Steven Spielberg (82 page)

W
HEN
he went to Poland in 1993 to make
Schindler’s
List,
Spielberg was “hit in the face with my personal life. My upbringing. My Jewishness. The stories my grandparents told me about the Shoah. And Jewish life came pouring back into my heart. I cried all the time.” The anguish he felt while making
Schindler’s
List
was translated directly to the screen. While immersed in his re-creation of the Holocaust, the viewer can readily understand why the filmmaker felt “constantly sickened” and “frightened every day” on location in Poland. To the almost overwhelming burden of paying witness to the history of his people was added the personal burden of finally coming to terms with himself.
Schindler’s
List
became the transforming experience of Spielberg’s lifetime. Making the film after more than a decade of hesitation and avoidance was the catharsis that finally liberated him to be himself, both as a man and as an artist, fully integrating those two, sometimes distinct-seeming halves of his personality.

What made the day-to-day experience in Poland bearable was what made it possible for him to undertake the project: the presence of his family. Before undertaking his “journey from shame to honor,” Spielberg “had to have a family first. I had to figure out what my place was in the world.” His second
wife, Kate, accompanied him to Poland with their five children.
*
His parents and his rabbi also paid visits to the location of what
Jewish
Frontier
reviewer Mordecai Newman called “Spielberg’s bar mitzvah movie, his cinematic initiation into emotional manhood.”

When he finally accepted his long-overdue Academy Award for directing
Schindler’s
List,
Spielberg thanked Kate “for rescuing me ninety-two days in a row in Kraków, Poland, last winter when things got just too unbearable.” He told the press he “would’ve gone crazy” without his family there. “… My kids saw me cry for the first time. I would come home and weep, not because I was feeling sorry for anybody—I would weep because it was
so
bloody
painful.”
Every couple of weeks, he said, “Robin Williams would call me with comic
CARE
packages over the telephone to try to get me to laugh.”

Even in those depths, Spielberg was never far from his more familiar niche as a crowd-pleasing commercial filmmaker. Three nights a week, he came home to the small hotel he had rented for his family in Poland, switched on a satellite dish situated in the front yard, and worked on
Jurassic
Park,
which had finished principal photography barely three months before
Schindler’s
List
began filming on March 1, 1993.

Because
Schindler’s
List
had to be filmed while it was still winter in Poland, Spielberg left many of the final postproduction chores of his dinosaur movie in the hands of George Lucas. But he reserved for himself the final decisions about the creation of computer-generated dinosaurs and the movie’s soundtrack. High-tech communication methods and computer technology enabled him to see evolving images at Industrial Light & Magic in northern California, along with such friendly faces as those of special-effects wizard Dennis Muren and producer Kathleen Kennedy (who shared producing chores with Gerald R. Molen). Each night when they were finished, composer John Williams would transmit his score, which Spielberg played on large speakers. All this interaction was transmitted from California to Poland and back again, scrambled to avoid piracy.

Spielberg’s schizoid, “culturally dislocating” existence working on both films simultaneously was “an unusual set of circumstances, and all my own doing. I don’t regret it, but I spend two hours on
Jurassic
Park,
and it takes a while to get back into
Schindler’s
List.
”
That bifurcated focus perfectly expressed the duality of his artistic personality at a crucial turning point in his career. His career-long balancing act between the somewhat arbitrarily defined poles of artist and entertainer, while never quite so stark as it was during those months in 1993, had made Spielberg a great popular artist. Even if the purely crowd-pleasing side of his nature often seemed dominant, his
strengths as a filmmaker, like Dickens’s strengths as a novelist, have always been drawn from that duality. Taking respites from the horror of
Schindler’s
List
to play with fantasy dinosaurs also may have helped keep him from becoming immobilized by despair while going about the task of re-creating the Holocaust in places where it actually occurred. “The test of a first-rate intelligence,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

A
three-hour, black-and-white film about the Holocaust was a highly risky commercial proposition for Universal. Although a few Hollywood films had been made on Holocaust issues,
†
no major-studio film had ever dealt with the subject with such a level of uncompromising, brutal realism. “I guaranteed the studio they’d lose all their money,” Spielberg recalled. “I told them that the $22 million it was costing to make the film, they might as well just give it away to me to make this film, because they were never going to see anything from it. That’s how pessimistic I was that there was a climate ready to accept [what is] essentially a movie about racial hatred. I was happily wrong.”

Not wanting what he called “blood money,” Spielberg offered to forego any salary and defer his lower-than-usual percentage of the gross film rentals until Universal recouped its production cost. All the money he earned from the film (which ultimately became a considerable box-office success) has been donated, through his Righteous Persons Foundation, to Jewish organizations and to such historical projects as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and Spielberg’s own nonprofit Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.

“Nobody else could have gotten any studio to say yes to this project,” Spielberg said. “… I don’t boast ever about my own accomplishments, but that was the time I said, well, thank God that I was able to become some kind of a nine-hundred-pound gorilla so I could have the ability to get this project off the ground…. One studio executive who shall remain nameless said, ‘Why don’t we just make a donation to the Holocaust Museum—would that make you happy?’ I blew up when I heard that.” That was a “message,” Spielberg felt, which “capped my resolve to make the movie immediately.”

