Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  In a sense, Spielberg was the Trojan horse through which the studios began to reassert their power. As Spielberg admits, “My influences, in a very perverse way, were executives like Sid Sheinberg, and producers like Zanuck and Brown, rather than my contemporaries in my circle in the ’70s. I was truly more of a child of the establishment than I was a product of USC or NYU or the Francis Coppola protege clique.”

  While Spielberg was shooting in the Vineyard, he got into a contretemps with the novel’s author, Peter Benchley, who took a swipe at him in the Los Angeles Times, saying, Spielberg “has no knowledge of reality but the movies. He is B-movie literate.... [He] will one day be known as the greatest second unit director in America.” In one obvious way, Benchley was completely wrong, Spielberg having become probably the most celebrated director in America. But in another way, he was right; Spielberg is the greatest second unit director in America. What he could not have foreseen, however, was that such was Spielberg’s (and Lucas’s) influence, that every studio movie became a B movie, and at least for the big action blockbusters that dominate the studios’ slates, second unit has replaced first unit.

  By the ’80s, Roger Corman, who gave so many New Hollywood directors their start, would begin to complain that he was having a hard time because movies he would make for peanuts with one of the Carradine brothers in the lead were starting to be made by the studios for $20 and $30 million, with big stars. Death Race 2000 would become Days of Thunder, with Tom Cruise.

  Like The Godfather, Jaws was very much a picture of its time, a post-Watergate look at corrupt authority. The Amity power structure, save for the chief of police, is united in wanting to cover up the shark attack to protect the almighty dollar, in the form of tourism. The picture’s only villain, outside of the shark, is the mayor, an elected official, a politician. But Jaws was a film of the political center: of the three men who take on the shark, Quint, the macho man of the right is killed, while Hooper, the intellectual Jew of the left, is marginalized, leaving Brody, the everyman cop, the Jerry Ford, the familymanregularguy who was president when the picture came out, to dispatch the shark.

  Moreover, although Jaws deftly uses the Us/Them formula deployed by films like Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, and M*A*S*H, “Us” is no longer narrowly and tendentiously defined as the hip counterculture, but is expansive and inclusive, a new community comprised of just about everyone—all food, so far as the shark is concerned. It transcended the political and demographic divisions between the Easy Rider counterculture audience and Nixon’s Towering Inferno middle-Americans.

  Basking in the glow of his huge hit, Spielberg was enjoying himself for the first time in his life. “The summer of ’75, I was feeling really good about myself and my career,” he said. “I was at peace with the movie universe. I was in my car and I decided to treat myself to an ice cream cone. So I pulled into 31 Flavors on Melrose. There was a line when I walked in, and they were all talking about Jaws. They were saying, ‘God, it is the most frightening film I ever saw. I’ve seen it six times.’ It was just like the whole 31 Flavors was talking about it. I got my ice cream cone, pistachio, that’s my favorite kind, and I got back in my car and I drove home. I turned on the TV set, and there was this story about the Jaws phenomenon on network news. And I realized—the whole country is watching this! That was the first time it really hit me that it was a phenomenon. I thought, This is what a hit feels like. It feels like your own child that you have put up for adoption, and millions of people have decided to adopt it all at once, and you’re the proud ex-parent. And now it belongs to others. That felt very good.”

  ON JUNE 20, the same day Jaws made motion picture history, Artie Ross was invited to dinner at Judy Schneider’s home on Palm Drive. She had sold the house, and, in her words, “I was giving a dinner for all the people who had participated in our lives there.” Artie had been working for producer Ed Pressman, traveling through the South promoting Sisters. He had just returned to L.A., where he was living in the producer’s old house in the Hollywood Hills. Artie had inherited Brackman’s tank of nitrous oxide when Jake returned to New York, and was using it regularly. The idea was, the more gas you inhaled, the better the high. Most people held the black rubber mask over their noses, so it would just drop away if they passed out. But Artie was in the habit of strapping the mask over his face. He had put the tank at the top of the landing, so that if he did lose consciousness, he would fall down the stairs, and the mask would be ripped off. “People had been warning him about putting on this mask when he was alone, that it was very uncool,” says Brackman. The night before, Artie had shown up at Bert’s with a large purple bruise on his forehead, claiming he had just seen the white light, just seen God.

