Spielberg gawked at the topless trio—Salt, Kidder, and Margolin. “I had never seen anything like that before,” he continues. “I was raised at home in a very modest family. Even my sisters covered up. When it came time to take off the pants or talk about sex, we all became little boys looking for our moms to protect us. I had missed the entire era of hippies, right over my head. I was too busy making movies. This was a little bit of Woodstock on Nicholas Beach Road. It was the first time I really felt connected with the flower child generation.”
Spielberg, who was emotionally still a teenager (he subsisted on Twinkies and Oreo cookies, slept in white crew socks and white T-shirts), fell under the spell of Margot Kidder, although he wasn’t quite prepared for the whole package. “We were out at Stanley Donen’s beach house, and Steve showed up with Margot,” recalls screenwriter Willard Huyck. “She was wearing this white flowing dress. We looked over, and she was lying next to him on the sand, but she had pulled the dress all the way up so she could tan herself. She didn’t have any underpants on. Steve went beet red. He went, ‘Margot!’ He was really embarrassed. Then, later at lunch, she was just really outrageous—it was like this kid from Arizona had met this bimbo—she was sitting there with her legs spread apart, eating her chili.”
Kidder introduced Spielberg to De Palma, to whom he immediately attached himself. The older man was a ladykiller and had attitude to spare, both things Spielberg appreciated. Spielberg started wearing a safari jacket, De Palma’s trademark garb. Eventually, he moved on to Marty, listening to him with the same rapt attention with which he absorbed De Palma’s opinions. Auteurism was foreign territory to him; the idea of movies as personal expression was novel. Says Kidder, “Steven loved movies, but this gang of guys who were going to put how they saw life onto film not only knew about film, but knew an extra element, which was artistic; they were going to be artists.” Spielberg never considered himself a “real” filmmaker. “He didn’t want to be the son of Jean-Luc Godard,” recalls Carson. “He wanted to be the son of Sid Sheinberg. He was just so different from Coppola and Scorsese and Schrader.” Added Milius, “Steven was the one who ran out to buy the trade papers. He was always talking about grosses.”
Continues Kidder, “That was why Steven was in awe of them. He was more innocent of spirit and less complicated than Brian or Marty, and that’s obviously reflected in his movies. He was much more normal than we were, in the sense of having our neuroses get in the way of our professional lives. Whatever trauma he went through because his parents got divorced he adjusted well to. He was never addicted or excessive. With Steven, what you saw was what you got.” He didn’t even do drugs. “I never took LSD, mescaline, coke, or anything like that,” he said. “But I went through the entire drug period, several of my friends were heavily into it. I would sit in a room and watch TV while people climbed the walls.”
Kidder tried to see to it that Spielberg didn’t embarrass himself, but it was difficult. He had no sense of style, was just desperate to be cool like everyone else, but he didn’t know how. He was short, so he bought cowboy boots to make himself seem taller. He was the kind of guy who wore bell bottom blue jeans with a crease. “They had thousands of zippers on them, and must have cost God knows what,” recalls Huyck. “They were the most ridiculous-looking pants I had ever seen.”
Spielberg dedicated himself to parsing the culture. “Every month he read all the magazines from Tiger Beat to Esquire to Time to Playboy,” says Milius. “He wanted to become an expert on what was hip, how people were thinking.”
Spielberg had little experience with women, and was extremely awkward and uncomfortable around them. He had a crush on Janet Margolin, but she never reciprocated. When he finally got a girlfriend, a stewardess he met while he was doing Sugarland Express and brought back from Texas with him, Kidder taught him about the birds and the bees: “Basically I was a Henry Higgins for him. I sat him down and went, ‘Okay, Steven, here’s how you do it—You don’t wear your socks and your T-shirt to bed, get something besides the Twinkies in the fridge, and read her Dylan Thomas,’ and he’d listen—‘Okay, okay’—‘and you’ll win this girl’s heart.’”
