Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Encountering Spielberg: A Steven Spielberg Profile (Part 2)

Trevor Hogg profiles the career of legendary Hollywood filmmaker Steven Spielberg in the second of a five part feature... read part one here.

Steven Spielberg The Sugarland ExpressIn an effort to gain access to their son, Ila Fae Holiday and Robert Dent kidnapped a patrolman causing them to be pursued by a massive Texan police convoy; the 1969 incident was a media sensation and served as the inspiration for the theatrical debut of Steven Spielberg. “The Sugarland Express [1974] is partly based on truth and partly on the wonderful cartoon imaginations of two genius writers, Hal Barwood [MacArthur] and Matthew Robbins [Mimic], with whom I collaborated,” stated the acclaimed American filmmaker. “In the true story, about 90 police cars from 11 counties, and God knows how many tank towns and four-way stops fell into this rag-tag formation. Our budget only allowed us 40 police cars, but I had to make it look like 100.” The story is reminiscent of a Hollywood classic by the legendary Billy Wilder. “I loved the Ace in the Hole [1951] similarity with The Sugarland Express; I liked the idea of people rallying behind a media event, not knowing who the characters are or what they’re about but just supporting them because they are on an errand of mercy to get their baby back and that sparks a good deal of good old American sentimentality.” Spielberg added, “The heroes of the picture are the police and I think the villains are the well-wishers who wish a little too much for these people.”

Historical facts gave way to fiction. “In real life it was the Clovis [Poplin] character played by William Atherton [The Day of the Locust] who was the manipulator,” remarked the director who made the character of Lou Jean Poplin, portrayed by Goldie Hawn (Shampoo), as the instigator of the resulting mayhem. “What made her a villain was the lapse in her memory about the child when she began looking for herself and not for the mission.” Shooting the on-screen interactions of Hawn and Atherton turned out to be a challenge for Spielberg as his female lead was best with the first couple of takes while her counterpart improved with each subsequent take. “I had to cover the interior dialogue scenes by giving Goldie her close-up takes one and two and then have her remain in the over-the-shoulder until take eleven or twelve when Bill was hitting his peak.” To help visualize the progression of the story, the rookie moviemaker borrowed a production technique he used on Duel (1971). “I had a graphic artist come into my office and sketch the entire movie on what you would call a Shell Oil map which I was able to tape to one wall of my hotel room in Texas. I could see exactly what the film would look like from a bird’s eye view as it progressed from one police car followed by two, then ten, then fifty; plus all the exciting pit-stops throughout the movie – the chicken-stand scene, the portable potty scene.” There was one major drawback to advance work which Steven Spielberg wanted to avoid. “There’s a danger in being so thoroughly prepared that when you come on the set the next day your thinking is not spontaneous….Marvelous accidents happen on the set – actors have suggestions, technicians have suggestions, a passing stranger may have a suggestion – and I think a director should keep his mind open everyday and not get trapped by the homework he falls in love with on the eve of shooting the actual scene.”

The Sugarland ExpressShot in continuity because of the logistics required to secure the varying number of vehicles needed for the different stages of the story, Steven Spielberg had to orchestrate a number of complicated sequences for the picture. “The stunt I’m proudest of is the KION-TV van capsizing in a mud puddle and sending six reporters flailing into the sky. I’m proud of that stunt because it was the perfect combination of stunt timing by Carey [Loftin], who was driving the news van, and the camera placement, which was ground level at six inches from the edge of the mud puddle with a wide-angle lens.” A dramatic scene had Spielberg mimicking what he referred to as John Milius’ (Flight of the Intruder) “ricochet shot”. “I was determined to have a great show of force in the used car lot shoot-out and to make all of the squib hits much larger than they are in most movies,” explained the Cincinnati native. “When a bullet punctures the glass in The Sugarland Express, not only does the glass spiderweb, but the entire windshield is torn loose from its nuts and holders and goes flying across the lot. And when a tire is hit by a bullet, the whole tire blows up, the hubcap flies off, and the entire car settles in a plume of dust. I really wanted to make this scene among the most violent pyrotechnically; I wanted you to feel that flying glass could do as much harm to the characters as the actual velocity of the screaming bullets.” Much of the dialogue in the film is by 2-way police radio. “John Carter, who was the soundman for The Sugerland Express, rigged the non-working microphones in the police cars to a 5-watt walkie-talkie which enabled an actor to depress the button and talk into his microphone. Then under the floorboards and out of sight of the camera was the actual speaker with Ben Johnson’s response from a paralleling car.” There was a practical reason for this approach. “Had we not used the 2-way police radio method in dubbing, we would have had to filter the sound.”

Unfortunately, the picture was far from being the commercial hit Steven Spielberg had hoped for as it earned $7.5 million in domestic box office receipts. “I think that the main failing of The Sugarland Express was the fact that we came out with two other films thematically similar – Badlands [1973] and Thieves Like Us [1974] – and the audiences were wrapping all three films into one bundle,” reflected Spielberg who also pointed out that the film was overshadowed by the release of major crowd pleasers Serpico, The Exorcist, The Sting, Papillon, and American Graffiti. Looking back on his theatrical debut the filmmaker admitted that a different approach was required. “I would have drawn the whole first half of the picture from his [Captain Tanner] vantage point, from behind the police barricades, from inside his police cruiser.” The second half of the movie he would have been devoted to showing the naiveté of Clovis and Lou Jean by telling the story from inside their car. The Sugarland Express did not go entirely unnoticed as it won Best Screenplay at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, and Steven Spielberg was nominated for the Palme d’Or.

Jaws posterWith the theme of his TV thriller Duel in mind, Spielberg shifted the roadside action to a waterside resort town for his next picture. “What really attracted me to the Jaws [1975] project was in the novel,” revealed the director of the best seller written by Peter Benchley, “the last 120 pages, when they go out to hunt, a sea hunt for the great white shark…The extended drama between these three people who are against each other, and then finally join forces to fight the shark.” An agreement was reached with producer Richard Zanuck. “I said I’d like to do the picture if I could change the first two acts…and then be very true to the book for the last third.” Zanuck agreed and Steven Spielberg went about revising the story so as to make the characters Sheriff Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) and Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) more sympathetic. “I took the Mafia out of it, I took, not the sex out but the affair [between Brody’s wife and Hooper] because there really is no time for a romantic ichthyologist to show up in town.” The third member of the trio was the wily veteran shark hunter. “My first choice to play [Sam] Quint was Lee Marvin [The Dirty Dozen] but Lee Marvin wasn’t interested. My second choice was Sterling Hayden [Dr. Strangelove], whom I thought would make an amazing Quint. He couldn’t do it either...Then [the producers] Dick Zanuck and David Brown suggested Robert Shaw [A Man for All Seasons].”

“My agent took me over to be introduced to him [Steven Spielberg], and he was having a conversation with a writer named Tracey Keenan Wynn [The Longest Yard],” recalled Roy Scheider (All That Jazz). “And as I approached him, I heard a conversation that went something like this, ‘We’re going to have to make this giant shark come out of the water, and land on a boat, and crack the boat in half!’ And I remember saying to my agent as we walked away, ‘Those guys, they’ve got to be kidding – a giant shark that cracks a boat in half!’ I thought they were loony.” Scheider was not alone in his assessment of the project. “He [Steven Spielberg] told me this movie he wanted to make, and it was really a total shocker,” stated Richard Dreyfuss (The Goodbye Girl), “as a tale, it was a great, exciting story. And I said, ‘Well, this sounds like it’s going to be a great movie. I’d rather watch this movie than shoot it, because it’s going to be a bitch to shoot!’" As it turned out Dreyfuss was right as the mechanical monster kept on malfunctioning, forcing the director to shoot more from the point of view of the aquatic killer. “Whenever you were on the island,” remembered the Oscar-winning actor, “you could hear the radio mikes, and they were always saying, ‘The shark is not working, the shark is not working.’”

