TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/81/81.58

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 14.6 KB | 272 lines

                                                                                CINEMA

Slam! Bang!

A Movie Movie


In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lucas crafts a real cliffhanger


Indians armed with poisoned darts and arrows. Arabian assassins
in black masks wielding wickedly whistling scimitars, Nazis by
the jackbooted legion, including a Gestapo sadist always dressed
in black, always giggling in happy anticipation of torturing
someone. A cave where tarantulas drop from the ceiling by the
bushel. An underground chamber alive with deadly snakes--7,500
of them. Flying wings and flying boats. A car chase and a
barroom brawl. Abduction by submarine. Supernatural forces.
A brainy professor who turns into a roguish soldier of fortune
between semesters. A heroine who talks tough, loves hard and
punches with either hand. A traitorous monkey--yes, a
treacherous little bundle of chattering fur who constantly
betrays the good guys until he is dispatched by a poisoned date,
not a minute too soon.

Raiders of the Lost Ark has it all--or anyway, more than enough
to transport moviegoers back to the dazzling, thrill-sated
matinee idyls of old. It is surely the best two hours of pure
entertainment anyone is going to find in the summer of '81, and
it is almost equally certain to be the great commercial hit of
the season--a blockbuster on the order of Star Wars and Jaws.
Which is as it should be, since it is produced by George Lucas,
37, who created the former, and directed by Steven Spielberg,
33, who made the latter.

This is good news, a cheerful prospect to contemplate as the
air conditioner goes on the fritz and the kids go into a
frazzle. One begins to wonder:  What did people do before
George Lucas started making movies?  But there is more to the
success of Raiders than the simple, "Let's see it again"
pleasure it is going to give audiences, though that, of course,
is its most basic virtue. In a troubled time for the American
movie, a time of runaway costs, indifferent craftsmanship and
stiffening competition from new entertainment technologies,
Raiders is, in fact, an exemplary film, an object lesson in how
to blend the art of storytelling with the highest levels of
technical know-how, planning, cost control and commercial
acumen. Most of its relatively low, $20 million budget (half
what Michael Cimino was permitted to squander on his out-of-
control flop, Heaven's Gate) is, as they say in Hollywood, "on
the screen."  It will therefore surely make money. The only
question is whether it will rival the huge worldwide grosses of
Star Wars ($500 million) and The Empire Strikes Back ($300
million).

Raiders represent Spielberg's best work in years, a return to
the briskness and coherence that have been missing since Jaws.
But in the end it is very much a producer's film, a George
Lucas film, reflecting not only his taste in entertainment but
a carefully evolved production style that leaves plenty of room
for creativity and none at all for miscalculation or
self-indulgence. The film began as "a daydream" back in 1973,
when Lucas first got the desire "to make a B movie I wanted to
see," and was modeled on Republic serials, those thrill-a-minute
kiddie-matinee favorites of the '30s and '40s.

His reverie centered on a college professor who, when not off
on foreign adventures, could be found in a nightclub with a
slinky, '30s-style blond on each arm. With a little help from
Writer-Director Philip Kaufman, who worked on the story for two
weeks, the blonds and the nightclub disappeared. Lucas'
archaeologist hero (along with anthropology, it was the
producer's favorite college course) finds himself recruited by
the American Government, circa 1936, to foil, singlehanded, a
huge German team that is on the brink of rediscovering the
long-lost Ark of the Covenant, in which the tablets containing
the Ten Commandments were placed after they were brought down
from Mount Sinai. Beyond its intrinsic value as the ultimate
object of religious veneration, the ark is believed to be
capable of conferring mystical power on its worldly possessor;
legend has it that an army with the ark in its van is
invincible--hence the scramble between Nazis and Yanks.

There the story rested until Lucas, cooling out on a Hawaiian
beach after launching Star Wars, began embroidering his tale
for Spielberg, his friend. "I felt like I was eating a barrel
of popcorn at a noon matinee,"  Spielberg recalls. Two years
later they called in Screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, who shared
the screenplay credit on Empire, for a marathon "pitching"
session. For five consecutive nine-hour days the three men
shouted, argued, paced and acted out the story until its line
was firm. "We are general practitioners,"  explains Spielberg.
"The best work I do is when I'm locked in a room with people
I respect and have fun with."

Ruling out Bondian improbabilities, they settled on the
adventure-serial structure. Cliffhangers usually came in
twelve parts, and by a happy coincidence there are a dozen major
menacing situations in Raiders. Each time there appears to be
no way out for the hero, Indiana Jones (named after Lucas'
beloved Malemute dog, whose "character" was previously borrowed
for Star Wars' Wookie), or the heroine, Marion, a reincarnation
of the "Hawksian woman," that sexy, spirited lady the late
director Howard Hawks always included among the boys in his
action films. At one juncture it appears that Marion, played
by the lovely Karen Allen, 29, may have been killed in an
explosion; at another she faces a choice between dishonor
(offered by oily No. 1 villain, Paul Freeman) and slow death
(eagerly threatened by No. 2 menace, Ronald Lacey). If Indiana
finds a secret passage out of a sealed tomb, you may be sure
he's soon going to have to grapple with a goon amid whirling
airplane propellers--and then, bloodied and bushed, roar off on
a spectacular chase. The great difference between Raiders and
its humble progenitors is that one doesn't have to wait a week
to find out where the escape hatch is hidden.

There are moments when the audience can catch its breath, but
they are brief and shrewdly calculated. Says Lucas:  "My films
are closer to amusement park rides than to a play or a novel.
You get in line for a second ride."  If that were their only
distinction, they would not be substantially different from any
reasonably well-made action-adventure picture. What gives them
their uncanny appeal is a depth, a resonance, that works almost
subliminally on the viewer.

Much of this special quality can be traced to the quiet
linkages, never blatant or campy, that Lucas' movies make with
everyone's shared movie past. These linkages are affectionate
and gracious acknowledgments that after almost 100 years movies
have built up an honorable set of visual traditions and
character conventions. Such references can be as broad as the
heroine's manner, as subtle as a glimpse of exaggerated shadows
on the wall during a fight scene, or the animated map tracing
Indiana Jones' progress from continent to continent as he
pursues his grail-ark. Says Harrison Ford, 38, Star Wars' Han
Solo, who plays Indiana:  "Raiders is really about movies. It
is intricately designed as a real tribute to the craft."
Spielberg agrees, noting that the film's opening image, that of
Paramount's famous mountain logo dissolving into a perfectly
matched real mountain, "is the first hint that you're in for a
trip."

But these historical references are not the only bows to
tradition in Raiders. The simple craftsmanship evident
throughout, the attention to detail, which, as the
special-effects people like to say, "sells the shot," puts the
viewer in mind of an almost vanished habit of meticulous
moviemaking. Two examples:  when Indiana makes his escape from
a sacred cave, a tribe of outraged Indians in hot pursuit, puffs
of dust are shaken loose from his clothes with each pounding
stride; later, when Marion loses a shoe as she is pushed into
the snakepit, the camera cuts to a shot of an asp slithering
through the open toe, as economical a suggestion of terror as
anyone has ever made. Movies can be made without such things.
But when they are present, they make the difference between the
merely good and the truly memorable.

Indeed, the whole Lucas emphasis on special effects, on loading
his films with optical tricks that can be created only in
movies, has a transforming effect on his work. It opens the
audience's mind--again with great subtlety--to the connections
between a seemingly simple tale of adventure and the richer
realm of myth. It is Homer's trick, the trick of all the saga
spinners and tale bearers down through the ages. And like them,
Lucas leaves his listeners free to choose the level on which
they will appreciate his work. When, at the end of Raiders, the
Nazis pry open the ark and let loose the defender demons it
contains, the effect is so breathtaking that one almost forgets
that this is the final horrific conflict between the forces of
light and darkness.

Indeed, Lucas insists that he resorts to special effects mainly
because they are economical, a way of delivering good movie
value at affordable prices. "I make films that generate
emotion,"  he says, adding that the challenge is to "make them
well enough so that they work at 51% effort. If the movie is
made at 100% effort, it is indulgent."  And likely to suffer
unbearable cost overruns. "Cimino made Heaven's Gate at 150%."
Moviegoers, says the frugal Lucas, will buy a weakish special
effect or even stock footage as long as their emotions are
engaged. "If it gets dreary, then they notice," he says. In
Raiders, only sharp-eyed cineasts will know that a shot of a
DC-3 flying in the Himalayas was bought from the remake of Lost
Horizon or that a 1930s street scene came from The Hindenberg.

Like another great craftsman, Alfred Hitchcock, Lucas prefers
to present himself as a pure entertainer, perhaps fearing that
references to more profound aspects of his work will put the
public off. "Francis Coppola likes to think of film as art,"
he says. "I don't take it that seriously. Art is for someone
to figure out 100 years from now."  Spielberg agrees and
disagrees. "We both see movies through youngsters' eyes," he
says. "I don't make intellectual movies. George, however, is
really an intellectual."

Slight, soft-spoken, reclusively inclined, Lucas wears that
mantle as lightly as he wears the garb of his Star Wars success.
He drives a Toyota, wears plaid sports shirts and high-top
basketball sneakers, works in a home-office complex in Marin
County, across the bridge from San Francisco. He loathes Los
Angeles ("Hollywood doesn't care about film; they live to make
deals") and does not like to direct. He runs his Lucasfilm
operation tightly but benignly. His top executives are often
film-school graduates and always knowledgeable, low-key,
untemperamental. They have to be smart since Lucas, unlike most
producers, can do anything that needs to be done around a
production. He ran a second camera for Spielberg on one of his
infrequent visits to a Raiders location. Uncredited, he
supervises all editing and is final arbiter of everything turned
out by Industrial Light and Magic, his special-effects shop down
the road. A man who believes in careful preplanning--all his
films are meticulously story-boarded--he simply cannot be conned
into spending money needlessly by a careless line producer or
a runaway director. Typical is his attitude toward casting.
"All I care about is good acting. Star value is only an
insurance policy for those who don't trust themselves making
films."

This does not imply a lack of generosity when it comes to
sharing credit or profits. When Empire struck gold, for
example, Lucas gave 25% of the windfall to his co-workers. And
he is not threatened by talent, as insecure executives are.
Says Spielberg, who went substantially over budget on his last
three pictures:  "Raiders was wonderful because George is in no
way intimidated by me. Also, it is hard to spend you friend's
money."  All the friend intended to spend, in any case, was $20
million--but he insisted that it look like $30 million on the
screen. The film was shot under schedule in a London studio and
on location in Hawaii, Tunisia and La Rochelle, France. "There
was not time for indulging inspiration," says Spielberg. "It
was spontaneous combustion, a relay race. We didn't do 30 or
40 takes--usually only four. It was like silent film-- shoot
only what you need, no waste. Had I more time and money, it
would have turned out a pretentious movie."

That emphatically, it is not. It is all zip-zap, biff-bang.
Yet so strong is the imagery, so compelling the pace, so sharply
defined are the characters, that one leaves the Lost Ark with
the feeling that, like the best films of childhood, it will take
up permanent residence in memory. Such film-going experiences
are, of course, what turned Lucas and Spielberg into film
makers. The latter speaks particularly of the lasting
impression Disney's Fantasia made on him--"life seen through
different eyes."

Spielberg has made the kind of movie Walt Disney might have made
had he lived into the 1980s, an entrancing combination of pure
cinematic movement, good-humored lack of pretense and allusive
fantasy. And he has been collaborating with the man who is
Disney's logical successor. For with the old master, George
Lucas shares certain values--Wasp, small-town, morally
conservative--and certain talents--for technological
innovation, cost-conscious supervision of team creative effort
and responsible merchandising of motion picture offshoots.
Lucas also holds to Disney's vision of a community of creative
film makers living and working together in a utopian atmosphere.
The Disney studio never came close to that, but Lucas has
already started construction on his communal Lucas Valley
compound, north of San Francisco.

The question for Lucas is whether he can sustain his idealism
in an envious and highly competitive field, where success is
usually measured by the bottom line. For Disney, utopia turned
into creative stasis and the once vaulting fantasies gave way
to the commercialized thrills of Disneyland. If Lucas can
preserve himself from commercial temptation, he may yet realize
his larger ambition, which is to use the profits from his
popular movies for more experimental work. "I want to push film
further and still get some emotional pull," he says. In the
confused and beleaguered movie industry, this is a tall order.
But Lucas is still a very young man. And an endlessly gifted
one.

--By Richard Schickel. Reported by Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles