Steven Spielberg (65 page)

“Poltergeist
is what I fear and
E.T.
is what I love,” explained Spielberg, relishing the opportunity to display both sides of his creative personality on adjoining screens in shopping malls. “One is about suburban evil, and the other is about suburban good….
Poltergeist
is the darker side of my nature—it's me when I was scaring my younger sisters half to death when we were growing up.”

His involvement on
Poltergeist
was unusually intense for a producer and writer. He was on the set for all but three days of the film's twelve-week shooting schedule, and he, not director Tobe Hooper, often appeared to be calling the shots. The issue of the film's authorship leaked into the press and gave rise to an acrimonious controversy over whether Spielberg was the
de
facto
director of
Poltergeist.
It was generally believed in Hollywood that Spielberg simply moved in and took over the film creatively, just as producer Howard Hawks had done with Christian Nyby, the credited director of the 1951 science-fiction/horror film
The
Thing
from
Another
World.

A mild-mannered, bearded Texan with a quirky sense of humor and a gift
for cinematic Grand Guignol, Hooper came to Spielberg's attention with
The
Texas
Chain
Saw
Massacre,
a low-budget 1974 horror film that became a cult classic. Spielberg found it “one of the most truly visceral movies ever made. Essentially it starts inside the stomach and ends in the heart…. I loved it.” When he suggested to Hooper that they make a movie together, Hooper said he had always wanted to make a ghost story.

By 1981, Spielberg had come up with a story he thought could serve as the basis for a mutually stimulating creative collaboration. Taking story credit as well as joint screenplay credit with Michael Grais and Mark Victor, Spielberg combined horror genre elements with his own suburban milieu of hilly, winding streets and cookie-cutter homes. In a malevolent twist on
Close
Encounters,
the spectral title characters (
poltergeist
is German for “noisy ghost”) kidnap the small daughter of a white-bread WASP family called the Freelings.
¶¶
“I really based the neighborhood on suburban Scottsdale, Arizona, where I grew up,” Spielberg said, though his home was actually in neighboring Phoenix. “… The Freeling family in
Poltergeist
is not atypical of the people I knew and grew up with.”

A soulless technical exercise in scaring the wits out of the audience,
Poltergeist
is a feature-film equivalent of the gross-out pranks little Stevie pulled on his sisters and neighbors. Its
pièce
de
résistance
is a grisly sequence of revengeful corpses rising out of the Freelings' muddy backyard swimming hole.
Poltergeist
may have been payback time for Spielberg, who seemed to take a sadistic relish in putting his complacent WASP neighbors through Hell. Most of the thinly plotted movie is taken up with elaborately horrific (if occasionally cheesy) visual effects by George Lucas's northern California company Industrial Light & Magic, as Steve and Diane Freeling (Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams) battle ghosts to rescue their angelic little daughter, Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke). Because the Freelings are such plastic Middle-American clichés,
Poltergeist
fails to arouse much empathy for the beleaguered family. Spielberg's familiar thematic obsession with a child's separation from his/her parents serves as little more than a plot device.
||||

S
PIELBERG
and Hooper at first appeared to be a good match. “We sit around and talk about movies almost like Huey and Duey [Donald Duck's nephews],” Hooper said. “Half of a piece of construction would be suggested
by one of us, and the other half would be completed by the other.” But it was not long before Spielberg came to the disenchanted conclusion that “Tobe isn't what you'd call a take-charge sort of guy.”

Making the film for MGM, where David Begelman, the fallen champion of
Close
Encounters,
was now in charge, Spielberg was concerned about making good on his promise to deliver the film at no more than 10 percent over its $9.5 million budget. The final cost of $10.8 million was 12 percent over the budget, although the movie (which Spielberg produced with Frank Marshall) finished shooting two days ahead of schedule. JoBeth Williams commented that Spielberg “drove us all like racehorses … I think that since making
1941
he's acutely conscious of time and money.”