MCA president Sid Sheinberg gave the director the go-ahead to make the picture with only one condition: he had to make
Jurassic
Park
first. As Spielberg acknowledged, “He knew that once I had directed
Schindler
I wouldn’t be able to do
Jurassic
Park.
”

I
N
the late 1980s, Spielberg bought a screenplay Michael Crichton based on his youthful experiences as a Harvard Medical School intern in the emergency ward of Massachusetts General Hospital.
ER
eventually would be transformed into Spielberg’s first prime-time hit TV series. “We were talking about changes in my office one day [in October 1989],” Spielberg recalled, “and I happened to ask him what he was working on, aside from this screenplay. He said he had just finished a book about dinosaurs, called
Jurassic
Park,
and that it was being proofed by his publisher. I said, ‘You know, I’ve had a fascination with dinosaurs all my life and I’d really love to read it.’ So he slipped me a copy of the galleys; and I read them and I called him the next day, and said, ‘There’s going to be a real hot bidding war for this, I’m sure.’

“But Michael said he wasn’t really interested in getting into a bidding war. He wanted to give it to someone who would make the movie. So I said, ‘I’d like to make it.’ And he said, ‘You mean you want to produce it or direct it?’ I said, ‘Both.’ And he said, ‘I’ll give it to you if you guarantee me that you’ll direct the picture.’ But then the agency [Creative Artists Agency, which represented both Crichton and Spielberg] got ahold of it; and they, of course, encouraged a bidding war, even though Michael had kind of promised me the book privately. Before long, it had been sent out to every studio in town, and the bidding was fast and furious.”

The novel is a hodgepodge of pulp fiction and diverting scientific speculation. Taking as his springboard the notion of cloning dinosaurs from prehistoric DNA preserved in amber, Crichton spun a yarn about a mad theme-park impresario named John Hammond who recklessly creates dinosaurs on a remote island off the coast of Costa Rica, only to see them run amok and destroy both him and the park. Although
Jurassic
Park
borrows elements from Crichton’s own 1973 movie
Westworld
—a sci-fi thriller about a theme park with a murderous robot gunslinger—it is even more indebted to Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel
The
Lost
World,
whose very title Crichton cribbed for his sequel, filmed by Spielberg in 1996–97 as
The
Lost
World:
Jurassic
Park.

Doyle’s protagonist, a British explorer named Professor Challenger, discovers a South American plateau populated by dinosaurs and ape-men, a prehistoric world removed from “the ordinary laws of Nature.” Like Crichton’s island, most of whose denizens (notably the
Tyrannosaurus
rex
) stem from the Cretaceous rather than the Jurassic Period, Doyle’s lost world freely mixes creatures from several geological epochs. Adapted as a silent film in 1925, the novel also was the source of Irwin Allen’s 1960 film
The
Lost
World,
at which the youthful Spielberg stampeded a Phoenix audience with his contagious vomiting prank. Acknowledging his debt to Doyle’s work, Crichton commented, “We’re both failed doctors who found storytelling more congenial than healing. Sometimes I think I’ve devoted my entire life to rewriting Conan Doyle in different ways.”

Crichton’s human characters in
Jurassic
Park
are pure cardboard, however, and his dinosaur action set-pieces are far less exciting than those in Spielberg’s film. But the author’s blend of pseudoscientific fantasizing with old-fashioned monster-movie hokum was tailor-made for Spielberg’s talents as a showman. As the director put it, “I have no embarrassment in saying that with
Jurassic
I was really just trying to make a good sequel to
Jaws.
On land.”
‡

The film rights were put up for sale at a non-negotiable asking price of $1.5 million plus a substantial percentage of the gross. Over a three-day period in May 1990, Crichton weighed matching offers from Warner Bros. (for director Tim Burton), Columbia/TriStar (for Richard Donner), Twentieth Century–Fox (for Joe Dante), and Universal for Spielberg. After a day of telephone conversations with all four directors, Crichton settled on Spielberg, with Universal throwing in another $500,000 for a screenplay by the author. “I knew it was going to be a very difficult picture to make,” Crichton said. “Steven is arguably the most experienced and most successful director of these kinds of movies. And he’s really terrific at running the technology rather than letting the technology run him.”

In a largely unsuccessful attempt to flesh out Crichton’s characters, Spielberg commissioned rewrites by Malia Scotch Marmo, who had worked on
Hook,
and David Koepp, the writer of Robert Zemeckis’s black comedy
Death
Becomes
Her.
Only Crichton and Koepp received screen credit for the script of
Jurassic
Park;
Marmo said her principal contribution was to make Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and the children, Lex (Ariana Richards) and Tim (Joseph Mazzello), more assertive. The crucial change introduced in Koepp’s shooting script was giving Crichton’s protagonist, Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), a deep-seated hostility toward children, providing a source of dramatic tension that does not exist in the novel (Crichton’s Grant “liked kids—it was impossible not to like any group so openly enthusiastic about dinosaurs”).

Even before the first script was written, Spielberg, in a departure from his usual order of procedure, was busy storyboarding his favorite sequences from the novel with production designer Rick Carter and several other illustrators. “We basically set up what the scenes were going to be about,” Carter explained. “Once [Spielberg] knows what the space is—that’s very important, to know where things are—he’ll just start playing a projector in his head. He’s open to contributions and he’ll talk it through, but he’ll actually draw these funny little frames which are incredibly detailed if you know how to look at them.” When hired to do his rewrite in the spring of 1992, Koepp found the storyboards “enormously helpful. It was like having a large portion
of the movie just handed to you, to be able to walk around and soak up the feel of what the movie was supposed to look like.”

Spielberg’s careful planning kept the complex production running smoothly. “From the beginning, I was afraid that a movie like
Jurassic
Park
could get away from me,” he said. “There had been other pictures—
1941,
Jaws,
and
Hook
—where the production simply got away from me and I was dragged behind schedule. I was determined not to let it happen this time. So I walked away from a lot of takes where, on my last picture, I might have stayed for four or five more…. I probably drove everyone to the brink of insanity in order to complete this movie on budget and on schedule.”