in Hollywood, events were conspiring to free Spielberg from the Universal TV treadmill. By the advent of what Joan Didion called ‘the hangover summer of 1970’, the dismal box-office receipts of youth films had been assessed, and their makers were out. ‘Nobody could get past the gate without a commitment from Barbra Streisand,’ she wrote. Casualties of the collapse littered Hollywood. ‘All the terrific twenty-two-year-old directors went back to shooting television commercials, and all the twenty-four-year-old producers used up the leases on their office space at Warner Brothers by sitting out there in the dull Burbank sunlight smoking dope before lunch and running one another’s unreleased pictures after lunch.’
Fortunately Spielberg wasn’t seen as part of this group. The Village Voice’s film critic Tom Allen was already nominating him as chief of ‘the post-Coppola generation’ – those directors who, instead of fighting old Hollywood, elected to infiltrate and subvert it from within. It was a mantle he was more than proud to wear. Today, he still defines himself as an independent movie-maker working within the Hollywood establishment’.
Two unexpected losers in the change of direction were Richard Zanuck and David Brown. A Stanford Research Institute report in 1970 had convinced both men that movies were about to undergo a seismic readjustment. With TV flooding the market, it was futile for Hollywood to continue serving a ‘movie habit’ which no longer existed. Instead, Zanuck told the board, Fox ‘must depend heavily on a very small proportion of highly successful films targeted for the youth market’. Those films, he went on, must offer something the audience couldn’t get on TV. Zanuck gambled that the ‘something’ was sex. He commissioned film versions of two notoriously explicit novels and hired soft-porn impresario Russ Meyer to make a sequel to another.
It was these films, Portnoy’s Complaint, Myra Breckinridge and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls which, Brown acknowledged, ‘did us in at Fox’. Amid complaints about the raunchiness of the new slate and, worse, a pre-tax loss of $23 million, Darryl Zanuck arrived back from Europe in August 1970. Deadpan, he recited to the assembled board a digest of the verbal obscenities in Portnoy’s Complaint (‘“Beat my meat” – one. “Blow me” – two. “Boffed” – one. “Boner” – one. “Cock” – sixteen’), then announced that, ‘As long as I am Chairman and Chief Executive of Twentieth Century-Fox, Portnoy’s Complaint or any other film with the same degree of obscenity will not be produced.’ The project was sold to Warner Brothers. After this vote of no confidence, Richard Zanuck and Brown couldn’t last long. In January 1971 Darryl Zanuck reclaimed the studio he created. His axe-man Dennis Stanfill ensured that his son’s dismissal took place with maximum humiliation. ‘There’s a ritual to severance,’ he told an astonished Richard. When Louis B. Mayer had been ousted from MGM, his complimentary Chrysler was reclaimed even before he reached the parking lot. Now, in order to get into his car, Zanuck had to step over a painter effacing his name from the tarmac.
Zanuck and Brown went to Warners with a five-film contract as independent producers. The irony of their dismissal was that they had read the market correctly. Cinema did need to capitalise on its differences from TV rather than imitate the rival form. Films had to become national events, blanketing the media, dominating conversation, relegating TV to its domestic role. Assessing Richard Zanuck and David Brown’s administration, Hollywood historian Stephen M. Silverman has described how Hollywood in the seventies followed their lead, ‘marketing total escapist fare during the summer, and [developing] the “blockbuster or bust” mentality that quickly afflicted movie-making… If a picture did not pull in at least $100 million, it was considered a wasteful exercise.’ The film-maker who would put Zanuck’s and Brown’s theories into practice and prove their validity was Steven Spielberg.
I have more of a bubble-gum outlook on life than I think Welles did when he made Citizen Kane.
Spielberg, of making his first feature
WITH HIPPY Hollywood discredited, the yuppie producers who were to dominate the 1970s found themselves suddenly in favour. Michael and Julia Phillips, East Coast Jewish, with a background in publishing rather than movies, exemplified them. From the moment they arrived in 1971, Michael in his conservative New York tailoring, the shapely Julia in hot pants, they were Hollywood’s hippest couple. Michael had read Law and worked on Wall Street as a securities analyst, and Julia was a protégée of David Begelman, but they talked like liberals, smoked dope, played touch football, liked surfing and lived at the beach. They were cool. They didn’t mind John Milius turning up at parties with a .357 Magnum and firing it out to sea as the sun came up.
The timing of their arrival was impeccable. Journalists already talked about the USC group as ‘an invisible studio’, but while it included plenty of directors and writers, it had no producers. The Phillipses filled that niche. Julia knew they could become the vital link between Old Hollywood and New. ‘I think we perform the peculiar function of putting together the Marty Scorseses and the Robert Redfords,’ she drawled. ‘We are equally intimate with both these kinds of people and we can put the old glove in touch with the new glove, you know?’
In his search for a feature, Spielberg saw less of the USC gang. On his way back from Europe, he’d stopped over in New York, where he’d met a man who was to become one of his closest friends. Burly, bearded, seven years older than Spielberg, Brian De Palma was the son of a Philadelphia surgeon. His childhood was tormented by rivalry with his brothers, an obsession with his mother and the infidelities of his father. At one point, he made midnight raids in black commando gear to sneak compromising photographs of him with his nurse. A science buff, early computer freak and maniac for Hitchcock, whose fascination with voyeurism and the erotic manipulation of women he shared, De Palma came to movies through underground theatre and film. His friends were actors like Robert de Niro, whose career he launched. In 1971 he’d just finished Hi Mom! with de Niro. When a friend of Spielberg’s brought De Palma to his hotel, he brushed past Spielberg and walked around the room, examining the furniture. Spielberg was impressed. Here was someone who, unlike him, didn’t give a flying fuck what people thought. When De Palma won a Warners contract and moved to Hollywood, they became friends, and remained close.
Another new friend was Sydney Pollack, who directed twenty Ben Casey, Frontier Circus and Kraft Suspense Theater episodes a year for Universal in the sixties before making highly-regarded features like This Property is Condemned and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? In 1972 he was just finishing Jeremiah Johnson with Robert Redford, from a script written in part by Milius.
Pollack, an ex-actor, grave and dignified, with something in common physically with Sid Sheinberg, increasingly occupied the role in Spielberg’s life as older brother and counsellor. He and Freddie Fields introduced Spielberg to more influential people, including Guy McElwaine, an ICM agent, and Alan Ladd Jr, then production head of Twentieth Century-Fox. Spielberg knew Ladd through George Lucas, who liked Ladd’s self-effacing style.
Two other members of the group, David Giler and Joey Walsh, were writers. Giler, later to contribute to the script of Alien, was developing a contemporary comedy based on The Maltese Falcon, The Black Bird. Walsh, an ex-child actor and recovering gambling addict who kept his hand in playing poker with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, had collected some of his experiences into a screenplay called ‘Slide’, about Charlie and Bill, two amateur gamblers with otherwise dead-end lives who become friends, get involved with a couple of call girls, share some laughs and a few losses.
Later, Julia Phillips would paint Spielberg as someone out of his depth in this society,
hanging around with men who were too old for him. Who bet and drank and watched football games on Sunday. Who ran studios and agencies. The group centred around Guy [McElwaine]
