TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/82/82spiel

Text File | 1992-10-05 | 26.5 KB | 480 lines

                                                                                May 31, 1982 

CINEMA

Steve's Summer Magic

E.T. and Poltergeist:  two from the heart


Once upon a time there was little boy name Steven, who lived in
a mythical land called Suburbia. His house was just like
everybody else's house; his family's car and dog and swimming
pool were just like everybody else's too. But little Steven's
dreams were different. He dreamed of telling the stories of his
strange land-- wonderful tales of his home and his school, his
parents and especially his friends--and making them shine like
new. So every night he would tiptoe outside his ranch-style
house and make a wish on the brightest star in the suburban sky.
Over and over he would whisper, "Help me tell the story."

One August night, when the sky seemed clearer and the starlight
stronger, Steven felt himself drawn to his family's two-car
garage. There, gleaming in a forgotten corner, was an old piece
of machinery he ha never noticed before:  an 8-mm movie camera.
He picked up the camera, turned around, and what do you think
he saw?  Yes, it was a beautiful rainbow, ribboning the night
sky:  a sign that the little boy had found the key to his
dreams. And just before the rainbow disappeared--a rainbow no
one else saw that sweet summer night-- Steven aimed the camera
heavenward and pressed a button. The little boy from suburbia
had begun to tell his story.

Steven Spielberg did grow up. He became rich and famous as the
director who enjoyed playing with sharks, spacemen and
snakes--and turning these fearsome critters into the stuff of
blockbusters. Jaws, which Spielberg and Producer Richard Zanuck
had feared might prove to be "a shark with turkey feathers,"
terrified moviegoers to the tune of $410 million. Close
Encounters of the Third Kind built a send of biblical awe around
man's first meeting with beings from outer space and put another
$250 million into the till. Last year Raiders of the Lost Ark
sent Saturday-matinee chills down a record- breaking number of
spines--another $310 million. Spielberg won plaudits as well as
profits for his masterly film-making technique. Still, critics
often accused him of creating Pavlovian exercises in zap-me
thrills--movie machines that destroyed, with systematic
elegance, the viewer's emotional defenses.

Now it can be told:  inside Spielberg, the machine that built
the machines, was little Steven and his suburban child's pulsing
heart. Look into the mouth of Jaws, and you will find the infant
fear of things that go chomp in the night. Search the skies for
a Close Encounter, and you can chart a child's hope that whoever
is out there will be just like him:  small and smooth and smart
and cuddly. Track the Lost Ark's Raiders, and you will discover
the thrill of escape that whets the imagination of every
fifth-grade Indiana Jones.

All this was prelude. At 34, Spielberg has tapped directly into
the power source of youthful fantasies and produced two
remarkable works of popular art. Poltergeist, which he
supervised from original story to final cut, is a horror movie
about malevolent spirits that infiltrate the home of an ordinary
California family. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, which he devised
and directed, tells of a creature from outer space who is
mistakenly abandoned on earth and befriended by three school-age
children. "Poltergeist is a scream," Spielberg says. "E.T. is
a whisper."  The first film means to thrill, the second to
enthrall. Both succeed beyond anyone's expectations, perhaps
even those of their prodigious creator. They re-establish the
movie screen as a magic lantern, where science plays tricks on
the eye as an artist enters the heart and nervous system with
images that bemuse and beguile.

Spielberg has formidable competition for the attention of
moviegoers this summer. The producers of Annie have engineered
a powerful media blitz to herald their lavish if lead-souled
musical. Tron, a futuristic melodrama set inside a video game,
hopes to lure the addicts of the arcades back to moviehouses.
New versions of Rocky, Grease, Star Trek and The Thing will
tempt old adherents. The Road Warrior and Blade Runner will
offer up eye-catching punk-rock apocalypses. Robin Williams will
attempt to enter The World According to Garp. Clint Eastwood and
Woody Allen have new movies, and Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton
will sing and dance their way through The Best Little Whorehouse
in Texas. Even so, Poltergeists' intelligence in confecting
disaster, its honest laughs and spine- snapping chills--from
upended kitchen chairs to ghostly vapors and a gaping, horrid
hell mouth--should lead it to the head of the class.

