibility of ordinary Americans in the trenchant manner of his wartime comedies
The
Miracle
of
Morgan's
Creek
and
Hail
the
Conquering
Hero.
But social satire, however farcical in spirit, cannot depart so far from reality that it turns into outright fantasy, or much of the satirical sting is lost. Having an aerial dogfight take place over Hollywood Boulevard, to cite the most egregious example, lends visual excitement to
1941,
but only adds to its unbelievability.

The film's most pervasive credibility problem is that the writers divorced the Los Angeles “air raid” from much of the social context that would have made it meaningful. While the characters' hysterical fear of “Japs” is exploited for what Milius gleefully referred to as “politically incorrect” farce, the most significant omission is any mention of the rounding-up of Japanese-American residents of Los Angeles and their deportation to internment camps, a process that was beginning in earnest during the week the actual shelling took place. The movie was backdated to the day and night of December 13, 1941, to heighten the proximity to Pearl Harbor. Purely for comic effect, the screenwriters took the license of throwing in Los Angeles's 1943 zoot-suit riots, while barely alluding to the anti-Hispanic bias that led to those riots. Acknowledging the true extent of the racist paranoia in wartime California would have made the film's satire of war hysteria much more troubling and incisive.

But Spielberg admitted, “I really didn't have a vision for
1941
.” It would have been a better film, he now thinks, if it had been directed by Zemeckis, who has described his own vision of
1941
as “very dark and very cynical.” Indeed, if Zemeckis had prevailed, the film's ending would have written a new chapter in the annals of darkness and cynicism: Jitterbugging delinquent Wally Stephans (Bobby Di Cicco), having become the bombardier on the
Enola
Gay,
drops the atomic bomb on Hiroshima as revenge for losing a USO dance contest. That ending was “too outrageous for everyone,” Zemeckis regretted. “No one would listen to me.”

T
HE
screenwriters' reckless conflation of historical events undermines the memorable scene of Major General Joseph W. Stilwell (Robert Stack) watching Walt Disney's
Dumbo
in a movie theater on Hollywood Boulevard. This scene was inspired by a letter Stilwell wrote to his wife from Washington, D.C., about his activities with his personal aide on December 25, 1941: “[W]e had Christmas dinner—and a good one—at a restaurant—and dissipated
further by seeing
Dumbo.
I nearly fell off my chair when the elephant pyramid toppled over. We sat through the film twice.”

Stilwell at the time was based in Monterey, California, as commander of the Third Army Corps, with responsibility for California coastal defenses from San Luis Obispo south to San Diego. He was in the Los Angeles area briefly in December, and though he encountered “strange cases of jitters” and some “wild, farcical and fantastic” rumors of imminent danger, no civil unrest occurred during his visit, nor was there any outside the Washington theater where the real-life general watched
Dumbo.
Considered in isolation, the scene in
1941
of Stilwell tearfully watching the baby elephant being caressed by its imprisoned mother is a strangely charming expression of childlike tenderness, evoking the power of entertainment to provide solace in time of war. But the unspoken (and no doubt unintended) implication that Stilwell is criminally oblivious to his duties makes nonsense of the historical character and undercuts Stack's dignified portrayal of Stilwell as one of the few sane individuals in the movie.

The role originally was offered to John Wayne, who read the script and “spent an hour trying to persuade me not to direct it,” Spielberg recalled. “I'm so surprised at you,” Wayne told him. “I thought you were an American, and I thought you were going to make a movie to honor the memory of World War II. But this dishonors the memory of what happened.” Another conservative icon, Charlton Heston, passed on the part for the same reason. “I never saw it as an anti-American film,” Spielberg insisted. “… What's wrong about sticking a pie in the face of the Statue of Liberty from time to time, if it's in the spirit of humor?”

Spielberg also offered the role to the legendary B-movie director Samuel Fuller, a former World War II infantryman, but Fuller objected that he bore no physical resemblance to Stilwell. Casting Fuller instead as the cigar-chomping commanding officer of the Southern California Interceptor Command, Spielberg finally turned to his shooting buddy from the Oak Tree Gun Club. With a military haircut, wire-rimmed glasses, and a minimal amount of makeup, Robert Stack bore an uncanny resemblance to “Vinegar Joe.”