A number of practical problems prevented Spielberg from personally replacing Hooper as director.
Poltergeist
started shooting in May 1981, while
E.T.
was in active preproduction, requiring Spielberg's daily attention to a myriad of technical and conceptual details. Although
E.T.
wound up being pushed back a month, it originally was scheduled to begin shooting that August, the same month
Poltergeist
finished shooting. Even if Spielberg could have found a way to juggle his schedule and give his full attention to both movies, his contract with Universal prevented him from directing another movie while making
E.
T.,
and Directors Guild of America rules prohibited the producer from taking over the job of the director.

“My enthusiasm for wanting to make
Poltergeist
would have been difficult for any director I would have hired,” Spielberg later admitted. “It derived from
my
imagination and
my
experiences, and it came [partly] out of
my
typewriter. I felt a proprietary interest in this project that was stronger than if I was just an executive producer. I thought I'd be able to turn
Poltergeist
over to a director and walk away. I was wrong.”

Being hired to direct
Poltergeist
was a quantum jump in Hollywood prestige for Hooper, since it was his first theatrical feature for a major studio and made him the latest protégé of Hollywood's most successful filmmaker. That may have been why he paid the price of acceding to Spielberg's constant presence on the set and turning over the last few months of postproduction to his writer-producer. “Tobe seemed to resolve Steven's participation in his mind,” felt production manager Dennis E. Jones. “But I'm sure inside he was hurting.”
***
Less than a month into shooting, Jeff Silverman of the
Los
Angeles
Herald-Examiner
reported Hollywood gossip that Hooper was
“not
really directing the pic anymore.” That prompted a response from Hooper that Spielberg's “involvement spans all aspects of this film and does not differ from those functions normally performed by the executive producer. He is on the set when I specifically request it and this is becoming increasingly less as he prepares for an upcoming picture which he will direct beginning in August.”

Other observers did not see it that way. Screenwriter Bob Gale, who made
two visits to the MGM soundstage where
Poltergeist
was filming, found it an “uncomfortable set,” because whenever Hooper gave an instruction to cinematographer Matthew F. Leonetti, Leonetti would look over his shoulder at Spielberg, who would nod or shake his head. Screenwriter David Giler and Spielberg's agent, Guy McElwaine, spent a day acting in the film as part of a group of men watching football on television, an inside joke about the male-bonding parties Spielberg attended at McElwaine's house. Giler recalls, “My partner, Walter Hill, and I were working on
Southern
Comfort
in a cutting room right across the way. When I came back from the set, I said, ‘Well, now I know what the executive producer does. I've always wondered. He sets up the camera, tells the actors what to do, stands back, and lets the director say, ‘Action!'”

Hooper made no public objection when the ads for the film treated him as a virtual nonperson, relegating his name to small type while proclaiming, “Steven Spielberg has fascinated, mystified and scared audiences with
Jaws,
Close
Encounters
of
the
Third
Kind
and
Raiders
of
the
Lost
Ark.
Now, he takes you into a world of terrifying forces that defy reason …” But Hooper finally had enough when he saw the trailer, in which the line “A Steven Spielberg Production” was twice as large as “A Tobe Hooper Film.” That was a violation of Directors Guild rules. Arbitrator Edward Mosk awarded Hooper $15,000 in damages, finding the trailer “denigrated the role of the director.” Mosk noted that “broader issues of dispute exist between the producer-writer and the director which seem to have exacerbated the current dispute over the trailer credit.” Ordering MGM to redo trailers running in New York and Los Angeles, Mosk also directed the studio to take full-page advertisements in three trade publications apologizing to Hooper and the DGA. The ads called the credit error “inadvertent” and said it “was not intended to diminish Mr. Hooper's creative achievement as the director of the film.”