E.T., though, is in a class all by its beautiful self. Of course
it should make truckloads of money:  its sneak previews have
been the most rapturously received since Jaws; industry
marketing experts have predicted it as a summer smash: and one
professional cynic emerged from a Manhattan screening of the
film last week and confidently announced. "$350 million."  But
the gleam of moisture in his eye said something else, something
everyone else will soon be able to discover:  that E.T. is a
miracle movie, and one that confirms Spielberg as a master
storyteller of his medium.

Not since the glory days of the Walt Disney Productions--40
years and more ago, when Fantasia and Pinocchio and Dumbo first
worked their seductive magic on moviegoers of every age--has a
film so acutely evoked the twin senses of everyday wonder and
otherworldly awe. With astonishing technical finesse and an
emotional directness that lifts the heart, E.T. spines its tale
of a shy, lonely boy in desperate need of a friend--when
suddenly one falls out of the sky. The movie is a perfectly
poised mixture of sweet comedy and ten-speed melodrama, of death
and resurrection, of a friendship so pure and powerful it seems
like an idealized love. None of this can be the result of
computerized calculation; instead it stems from a seamless blend
of writing, direction, casting and celestial good luck. Even its
creator seems pleased:  "I put myself on the line with this
film, and it wasn't easy. But I'm proud of it. It's been a long
time since any movie gave me an `up' cry."

With the exception of 1941, a self-destruct farce starring Dan
Aykroyd and John Belushi, every Spielberg feature has been on
the mark in jolting the moviegoer with intelligent grins and
shudders. A prototype of the new "computer generation" of
children, Spielberg uses the cinema's infernally complex
machinery to tunnel into the popular psyche. That is why the
most personal film of his youth, Close Encounters, was among his
most popular. Poltergeist and especially E.T. should prove even
more accessible to all kinds of moviegoers--for here the
characters are richer and more humans, and the encounters are
with the hearts of darkness and light, in a part of America that
prides itself on occupying the serene center of the national
dream.

Together, the two new films compose a marvelously detailed
diptych of suburban life. It is a life that Spielberg, who grew
up in a series of bedroom communities, knows from the sheltered
inside:  "I've never been robbed or in a fistfight. I never saw
a dead body. Until I went to New York City. I'd never eaten real
Italian food. Walt Disney was my parental conscience. And my
stepparent was the TV set."  Virtually every Spielberg film has
made room for the camaraderie and antagonisms that percolate
across the Formica kitchen table. But until now, none of the
films had been told or seen from the child's point of
view--where the prefab house seems unique and enveloping, where
every utilitarian recess holds its own sly secret, where Mom can
be the Queen Mother or a royal pain, and Dad is Santa Claus or
the Big Bad Wolf.

At the center of both E.T. and Poltergeist is the suburban
family, as normal and American as Pop-Tarts. In Poltergeist, Dad
(Craig T. Nelson), late 30s, sells tract houses, reads
biographies of Ronald Reagan and furrows his brow to watch his
hairline recede. Mom (Jobeth Williams), early 30s, keeps house,
sings TV beer jingles and tucks in her son under a Star Wars
bedspread. If this seems the derisory stuff of sitcoms, it is
not. "I never mock suburbia," Spielberg declares. "My life comes
from there."  He likes these people and communicates that
affection. Faced with balky children or a restless preternatural
presence, the parents demonstrate their go- with-the-flow
resilience. And when things get climactically hairy, these
people can be roused to fear and anger, can summon reserves of
surprising strength. They are the movies' favorite species:
ordinary heroes.