One day, Spielberg and comedy writer Carl Gottlieb, an old friend, were having lunch in the Universal commissary, when Victoria Principal, then a starlet with a tiny role in Earthquake, plopped down in the seat next to Steven and stuck her chest in his face. According to Gottlieb, she said, “I’d like to get to know you better.” To him, her body language said, “If you want to fuck me you can, if I can be in a movie.” She had reached under the table and grabbed his crotch. (Principal says they were just friends.) “Steven briefly brought out Victoria Principal to the beach, which was a stunner for all of us,” says Kidder. “We prided ourselves on not being bimbos, and here was a bimbo with our beloved Steven. It was like, what? We tried to discourage that.”
WHILE THE CONVERSATION was in post, Coppola left the Bay Area to begin Godfather II, which commenced principal photography on October 23, 1973, in Lake Tahoe. Again, he was working with Gordon Willis. Willis still had the bitter taste of The Godfather in his mouth. He initially refused the film, but as he explained to Michael Chapman, Paramount backed a dump truck of money up to his door, and he couldn’t turn it down. Francis was besieged by hordes of groupies. As Ellie put it, a “fresh crop of adoring young protégées [was always] waiting in the wings.” Coppola hired Melissa Mathison, his former baby-sitter, as his assistant. He had watched her grow up into a tall girl—about five foot eight—with sandy hair. She was thin and flat-chested, flashed a lot of gum when she smiled, and would never quite pass for beautiful, especially compared with some of the busty bimbos with whom Francis was seen, but she was bright, droll, and self-assured. Like Ellie, she was WASPy-looking, but more than a decade younger. She engaged Francis on an intellectual level, and best of all, she adored him. Melissa favored long dresses and skirts, hippie-style, and rarely wore a bra. He had been using her for odd jobs. She helped get the Broadway house ready for occupancy, cleaning the toilets. Now she answered phones and kept the fridge supplied with grape juice. Francis used to say, “She’s the greatest thing in bed I’ve ever had. She fulfills all my fantasies.” The liaison displeased Francis’s parents, who were often on the set. When the production got to New York, in January 1974, 6th Street between Avenues A and B was dressed to look like the ’20s. Francis wanted to be able to, say, talk to Willis three blocks away, so he had the street wired for sound. One day, according to Gray Frederickson, he got into a fight with his parents over Melissa. “You’re a good Catholic boy. What do you mean carrying on with that girl?” yelled Italia. “I’ll carry on with anyone I want to carry on with,” retorted Francis, furious. “It’s none of your business. I’m a grown man!” The sounds of this battle were carried over the speakers, to the amusement of the crew. Coppola, who had just shot a film about the morality of surveillance, had managed to bug himself. The shoot was an ordeal for Eleanor; she cried a lot.
•
IN THE FALL OF 1973, while The Sting was in post-production, and Spielberg was working on The Sugarland Express, Michael Phillips and Spielberg met for lunch in the Universal commissary and talked about their mutual nostalgia for ’50s science fiction films. Spielberg had been gestating an idea about the first contact with aliens for a long time. To some degree, it was a remake of a film he had made as a teenager called Firelight. He told Michael he had an idea that concerned UFOs, Watergate, and a government cover-up. They made a deal to do Project Blue Book (later, Close Encounters of the Third Kind) as his next film. They set it up with Begelman at Columbia.
The Phillipses convinced Spielberg to hire Schrader to write the script, as bizarre a pairing as one could imagine. Spielberg came over to the house Schrader shared with his brother, Leonard, and laid out his ideas. All he had was an ending, and a series of images. “There’s a horizon line right across the middle of the screen,” he said excitedly, waving his arms around, painting a picture. “You’re lo
oking into infinity, it’s night, the sky is black and full of stars, and you see these UFOs, these spaceships, and some of them are really big, and this spacecraft is coming in and it fills up almost 25 percent of the screen. And then from below the horizon, there’s one that’s bigger, and it fills a third of the screen, and then you realize that that’s just the turret, this spaceship goes right off the frame on both sides, it must be five miles wide. And the red lights would come this way, the blue lights would be back here...” Paul and Leonard sat there, mesmerized. Leonard turned to Steven, said, “Look, what would this feel like if this ever happened? If there’s a precursor, it’s like Cortés and Montezuma meeting, two people who have no idea the other existed.” They agreed that the issues raised by this encounter were spiritual: Who are we? Why are we here? How should we relate with each other?
“Why don’t you do the life of Saint Paul?” Leonard asked Steven.