Jaws Steven Spielberg“It’s really a movie about our fear of the water,” observed Steven Spielberg. “When you’re out swimming and turn to tread water, half of your body is under the surface and you can’t keep tabs on what’s happening down there around your feet.” Making the principle photography a complicated endeavor was the decision to film in a real setting. “I wouldn’t want to do it in a tank because it wouldn’t be believable, especially today when pictures like The French Connection [1971] and Midnight Cowboy [1969] are shot in a documentary style, on location.” To effectively portray the live action, the filmmaker had a specific place in mind. “The real attraction of Martha’s Vineyard was the fact that it was the only place on the East Coast where I could go twelve miles out to sea and still have a sandy bottom only thirty feet below the surface of the water, where the mechanical shark could function.” There was a significant creative reason for selecting the location. “It was very important that, no matter where my cameras turned, I didn’t want to see land. My fear was the minute the audience saw land they’d say, ‘Look, it is getting pretty intense out there, just turn the boat around and go toward that land we keep seeing in your movie!’”

Other major complications arose during the production of the picture. “It’s the first movie that I had not prepared because I had no time,” stated Steven Spielberg. “The studio wanted to begin with this picture quickly because of the intended Actors Guild strike; they got the film going at least two months prematurely. Suddenly I found myself in Martha’s Vineyard looking at locations and rewriting the script every night with Howard Sackler [The Great White Hope] and then Carl Gottlieb [The Jerk].” There was no relief from the rushed atmosphere for the twenty-nine year old filmmaker. “I couldn’t rehearse with the actors and we had to make their performances come together virtually twenty-four hours before we began shooting or during Take 3 an idea would pop into my head, so we’d get into a huddle, break, and re-shoot it. I didn’t have Robert Shaw until we were almost shooting…We were casting as we went along, Roy was the first person cast in the picture and Roy only had a three week headstart.” Reflecting on his sophomore effort, Spielberg said, ““When I first heard the word Jaws I just thought of a period of my life when I was much younger than I am right now, and I think because I was younger, I was more courageous…or I was more stupid. I’m not sure which. So when I think of Jaws, I think about courage and stupidity. And I think both of these things exist underwater.”

Credited with being the original summer blockbuster, Jaws become the first picture to gross over $100 million in U.S. box office receipts; it went on to achieve a worldwide total of $471 million. Not only audience members were impressed as the seafaring thriller won Academy Awards for Best Editing, Best Original Score, and Best Sound while receiving a nomination for Best Picture. At the BAFTAs, Jaws was lauded with the Anthony Asquith Award for Music and contended for Best Actor (Richard Dreyfuss), Best Director, Best Film, Best Editing, Best Screenplay, and Best Soundtrack. The Golden Globes awarded the movie with Best Original Score, while handing out nominations for Best Director, Best Picture, and Best Screenplay. The Writers Guild of America nominated the $7 million production for Best Adapted Screenplay – Drama and Spielberg received a Directors Guild of America nomination.

“Finding a story that will hold my interest for the nine months it takes to make a motion picture from start to finish, that’s my biggest problem,” confessed Steven Spielberg who also admitted, “The conception of the story is the most exciting part of making a picture for me. The second most exciting part is assembling the film. The most nerve-wracking part of the movie, the process that I most dislike, is the actual shooting and directing of the picture.”

Close Encounters of the Third KindFor his third cinematic endeavor, Spielberg delved into the world of “scientific speculation” with his space alien visitation picture Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). “I was interested in finding out why people looked to the skies and wanted to believe, as I was looking to the skies myself to try to understand what was happening up there that the Air Force and the Government didn’t want to tell us about,” said the director. “A lot of the sightings people have at night are because they never look and they are just discovering the sky; so many reports are easy to explain astronomically, conventionally. There are other reports that are impossible to describe conventionally, but the basic scientific community isn’t ready to change [Albert] Einstein’s rules.”

“Every set-piece was sketched, I had hundreds of little drawings, I pre-cut the entire film and then shot it to cut later,” said Steven Spielberg of his extensive preproduction planning. “There are moments with the people when they improvise and go beyond the script. Essentially, I am not a writer and I don’t enjoy writing. I’d much rather collaborate. I need fresh ideas coming to me, because I can’t send fresh ideas out into space and expect them to return, I need them to bounce off something. So I locked myself away to write Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and when I came out I had a pretty good structure but I wasn’t crazy about some of the characters. The actors helped me shake out the fat and get right down to what the scene was about.” The filmmaker’s decision to write the script himself was made out of necessity. “Everybody wanted to make it much more of a James Bond adventure. Either that or the other side: too personal, too cloistered, with nothing ever really happening, getting into why a man’s life comes apart. It was either all family or all UFOs. Nobody wanted to do both.”

Even with his previous movie being a huge box office success, the executives of the Hollywood studio financing the picture kept close tabs on their investment. “I had to meet with the treasurer of Columbia many times,” stated Steven Spielberg. “I had to meet with each member of the board individually on occasion. We had them down on the set in Mobile, Alabama, looking at our supersets.” Questioned about how he dealt with the pressure, the filmmaker answered, “The worst thing they can do is fire you; they can’t kill you…if you can stand back and find something funny to laugh at – it’s a way of saving your presence of mind, and this is what I do when things get really bad.” Making things easier for Spielberg was the reunion with two key collaborators from Jaws – actor Richard Dreyfuss and music composer John Williams. “Richard is so wound up in a kinetic energy. He’s as close an actor to Spencer Tracy [Judgement at Nuremberg] as exists today. I also think he represents the underdog in all of us.” As for the man who has scored all of his pictures with the exception of The Sugarland Express, the director confessed, “Johnny Williams I have very little control over, except we listen to music together and I’ll show him my film and try to talk it through and give him a sense of my taste in musical atmospheres. But once Johnny sits down at the piano, it’s his movie, it’s his score.” Two newcomers involved in the $20 million production were film editor Michael Kahn and three year old performer Carey Guffey (Stroker Ace). To get the right on-screen expression from Guffey, the filmmaker had to improvise. “I opened a giant gift box and pulled out a toy car in order to get him to react to the UFO approaching his home.”

Close Encounters of the Third KindAdvance screening sessions are viewed by the director as being a useful tool in fine tuning a picture. “On Close Encounters, I had a very important decision to make,” explained Steven Spielberg, “whether or not to use the Walt Disney song When You Wish Upon a Star at the end of the movie, with Jiminy Cricket’s actual voice performing it. The only way I could tell was to have two different previews, on two different nights: one night with the song, one night without it. I then analyzed the preview cards very carefully, interviewed the people who left the theatre and made a determination that the audience wanted to be transported to another world along with Richard Dreyfuss as he walked aboard the mothership. They didn’t want to be told the film was a fantasy, and this song seemed to belie some of the authenticity.” Spielberg subsequently nixed the idea. “I didn’t want Close Encounters to end just as a dream.”

