Word: spielbergisms
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
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...
...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...
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 Tobe 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...
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 interviewed 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...