When they went on location at the downtown Los Angeles Theatre to shoot the scene of Stilwell watching
Dumbo,
Spielberg asked Stack if he wanted drops for his eyes to help himself cry.

“If I remember
Dumbo,
it was a great scene,” Stack replied. “If I look at
Dumbo,
I can do it without acting.”

“I want the scene run for Bob!” Spielberg said. “Roll it!”

“He made sure I had the setting all around me,” Stack remembers. “He didn't say, ‘OK, you're reacting to …' When I made my first picture, with Deanna Durbin, they had a blackboard and they pointed to it and said, ‘There she is, she's beautiful!' As I was watching the scene in
Dumbo,
tears were starting to come. This guy was shooting with a massive camera and all that incredible equipment, but he didn't get overpowered with the camera.
Steven shot that in one take! I couldn't believe it. He has incredible confidence. I've never done anything like that before, without coverage or protection. I thought, ‘This guy knows what he wants. That's class!'”

Stack adds, “But if you want the truth, I never fully understood the script. It was a strange script. Just plain strange.”

S
PIELBERG'S
fondness for
Mad
magazine's “Scenes We'd Like to See” was gratified by
1941
's irreverent riffs on the patriotic fervor of vintage World War II movies. On a deeper thematic level, the script offered him a demented comic inversion of
Close
Encounters.
Its satiric portrayal of a narrow-minded American populace overcome with exaggerated fear of alien invasion and unidentified flying objects allowed Spielberg license for his hitherto submerged sense of comic invective.

Although Spielberg rather foolishly described
1941
at the time of its release as “a celebration of paranoia”—an indication of how confused his conscious intentions were in approaching the subject—his deepest and most truly subversive sympathy is, as always, with the outsiders. While Japanese-Americans are conspicuous by their absence, the commander of the Japanese submarine, Mitamura (Toshiro Mifune, hero of
The
Seven
Samurai
and other Akira Kurosawa classics), is portrayed as a man of fierce dignity and stature, if a bit blinkered in his idea of military “honor.” (It's fortunate that Spielberg had second thoughts about the propriety of casting John Belushi in the role.) In one of the few genuinely funny scenes in the movie, Mitamura, searching for a way to “destroy something honorable on the American mainland,” brushes off the skepticism of a subordinate who asks, “Is there anything honorable to destroy in Los Angeles?” To which the boyish navigator brightly suggests, “Hollywood!”

Mitamura's decision to shell Hollywood to “demoralize the Americans' will to fight” gives Spielberg the opportunity to trash the Los Angeles basin from the Santa Monica Pier to the La Brea Tar Pits and Hollywood Boulevard. Far removed in spirit from the apocalyptic vision of “The Burning of Los Angeles” in Nathanael West's
The
Day
of
the
Locust,
this gleeful fantasy of destruction is sheer juvenile indulgence on Spielberg's part. The lovingly and lavishly rendered mayhem of riots, plane crashes, and explosions, along with the wholesale trashing of any available prop, became the movie's mindless
raison
d'être.
The Three Stooges served as the screenwriters' inspiration for much of the film's infantile humor. The director, reports Gale, was also “a big Stooges fan.”

Spielberg's need to unwind from the pressures of filming
Close
Encounters
led him to dream up all sorts of zany, outrageous gags for
1941
, such as the self-referential opening sequence of a naked female swimmer encountering a Japanese submarine off the fog-shrouded coast of northern California. Parodying the opening of
Jaws
, Spielberg cast the same shapely young woman (Susan Backlinie) who had been attacked by the shark and had John
Williams repeat his ominous musical theme. While mildly amusing, the scene went on far too long, and it was a bit early for Spielberg to begin paying homage to his own movies. “We wouldn't have had the audacity to propose that,” Gale admits. “And we have a lot of audacity.”
†

Spielberg's impulses toward self-conscious stylization made him flirt with an even more radical notion. “In the back of my mind,” he said, “I always saw
1941
as an old-fashioned Hollywood musical,” with big-band numbers written by Williams. “… I just didn't have the courage at that time in my life to tackle a musical.” The film's excitingly staged jitterbug contest was described by the director as “a fragment of what I wanted to do … [and] the most satisfying experience for me in making
1941
.”

T
HREE
months before the cameras rolled, Spielberg vowed, “I will not make this movie if it costs a penny over $12 million.” As the budget escalated well beyond that figure, Zemeckis and Gale had the quotation bound into their revised drafts of the screenplay, and Spielberg's vow also mysteriously appeared on gag T-shirts distributed to the crew. Another T-shirt, made up by the crew members themselves during the 247 days of shooting, contained the weary sentiment, “
1941
Forever … and ever … and ever.”

Although initially developed under Milius's deal at MGM,
1941
was made as an unusual joint venture of Columbia and Universal. “Spielberg didn't want to make the movie at MGM,” Gale explains. “He had just made
Close
Encounters
for Columbia. Steven had an interesting theory, which was to make your next picture for the same studio you were working on your current picture for, because that would keep them honest about wanting to promote it. Dan Melnick was running MGM at the time we developed
1941;
Melnick didn't like the script at all—he didn't get it. Then Melnick ended up at Columbia; after [David] Begelman left, he was running the store [as head of worldwide production]. I remember Melnick saying, ‘I don't understand this script, I don't think it's funny, but I guess if both Milius and Spielberg say this is gonna be a good picture, we'll do it.' So that's how it got to Columbia. At the same time, Sid Sheinberg was putting a tremendous amount of pressure on Steven to do his next picture at Universal: ‘You gotta make another picture for me, Steven. You owe me.'”
‡

The two studios shared all costs and proceeds on
1941,
with Universal handling U.S. and Canadian distribution and Columbia distributing the film overseas. Completed at a cost of $31.5 million,
1941
was one of the most expensive films made up until that time, more than $5 million over its $26 million budget (and a whopping $20 million over its original cost estimate).
Although
1941
had an executive producer, John Milius, and a producer, Buzz Feitshans, Spielberg admitted
1941
went “capriciously and lavishly over-budget and over-schedule, which was all my fault…. We would have been better off with $10 million less, because we went from one plot to seven subplots. But at the time, I wanted it—the bigness, the power, hundreds of people at my beck and call, millions of dollars at my disposal, and everybody saying, Yes, yes, yes….
1941
was my Little General period.”
1941
became a textbook example of what can happen when a director coming off two successive hits (both of which had gone well over budget) has no one willing or able to say “no” to him.

Columbia's production president John Veitch, the executive directly responsible for the film, told Zemeckis and Gale he would let Spielberg do whatever he wanted because he was a “genius.” Although Veitch's faith in Spielberg's creative instincts had been triumphantly borne out by the artistic and commercial success of
Close
Encounters,
such license allowed the misconceived
1941
to spiral out of control, giving free rein to Spielberg's worst instincts. “If you're going to go over budget, you want to go over budget with someone like Steven,” Veitch contends. “He's not going over budget because he's being careless or because he's going to get a scene no matter how much it costs or how long it takes. Steven's dedication is to getting the finest picture possible.”

The runaway atmosphere of the production was exacerbated by factors beyond Spielberg's control, including the fact that Belushi and Aykroyd could only work three days a week because they were commuting to New York for
Saturday
Night
Live.
Rampant cocaine use also was a major problem. According to Bob Woodward's book
Wired:
The
Short
Life
and
Fast
Times
of
John
Belushi,
the actor's heavy use of cocaine often made it hard for him to remember lines and forced him to work in short, unpredictable bursts of energy. On one occasion, Belushi arrived on the set an hour and a half late, “so drugged up that he nearly rolled out of the car onto the ground.” Angrily confronting Belushi in the star's trailer, Spielberg told him, “You can do this to anyone else, but you can't do it to me. For $350,000 [Belushi's salary] you're going to show up.” Spielberg delegated associate producer Janet Healy to watch over Belushi, but as Woodward reported, “Healy didn't find John's drug use unusual compared to that of some other members of the cast and production crew. She counted twenty-five people on the set who used cocaine at times.”