  Bert was about to leave for Havana to visit Huey. In the early evening, Blauner stopped by Artie’s, unannounced, intending to bring him to Judy’s for dinner. “I knocked on the door and there was no answer,” he recalls. “The door was ajar, so I pushed it open, I saw somebody’s legs sticking out from around the corner, so I thought, Why’s somebody hiding from me? I went around the corner, and there was a guy, slumped forward, on his knees. I pulled up the head, and there was this gas mask looking at me. I pulled it off, and it was Artie. He had died from an overdose of nitrous oxide. One eye was sort of open, there were gurgling noises, he had thrown up. I didn’t know if he was dead, and I didn’t know the address, so I ran up to the street, got the address, ran back, called emergency. By then I’d forgotten the address, so I ran back and forth again. I was blaming myself, but he’d been dead for hours, and I didn’t know it.”

  Artie’s death should have given pause, interrupted the headlong rush from grass to acid to coke to freebasing at the end of the decade. It was an intimation of John Belushi’s death to come. But Bert and his circle shrugged it off. “It may have been the end of the nitrous fad, but Bert instituted an annual Artie Party on the anniversary of his death where people would get together and take a lot of drugs,” says Brackman. “He did one the following year in Jalapa in which [writer] Michael O’Donoghue, on acid, took a swan dive into a patio and busted his front teeth.” Reflects Salt, “There was such a devotion to drugs that everybody had to do a little dance around it. There had to be a way that it was cool, like, ‘We’ll meet you there soon, Artie.’ Nobody dealt with it like it was—utterly pitiful.”

  HOLLYWOOD WAS THRIVING. Driven by The Exorcist and The Sting, the 1974 grosses were the highest since the peak of the postwar boom, in 1946. With Jaws leaving those movies in the dust, 1975 looked to be another record year. The Vietnam War, which had been a permanent fixture of the American landscape for a decade, was finally over, the despised Nixon licking his wounds in disgrace. It seemed as if the antiwar movement had won.

  But changes were afoot. At about the same time Diller presided over the departures of Yablans and Evans from Paramount, Ashley and Calley left Warners. They would both eventually return, but the studio would never be the same. Calley was replaced by Spielberg’s agent, Guy McElwaine, who joined Warners after his agency, CMA, the third largest in the business, merged with IFA, the second largest agency, to form a behemoth, International Creative Management (ICM) in January of 1975. The consolidation accelerated the flight of agents to the studios. In an eighteen-month period from roughly 1974 to 1976, something like fifteen to twenty people deserted CMA or ICM, including Freddie Fields, Mike Medavoy, and John Ptak. The agency business had never looked so dismal. So when five Young Turks left the largest agency, William Morris, to strike out on their own, no one on the outside took much notice. They called their new company Creative Artists Agency (CAA).

  CAA mushroomed seemingly overnight to become the dominant institution in the industry. According to Yablans, “During my era in the early ’70s at Paramount, we didn’t have packages. You got a script, you hired a director, you hired the actors, you made a movie. Now they did it backward. The package was put together before the movie was ready to get made, so the script became the slave to the process
, rather than the other way around. It was a lazy man’s way of making movies.” With the executive ranks less stable, novice production heads, often from the agencies, would become almost totally dependent on CAA for their product.

  With BBS moribund, the changing of the guard at Warners and Paramount, the two studios responsible for most of the key pictures of the decade, and the birth of CAA, 1975 has to be regarded as something of a watershed year. Not only had Jaws whetted studio appetites for blockbusters and introduced expensive TV promotion, but some of the biggest directors of the early ’70s went down in flames. The Bogdanovich bubble finally burst with At Long Last Love; The Fortune was Mike Nichols’s third flop in his last four outings; while the mediocre performance of Nashville, along with Arthur Penn’s Night Moves, suggested the dangers of the deconstructive, anti-genre road down which Penn and Altman were traveling, and served as a reminder that the audience for New Hollywood films might be considerably smaller than these directors supposed.

  Precious few spied the dark clouds on the horizon. One was Kael. Always the Eeyore, she wrote a prescient piece in August 1974, in which she warned that television was debasing audience taste. “There’s no audience for new work,” she charged. Railing against “the bosses,” their failure to push pictures like The Conversation and Mean Streets, and the revival of the star system, she recognized that the studios had recovered from the seismic dislocations of the late ’60s. Ironically, the very success of the New Hollywood, rather than rendering the studio system obsolete, as Hopper and Penn had imagined, had merely reinvigorated it. She wrote, “These men were shaken for a few years; they didn’t understand what made a film a counterculture hit. They’re happy to be back on firm ground....” Voicing the utopianism of an earlier decade that still echoed faintly through the self-satisfaction of the mid-’70s, and no doubt thinking about Scorsese and Altman, she called on directors to drop out, raise money outside the system. She warned, Cassandra-like, of the death of movies.

  LIKE THE GODFATHER, Jaws was such a phenomenon that the director almost got lost in the shuffle. Some of Spielberg’s friends derided his success, told him it was just luck, being in the right place at the right time, and that he would never repeat the trick. The picture was only nominated because of its grosses. Like Easy Rider, it seemed like a product of cultural automatic handwriting. Indeed, its lively script, strong in story and colorful character development, was a serendipitous accident, entirely uncharacteristic of Spielberg’s subsequent work. Ironically, one of his greatest gifts may very well have been his recognition of his own limitations, his talent for playing the perfect audience to his inspired collaborators, and his spongelike ability to soak up their contributions.

  Spielberg was so sure he was going to be nominated for an Academy Award that he invited a TV camera crew to his office to film his reaction to the good news. Only there wasn’t any. Jaws was nominated for Best Picture, but the director was slighted. Instead, the Academy selected Altman for Nashville, Milos Forman for Cuckoo’s Nest, Stanley Kubrick for Barry Lyndon, Sidney Lumet for Dog Day Afternoon, and Federico Fellini for Amarcord—a splendid array of directors and pictures for this pivotal year. Complained Spielberg, as the camera caught him with his face in his hands, “I can’t believe it. They went for Fellini instead of me!” Nominating the picture and not the director was a real slap in the face.

  Says Leonard Schrader, “In the early ’70s, when I heard Scorsese talk for hours with my brother, with De Palma, with Spielberg, about how to play the power game, the assumption, never questioned, was that power was a means, not an end. We wanted to make great films, we wanted to be artists, we were going to discover the limits of our talent. Now what was left was power for its own sake, not as a means, but as an end. This generation started out as believers. They behaved as if filmmaking were a religion. But they lost their faith.”

  Spielberg was consumed by anxiety and self-doubt. Although friends had pitched in all along the way, when credit time came, Spielberg felt that some members of the team were getting too big for their britches. The camaraderie that bound the movie brats was fraying around the edges. Even getting too much press attention was dangerous, getting nominated for an Oscar when the director wasn’t was asking for it, and winning when the director didn’t (or even when he did) could be fatal. Often, directors broke up a winning team, as was the case with Jaws. Says one person who worked for Spielberg, “The number of times he wanted his name on the screen was an embarrassment. If he could have written, ‘Hair Styled by Steven Spielberg,’ he would have.”

  When Verna Fields later won an Oscar for editing Jaws (she died of cancer in 1982), Spielberg took umbrage at her words to the press, which indeed were pointedly ambiguous, much like Towne’s comments on Bonnie and Clyde. She said, “I got a lot of credit for Jaws, rightly or wrongly.” (Marcia Lucas always felt she took too much credit for Graffiti.) Fields was slated to edit Close Encounters, as well as get a producer’s credit. But, according to Julia Phillips, who would later be thrown off Close Encounters because of her drug habit, and therefore had reason to dislike Spielberg, “Steven started to resent all the credit she was giving herself for its success and asked me to kill her off.” When Fields was to be featured in a Kodak ad celebrating women in the industry, she claims he asked her to have her replaced by Marcia Lucas.

  Spielberg was particularly sensitive about the writing credit, which went to Gottlieb and Benchley. Gottlieb says, simply, “Spielberg didn’t write it.” Gottlieb had fashioned an account of the production called The Jaws Log, which he showed to Spielberg in typescript. “I didn’t want to say anything that would piss him off,” he continues. “When the book came out, I sent him a copy. He looked through it and hurled it across the room in disgust. The reason he did that, the reason he was miffed that Verna got an Oscar and he was overlooked, was that it troubled him that there was anyone else who could have a public and legitimate collaborative claim. Not even an authorship claim, but merely a collaborator’s troubled him. He always liked to have collaboration on his terms. You collaborated with Steven at your peril. It wasn’t enough to be the wunderkind, to the point where he took a year off his age. In those days, there were real auteurs around, and Steven was not going to be one of those guys, much as he wanted to be. Because his film was so wildly popular, he was always denied that recognition. It was not perceived of as art, but entertainment. With each successive film, he was more and more careful to maintain that position as the auteur.”

  Spielberg took steps to make sure credit would not be an issue on Close Encounters. Julia Phillips said he “made me pressure every writer who made a contribution to the script.” She told Schrader that none of his work was left in the shooting script, and that Spielberg wanted sole writing credit. Paul agreed not to contest it. “Steve felt he hadn’t been given enough credit for the Jaws script, he was going to make sure that didn’t happen again,” recalls Schrader. “My office was right next to Michael and Julia’s at Columbia, and I thought we were all friends. But this credit thing left a pretty sour taste.” He added, Spielberg “seemed to resent the fact that anyone has ever helped him, whether they be Verna Fields, Zanuck and Brown, Peter Benchley, Carl Gottlieb, Mike and Julia Phillips. That’s Steve’s problem.” For his part, Spielberg commented, “It surprises me that Schrader would slink after someone else’s success by vividly inflating his imagined contributions.”

  Schrader was not the only writer who did uncredited work on Close Encounters. Jerry Belson did some writing, so did John Hill. Finally, Spielberg tried to do it himself. Like Lucas, he was not a facile writer, and once again, his friends rescued him. “Steven started cutting and pasting and writing his own stuff,” recalls Robbins. “Hal Barwood and I were really upset by the script, it was so full of holes it offended me to look at this thing. ‘You gotta do this, you gotta do that, it’s an obligatory moment,’ and he’d listen with these big eyes, ‘Let’s do it, let’s do it, write that down.’ Then he called on us to come to work on it
. We were writing at night, big chunks of that movie. We created the story line of the kidnapping of Melinda Dillon’s little boy, Cary Guffey. He shot our script. Our names were not on it. We didn’t care. In those days, there were no stakes. It was like you were being paid to sit in the sun and bullshit and then type it up. It was clear that Steven was really a talented director, and what I always liked best about working with him was that it made my own stuff better. He was full of ideas. They just poured off him. Even when they were lousy, they would provoke more ideas. Along with his ability, in those days, not to have a big ego about whose ideas they were. Kibitzing like this was sort of a game, and you expected the same kind of help on your stuff, and you got it.” The two writers had done uncredited work on Jaws as well. Spielberg gave them a point each, explaining, “This is not just for this movie, it’s for Jaws too.”

  The problems with Jaws had been so serious that Spielberg was worried that Columbia would never greenlight CE3K. It was an expensive film, and Columbia was still broke. Rob Cohen had set up The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings at Universal. The script had been written by Barwood and Robbins. Spielberg called Cohen, said, “Don’t you like the way I direct?”

  “What are you talking about, you’re brilliant.”

  “How come you haven’t offered me Bingo Long?”

  “’Cause I didn’t think you’d be interested, it’s a small picture.”

  “I love that script. I love Matt and Hal... ”

  “I’d be thrilled, are you kidding? Let’s get together and talk about it.” Cohen says Spielberg told him, “I’m in a very difficult position. Begelman’s giving me all this money to write this script, but I really want to do Bingo Long, so just call Sid, he’s got options on me, and tell him to preempt me.” Which is how Spielberg became attached to Bingo Long throughout its preproduction. But in that time, Jaws went from looking extremely iffy to looking like a hit, and the better Jaws looked, the less Spielberg was interested in Bingo Long, and the more he drifted back to what he really wanted to do, which was Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Continues Cohen, “He just wanted to be sure he had the next thing set up, and he knew that by pitting me against Julia Phillips, he would win either way, because either Julia would have a renewed sense of how important he was, and work harder to get Close Encounters made, or he would have another movie. He’s a master at choreographing the elements of this business. He didn’t get to be ‘Steven Spielberg’ just by being a good director.”