the Ark is sequestered in a giant warehouse choked with anonymous crates.
All Spielberg’s films are ‘about’ cinema before they are about anything else. ‘It’s very clear his references are to film rather than literature,’ says Tom Stoppard, who wrote the script for Spielberg’s version of J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun and acted for more than a year as his informal dramaturg. ‘If one was talking about Captains Courageous, one was talking about Spencer Tracy and the movie, rather than the book.’ Julian Glover says:
It’s not that he ever said, ‘This shot is a copy of one in Stagecoach; the remake, not the original,’ or, ‘Here’s my Lawrence of Arabia shot. But you just had a sense… He asked me to do one shot [on Indiana Jones and the Lost Crusade], and I said, ‘Steven, I don’t know why I’m making this move.’ And he said, ‘Well, in Adam’s Rib, Spencer Tracy…’ And I just held up my hands and said, ‘That’s fine.’ Obviously he knew exactly what he was doing.
Kevork Malikyan, who played Kazim in The Last Crusade, had a similar experience. Spielberg spent hours staging his death. He was to collapse into Alison Doody’s arms and slide down her body. After grabbing him, she pulls her hands back to find them covered in blood. The shot refused to gel, and Spielberg dropped it, never mentioning he’d been trying to recreate the death of a disguised Daniel Gelin in the arms of James Stewart in Hitchcock’s remake of The Man who Knew too Much.
One can multiply such stories by the dozen. TV exposed the Brats to more movies than most Hollywood professionals saw in a lifetime. They wore their knowledge self-consciously, even arrogantly, and while Spielberg didn’t carry it to the extremes of Schrader or De Palma, he prepared his first cinema feature with a sense that he was not so much creating something new as building on what had gone before. ‘Once,’ recalls John Milius, ‘Steve and I were talking about how easily we could recreate the atmosphere of a Ford or Hitchcock film. He said, “But how is it we’re able to do that?” and I said, “Simple. We stole it.”’
Older heads despaired of the Brats’ fascination with movie lore. The newcomers, too young to have worked on the films they admired, saw old films not, as their makers did, in terms of personal experience, but as collections of themes, catchphrases, stylistic tricks. Recycling a gibe of Oscar Wilde, British critic Philip French accused them of knowing ‘the credits of everything but the value of nothing’. John Gregory Dunne agreed.
It always struck me that of all the people who were at the Phillipses that summer, there were very few who actually work… the social and cultural mines. [They were] basically gadgeteers. More interested in things… People graduate from Michigan State or wherever, take their book bags, come here to film school, and have no other basis in life except the movies they’ve seen. That’s why they’re making movies about Superman and poltergeists, and about psychic phenomena… Their problem is that they have never done anything.
‘You get the feeling,’ wrote Pauline Kael in an influential review that did much to put Spielberg on the map, ‘that the director grew up with TV and wheels (My Mother the Car?), and that he has a new temperament. Maybe Spielberg loves action and comedy and speed so much that he doesn’t really care if the movie has nothing else in it.’
The model for The Sugarland Express was, inevitably, another movie. In 1951, Austrian-born Billy Wilder paid an acid tribute to the affection of his adoptive country for bread and circuses with Ace in the Hole. A reporter named Chuck Tatum, played by Kirk Douglas at his most misanthropic, happens on the story of a lifetime, a man trapped in a mine under a New Mexico mountain. Rescuers expect to dig him out in a day or two, but Tatum, spinning out the story, persuades them to sink a shaft from the top. A ghoulish carnival gathers around the stricken man, with the reporter as its arrogant ringmaster. Tatum becomes famous, but the man dies.
To nobody’s surprise, least of all Wilder’s, Ace in the Hole flopped. ‘Americans expected a cocktail,’ he said, unperturbed, ‘and felt I was giving them a shot of vinegar instead.’ But Spielberg never concealed its affinities with The Sugarland Express: ‘I loved the Ace in the Hole similarity. I liked the idea of people rallying behind a media event, not knowing who the characters are or what they’re about, but just supporting them because they are on an errand of mercy to get their baby back – and that sparks a good deal of good old American sentimentality.’ It was a theme he would return to in 1941: the power of the media to convince people of almost anything, and the readiness of those people not only to believe what they hear but to act on it, often catastrophically. Sight and Sound saw the connection between Wilder and the anarchic hymns to road violence to which The Sugarland Express superficially belonged by summing it up as ‘Ace in the Hole meets Vanishing Point’. Few people grasped that Spielberg, as he been on the side of the truck rather than the car in Duel, wasn’t deploring mob rule in Sugarland Express but relishing it.
Once he started shooting, Spielberg had his hands full controlling his first major feature crew, and in particular Zsigmond, who had ambitions to direct and wasn’t backward in suggesting how he would have planned a scene. These problems were exacerbated when Spielberg insisted on operating the camera himself for many sequences. Lighting cameramen traditionally work with an operator who runs the camera while they concentrate on placing lights and mapping out movements. Spielberg, however, still had the amateur’s love of shooting, and would continue to handle the camera on many scenes throughout his career, to the irritation of directors of photography.
‘Vilmos is a very interesting man,’ Spielberg said diplomatically, ‘And when you employ his great camera eye, you also get gratis his thoughts. He would offer ideas beyond the definition of the American cinematographer.’ Arguments were common, but Spielberg won most of them. ‘When a cameraman [has] free rein,’ he said, ‘he becomes the director and the director becomes the apprentice.’ And he felt he’d gone through his apprenticeship at Universal already. However it was Zsigmond who persuaded him that the camera, rather than occupying the position of a detached directorial Eye of God, should always represent the point of view of a character. Thereafter, Spielberg’s films became more concerned with people and a little less like cartoons.
‘Several crew members said they’d never been on a happier location,’ Goldie Hawn remarked. ‘Four of them ended up marrying local girls from San Antonio, which was our base of operations. One was a waitress, another took reservations at the Holiday Inn. Hollywood meets Texas. It was a happy company.’ Spielberg was unaffected, even amused by the nocturnal sighs and moans, which, characteristically, he noted in relation to a movie. ‘Walking along the hall at one in the morning at those Holiday Inns sometimes sounds like Gyorgy Ligeti’s Atmospheres from 2001.’ Sex helped alleviate the tensions of working in a district fed up with film units. Sam Peckinpah was shooting The Getaway in the area, and his piratical crew had looted CB radios from their hired police cars. As a result, Zanuck/Brown had to buy twenty-five junked black-and-whites at auction. After the shoot, Spielberg bought the Poplins’ car, with dozens of bullet holes still visible where the special effects technicians had drilled them, and drove it for years.
In February, he had cause to be glad he turned down White Lightning. Scandal erupted on location for Reynolds’s The Man who Loved Cat Dancing, shooting in Gila Bend, Arizona, with his one-time playmate Sarah Miles. Miles’s ‘personal assistant’ David Whiting was found dead after a Quaalude overdose, and evidence at the inquest suggested he and Reynolds had been sharing Miles’s bed. In different circumstances, it might have been Spielberg, not Vanishing Point’s Richard Sarafian, who had to handle this production and public-relations nightmare.
In May 1973, just as shooting on Sugarland ended, literary agent Roberta Pryor delivered to Zanuck in the California office and to Brown in New York typescripts of a new novel by an unknown writer. Both men read it overnight. Richer producers,