“Who’s Saint Paul?”
“You know, Saint Paul was the guy who persecuted the Christians, the number one persecutor, until one night he saw the light on the road. And then he becomes the number one Christian. Take a guy whose job it is to hunt all those people spotting UFOs, a scientist, works for the Pentagon. Until one night, he sees one. He says, ‘I have to be the first guy to make contact with them.’ He discovers there is a whole program...”
Paul signed on in December 1973, and wrote a script about a UFO that crashes at the North Pole, pillaging Howard Hawks’s The Thing. The story focused on the army’s attempts to keep it secret. It was called Kingdom Come. Steven didn’t like it. He said, “I want these people to be people from the suburbs, just like people I grew up with, who want to get on the spaceship at the end.” Schrader had spent his life getting away from average Americans, couldn’t have cared less about Spielberg’s John Does. The argument grew heated. “If somebody’s going to represent me and the human race to get on a spaceship, I don’t want my representative to be a guy who eats all his meals at McDonald’s.” Schrader yelled at Spielberg.
“That’s exactly what I do want!”
“If you don’t want to do it my way, go find another writer.”
Says Robbins, “Steven didn’t like Schrader’s work, and he didn’t like Schrader.” Spielberg later referred to Schrader’s script as “one of the most embarrassing screenplays ever professionally turned in to a major studio or director.”
In 1973, Richard Zanuck and David Brown had paid $175,000—prepublication—for the movie rights to Jaws, a novel by Peter Benchley. The story was set in the summer tourist season on a fictional island called Amity, somewhat of a misnomer, as it would turn out. Zanuck and Brown knew they had to start principal photography in the spring of 1974. If they didn’t, they would have to wait till the following summer, by which time the book’s sales would presumably have waned. To make matters worse, in response to a threatened actors’ strike, the studios were refusing to start pictures that could not be finished by June 30, when the SAG contract expired.
Unable to come up with a workable script for Close Encounters and unsure of his financing, Spielberg was looking for something to do, hanging out in his producers’ office one day in the third week of June. As Spielberg has told the story, “[I] swiped a copy of Jaws in galley form, took it home, read it over the weekend, and asked to do it.” But after Zanuck and Brown gave him the nod, he developed reservations, which he expressed at a dinner with Brown and his wife, Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown, at the Spanish Pavilion in New York. He was worried that the project was too commercial. As Spielberg recalls, “I didn’t know who I was. I wanted to make a movie that left its mark, not at the box office, but on people’s consciousness. I wanted to be Antonioni, Bob Rafelson. Hal Ashby. Marty Scorsese. I wanted to be everybody but myself.” He thought, Who wants to be known as a shark-and-truck director? “There are two categories, films and movies,” he explained to the producer. “I want to make films.” Brown replied, using the same argument Bluhdorn used with Coppola, “Well, this is a big movie, a big movie. This will enable you to make all the films you want!”
Spielberg knew that at worst, Jaws would be a tired exercise in an Old Hollywood genre, but at best, like The Godfather and The Exorcist, it might be reanimated by a New Hollywood approach. “I was hell bent on shooting on the open sea, and if they insisted I shoot it in the tank, I was absolutely going to quit the movie,” he says. “That piece of polyethylene and floating timber and steel was not going to scare anybody, unless they believed it was real. The ’70s was a time when the environment was crucial to the storytelling.”
When Sugarland finally came out in April of 1974 (it was moved back to avoid The Sting and The Exorcist), the reviewers were enthusiastic. Kael, eerily dead-on about Spielberg, called him “that rarity among directors—a born entertainer,” and described Sugarland as “one of the most phenomenal debut films in the history of movies.” It became a bit of a cult film, but it flopped at the box office. Whereas Bonnie and Clyde had skillfully blended disparate emotional tonalities, Sugarland’s audience was put off by the fact that what appeared at first to be a light romp suddenly plunged into tragedy. Spielberg concluded that it was too much of a New Hollywood downer for the audience to swallow. He had arrived at the same point in his career that Coppola had after The Rain People when he was debating whether or not to do The Godfather, and Lucas had after THX, gestating Graffiti. Much as Spielberg wanted to be Rafelson or Scorsese, he also wanted a hit. Brown’s argument made sense. He changed his mind.