Columbia Studio executives had nothing to worry about as the movie tallied $304 million in worldwide box office receipts. The Oscars lauded the science fiction tale with the Academy Award for Best Cinematography along with a Special Achievement Award for Sound Effects Editing; it also contended for Best Supporting Actress (Melinda Dillon), Best Art Direction & Set Decoration, Best Director, Best Visual Effects, Best Original Score, Best Editing and Best Sound. At the BAFTAs, Close Encounters of the Third Kind won Best Production Design & Art Direction while also receiving nominations for Best Cinematography, Best Director, Best Film, Best Editing, Best Screenplay, Best Sound and Best Supporting Actor (François Truffant). The Golden Globes nominated the movie for Best Director, Best Picture – Drama, Best Original Score and Best Screenplay; other nominations came from the American Cinema Editors and the Writers Guild of America for Best Edited Feature Film and Best Original Screenplay respectively. Three years later a Special Edition version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released with various scenes either shortened or deleted along with an additional 7 minutes of footage. In 1998 the Collector’s Edition cut appeared with a 101 minute long documentary titled The Making of Close Encounters and for the 30th Anniversary Edition (2007) all three theatrical versions of the picture were packaged together.

1941 Steven Spielberg“The script came to me in a funny way,” remembered Steven Spielberg on how he became involved with 1941 (1979). “I was shooting skeet with John Milius at the Oak Tree Gun Club and these two young protégés of mine and John’s, Robert Zemeckis [I Wanna Hold Your Hand] and Bob Gale [Back to the Future], brought me the first draft to read for an opinion. I don’t think there was one comic line in the entire first draft, but there were some wonderful visionary set pieces. It wasn’t a film from my heart. It wasn’t a project I initiated, dreamed about for ten years, although I have shed blood over it as if it were my own. Rather than a bastard adoption, I like to think of it at times as if it were a project I was forced to take because of my own state of mind.” Commenting on the origins of the screwball action-comedy 1941, Zemeckis stated, “This is a picture that could only be conceived, written, and made by guys who know World War II by seeing it in the movies. None of us were even born when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.” For Spielberg the time was right to lighten the prevailing dark mood reflected in Apocalypse Now (1979). “I felt that after the war in Vietnam and the disillusionment the nation experienced, it was important to remind people that war doesn’t have to be a trip up the river to hell; it could also be a lot of laughs.”

1941 is loosely based on a minor World War II incident when an offshore Japanese submarine fired at some oil wells near Santa Barbara causing a state of panic in Los Angeles resulting in anti-aircraft guns firing at unidentifiable targets. Two distinguished actors were aboard the enemy vessel, Toshiro Mifune (Seven Samurai) as the underwater ship’s commander and Christopher Lee (The Wicker Man) as the high-ranking Nazi officer assigned to be an observer. “I was personally drawn in by sympathy to the Japanese story when I first read the script,” revealed Spielberg. “I said, ‘Here’s my chance to work with the greatest samurai of them all, Toshiro Mifune.’ He came into my house when we first met. He walked in wearing a business suit, with his thinning hair and great big smile, with very little English to his credit, but he had a wonderful interpreter with him. We exchanged gifts. He opened up the book and he said, ‘Now here’s where the script is wrong.’ Our submarine was wrong, according to Toshiro, and we made corrections. So in that sense, Toshiro cleaned up the Japanese act and made them more professional and worthy of our great fear and respect.” Setting the tone for the story is the parody of the opening sequence found in Jaws which sees actress Susan Backlinie reprise her fatal scene as the unsuspecting skinny dipper; this time around she is not surprised by a shark but by a submarine which surfaces with her hoisted aloft on its periscope.

1941 John BelushiRecruiting actors who could handle detailed choreographed slapstick routines which were the staple of bygone days was not an easy task for Spielberg. "The Chaplins, the Harold Lloyds, the Fatty Arbuckles, the Snub Pollards of yesterday have become the more coifed and slick Steve Martin [Roxanne], Albert Brooks [Broadcast News], Robin Williams [Dead Poets Society], and John Belushi [The Blues Brothers]. There’s more verbal wit in comedy today, with the exception of Belushi, who I think is the most visually prone actor-comedian working in film and theatre. I think he’s amazing. There isn’t anyone like him or who comes close.” Along with Belushi, the director was impressed with the work of another performer. “Dan Aykroyd [Driving Mrs. Daisy] is interesting. He’s a contemporary soldier of our time. As far as I was concerned…he was the comic sergeant-at-arms on 1941. He has one of the fastest minds for situation comedy and funny storytelling, and at the same time he’s very technical. He can tell you all the byproducts of gypsum…and have you roaring with laughter!” Spielberg soon learned you can have too much of a good thing. “No one wanted to be normal – as much as I tried to normalize certain relationships…because realism is the cement floor of comedy. Without it you’re floating in a fantasy netherworld. But everybody watching John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd perform…wanted to be just as crazy. They all wanted to be bigger than the war, bigger than history.”

“There were so many elements that had to be chopped out because the movie was so big, and he had to get down to a manageable time,” reflected Dan Aykroyd. “That’s the big lesson. Before you even start to walk onto a set or think about production, you’ve got to have a solid story that is so clear and vivid that there isn’t much room to deviate and improvise.” Steven Spielberg acknowledges he was out of his league venturing into the genre of comedy. “A comedy is an elusive chameleon-like beast,” observed the filmmaker. “It’s really an area of film that I’m not going to make a habit of.” The director mused, “Hopefully, 1941 is the last movie I make that celebrates the boy in me. And then hopefully I can go on from here and do something more adult-like and perhaps more boring.” The $35 million project turned out to be as wayward as the submarine that sets off the civic mayhem as it earned $92 million worldwide. Entertainment industry publication Variety observed, “Billed as a comedy spectacle, Steven Spielberg’s 1941 is long in spectacle but short on comedy.” Not all was lost for the picture as it was nominated for Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects and Best Sound at the Academy Awards. Renowned filmmaker Stanley Kubrick produced the golden standard for social satire in 1964. “The brilliance of Dr. Strangelove, and in my humble opinion one of the failings of 1941, is the fact that in Strangelove, the broad, baroque comedy was extra funny, because the reality of the situation was so true to life,” observed Steven Spielberg. “The juxtaposition of docu-drama and crazo-comedy has never worked better in any movie.”

Steven Spielberg George Lucas“George and I have known each other forever it seems,” reminisced Spielberg about his close friendship with fellow American filmmaker George Lucas. “We met at a backstage party after a student film festival and we just became friends. Years later, George had finished Star Wars [1977] and was planning to go on a trip that would take him far, far away from its opening weekend; so I joined him in Hawaii. We were just waiting for the grosses to come in [Close Encounters of the Third Kind had also just been released]; it was like waiting for election returns. As we all know, it turned out to be a landslide for George Lucas. George, at that point, just gushed a sigh of relief and then changed the subject from Star Wars to what I was doing next. He asked me, ‘What film would you like to make?’ And I said, ‘Well, you know what I’ve always wanted to do? I’ve always wanted to direct a James Bond picture.’ And George said, ‘I got that beat.’ I asked, ‘What do you mean?’ He replied, ‘I have Raiders of the Lost Ark’ [1981] – and that was the beginning of our professional partnership.”

When originally constructing the concept, George Lucas consulted writer-director Phil Kaufman (The Right Stuff). “I told him the story, which at that point was Indiana Smith on the hunt for some kind of supernatural artifact,” said Lucas. “I knew it was set in the 1930s and that the Nazis were in it, because I knew the Nazis had also searched for supernatural artifacts. That’s when Phil told me about the Ark of the Covenant.” When an opportunity arose to work with Clint Eastwood on The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Kaufman left the project. Despite the setback Lucas continued to develop the idea. “George said, “‘Look, this a B-movie,’” recalled Steven Spielberg. “‘They used to make four of them a week, at each studio, for fifteen years from the 1930s into the ’40s.’ He said, ‘Raiders was part of a series of sagas following the exploits of an adventurer –archeologist, not unlike the Tarzan series or, by the same token, not unlike the serials of the ‘50s. The difference would be that our leading man would be involved in mortal adventures and in otherworldly events'. George said, ‘We’ll keep it in the ’30s, but we’ll update it and make it modern, and still keep it old.’ It was great.”

Raiders of the Lost Ark“I found Larry [Kasdan] when I read a script of his that I had Universal buy for me called Continental Divide [1981],” said Steven Spielberg. “Then I introduced Larry to George, suggesting to George that I wanted Larry to be the screenwriter on Raiders.” In January of 1978 Spielberg, Lucas, and Kasdan had a series of brainstorming sessions together. “We had a tape recorder going and George essentially guided the story process,” remarked Steven Spielberg. “The three of us pitched the entire movie in about five days. Most of the time we were trying to outshoot each other with ideas. George, Larry, and I sat in a room and contrived a very structured story that is eighty percent of what the script turned out to be.” When it came to deciding who would personify the swashbuckling character on the big screen, Spielberg and Lucas were of a particular frame of mind. “Because George and I wanted to discover somebody new, we never thought of the established actors. We were looking for the guy who might be doing a Camel cigarette ad on television and hasn’t had a break yet. So we went through the files and met everybody, from good off-off-Broadway actors to male models, and it was discouraging.” On April 16, 1980 the ideal candidate was selected. “We made the offer to Tom Selleck,” revealed Spielberg. “Of all the people we looked at, over 250 male actors, he was the best. But Tom Selleck had a deal with CBS for a series called Magnum P.I. that was inactive, and once they heard that George and I wanted to star him...CBS put the series into production and preempted our using him.” The solution to the problem was to recruit an actor associated with the original Star Wars trilogy. “Harrison was my idea,” said Steven Spielberg. “We had three weeks to cast the part, with nobody close. But then I saw a rough cut of The Empire Strikes Back [1980], and Harrison was just real good in Empire. So I called George, and I said, ‘He’s right under our nose.’ And George said, ‘I know who you’re going to say.’ And I said, ‘Who?’ He said, ‘Harrison Ford.’”

“One scene in Raiders called for Harrison to fight the swordsman in a duel lasting three minutes,” recalled the director. “I had two days to shoot it in, but Harrison couldn’t stand up because he had a bad case of the Tunisian Touristas. I suggested that he take his gun out and just shoot the swordsman. The solution was quite possibly an inspired compromise. I think and work better when I’m pinned down, more than when I have all the money in the world and all the time and all eyes watching my next movie.” Spielberg’s craftiness in handling on-screen performances extended to the actress playing, Marion Ravenwood, the leading lady and love interest of the picture. “In Raiders, I dropped snakes on Karen Allen’s [Starman] head because I didn’t think she was screaming for real.” Kathleen Kennedy, who ran Spielberg’s then newly formed production company Amblin Entertainment, was impressed with the moviemaker’s foresight during the principle photography for the picture. “When we were doing the big plane sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark,” recollected Kennedy, “where they have the big fistfight under the wing – the whole time from when Indiana Jones runs out to the wing until the airplane explodes is about a hundred and fifty cuts. They can only go together one way. He knew already in his mind exactly what every single shot would be. He just sees all that. And what happens is he gets impatient, because once he sees it he doesn’t want to lose what he sees.”

Raiders of the Lost ArkAsked about his experience of collaborating with a colleague and a friend, Steven Spielberg answered, “George is a great influence on me in terms of economics and budgets and schedules. He’s a great producer and he’s taught me a lot about creative compromise, about how you don’t have to spend thirty million dollars to get fifteen million dollars on the screen.” The director surrounded himself with familiar faces. “I enjoyed cutting Raiders with Michael [Kahn] more than I’ve ever enjoyed editing any movie before,” enthused Spielberg. “We had a great time, especially in tightening the film until it began to exceed the speed limit for a movie of its nature, and once the film exceeded the design in terms of forward velocity, that’s when I stopped and said, ‘Okay, I’m finished.’ Then I showed it to George, George made some adjustments, and we showed it to Paramount and then released the picture.” The filmmaker also admires his other frequent collaborator. “I marvel at John Williams because he can conduct his own music over and over again. I can’t do that. I’ll dedicate two or three years of my life to one film. But then I want to move on and try something new.” However, Spielberg did break with tradition when it came to a friendly handshake deal. “I made George Lucas a promise that if the first one was successful I would do two more.” The director added, “The only thing that would have gotten me to break my word to George was if everybody’s attitude was, ‘Lets get this over with. We’re going to make money on it anyway. Let’s just play it safe and give the audience exactly what we think they want.’”

“I never saw Raiders with the general public until it opened at the Cinerama Dome after its forty-fourth week in movie theatres,” confided Spielberg. “I was able to watch the picture semi-objectively and to enjoy the film as entertainment. But there was still a feeling of, ‘Why did I do it that way? Why didn’t I do it this way? Gee, why did I use those syphilitic camels?’” Obviously, movie audiences did find any fault with the desert animals as the action-adventure which cost $18 million to make grossed $384 million worldwide. At the Academy Awards, Raiders of the Lost Ark won Best Art & Set Decoration, Best Visual Effects, Best Editing, Best Sound and a Special Achievement Award for Sound Effects Editing; it also contended for Best Cinematography, Best Director, Best Original Score and Best Picture. The BAFTAs awarded the movie with Best Production Design & Art Decoration while nominating it for the Anthony Asquith Award for Film Music, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Film, Best Sound and Best Supporting Actor (Denholm Elliott). Other nominations included one from the Directors Guild of America, the Writers Guild of America for Best Original Screenplay – Comedy and the Golden Globes for Best Director; while the American Cinema Editors handed out the Eddie for Best Edited Feature Film.

Returning to the subject matter explored in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Steven Spielberg decided to produce a screenplay written by John Sayles (Lone Star) about a group of hostile space aliens that attack a remote farmhouse.

Continue to part three.

For more on Jaws be sure to head over to the JawsMovie, JawsFan and The Shark is Still Working.

TheRaider.net is your source for all things Indy, while Mystery Man on Film have more about the Raiders of the Lost Ark story conference, along with a link to download the transcript. For more on the making of the films, be sure to check out J.W. Rinzler's The Complete Making of Indiana Jones.

Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation

Visit the official Dreamworks website here.

Related:

Five Essential Films of Steven Spielberg
Short Film Showcase - Amblin' (1968)
Movies for Free! Duel (1971)

Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada.

Grown Ups defeats Scott Pilgrim at the UK box office

UK box office top ten and analysis for the weekend of Friday 27th - Sunday 29th August 2010.

Comedy appeared to be the order of the day for the last weekend of August with big hitters Grown Ups and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World squaring off against each other for the title of UK box office champion. Grown Ups - which stars Saturday Night Live alumni Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, David Spade and Rob Schneider (along with Paul Blart: Mall Cop's Kevin James) - banked £2m to take the top spot, giving Sandler his biggest ever opening in the UK and leaving Edgar Wright's comic book adaptation Scott Pilgrim to settle for second place with £1.6m.

Another two newcomers manage to make an appearance this week, albeit in the opposite end of the chart - Thor Freudenthal's adaptation of the Jeff Kinney book Diary of a Wimpy Kid takes eighth with £671k while the special edition release of James Cameron's Avatar takes ninth, adding another £624k to extend its record-setting gross to a whopping £92.8m.

Heading up the list of familiar faces is Disney-Pixar's smash hit animation Toy Story 3, which holds on to third and adds another £1.5m for a total of £67.6m after six weeks on release, while Last week's top two films - actionfests The Expendables and Salt - both fall three spots to fourth and fifth respectively. Filling out the bottom half of the chart are horror remake Pirahna 3D (down two to sixth), Christopher Nolan's Inception (down one to seventh), and the critically mauled Marmaduke (down five to tenth).

