Steven Spielberg (94 page)

Spielberg’s degree of detachment from the problems most people encounter in daily life can perhaps be measured by a comment he made in an interview for a documentary extra on the DVD edition of his 2004 movie
The Terminal
, a Kafkaesque comedy-drama in which Tom Hanks plays an Eastern European stuck for weeks at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. Cast and crew members were asked to relate their worst horror stories about airports, and everyone had such a story except Spielberg. Even though his lengthy list of phobias still includes a fear of flying, he said, “I can’t remember a single problem I had—I was never detained, I was never put in secondary, I was never questioned—I was never searched except the normal searches they do now with the wand. I don’t think I was ever hassled in an airport. The only time I get hassled in an airport is by paparazzi and reporters some now. So I’ve been lucky.” Traveling first-class and being sheltered in VIP lounges could turn a filmmaker into a snob, but Spielberg has no difficulty empathizing with Hanks’s Viktor Navorski; he felt an “immediate affinity for Viktor’s story … this displaced person in search of a life.” The movie betrays no sign of the director forgetting what it is like to deal with life’s daily struggles.

Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, who has worked with Spielberg on all the features he has directed since
Schindler’s List
, said in 2009, “He’s not an
eccentric
. He’s well-rounded. It would be easy for someone like him to lose that. I respect him for maintaining a semi-regular life. That’s really important for any filmmaker—maintaining a sense of reality.” Spielberg’s
determination
to balance his family life and professional life is unusually successful by Hollywood standards.
Munich
screenwriter Tony Kushner observed that while Spielberg is “tireless” in his working habits, “it’s a relaxed calm in him, not manic energy. He’s genuinely happy in his work, which I think is a rare
commodity
.”

T
HE
major stipulation Spielberg made with his partners when they formed DreamWorks was that the company would make no more than nine movies a year. Spielberg thought that would keep the work manageable and not let it interfere with his primary role as a director or with his family life. Although the limitation was one of the hurdles in DreamWorks’s mission of becoming a major studio, the company also had trouble in its first few years finding enough worthy projects to fill its modest production slate. But soon the company would expand its yearly program, with a noticeable decline in standards (other than in animation) that opened the door for even more
unabashedly
lowbrow films.

The early DreamWorks slate was a mixed bag that included a
cliché-riddled
action thriller (
The Peacemaker
); a lackluster disaster movie (
Deep Impact
); a hokey horror remake overly reliant on special effects in place of the Val Lewtonish subtleties of the original (
The Haunting
, somewhat redeemed by Lili Taylor’s luminous performance); and gimmicky family comedies showcasing Stan Winston’s animatronic wizardry (the tiresomely belabored special-effects
farce
Mousehunt;
an amiable yarn about a talking parrot,
Paulie;
and a jolly if overly extended sci-fi spoof,
GalaxyQuest
).
The Peacemaker
, with George Clooney and Nicole Kidman teaming to save New York from a nuclear
terrorist
attack, marked an inauspicious debut for the new company, sending the unfortunate message that DreamWorks, for all its self-aggrandizing hype, was not setting out to break the Hollywood studio mold for predictable genre fare. DreamWorks’ welcome gesture of hiring a woman director to make both
Deep Impact
and
The Peacemaker
was mitigated by Mimi Leder’s inability to bring anything distinctive to those two films. In
The Peacemaker
, she
mimicked
her own work on the DreamWorks TV series
ER
with predictably
frenetic
Steadicam walk-and-talk scenes while allowing Kidman’s supposedly brilliant nuclear expert to be rattled and dominated for most of the story by the strutting macho military officer played by Clooney.

The provocative antiwar satire
Small Soldiers
stood out from those early
releases
in originality, though it was eclipsed at the box office and in the media by
Saving Private Ryan
. Jeffrey Katzenberg’s animation division contributed the droll
Antz
, with Woody Allen as a neurotic but rebellious worker ant who rallies his people like Moses, and a grandly beautiful and stirring biblical epic about Moses himself,
The Prince of Egypt
, which did respectable business ($101 million in the United States and a total of $228 million worldwide) but didn’t cause much competitive anxiety for Katzenberg’s enemies at Disney.