SPIELBERG DIDN’T MUCH LIKE Benchley’s script for Jaws. None of the characters were likable, and he said that when he read the book, he rooted for the shark. There had to be people to root for. He asked John Byrum, a kid who had just gotten into town, to do a rewrite. Byrum went to his office. He recalls, “Steven was sitting on the floor of his bungalow playing with a toy plastic helicopter. Battery-operated. It flew around in circles. I start telling him my notions about the script, and he said, ‘Oh, great idea!’ Like a twelve-year-old. Then he said, ‘I gotta have my think music on,’ so he put on this James Bond album soundtrack.” Byrum, who had an offer to write Mahogany, thought to himself, Do I want to spend a year with this guy, or do I want to be in San Tropez with Tony Richardson and Diana Ross. So he declined.
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Howard Sackler (The Great White Hope) wrote a draft that solved some problems, but by no means all, and the beginning of principal photography was only weeks away. Spielberg persuaded Zanuck and Brown to hire scriptwriter Carl Gottlieb. Robbins and Barwood also pitched in, uncredited.
Robbins introduced Spielberg to Verna Fields. They connected immediately, and he hired her as editor. She was a great favorite of Tanen’s, and Spielberg, recalling what had happened to American Graffiti, perhaps thought she would buy him some insurance, protect him from Tanen, whom he didn’t like. Tanen and Sheinberg were rivals. Spielberg was Sheinberg’s protege and worse, a pal of Lucas’s, who still hated Tanen for “mutilating” Graffiti. Spielberg was not above such calculations. He had already hired Lorraine Gary, Sheinberg’s wife, to fill a small part, a bold move, politically, that could have backfired. Fields turned down Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love to do Jaws. When Verna told him the bad news, Peter is reputed to have burst into tears.
Although Spielberg had welcomed the addition of Goldie Hawn to Sugarland, she hadn’t been much help at the box office, and this time he resisted when the studio suggested Charlton Heston and Jan Michael Vincent, Universal’s idea of square-jawed he-men for a man-against-the-sea saga, which is the way they imagined Jaws. “My goal was to find someone who had never been on the cover of Rolling Stone,” said Spielberg. He adds, “I wanted somewhat anonymous actors to be in it so you would believe this was happening to people like you and me. Stars bring a lot of memories along with them, and those memories can sometimes, at least in the first ten minutes of the movie, corrupt the story.” He would also, like Coppola, cast as many amateurs as he could, people who might have
trouble reading lines, but nevertheless looked right. Zanuck and Brown suggested Robert Shaw, who had played in The Sting, for Quint. Richard Dreyfuss, then a struggling actor who is reputed to have carried a much abused scrap of lined yellow note paper in his back pocket with the names of all the casting directors who ever rejected him for a role, turned down Jaws three times. He didn’t like the script, didn’t like his character, whose main function appeared to be exposition. He was just there to dispense shark facts. “Then I saw The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, and I was just so freaked out, I thought my performance was so terrible, that I called Steven and begged for the job. I went with the fish movie. We started the film without a script, without a cast, and without a shark.”
After six months in preproduction on Jaws, Spielberg was again ready to pull out. It was clear to him that Sheinberg indeed regarded the picture as little more than Duel with a shark. Spielberg was convinced, as he recalls, “that it was just an exploitation movie, Moby-Dick without Melville, without the eloquence. I was just making a Roger Corman movie. I stayed up at night fantasizing about how I could get myself off this picture short of dying, how I could frag myself, break my leg or shoot myself in the foot, fall down a flight of stairs and hurt my arm and maybe feign, Oh, I can’t direct this movie, my arm doesn’t work. I was out of my mind for a while. So I went to Sheinberg, and Zanuck and Brown, and said, ‘Let me out of this film.’ Dick pulled me aside and called me a knucklehead, said, ‘This is an opportunity of a lifetime. Don’t fuck it up.’ And Sid said, ‘We don’t make art films at Universal, we make films like Jaws. If you don’t want to make Jaws, you should work somewhere else.’ Thank God, the three of them said ‘No, you’re stuck with us, and we’re stuck with you.’ Because it wound up being my ticket to freedom.”
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