Number one this time last year: The Final Destination































































































































































Pos.FilmWeekend GrossWeekTotal UK Gross
1Grown Ups
£2,006,9451£2,006,945
2Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
£1,604,5451





















































£1,604,545
3Toy Story 3£1,499,5246































































£67,593,215
4The Expendables£1,311,3812































































£6,816,414
5Salt£967,8832











































































£4,383,618
6Pirahna 3D£886,4952£3,287,882
7Inception£699,0417

























































£33,085,858
8Diary of a Wimpy Kid
£671,1611















































































£671,161
9Avatar£624,1061









































































£92,813,108
10Marmaduke£586,7152













































































£2,938,461


Incoming...

A whole host of new releases make their debut this coming Friday including DC Comics adaptation Jonah Hex (cert. 15), rom-com The Switch (cert. 12A), comedy Dinner For Schmucks (cert. 12A) and horror The Last Exorcism (cert. 15). If none of those tickle your fancy then there's also the choice between Brit crime thriller Bonded By Blood (cert. TBC) and Tyler Perry comedy drama Why Did I Get Married Too? (cert. TBC), along with Bollywood efforts Nandalala (cert. 12A) and Chhevan Dariya (cert. TBC).

U.K. Box Office Archive

Monday, August 30, 2010

British Cinema: Kandahar Break (2009)

Kandahar Break: Fortress of War, 2009.

Directed by David Whitney.
Starring Shaun Dooley, Dean Andrews, Rasheed Naz and Tatmain Ul Qulb.

Kandahar Break
SYNOPSIS:

A British mine clearance engineer is pursued across the desert after falling foul of a corrupt police chief in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

Kandahar Break
The feature debut of British writer-director David Whitney, Kandahar Break: Fortress of War takes us back to a pre-9/11 Afghanistan during the height of Taliban control and stars Shaun Dooley (Eden Lake) as Richard Lee, an ex-British army bomb disposal expert now earning his living as a privately-contracted British engineer. After spending time working in Africa, Lee returns to Afghanistan in 1999 to fulfil a mine clearance contract on behalf of the Taliban government, who have since came to power and exerted their will upon the country.

Reuniting with co-workers Steve Delamore (Life on Mars’ Dean Andrews) and translator Jamilah (newcomer Tatmain Ul Qulb, who impresses in her first role), a young Afghan woman with whom he has a romantic past, Lee is warned of the strict enforcement of Sharia law and the Taliban's thirst for conflict. Despite this, his naïve ignorance quickly brings him into confrontation with his employers when on first day at work he finds himself staring down the barrel of an AK-47 after urinating within the vicinity of a Muslim woman.

Having witnessed first-hand the brutality of the regime, Lee announces his intention to take Jamilah to London to escape the oppression but his troubles are further compounded when the local Taliban governor Ashiq Khan (Rasheed Naz) replaces her as his translator. After the two are seen sharing a kiss Jamilah is kidnapped by an enraged mob and taken to be stoned as punishment. Although he manages to disrupt the proceedings Lee is unsuccessful in his efforts to save Jamilah’s life and - condemned to death himself - his only option is to flee Kandahar and embark on a perilous journey across the Afghan desert towards the sanctuary of the Pakistan border.

Kandahar Break's pre-war setting presents a refreshing and somewhat insightful change to current trends and the film is entirely convincing in its representation of a corrupt regime exerting their control over the weary Afghan people. With the production hazarding the dangerous tribal regions of Pakistan in its quest for authenticity – a decision which almost turned to tragedy when four Pakistani crew members were injured when rebels opened fire on their mini-bus – questions are also raised about the effectiveness of the ongoing Afghan conflict.

However, while a title like Kandahar Break: Fortress of War may conjure the impression of yet another artistic take on the War on Terror, it is difficult really to describe the film as such. Whitney actually delivers a film of two halves, starting out with a simple ‘forbidden love’ story against the backdrop of the Taliban’s extremist ideology, which quickly segues into a chase-thriller as Lee is pursued by both the government and his co-workers in his desperate trek to safety. Throw in a little socio-political commentary, convincing performances from its cast and accomplished cinematography and what you have is a rather decent drama that manages to deliver for the majority of its duration. Whitney has certainly shown his potential as a filmmaker and with a handful of festival awards under his belt for Kandahar Break, he could be one to watch out for as his career progresses.

Kandahar Break receives a limited theatrical release in select UK cinemas from September 10th and is released on DVD and Blu-ray September 13th. View the trailer here.

Gary Collinson

Movie Review Archive

Sunday, August 29, 2010

Behind-the-scenes featurettes from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Harry Potter and the Deathly HallowsWe're now less than three months away from the release of the first part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which marks the beginning of the end for the most lucrative movie franchise in history. Having split the final instalment of J. K. Rowling's best-selling series in two and armed with a budget rumoured to be in the region of $500m for the back-to-back productions, Order of the Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince director David Yates will be hoping the bring the saga to a fitting conclusion (and rake in the box office returns) when it opens world-wide this coming November.

The Deathly Hallows sees Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) and Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) set out to track down and destroy the Horcruxes, Lord Voldemort's (Ralph Fiennes) secret to immortality and destruction as the Dark Lord unleashes his war against the wizarding world. Newcomers to the cast include Ciarán Hinds (Aberforth Dumbledore) Rhys Ifans (Xenophilius Lovegood) and Bill Nighy (Rufus Scrimgeour), in addition to a host of familiar faces including Helena Bonham Carter, Robbie Coltrane, Tom Felton, Brendan Gleeson, Richard Griffiths, John Hurt, Jason Isaacs, Helen McCrory, Miranda Richardson, Alan Rickman, Maggie Smith, Timothy Spall, Imelda Staunton, David Thewlis, Julie Walters and Bonnie Wright.

To whet your appetite for the upcoming film, why not check out these three behind-the-scenes featurettes entitled "The Story", "Forest Run" and "On the Run"...






Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I is released in North America and the UK on November 19th 2010, with Part II following on July 15th 2011. Watch the trailer here.

Cult Cinema: The Strange Vice Of Mrs. Wardh (1971)

The Strange Vice Of Mrs. Wardh, 1971.

Directed by Sergio Martino.
Starring George Hilton, Edwige Fenech, Conchita Airoldi, Manuel Gil and Carlo Alighiero.

The Strange Vice Of Mrs. Wardh
SYNOPSIS:

A restless woman becomes embroiled in a horrifying mystery that threatens to drive her to the brink of madness... or worse.

The Strange Vice Of Mrs. Wardh
Lo strano vizio della Signora Wardh (1971) is a Giallo par excellence. Directed by Sergio Martino (The Case Of The Scorpion’s Tail, All The Colors Of The Dark), and starring none other than the queen of the Giallo herself, Edwige Fenech (Strip Nude For Your Killer), it represents something that a film obsessive will seldom discover yet constantly seeks – the rare gem. A piece that, despite being so great, is so difficult to get hold of. In this case one can only see the film by importing a rather peculiar looking Thai DVD, or settling for the lacklustre MYA Communications effort. The now legendary NoShame DVD, complete with its thirty-minute documentary on the film, entitled “Fear Behind The Door”, could set you back a walloping £80! Well, enough of the DVD nerd mumbo-jumbo, “why is this film so great?” I hear you ask…

The Strange Vice Of Mrs. Wardh – also known as Next! and Blade Of The Ripper – was released at the heart of the Giallo boom in Italy, which lasted from about 1965-1975. It concentrates on a series of grisly murders, the victims of which all have some connection to our heroine, Julie Wardh (Fenech). Mrs. Wardh is quite the minx, balancing three lovers at once, as well as a… strange vice.