Spielberg's heroes, whom he sees as extraordinary, are children.
At the emotional center of each new film is a trio of siblings:
 a teen- ager, a nine- or ten-year-old boy, a fair-haired
preschool girl. To the awful pull of the forlorn or malevolent
spirits residing inside the Poltergeist house, each child is
different attuned. The teen-age girl is too involved with
growing up to take much notice; the boy, Robbie (Oliver Robins),
can be reached only on the frequency of fear; but the
five-year-old, Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke), is unaware and
unafraid of the spirits' terrible power--and is theirs for the
taking. It is she who releases the poltergeists (literally,
noisy ghosts) from their long bondage between this world and the
next. Drawn to the blankly fuzzy, humming screen of the
living-room TV late one night, Carol Anne speaks to them, and
is heard and seduced and swallowed by them into the restless
heart of the house. The film's last hour documents a harrowing
tub of wills between Carol Anne's parents and the spectral army
surrounding them:  between the spirits and two specialists, a
parapsychologist (Beatrice Straight) and a child-voiced psychic
(Zelda Rubinstein), who exert their powers to "cleanse" the
house; and ultimately among the spirits, fighting to release the
child or forever claim her for their own.

At first and final glance, Poltergeist is simply a riveting
demonstration of the movies' power to scare the sophistication
out of any viewer. It creates honest thrills within the confines
of a P.G. rating and reaches for standard shock effects and the
forced suspension of disbelieve only at the climax, when we
realize that the characters are behaving with such obtuseness
precisely because they are trapped inside a horror movie. On the
plot level, Poltergeist is a warning against trying to build a
mobile modern life over the unquiet graves of the past. The
picture can also be seen as a sly comedy supporting the
proposition that violence on TV--or, more precisely, in it--can
have a dire influence on children who watch it. (Spielberg calls
Poltergeist "my revenge on TV.")  Whichever, when the demons
escape the TV set, careering around the room like puffs from a
deranged steam engine, the little girl turns to her parents and
blithely announces:  "They're here!"  Right inside the mind of
a sensitive child.

In the Spielberg world, there is a reason for this. Children,
creatures of innocence and intuition, evolve a fantasy
life--their real life--that personalizes everything around them.
Machines become toys, toys are animated into pets, pets turn
into near-human friends, and all play crucial roles as the
saints and dragons of a child's deepest dreams. In Poltergeist,
Carol Anne talks to "the TV people," and they talk back:  they
even play with her, to malefic effect. But Spielberg, as he
demonstrated in Close Encounters, is no kidnaper. What he takes
from the audience--in thrills, anxiety, even children-- he gives
back, better than new.

In E.T. he goes a step further:  he gives back a new fairy tale
as good as old. The film opens on a night sky. Disney blue and
full of twinkling stars. In the clearing of a forest that Bambi
and Thumper might have been pleased to call home, a spaceship
sits--not a high- tech marvel of the NASA future but a
bell-shaped spinster of a ship, with old-fashioned street lamps
appending and the unmistakable aura of Captain Nemo's Nautilus
from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. A misty crescent
moon gives glimpses of child-size figures moving about in capes
and cowls on a field expedition for earth flora. One of these
figures wanders off and encounters the threatening glare of
headlights and the honking of car horns. Before the errant
extra-terrestrial can return to his comrades, the spaceship
abruptly ascends and little E.T. is left, alone and friendless,
in an alien climate, where he can never flourish and may not
survive.

E.T., a gentle space elf who at first glance seems as homely as
a turtle without its shell yet eventually proves as beautiful
as an enchanted frog, must find a rescuer. And the rescuer must
be a child, whose Galahad strength only E.T. and the moviegoer
can immediately discern. The child is Elliott (Henry Thomas),
a thin, quiet, wise-faced lad of ten who makes initial contact
in a time- honored American fashion:  by playing catch with a
softball. With the help of his older brother Michael (Robert
MacNaughton) and younger sister Gertie (Drew Barrymore), Elliott
must battle the elements and some prying adults in a children's
crusade to win E.T. his freedom.

