Word: spielbergisms
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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...
...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...