The ninety-minute film can be split into two sections, the first sixty minutes plays like a typical Giallo: it has its black-gloved killer, who never leaves home without his straight razor; and it has its glamorous females and wonderfully dressed males (along with a haunting theme to boot). Here Martino does ‘Giallo’ perfectly, and whilst I was very impressed the first hour does not really go beyond this. Indeed, an hour into the film one finds oneself in a strange situation: yes, the film is perfect and has everything a Euro-trash fan could desire (the music, the melodrama, the tackily exotic characters), however it does not seem to be going passed that. At this point one is thinking of the intelligence behind The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (Argento, 1970) and wondering whether or not it will rear its beautiful head in Martino’s world. Don’t get me wrong, the film is fantastic and there are some wonderful suspense scenes, including a nail-biting chase in an underground car park, but it is not until the second part – the thirty-minute finale – that things really get interesting. Such an incredible piece of cinema; a snowballing, twist-laden, ever-developing mystery unfolds before our very eyes and reveals The Strange Vice Of Mrs. Wardh to be one of the genre's greatest artefacts.

I will not give away the ending; in fact I haven’t really given away much of the film whatsoever. A quick look at the IMDB synopsis is enough to whet one's appetite:
"An ambassador's wife discovers that one of the men in her life – either her husband, an ex-lover or her current lover – may be a vicious serial killer."
See what I mean by ‘typical’ sounding? Don’t let this fool you, the execution by all involved really makes this film stand out in a genre which already has so many recommendations. What’s not to like? Go forth and seek it out!

Robert Cowlin

Movie Review Archive

Saturday, August 28, 2010

Movies... For Free! Duel (1971)

Duel, 1971.

Directed by Steven Spielberg.
Starring Dennis Weaver, Carey Loftin and Jacqueline Scott.

Duel Steven Spielberg
Written by I Am Legend novelist Richard Matheson and based off his own short story that had featured in Playboy, Duel is a psychological thriller about a motorist (Dennis Weaver) who is stalked by a crazed truck driver (Carey Loftin). It is notable for being the feature debut of Steven Spielberg, who had recently signed to a contract with Universal and had been honing his skills on the well-received TV pilot Night Gallery (1969) and episodes of several TV shows including Marcus Welby, M.D. (1970), Columbo (1971) and Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law (1971).

Shot on location in 13 days for an original running time of 74 minutes, Duel enjoyed high ratings when it premiered on US television as an ABC Movie of the Week in November 1971. This prompted Spielberg to embark on two additional days of filming, extending the movie to 90 minutes for a theatrical release in Europe and the UK (along with a limited North American release the following year). With the success Duel establishing Spielberg as a major emerging talent, he would go on to produce two further TV movies before making his theatrical feature film debut in 1974 with The Sugarland Express.

For more on Steven Spielberg, check out Trevor Hogg's in-depth career profile Encountering Spielberg and be sure to vote in our poll for your favourite Steven Spielberg movie.


Embed courtesy of GoogleVideo.

Related:

Five Essential Films of Steven Spielberg
Short Film Showcase - Amblin' (1968)

Click here to view more short films and public domain features.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Movies That Might Have Been - The Beatles Do The Lord of the Rings

Gary Collinson ponders the fate of The Lord of the Rings had the stars aligned differently in Movies That Might Have Been...

What We Got…

Fans of J. R. R. Tolkien’s classic fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings were surely satisfied with Peter Jackson’s Award-winning trilogy, which remained pretty much faithful to the sacred source text and adopted the book's three-part structure of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King. Jackson and his special effects house Weta Digitial brought Middle-Earth to life with state of the art visual techniques and a near-perfect cast that included Elijah Wood (Frodo), Ian McKellen (Gandalf), Sean Astin (Sam), Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn), Orlando Bloom (Legolas), Christopher Lee (Saruman), Hugo Weaving (Elrond) and Liv Tyler (Arwen), along with the splendid motion capture work of Andy Serkis as Gollum.

Released in three installments between 2001 - 2003, The Lord of the Rings delighted audiences and critics alike on its way to a world-wide gross of almost $3 billion and a place as one of the most popular film franchises of all time. The series sparked a resurgance in the big-budget fantasy genre along with a host of prestigious awards, while anticipation for the oft-delayed prequel The Hobbit continues to grow by the day.

What Might Have Been...

Back in the mid-1960s when discussing possible projects for their three picture deal with United Artists, John Lennon was lobbying his fellow band-mates in The Beatles to bring The Lord of the Rings to the screen. His proposal would have seen Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr as hobbits Frodo and Sam, with George Harrison as Gandalf (he certainly looked the part) and Lennon taking on the role of Gollum. Unfortunately - and perhaps rather unsurprisingly - the former Oxford University professor wasn't too keen on letting The Beatles loose on his baby and nixed the idea, holding onto the film rights until 1969 by which time a Beatles adaptation was a tad unlikely.

So, how would a Beatles take on The Lord of the Rings have gone down? When you consider their output around that time (the utterly bizarre Yellow Submarine, for example) and the amount of mind-altering substances that would have no doubt inspired the look and feel of the picture, you can only begin to imagine how surreal this could have turned out. It would certainly have been an experience and, as Peter Jackson commented back in 2002 when hearing the news direct from McCartney himself, “there probably would’ve been some good songs coming off the album.”

With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the possibilities for the soundtrack to The Beatles Do The Lord of The Rings

Across the Middle-Earth
Dragons in the Sky with Nazgûl
Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me and My Gamgee
Good Mordor, Good Mordor
I Am the Warg-rus
Lady Galadriel
The Ballad of Sam and Frodo
The Continuing Story of Tom Bombadil
The Eye on the Hill
When I’m Eleventy-One

Have we missed out then?

There's no doubting the quality of Jackson's trilogy, which has to be one of the most definitive adaptations of just about anything ever, but thirty-odd years is more than enough time for a reboot. The Beatles version of The Lord of the Rings would likely have been a 'loose' adaptation at best, but certainly a moneymaker in its day and something that I'm sure a lot of people would love to have seen come to fruition. Let's face it - it certainly couldn't have been any worse than Ralph Bakshi's animated effort from 1978.

Alas, it just wasn't to be so if you want to see the Fab Four larking about on ring-centric adventures then you'll just have to make do with Help! I'm afraid.

Any thoughts on how you think this would have worked out? Any more song titles?? Feel free to leave your comments...

Gary Collinson

Thoughts on... Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010)

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, 2010.

Directed by Edgar Wright.
Starring Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ellen Wong, and Kieran Culkin.

Scott Pilgrim vs The World
SYNOPSIS:

In order to date the girl of his dreams Ramona Flowers, Scott Pilgrim must defeat her seven evil ex’s.

Scott Pilgrim vs The World
Having so much hype around a film can ensure that unless the film lives up to its expectations, it can leave you with a feeling of disappointment, which I’m afraid, was the case for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. I’m not saying the film was bad; in fact I really enjoyed it, it just wasn’t amazing. The cast were brilliant, and I’m big fan of Edgar Wright, but there were some parts of this film that just didn’t work.

Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is an unemployed bass player who spends his time rehearsing with his band and holding hands with his seventeen year old girlfriend Knives Chau (Ellen Wong). That is, until he meets Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). Completely infatuated, Scott pursues Ramona until they eventually begin dating. Unfortunately for Scott this means he must now defeat her seven evil ex’s.

The part of the film I really enjoyed most was probably the beginning. It was funny, witty, the acting was excellent, and I loved the perfectly balanced mixture between reality and the gaming world. Somewhere between the fight scenes I started to lose interest. The problem is that after the first battle the rest of the film is like a staccato of scenes; nothing flowed together and each scene seemed to jump into the next. The fight scenes themselves were great and each ex was very different from the previous, in terms of both appearance and supernatural abilities. The fights were well choreographed, entertaining, and I loved that each ex exploded into coins after being defeated.

What got tedious was Ramona disappearing or breaking up with Scott after every battle and Scott then moping around after her until the next fight sequence. By the fifth or sixth ex I was bored and wanted the film to be over. That being said the final fight sequence was by far the best, it’s just a shame that the time it took to get there felt a bit like being pulled in six different directions at once.

The film did have its good elements, and I think the cast was one of the reasons why I did enjoy the film. Ellen Wong as Scott’s seventeen year old slightly stalker-ish girlfriend was probably one of the best, although Kieran Culkin who played Wallace, Scott’s gay roommate, was another performance that I really enjoyed. Each of Ramona’s ex’s were played by some great actors, one of my favourites being Brandon Routh (although I am a slightly biased fan ever since Superman and Chuck), who had vegan superpowers.

While Scott Pilgrim isn’t amazing, it’s certainly worth viewing and deserves more box office attention than its competitors The Expendables and Eat, Pray, Love. Just don’t expect the film to be as good as the hype.

Vicki Isitt

Movie Review Archive

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

First trailer for Danny Boyle's 127 Hours

British director Danny Boyle (28 Days Later) follows up the BAFTA and Academy Award-winning Slumdog Millionaire this November with 127 Hours, a drama based on the true story of Aron Ralston, the American mountaineer who came to attention back in 2003 when he amputated his own arm after becoming trapped by a boulder for five days. The film sees Boyle reunite with Slumdog scribe Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty) and producer Christian Colson (The Descent), with Spider-Man's James Franco in the lead role as Ralston alongside supporting players Lizzy Caplan (Cloverfield), Kate Mara (Brokeback Mountain) and Amber Tamblyn (The Grudge 2).

Check out the first trailer from the film, which has made its way onto the internet this week...


127 Hours is set to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this September and goes on general release in North America on November 5th, 2010. No word yet on a UK release, although the film is scheduled to close the 2010 London Film Festival in October and you'd have to expect it to hit cinemas in time for awards season consideration.

Encountering Spielberg: A Steven Spielberg Profile (Part 1)

Trevor Hogg profiles the career of legendary Hollywood filmmaker Steven Spielberg in the first of a five part feature...

Steven Spielberg“My childhood was bad and it was good. It was chaotic; it was noisy; it was real loud. I have a big family, with three younger sisters,” stated American filmmaker Steven Spielberg whose reserved father, Arnold, was an electrical engineer for General Electric and his doting mother, Leah, a former concert pianist. “My dad was of that World War II ethic. He brought home the bacon, and my mother cooked it, and we ate it. I went to my dad for things, but he was always analytical. I was more passionate in my approach to any question, and so we always clashed.” Leaving behind his hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, the young boy found himself and his family being transplanted to New Jersey and then to Arizona. Certain rules had to be followed in the Spielberg household. “My parents rationed television and motion pictures. I could only see films in their presence and usually pictures that appealed more to them, which today you would call of the General Audience nature, like Danny Kaye [White Christmas] pictures, musicals like The Court Jester [1955] and Funny Face [1957] with Audrey Hepburn [Roman Holiday], and Disney films.”

The desire to become a filmmaker came out of necessity for the legendary Hollywood director. “It developed because my father would take a lot of home movies on our camping trips. I had an outdoorsy family and we would spend three-day weekends on outings in sleeping bags in the middle of the wilderness up in the White Mountains of Arizona. My dad would take the camera along and film the trips and we’d sit down and watch the footage a week later. It would put me right to sleep.” To correct the situation Spielberg produced his first theatrical productions. “I began to actually stage the camping trips and later cut out the bad footage.” Spielberg’s interest in the cinematic craft accelerated when he took a novel approach to achieve a childhood goal. “I was a Boy Scout who wanted to get a merit badge in photography. The prerequisite was that you had to tell the story with still photos. Rather than shoot stills, I took my movie camera and made a little Western three minutes long, using friends of mine from the same Boy Scout troop. I cut the film in the camera [didn’t do any splicing when I got home] and showed it to the Boy Scouts a week later. Not only did I get my merit badge, but I got whoops and screams and applause and everything else that made me want to do it more and more.” Wanting to recapture the moment, the twelve year old was soon at work creating a follow-up to The Last Train Wreck (1957). “It influenced me enough to want to go off and make another Western, seven minutes long – using two rolls of film. It [The Last Gun, 1959] was a little more sophisticated.”

“I made a war film next called Fighter Squad [1961], because I was inspired by those 8mm Castle Film capsule documentaries of the Forties,” recalled Steven Spielberg whose cinematic ambitions fueled his ingenuity. “They were in black and white and they had great gun camera shots of tracer bullets flying out and Messerschmitts catching fire and plunging to earth and tanks and trains exploding. I’d buy seven or eight of those films and pull out all the exciting shots and write a movie around them.” The resourcefulness of the aspiring filmmaker did not end there. “I used young people in the neighbourhood, friends of mine from school. If I needed a shot of a young flyer pulling back on the stick of a P-51, we’d go out to the Skyharbor Airport in Phoenix and climb into a P-51[after our parents got us permission] and I’d shoot the close-up of the stick being pulled back. Then I’d cut to a piece of stock footage of the airplane going into a climb. Then I’d cut back to a close-up of a fourteen year old friend of mine grinning sadistically. Then another close-up of his thumb hitting the button. Then another stock shot of the gun mounts firing. I’d put the whole thing together that way.”

When it came to making a movie which people would want to see Steven Spielberg set about mastering the art of storytelling. “Most of my scripts were written on the backs of graded arithmetic papers, in loose-leaf notebooks, anywhere I could find something to write on. Most of the time I would write the scripts, commit them to memory and then tell people what to do. It wasn’t until much later that I would sit down at a typewriter, write a shooting script, make Xerox copies and hand them out. But it was one of the best lessons I ever learned. I learned to keep a film in my head, then dole out what was needed to be told to people who were performing and who were being the technicians.” Recognition for his flourishing cinematic talent was beginning to go beyond Spielberg’s residential neighbourhood with the release of his forty-minute war picture Escape to Nowhere (1961). “One of my films won first prize at an amateur film festival, the Canyon Film Festival in Arizona, and the prize was a 16mm camera…I was fifteen. But I knew I couldn’t afford 16mm processing...so I traded the camera in on a Bolex-H8 8mm movie camera. It was very fancy equipment at the time. At the same time, with a little help from my dad, I got a Bolex Sonerizer, which was the first piece of technology capable of recording sound directly onto 8mm film with a magnetic coating down the side. Now I was able to make pictures, send the cut footage to Eastman Kodak and have them put the magnetic stripe on and send it back to me. Then I would post-sync all the dialogue, sound effects and music in our living room.”

Next Steven Spielberg branched into a genre with which he has become synonymous. “I did science fiction movies and, with the Bolex, I was able to shoot a sequence, rewind the film and then shoot double-exposures – people disappearing, beautiful young women turning into ghoulish nightmares. I’d use the old Lon Chaney dissolve trick – applying a little more makeup every few feet and dissolving from one stage of malignant facial growth to the next until I had Vampira.” To complete his cinematic vision, Spielberg ventured into the realm of post-production. “I edited everything myself. Once I discovered how important a cut was, I never cut in the camera again. I would shoot all the master shots on one roll, all the close-ups on another roll and all of the action and trick shots on a third roll. Then I would break the film down and hang all the separate shots on pins on a little makeshift cutting rack in my bedroom at home. I’d label each one of them with a piece of tape, identifying it by number, what was in the scene, and where it was to go. Then I would pull each one of its pin and cut the way they cut today. So I really assembled the film. I became a film editor before I became a professional director.”