To Elliott, E.T. is everything a boy could want:  a toy, a pet,
a jolly Space Invader of a video game--most of all, a friend
whose feelings become his own. To Gertie, E.T. is a youngest
sibling's most welcome addition: someone even smaller than she,
an infant brother she can dress up as a bag lady and even teach
to speak. E.T. is remarkably adaptable and wonderfully funny in
his adventure on earth. Left alone in the house, he toddles
around like a middle-aged ironworker on a weekend without the
wife, his potbelly peeking out of a plaid bathrobe as he watches
TV and gets drunk on Coors beer. Later still, he is a holy sage,
a whiz-kid Yoda, constructing a transmitter out of spare parts
to signal his spaceship. And he has an extra gift for children.
If the moment is propitious, and they truly believe, E.T. can
make them fly away from danger and into the harvestmoon sky.

To tell more of the plot would be to spoil one of the film's
pleasures, its gratification of the child's delight in
wondering "What comes next, Daddy?"  It is enough to say that
E.T. stands securely in the company of some classic children's
stories, from Peter Pan to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. With the
crucial help of Screenwriter Melissa Mathison, who was present
every day on the set. Spielberg has infused comic and dramatic
tension into a story in which, one comes to realize, there are
no villains. Everyone is nice, and the conflict comes from a
taffy pull between good and greater good. That conflict is
achingly strong, its resolution euphoric.

The working title for E.T. was A Boy's Life. And as surely as
any work of science fiction can be its author's autobiography,
the boy here is Steven Spielberg. His parents seeded the mix of
science and art that would surface in Spielberg's films:  his
father Arnold was a computer engineer, his mother Leah a former
classical pianist. (They were divorced when Steven was 17.)  In
many ways, he was a typical boy. He loved animals, especially
cocker spaniels--and parakeets, which he kept in his bedroom,
flying free. "There would be birds flying around and birdseed
all over the floor," recalls Leah, now 62 and the owner-operator
of a kosher delicatessen in West Los Angeles. "I'd just reach
in to get the dirty clothes."

In a house he had to share with three mischievous younger
sisters, Steven would take the standard boy's revenge:  lock
them in the closet and then throw in the thing they feared most.
"He used to scare the hell out of them,"  Leah says. "When they
were going to sleep, he would creep under their window and
whisper, `I'm the moon!'"  But the fraternal bogeyman was also
a small festival of phobias. "My biggest fear was a clown doll,"
he says. "Also the tree I could see outside my room. Also
anything that might be under the bed or in the closet. Also
Dragnet on TV. Also a crack in the bedroom wall--I thought
ghosts might come from it."  For Spielberg, film making has been
a profitable form of psychotherapy:  those boyhood fears form
the spine of the Poltergeist plot.

He might have hatched that plot in the nursery, for by then
Steven had discovered his life's passion. Leah recalls, "One day
Arnold bought a movie camera and started taking pictures of
Steven. He was still a baby, but he got up and walked straight
for the camera."  At twelve, he got his own movie camera, an
inexpensive Kodak, and would spend hours alone writing scripts,
drawing shots on sheets of paper that piled up in his room,
making movies. He would film head-on crashes of his Lionel
trains. He would go on camping trips with his family and turn
his home movies into melodramas. ("I never felt life was good
enough," he says now, "so I had to embellish it.")  At his
request, Leah boiled cherries jubilee in a pressure cooker until
it exploded, and Steven filmed the messy crimson walls and
floor. Once Leah asked him to photograph the family in their
convertible; Steven took a shot of the hubcap. Leah shakes her
head:  "I should have known that meant something!"