Spielberg took out his own double-edged ad in the trades, in the form of a letter addressed to Hooper: “Regrettably, some of the press has misunderstood the rather unique, creative relationship which you and I shared throughout the making of
Poltergeist.
I enjoyed your openness in allowing me, as a producer and a writer, a wide berth for creative involvement, just as I know you were happy with the freedom you had to direct
Poltergeist
so wonderfully. Through the screenplay you accepted a vision of this very intense movie from the start, and as the director, you delivered the goods.”

While the advertisements by MGM and Spielberg may have helped salve Hooper's wounded pride, the brouhaha was a setback to his career, negating any positive effect the film's box-office success otherwise would have had on his future in Hollywood. Generally treating
Poltergeist
as an efficient but uninspired genre piece, reviewers knew where the true credit lay. Pauline Kael wrote in
The
New
Yorker,
“Whatever the credits say, [Spielberg] was certainly the guiding intelligence of
Poltergeist
—which isn't a high compliment.” David Ehrenstein commented in the
L.A.
Reader
that if only Hooper had been given free rein, he would have been “the ideal person to tear this
vision of domestic bliss limb from limb.” But Spielberg wanted a family audience for the PG-rated film, and Ehrenstein accused him of wanting “to play with horror, but not for keeps…. You don't have to be a dedicated follower of the
politique
des
auteurs
to recognize that
Poltergeist
owes a lot more to the creator of
Close
Encounters
of
the
Third
Kind
than it does to the perpetrator of
The
Texas
Chain
Saw
Massacre.
”

Despite his insistence on claiming credit in the press (“I designed the film…. I was the David O. Selznick of this movie”), Spielberg seemed somewhat uncomfortable with the public scrutiny of his role as shadow director of
Poltergeist.
Coming at the same time
E.T.
was making him (in the words of
Rolling
Stone's
Michael Sragow) “the most successful movie director in Hollywood, America, the Occident, the planet Earth, the solar system and the galaxy,” Spielberg's treatment of Hooper looked like a symptom of incipient megalomania. Spielberg told the
Los
Angeles
Times
he had learned a lesson from the experience: “If I write it myself, I'll direct it myself. I won't put someone else through what I put Tobe through, and I'll be more honest in my contributions to a film.”

A
NOTHER
low-budget moviemaker whose work Spielberg admired was Joe Dante. After making
Piranha,
Dante directed
The
Howling,
a 1981 black comedy about werewolves. Spielberg cast its leading lady, Dee Wallace, in
E.
T.,
and hung a poster from the movie on the wall of his production office. A few months later, Dante and producing partner Michael Finnell were struggling to put together projects from their small Hollywood office, a dump they called “Cockroach Palace,” when a script arrived unannounced from Steven Spielberg.

Gremlins
was a horror yarn by the then-unknown young writer Chris Columbus. Dante remembers thinking the script “must have come to the wrong address. I thought, This is incredible—this guy [Spielberg] doesn't know I'm alive! It came at a time when I was dead broke.
The
Howling
was a big hit, but it wasn't for me. My career seemed pretty much stalled. If it wasn't for Steven, I probably would have made twenty-seven more low-budget movies. I think he has a genuine desire to be able to give directors a chance. He loves being the mentor and having protégés.” Explaining why that is so, Spielberg reflected in 1986, “I have instant recall about how I felt when I wanted to be a movie director and there was nobody around who wanted me to be one…. All people see a reflection of themselves when they're helping other people. I can't deny, and no one can, that there is vanity involved in helping a young person achieve his goal. The vanity is a chance to get started a second time, to project oneself into the young filmmaker's own career and to feel what it was like to get that first break all over again.”

Despite his elation at being tapped for stardom by Spielberg, Dante was aware of all the “negative publicity about Steven being responsible” for the
direction of
Poltergeist.
“I have no idea how true that was, but it was certainly something that was in the back of my mind: ‘Am I going to be making my picture or somebody else's picture?' Steven was very sensitive about those allegations. He said, ‘I can't do that, because if I do that, nobody will want to work here.'”