After its erratic and uncertain start, DreamWorks’ real breakthrough as a major Hollywood player came in 1999 with
American Beauty
. Written by Alan Ball, this corrosive look at suburban angst went beyond Spielberg’s own critiques of the anxious emptiness of American middle-class existence to
portray
a society rotted from within by materialism and barely suppressed sexual pathologies. It was a prescient look at a society that would soon descend into moral chaos.
American Beauty
was filmed in an ironically languid and elegant style by British theater director Sam Mendes and master cinematographer Conrad L. Hall. A runaway box-office hit, it won five Oscars, including the best-picture award, in 2000. The
New York Times
headlined, “Oscar Victory Finally Lifts the Cloud for DreamWorks,” and
Variety
proclaimed, “
Hollywood
is finally taking note: DreamWorks has truly arrived.”
Gladiator
, Ridley Scott’s robust throwback for DreamWorks to the old sword-and-sandal genre, took the award the following year. The fledgling company’s back-to-back
successes
at the Oscars erased much of the memory of its previous mediocre performance and elevated its status in the eyes of the industry. In 2002, another film in which DreamWorks participated, Ron Howard’s offbeat but sanitized Cold War drama about an eccentric mathematician,
A Beautiful Mind
, took the top prize at the Oscars, but it was a Universal release domestically.

In 2000, DreamWorks paid the bills with the box-office success of such broad but enjoyable comedies as
Road Trip
and
Meet the Parents
, but its
patronage
of Woody Allen resulted in one of his weaker films,
Small Time Crooks;
Robert Redford’s mostly elegant, engrossing golfing movie
The Legend of
Bagger
Vance
(flawed by Charlize Theron’s clumsy rendition of a Southern belle
and by the cloying overtones of what Spike Lee called its “magical, mystical Negro” theme) hit a box-office bogey; and the animated film
The Road to El Dorado
was a major money loser. Cameron Crowe’s autobiographical
comedy-drama
set in the rock world,
Almost Famous
, and Rod Lurie’s feminist political drama
The Contender
won critical approval but failed to attract audiences.
Cast Away
, Robert Zemeckis’s tour de force with Tom Hanks as a man surviving on a desert island, became a major hit, but DreamWorks had only foreign distribution rights.

American director Barry Levinson’s offbeat, piquant satire of Belfast
politics
in the 1970s,
An Everlasting Piece
, was unceremoniously dumped from theaters by DreamWorks after a brief run, much to the dismay of its producer Jerome O’Connor, who sued the company and accused Spielberg of pandering to the British for the sake of his knighthood and his filmmaking relationship with the United Kingdom. O’Connor claimed that DreamWorks “killed” the film in the United States due to “political pressure” from the British
government
after Levinson refused to make cuts. Calling the lawsuit “patently ludicrous,” DreamWorks went on to distribute the film on DVD in the United States.

Despite its Oscar winners for best picture and its intermittent
commercial
hits, DreamWorks’ signature as a studio remained indistinct because of its eclecticism, a product of its attempt to appeal to a wide variety of tastes. The company’s spotty overall record and lagging artistic ambition became increasingly evident as the years went on and it descended into making crude and racist lowbrow comedy (Eddie Murphy’s
Norbit
) and ultra-mindless
action
fare such as Michael Bay’s
Transformers
franchise. The modest level of the company’s artistic ambitions raised the question of why Spielberg would take time away from directing to run a studio if most of its films were not
appreciably
different in quality from those of other companies. His track record as a producer ever since the 1970s, with occasional exceptions, shows a dismaying penchant for the cinematic equivalent of junk food. Part of him seems to revel in making such lowbrow fare, allowing him to dabble in the kinds of films he would never put his name on as director. They are a relief from his heavier filmmaking responsibilities as well as an indication that he is still somewhat “hooked on the crap of his childhood” (as Pauline Kael observed of George Lucas when he and Spielberg recycled old serials into
Raiders of the Lost Ark
).