Steven Spielberg FirelightProducing his independently-funded pictures had become more expensive resulting in Steven Spielberg adopting an enterprising financial solution. “The audience was usually composed of children under twelve. I sold tickets for a dime [later raising it to quarter] and they’d come over to my house. We’d used the family room and they’d sit on card-table chairs. That was my first audience – youngsters. I made a film at sixteen called Firelight, which was a very ambitious science fiction film that ran two and a half hours. It was made with a sound stripe and had sync dialogue, music and sound effects created in the camera involving four, five, and sometimes ten passes on a single piece of film. I showed the film a buck a head to 500 people. The film cost $400 and I made $100 profit on the first night it showed. My father was transferred and we moved the next day to San Francisco – actually twenty-four hours after the premier of my first sophisticated full-length movie. After that my life changed and I went without film for about two years while I was trying to get out of high school, get some decent grades and find a college. I got serious about studying.”

Even though he was able to indulge himself in his creative passion, Steven Spielberg reflects on his childhood with a hint of regret. “All the guys who discovered girls early never had anything to do with my movies. The guys who were dating at twelve and thirteen thought making movies was kid stuff, and so most of the friends I had helping me on those films were the late-starters in life.” The director’s younger sister Anne sees things differently. “He had more friends than he remembers having. I don’t think he realized the crushes that some girls had on him. Some of my friends had major crushes on him. If you looked at a picture of him then, you’d say, ‘Yes, there’s a nerd. There’s the crewcut, the flattop, there are the ears. There’s the skinny body.’ But he really had an incredible personality. He could make people do things. He made everything he was going to do sound like you wished you were a part of it.” Assessing his short films, Steven Spielberg remarked, “They were recognizably home movies with youngsters with cowboy hats and German combat helmets. It is a joke to see them today. What surprised me was there was technique in some of the earliest films, the fast cutting.”

Amblin poster Steven SpielbergAddressing the Hollywood folklore about him deviously inhabiting an empty office on the Universal Studio lot, which allowed him to establish the necessary industry contacts to get his moviemaking career started, Spielberg remarked, “The first job came when Sid Sheinberg, who was president of television production at Universal at the time, saw a twenty-four minute short I had made called Amblin’ [1968]. I made the short while I was a student at Cal State, Long Beach, but not as part of the film program of Cal State; it was done on my own with $15,000 from Dennis Hoffman, an independent producer. When Sid Sheinberg saw it, he just said, very simply, ‘I’d like you to spend the next seven years of your life here at Universal Studios. Along with that, you will be directing, writing, and producing. How would you like that? How does that sound?’ Well, it sounded fine to me. There were no other jobs in the offing, and I had just turned twenty-one. It was a dream come true. He immediately put me into a TV movie, a pilot trilogy called Night Gallery. I shot the second section with Joan Crawford [Mildred Pierce], a forty-three minute story written by Rod Serling [Twilight Zone]. I didn’t work for a year after the show came out.”

Asked about the hitchhiking picture which serves as the namesake of his production company, Spielberg confessed, “Amblin’ was an attack of crass commercialism. I had made a lot of little films in 16mm that were getting me nowhere. They were very esoteric. I wanted to shoot something that could prove to the people who finance movies that I could certainly look like a professional moviemaker….The only challenge that’s close to my heart about Amblin’ is I was able to tell a story about a boy [Richard Levin] and a girl [Pamela McMyler] with no dialogue. That was something I set out to do before I found out I couldn’t afford sound even if I wanted it.” Spielberg added, “When I look back at that film, I can easily say, ‘No, wonder I didn’t go to Kent State,’ or ‘No wonder I didn’t go to Vietnam or I wasn’t protesting when all my friends were carrying signs and getting clubbed in Century City.’ I was off making movies, and Amblin’ is a slick byproduct of a kid immersed in film.”

Steven Spielberg is a strong believer in being proactive. “Studios aren’t buying qualities like eagerness and enthusiasm and a willingness to learn. They want material evidence that you’re a moviemaker who’s going to turn a profit. They want to see and feel how good you are before they’re going to give you $300,000 to make a movie. I began by making 8 and 16mm films, some for $15 a piece and some for $200. You can’t excuse yourself by saying, ‘Well, I can’t raise the money to make the short film to get into the front door and show my work.’”

Directing episodes for television series such as Marcus Welby, M.D. (1970), The Name of the Game (1971), The Psychiatrist (1971), Columbo (1971) and Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law (1971), the young director found his big screen filming sensibilities being frustrated by the unwillingness of those in the TV industry to breakaway from traditional shooting techniques. “Fancy footwork isn’t smiled upon in TV,” declared Steven Spielberg who was responsible for creating a one-hour show in six days. “The one thing I refused to conform to was the television formula of close-up, two-shot, over-the-shoulders and master shot. I kept hoping that every time I’d make a TV show, enough people would see it and like my work and give me a feature to do, but it took a number of years before they began knocking on my door.”

Duel poster Steven SpielbergHelping Steven Spielberg gain the attention of Hollywood was a television movie about a man (Dennis Weaver) terrorized by a predatory truck driver. To map out the story, the young filmmaker created a forty yard long and five feet tall production board. “I did it at first as a visual overview for myself, because the script was so verbose,” explained Spielberg on how he went about making his 1971 effort Duel. “I had to break the script down and visualize the entire movie on a road stretched all around the production office. I divided up each key moment and gave it a nickname and was able to walk the network people through the entire story.” The unconventional approach became an indispensable tool. “I think without the overview I would be a little confused about where to the put the cameras, and I shot it in sixteen days. It was really a movie that should have been done in fifty days.”

Watched by 15 million American TV viewers, the small screen picture was a major hit for Steven Spielberg. “After Duel came out on television, that first week, my agent received ten or fifteen feature film offers.” With additional scenes added, the road thriller was given a European theatrical release. “Dylis Powell saw the picture and she flipped out for it,” recalled Spielberg who credits The Sunday Times film critic as being an instrumental supporter. “She gathered all the London critics together in one room and showed it to them one night, and the criticism got Universal and the C.I.C. to release the picture in Europe.”

Two more TV movies were helmed by the Ohio native. A demonic-possession horror tale starring Sandy Dennis (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and Darren McGavin (A Christmas Story) called Something Evil (1972) aired on CBS; NBC broadcasted Savage (1973), a story about a journalist played by Martin Landau (Ed Wood) who discovers a blackmail plot. “You can do five bad television shows but you cannot make five bad motion pictures; ‘bad’ meaning films that aren’t received critically and commercially,” observed Spielberg who had originally planned to make his theatrical feature debut with White Lightning (1973) starring Burt Reynolds (Boogie Nights). “And so I just waited and waited and waited. I had a little bet with myself that the first movie I ever directed would be from my own story and it was really sort of a mental deterrent for other projects that came along. I’d say to myself, well, I could direct this, but I couldn’t film this and then The Sugarland Express [1974]. I had read a story in the Citizen News that was about the Texas hijacking and I wrote the original story…it was worth waiting for.”

Continue to part two.

For more on Steven Spielberg, visit the official Dreamworks website.

Related:

Five Essential Films of Steven Spielberg
Movies... For Free! Duel (1971)
Short Film Showcase - Amblin' (1968)

Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada.