Steven Spielberg (60 page)

Paramount insisted on taking distribution and overhead fees, but those reportedly amounted to only about half of the industry standard, and the studio agreed to assume the entire negative cost, as well as letting Lucasfilm own the negative. Paramount wanted outright ownership of sequel rights but finally agreed that Lucasfilm would have to be involved in the making of four possible sequels.
¶
Spielberg received a $1 million directing fee for
Raid
ers
and a sizable percentage of the gross; Lucas personally received a $1 million fee for serving as executive producer, in addition to his company's large share of the gross. Lucas and Spielberg also received “very handsome” bonuses for completing the film just under the $20 million budget, Kazanjian says. “It was George's bonus, but he split that with Steven as an incentive, and said, ‘Half of it is yours if you bring this in on budget.'”

“We built in tremendous penalties if they went over, and they agreed without hesitation,” Eisner said. “I figured either they don't care or they've got this thing figured out…. You don't make standard deals with these kinds of people…. If we got shafted on this agreement, we would like to be shafted two or three times a year in this way.”

Despite their triumphant dealmaking, Spielberg was not entirely enthusiastic about making the film. It took so long to put the deal together that by the time
Raiders
was a “go” project, he had lost a certain amount of interest in it and “wanted to move on to smaller, more personal projects.” “George and I would go down and visit Steven on the set of
1941,
”
Kazanjian recalls, “and we would discuss
Raiders.
And we weren't really getting a firm commitment out of him that he would direct it. We started even looking at, or thinking about, other directors, because Steven had not committed. We never
got a firm commitment until almost the very end, when we said, ‘OK, folks, in about three weeks we're going to start preproduction and we're ready to go. Yes or no?' Steven loved the project, but he had a lot of things going.

“One of the challenges we had was that Steven owed one picture to Universal, and [Sid] Sheinberg kept saying, Tou can't do
Raiders
of
the
Lost
Ark,
you owe a picture to me.' Also at that time, there was a lawsuit over
Battlestar
Galactica
[Fox, at Lucas's urging, sued Universal for copyright infringement over the TV series, claiming it was a copy of
Star
Wars
]. So that even angered Sid more. Universal passed on
Raiders:
that wasn't a Steven picture, that was a George Lucas picture. It was only at the last minute that Sid released Steven and said, ‘OK, you can do it.'”

“
I
F
I could be a dream figure,” Lucas once declared, “I'd be Indy.” The character of Indiana Jones, an improbable amalgam of archeologist, soldier of fortune, and playboy, was the kind of heroic surrogate a bright, nerdy kid would create after watching a Saturday matinee program of cliffhanger serials.

Lucas and Spielberg decided to collaborate on
Raiders
of
the
Lost
Ark
after discovering that they shared a nostalgia for the serials of the 1930s and 1940s. Among the serials they cited as inspirations were
Flash
Gordon
Conquers
the
Universe,
Don
Winslow
of
the
Coast
Guard,
Blackhawk,
and
Commando
Cody.
Those two-fisted adventure yarns depicted a world in which good and evil were clearly distinguishable and virtually nonstop action took the place of the more emotionally complicated dialogue and “mushy stuff” that dominated movies made for adult audiences. For two filmmakers who clung stubbornly to boyish behavior and preoccupations but were uncomfortably aware that they were no longer boys, such regression was a tempting response to the increasingly vexatious responsibilities of adulthood.

In the early 1970s, Lucas began outlining four stories featuring “a shady archeologist” who wears a 1930s-style fedora and carries a bullwhip, like Zorro or Lash La Rue. The character was named Indiana after a female Alaskan malamute owned by Lucas's wife, Mareia. Indy also had what Lucas called his “Cary Grant side,” a fondness for wearing top hat and tails and lounging around drinking champagne with slinky blondes. The first director Lucas approached to work on the project, fellow Bay Area filmmaker Philip Kaufman, added a weightier theme. He proposed that Indy search for the lost Ark of the Covenant of Hebraic Law, the sacred cabinet in which the broken tablets containing the Ten Commandments were stored. “There was an old doctor I went to [as a boy] in Chicago who was obsessed with the lost ark's legendary powers,” recalled Kaufman. “And books have been written about Hitler's search for occult artifacts, which he thought would make him omnipotent.”

Lucas's own passionate interest in mythology and the supernatural, which is also at the heart of his
Star
Wars
saga, was stimulated by the notion of
sending Indy on a quest for a legendary object with transcendent spiritual significance. But the element of Jewish mysticism in
Raiders
probably never would have occurred to Lucas, who was raised as both a Methodist and a Lutheran. Kaufman put
Raiders
aside in 1974 to work on another movie, and Lucas bought him out after Spielberg expressed interest in the dormant idea three years later; Kaufman's lawyers had to insist on their client sharing a story credit with Lucas, over Lucas's initial objections.

Raiders
is by no means a simple pastiche of old serials. “When George and I first began talking about this project,” Spielberg recalled, “we sat in a screening room at Universal and saw
Don
Winslow
of
the
Navy
—all fifteen episodes—and we were bored out of our minds. I'd already said, yes, I'd do this for George. But I was so depressed that I walked out of the theater thinking, ‘How can I get out of this?'”

“These things sure don't hold up after twenty-five years,” Lucas remarked as they left the screening room.

Then his commercial pragmatism quickly reasserted itself: “I was appalled at how I could have been so enthralled with something so bad. And I said, ‘Holy smokes, if I got this excited about this stuff, it's going to be easy for me to get kids excited about the same thing, only better.'”

L
AWRENCE
Kasdan was writing TV commercials for a Los Angeles advertising agency when Universal bought his original screenplay
Continen
tal
Divide
for Spielberg in late 1977. An aficionado of the films of Howard Hawks, Kasdan conceived
Continental
Divide
in the spirit of Hawks's smart, sassy, unsentimental romantic comedies such as
Bringing
Up
Baby
or
His
Girl
Friday.
Kasdan's script paired a rumpled big-city newspaper columnist with a reclusive ornithologist he tracks down in the wilderness for a personality profile. Spielberg said he bought the script with plans to direct it, but as Kasdan puts it, “Steven buys everything and he owns everything. The first thing he says is always, ‘I might direct.' He talked about it for about ten minutes.”

Spielberg's interest helped trigger a bidding war that saw the final purchase price of the script escalate to $250,000. “He wanted me to write
Raiders
of
the
Lost
Ark,
and
Continental
Divide
was a kind of carrot,” Kasdan says. “When I met Steven for the first time before he bought it, they were shooting
I
Wanna
Hold
Your
Hand
at Universal, and Steven was hanging around. We sat down on a curb. He said, ‘I really like your script. I don't know who's going to do the movie, but the person I really want to talk to you is George Lucas. He and I are going to do this adventure film, and you are the perfect guy to write it. But I want to warn you, he's excited about you, and he's going to want you to write
More
American
Graffiti.
Don't do that.' These guys were desperate for writers—two months ago I had been an advertising writer!”

What Spielberg and Lucas were looking for, Kasdan realized, was “someone
who could write
Raiders
in the same way that Hawks would have someone write a movie for him—a strong woman character, a certain kind of hero. So that's what got me the job.”

Continental
Divide
did not turn out well. Kasdan's script was reworked by Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins, and Jack Rosenthal. After casting difficulties and tense arguments between Spielberg and Universal production chief Ned Tanen, the studio refused to let Robbins direct, continuing to hold out hope that Spielberg would take over the reins. But Spielberg washed his hands of the project, selling his right to direct for $100,000 and 5 percent of the profits. He took an executive producer credit on the 1981 release along with Bernie Brillstein, manager of the male lead, John Belushi. Under the lugubrious direction of Englishman Michael Apted, the romantic chemistry between Belushi and leading lady Blair Brown not only failed to reach combustion, but seemed virtually nonexistent.

K
ASDAN
,
Lucas, and Spielberg met for story conferences on
Raiders
of
the
Lost
Ark
from January 23 to 27, 1978. Their nine-hour daily brainstorming sessions at the Sherman Oaks home of Lucas's assistant Jane Bay were tape-recorded and formed the basis for Kasdan's six months of work on the first-draft screenplay.

Spielberg and Lucas had clear visual ideas for some scenes they wanted to see. “We want to have the boulder” was one of their instructions to Kasdan: for the thrill-packed opening sequence of Indy fleeing a booby-trapped cave, Spielberg invented the memorable image of the hero being pursued by a giant boulder. Lucas's wish list included a submarine, a monkey giving the Hitler salute, and a girl slugging Indiana Jones in a bar in Nepal. Out of the story conferences also came a hair-raising chase through a mountain in a mine train and an elaborate sequence of Indy escaping from a Shanghai palace with a precious artifact, jumping from an airplane in an inflatable rubber raft, and making his way down a river. Eventually eliminated in preproduction for budgetary reasons, those two sequences wound up being adapted for use in the 1984 sequel,
Indiana
Jones
and
the
Temple
of
Doom.

While Lucas and Spielberg dwelled on gags and set-pieces, Kasdan emphasized the need to round out Indy's personality. “I became worried that the thing was becoming a straight action piece, which is probably the way it turned out,” the writer said in 1981. Spielberg acknowledged that Kasdan “didn't stick with our story outline a hundred percent…. Larry essentially did all the characters and tied the story together, made this story work from just a bare outline, and gave it color and some direction.”

Kasdan turned in his first draft in August 1978, but before even reading it, Lucas assigned him to do an emergency rewrite of
The
Empire
Strikes
Back.
When Lucas eventually found time to turn his attention to the
Raiders
script,
he told Kasdan, “It's too expensive and too long. Go back and take out everything that isn't the main bones of the story.” “I hated doing it,” the writer admits, “but after I was done I realized it was very muscular and fast-paced.” Spielberg did not have time to begin working with Kasdan on screenplay revisions until he returned from his vacation to Japan in December 1979.

A
FTER
four years of living together and three months of being engaged, Spielberg and Amy Irving decided to get married in Japan on what was planned as a three-week honeymoon. “I'll be pregnant by April,” Amy told friends. “We can't wait to start a family.” Exactly what happened on the trip has never been revealed by either party, but while they were traveling, the marriage plans were called off for the time being. “We weren't ready,” was all Amy would say publicly.

There had been rumors that while shooting
Honeysuckle
Rose
earlier that year in Texas, Amy had had an affair with her romantic partner in the movie, grizzled country singer Willie Nelson. Although she denied the rumors, she did say, “When I was in Texas, I suddenly met all these people who really just loved you for being yourself. They were more honest than people I'd met in Los Angeles, and that appealed to me.” To explore her own identity in a more private setting, she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. “Having come from a relationship with a very public man, I needed to go and find out what my life on my own was about.”

Whether or not Steven still felt he was not ready for marriage, his breakup with Amy was a traumatic event, his worst emotional experience since his parents' divorce. But he admitted it was a necessary lesson in helping him reach emotional adulthood. “Life has finally caught up with me,” he said. “I've spent so many years hiding from pain and fear behind a camera. I avoided all the growing-up pains by being too busy making movies. I lost myself to the world of film. So right now, in my early thirties, I'm experiencing delayed adolescence. I suffer like I'm sixteen. It's a miracle I haven't sprouted acne again. The point is, I didn't escape suffering. I only delayed it.”

One of the immediate consequences of their breakup was that Amy lost the part of Marion Ravenwood, Indiana Jones's love interest in
Raiders.
Amy's previous resolve not to mix romance and work apparently had weakened long enough to let her convince Steven she should play the part. After their split, Spielberg told Lucas, “Let me cast Marion.” That seemed equitable, for Marion was only to appear in the first of the three Indiana Jones movies, and Lucas and Spielberg jointly decided on the casting of Indy. After screen-testing many candidates for Indy, including some unknowns, they first offered the part to Tom Selleck, who was prevented from playing it when CBS-TV exercised its option for the series
Magnum
P.I.
Less than six weeks
before shooting began, Spielberg and Lucas spotted Indy right under their noses and cast Harrison Ford, who had played the hard-boiled but lovable pilot Han Solo in
Star
Wars.