But there are more pragmatic business reasons for Spielberg’s willingness to pander to the lower tastes of his audience by churning out more than his share of mediocrity for DreamWorks. It was part of the price he paid for greater freedom within the Hollywood system. “I realized one day that I had always been working for other people,” he said in 1997. “With all my
independence
to make movies, they were controlled by the copyright holders—the studios that put up the financing. I have a car, a house, a family, and they own the clothes on their backs. And yet, the job I go to, I’m always working for somebody else. I’m not part of the land that I built my career on.”

While running a studio may seem like misdirected energy, in the end it’s a function of Spielberg’s determination to control his own artistic destiny. He captured his paradoxical situation by describing himself in 2001 as an “
independent
working in the Hollywood mainstream.” Being a mogul helps give Spielberg creative autonomy as a director: “I’m able to have the freedom to make a movie like
Saving Private Ryan
necessarily rough, as opposed to having a studio boss say, ‘Distill it and water it down like all those other World War II movies so maybe we can make a profit.’ I’m able to at least make that choice for myself. If I shoot
myself
in the foot by making
Private Ryan
too much of a tough journey, at least
I
made the choice.” As Daniel M. Kimmel observes in his 2006 book,
The Dream Team: The Rise and Fall of DreamWorks: Lessons from the New Hollywood
, the company with its diversified slate also “provided a means to cut the risk on his films.” Making more surefire crowd-pleasers helped balance out the possible commercial downside of an
Amistad
or an
A.I.
Spielberg often spread the risk further by partnering with other companies for the films he directed and other DreamWorks projects.

Keeping his Amblin/DreamWorks headquarters on one studio lot (what he calls his “birthplace,” Universal Studios) while working for other companies is part of Spielberg’s strategy to avoid being owned and operated by other people, as he had been during his early years working under contract as a Universal TV director. Despite his unparalleled clout in Hollywood,
achieving
total independence was another matter. He and his partners had to
gradually
scale down their grandiose dreams of a full-service studio, concentrating less of their distracted attention on television (other than the occasional hit miniseries, such as
Band of Brothers
and the sci-fi saga
Taken
) and selling off their interactive media division to focus on feature films. That decision was a necessary allocation of constricting resources but made them more vulnerable to the vagaries of the marketplace.

What finally made DreamWorks stand out from its competitors artistically was an animated film,
Shrek
, released in May 2001. This brash and stylish fairy tale about a lovelorn ogre (voiced by Mike Myers) in a medieval kingdom was a runaway box-office hit, grossing $455 million worldwide.
Shrek
vindicated
Katzenberg’s rebellion against Disney and demonstrated his ability to rival its former monopoly in the field. The film spawned a series of lucrative sequels;
Shrek
2
(2004) surpassed the original in popularity, bringing in a staggering $880 million worldwide and becoming the most successful
animated
film ever made, surpassing Disney’s 1994
The Lion King
.

What made the triumph of this new animated franchise particularly sweet was that Katzenberg inserted a series of raucous jibes at Disney into the
storyline
of
Shrek
. From the opening gag of the ogre tossing a storybook into his toilet, the film pokes irreverent fun throughout at the Disneyfication of fairy tales. Most cheekily, Lord Farquaad’s castle looks remarkably like the iconic Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland, complete with merchandising outlets and regimented crowd control, and the petty, arrogant ruler bears more than
a passing physical resemblance to Katzenberg’s nemesis at Disney, Michael Eisner. Liza Schwarzbaum described
Shrek
in
Entertainment Weekly
as “a kind of palace coup, a shout of defiance, and a coming-of-age for DreamWorks, the upstart studio that shepherded the project with such skill and chutzpah.”

Over the next few years, DreamWorks’ fortunes in live action would ebb and flow, keeping it on shaky ground, but the most thriving component of the new company, the one with the most truly distinctive style, would be its animation division, with which Spielberg had little direct involvement. The energetic Katzenberg, with his single-minded devotion to his craft, showed how a studio executive could put his stamp on a company’s output, while Spielberg’s halfhearted stewardship of live action and the generally forgettable nature of many of the films he supervised with production executives Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald would continue to raise questions about the overall viability of the DreamWorks enterprise.