It did indeed. The boy who was last to be chosen for any pickup
baseball team, who was labeled "the retard" by the boys in his
phys.- ed. class, who was sickened by having to dissect a frog
in junior high and ran outside to vomit with the others-- "and
the others were all girls"-- found he could win friends and
influence people with his movies. He enrolled in a Boy Scout
photography program, where his success made him at 13 one of the
youngest Eagle Scouts ever. ("If I hadn't been a Scout,"
Spielberg cheerfully admits today, "I'd probably have ended up
as an ax murderer or a butcher in a Jewish deli.")  One high
school jock who used to taunt Steven was won over when the young
director case him in an 8-mm movie called Battle Squad. At
Phoenix's Arcadia High School, Spielberg found fellow spirits
in the theater-art program--"My leper colony. That's when I
realized there were options besides being a jock or a wimp."

After a couple of years at California State University at Long
Beach, he slick-talked his way into an interview with Sid
Sheinberg, then president of Universal television, and on the
strength of his short film Amblin', became the youngest director
every signed to a long- term Hollywood studio contract. At 21,
he was putting Joan Crawford through the paces of a Night
Gallery tale. He directed eleven episodes of various Universal
series:  a The Name of the Game here, a Columbo or The
Psychiatrist there, displaying his tyro talent, learning the
business. "TV taught me to think on my feet," he says. "You have
six days to shoot 50 pages of script. TV is a well-oiled
machine. Either you roll with it or it rolls over you."  He
rolled, all right:  within three years he had directed his first
TV movie, Duel, about an evil driverless truck bent on crushing
a mild motorist on the endless blacktop the Southwest. Shot in
twelve days for $300,000, Duel went on to earn Universal $9
million when it was released to theaters in Europe.

Now the big leagues were calling. After his debut feature film
The Sugarland Express, an eccentric car-chase comedy starring
Goldie Hawn, Spielberg found himself off the coast of Martha's
Vineyard directing a huge case and crew--and one wayward
mechanical shark--in Jaws. A 55-day shooting schedule ballooned
to 155 days; the $4 million budget soared to $8 million. Studio
executives were threatening to close down the film and put
"Bruce," the shark, on exhibit as part of the Universal City
tour. The crew was wavering daily between seasickness and shell
shock. "It was almost Mutiny on the Bounty," Spielberg recalls,
gleefully mixing his analogies, "with me tied to Moby Dick."
But audiences responded to the film with the same question that
Steven's mentor. Sid Sheinberg, asked when he first saw it:
"Isn't there any more?"  For Universal there was: Jaws set a new
record for film grosses. And Close Encounters solidified
Spielberg's reputation for touching minds and pocketbooks with
equal acuity.

It was too much, too fast, too easy. Few worried when Spielberg
spent double his Jaws budget and then overextended himself by
$6.2 million on Close Encounters; after all, everybody got rich
anyway. With 1941 there was no such reprieve. Though the film
eventually broke even--and though, frame for frame, it was every
bit as adroitly assembled as his hits had been--1941 tarnished
the boy wonder's luster. "Until then I thought I was immune to
failure," he says. "But I couldn't come down from the power high
of making big films on large canvases. I threw everything in,
and it killed the soup, 1941 was my encounter with economic
reality."

Fortunately for Spielberg, he soon had a closer, more crucial
encounter, when George Lucas, whom Spielberg had known since
1967, asked him to direct the first film in a new adventure
series called Raiders of the Lost Ark. With the Star Wars films,
Lucas had demonstrated that energy, invention and an appealing
ingenuity could somehow balance themselves on Hollywood's bottom
line. "George knows how to put the most on the screen for the
cheapest price," Spielberg says. He did more than anyone to help
me make a movie on budget. While we were preparing Raiders he
would tell me, `You've got a $50 million imagination with a $10
million thought behind it.'" Together, the two young tycoons
built plenty of twists into their roller coaster of a plot,
brought Raiders in under its $20 million budget and made it one
of the top four money-earning films in the U.S. The other three:
 Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Jaws.

The problem, as Spielberg sees it, is the ambition for
megabucks: "Everybody is aiming for the rightfield stands."  But
hatching a blockbuster may be the only way for a film maker to
outsmart the deal makers running the big studios. Spielberg and
Director Brian De Palma (Carrie, Dressed to Kill) recently
haggled with two major studios over the rights to Michael
Crichton's bestselling novel Congo. "A deal is a work of science
fiction," Spielberg says. "I wasted three months learning how
not to make one. Eventually, Brian and I walked away. The whole
`movie game' is just one more useless experience."  He wishes
the studios would put some of their profits into development of
new talent:  "It each studio would take $1 million profit per
big movie and invest it in film schools and writing programs,
we'd have the industry that David O. Selznick and Irving
Thalberg created."  The director has given $500,000 to the
U.S.C. film program. "We must become like Walter Huston in
Treasure of Sierra Madre--we must put the mountain back."

Like Lucas, Spielberg has earned the right to create and shape
his own film projects,whether or not he is the nominal director.
He had planned only to produce Poltergeist, but soon found
himself rewriting the script (from his original story) and, word
had it, taking over from Director Robe Hooper, who had surged
to midnight-movie prominence seven years earlier with The Texas
Chain Saw Massacre, a relentless exercise in terror set, like
Poltergeist, in a darkened house. He might have had a chance if
he had banned Spielberg from the set. But Spielberg had chosen
the cast and locations and "story- boarded" the film--devised
sketches that approximated virtually every scene the director
would shoot. "My taking over had less to do with Tobe's
competence," Spielberg says, "and more with the fact that I'm
bullish about my ideas."

With Elliott and his little friend E.T., though, all was smooth
sailing--a dream of a set for a dream movie. The mechanical
creature performed beautifully as a machine and as an actor. And
Spielberg found the children easy to work with, explaining the
story in terms of fairy tales and board games. For the main
roles he had interview more than 300 children. "Many of them
were remarkable," he says, "but they weren't real. They thought
before they felt. Then, just a few weeks before we were to start
shooting, Henry Thomas walked in. He gave a dreadful reading.
I could see he was petrified. But when I asked him to improvise
a scene with our casting director, he transformed immediately
into Elliott. He can act and react. He's gifted and malleable.
He gave an incredibly controlled performance." Mature and
childlike by turns, utterly unaffected yet supremely resourceful
as an actor. Thomas is largely responsible for making scenes
between a boy and a pile of steel and foam rubber glisten with
feeling.

Spielberg hopes that with E.T. and Poltergeist he will be taken
seriously as a director of actors. He has every reason to be.
In both pictures, the children are natural and winning. As the
mother in Poltergeist, Jobeth Williams, who Spielberg predicts
could some day be on a par with Jill Clayburgh, creates a
surprisingly rounded character. She gives the movie audience an
electrifying shiver the moment her character feels Carol Anne's
spirit moving through her body. In E.T., Dee Wallace has some
quietly affecting scenes as Elliott's mother, who cannot quite
hide from her children the ache of loneliness at her husband's
desertion. In Spielberg's previous features, only one actor
(Melinda Dillon, in Close Encounters) was nominated for an
Academy Award. That figure should change next year, and
Spielberg should emerge from under his portable cloud of Mr.
Special Effects.

In fact, only one of his future projects--the sequel to
Raiders--will rely heavily on effects. He is developing a
musical with Composer- Arranger Quincy Jones, and wants to
remake the 1943 fantasy film A Guy Named Joe (a scene from it
appears in Poltergeist). He is shepherding a number of
film-school graduates through their first commercial movies. And
fermenting in the back of his busy brain is a plot line for E.T.
II. If he realizes half of the projects he has planned, he could
be busy for the next 50 years. And when will he stop making
films?  Says Steven the Indefatigable:  "When I'm Henry Fonda's
age."  Even then, one suspects, Spielberg--the Ahab of Jaws, the
star child of Close Encounters, the Adventureland warrior of
Raiders, the scheming spirit behind Poltergeist, the bright
little boy of E.T.--will still be infusing familiar stories with
his craft and his cagey innocence. For moviegoers, that may be
as close as they can get to an old-fashioned "happily ever
after."

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