Index

#01. Hired illegally (without permits)

In the third draft of “Twilight Zone—Landis Episode,” dated June 13th, 1982, a new Vietnamese Village sequence was added (Scenes 28–32) in which the anti-hero protagonist redeems himself by rescuing two orphans from a marauding combat helicopter. Several of the filmmakers, in an effort to maximize realism despite labour laws, conspired to cast the parts illegally (without permits). The conspiracy would spiral to include several lower-ranked members of the production, forcing them to risk their careers by speaking out, or else be made complicit.

1. June 13th: Third draft; children added to rescue sequence.
2. June 16th: Casting session; casting agent raises legal and safety concerns.

   Associate casting agent, Marci Liroff, of Fenton & Feinberg Casting, although just 24 years old, had already worked with Amblin (Spielberg’s production companies: Amblin’ Productions, Inc., incorporated in California on December 17th, 1970, and Amblin’ Entertainment, Inc., incorporated April 1st, 1980) twice before, on Poltergeist (1982) and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982).

   On July 7th, 1983, police investigators spoke with Liroff, who said:

   ... on 6/16/82 she had been one of four people at a “Casting Session” which took place in John Landis’ office at Universal Studios. Present at the casting session were herself, her boss (Mike Fenton), George Folsey, and John Landis. During this session, Mr. Landis explained to everyone present that the character (“Bill”) being portrayed by VICTOR MORROW in the Landis episode was coming across too harsh in the movie. Mr. Landis said that during the previous evening, he had come up with an idea, “softening Morrow’s character.” Mr. Landis explained that his idea included Vic Morrow running across a river at night being pursued by a helicopter which would be firing simulated machine gunfire. As Mr. Morrow was running across the river, he would be carrying two children. This scene was supposed to depict Vic Morrow rescuing these two Vietnamese children as a Vietnamese Village was under attack. Mr. Landis continued that, as Mr. Morrow crossed the river carrying the two children, numerous large explosions would be occurring to either side and to the front and back of the actors.

   Mr. Landis told Ms. Liroff that they wanted her to obtain two children “Vietnamese, Korean or Thai, approximately 6 or 7 years of age” for use in the aforementioned scene. She stated that based on the children being in close proximity to explosions and close proximity to a helicopter, there was no way she would be involved in hiring the children.

   She also explained that because of the danger, there was no way they could obtain necessary permits through the normal channels. She stated that she continued explaining to Mr. Landis and those present that additionally, the entire scene was to be shot in the late night and early morning hours and for that reason and in addition to the danger, there was no way proper permits could be obtained. Ms. Liroff continued by telling Mr. Landis that she would not be involved with the procurement of the children for this scene. She stated that her boss, Mike Fenton, concurred with her.

   Ms. Liroff continued that John Landis, after receiving her refusal to obtain the children, immediately turned towards George Folsey and began to hold a conversation with him. During this time, Dan Allingham entered the office. Ms. Liroff stated that Landis, Folsey, and Allingham began having a conversation about hiring children in spite of the fact that they couldn’t get them through normal legal channels.

   She stated that John Landis told Folsey and Allingham that they would “just have to get the kids off the street, we won’t put them on any records and we won’t tell anyone what we’re doing.”

   She recalls that George Folsey commented something to the effect, “Okay fine, that’s how we’ll do it.” (Police Report)

   Liroff also supplied the police with her casting notes for the day, where she’d written,

   “Two Vietnamese kids, boy/girl (Chinese or Korean, Thai. Two nights.)”

   Besides substantiating that Landis had asked them to procure children at all (which Landis denied), Liroff’s testimony also established that the filmmakers believed that the shooting would or could take “two nights.”

   This is significant because the parents were only given an abridged version of the sequence before committing to participate, and were told they would only be needed between 7:00pm–1:00am on a single night. But once they arrived on set, the filmmakers casually and repeatedly extended the families’ time commitment across two nights, past the point where all four parents were able to supervise their children as planned, and to the point of exhaustion. Along with the misrepresentation of the danger involved, then, the misrepresentation of the time commitment is a major issue in assessing the filmmakers’ culpability.

   By 1984, Liroff supplemented her police statement, going on the record about the involvement of Executive Producer Frank Marshall (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Poltergeist, E.T.).

   She testified that two days after the alarming casting session, during a scheduled production phone call with Marshall, whom she knew from her work on Poltergeist and E.T., she alerted him to Landis’s explicitly stated intentions to hire children “off the street.” He told her he would take care of it.

   During cross-examination, the defence suggested that she couldn’t have been seriously alarmed by Landis’s statements, because she hadn’t followed up about the matter further at the time.

   The young casting agent replied, “I told the director it was illegal. I told the producer, the production manager. I didn’t know it was my job to be a policeman. In hindsight I wish I had.” (qtd. in LaBrecque 162)

3. June 26th: Fourth draft; budget increase approved.
4. July 6th: Discussions about hiring children illegally (without permits).

   The issue of the children lay dormant for the rest of June as the Landis group geared up for production, starting with his prologue to the film, “Real Scary”.

   Meanwhile, the new Vietnamese Village sequence was still awaiting official studio approval, which it received late in the month. Landis’s group would receive an additional $200,000 to make it, on top of the segment’s existing $1,000,000 budget (Chain, ch. 18). Landis turned in a fourth and final draft on June 26th, 1982, but it contained only a few minor adjustments.

   After the production got notice that the budget had been officially approved by the studio, the account of how the hiring proceeded varies: namely, between that of Co-Producer and Director John Landis and his “office” co-defendants, and that of Executive Producer Frank Marshall, known only by inference, in the absence of any public reference to the matter except for his 1990 LA Times interview.

   The problem faced by the Landis group was that according to California state labour laws, well-known within the film industry, children under the age of 8 could only be worked until 6:30pm.

   Marshall has never accounted for basic questions concerning his failure to prevent the illegal hiring of two children for a dangerous practical effects scene despite being alerted to Landis’s intention to do exactly that.

   Defendants Landis, Folsey, and Allingham, for their part, have consistently maintained that after the budget was approved, Marshall twice visited their offices, an assemblage of trailers on the Universal Studios lot, to address the practical issue presented by the addition of the Vietnamese Village rescue sequence to the script: once early in the week of July 5th–9th, 1982, and once at the end of that same week (see Braun’s letters to the DA; Landis’s trial attorney James Neal’s opening statement; Landis’s trial testimony; Folsey’s interviews with journalists).

   The discussion the first day, the defendants say, turned on whether it would be possible for the production to get waivers from the labour board that would allow the children to work at night legally.

   According to the defendants, Marshall said he would have “the woman who works with me call the labor board and see about the viability of getting waivers.” (LaBrecque 13) They assert that Marshall was referring to Associate Producer, Kathleen Kennedy.

5. July 9th: Defendants conspire to hire children illegally.

   On Friday the 9th, the defendants say, Marshall returned to the offices and informed them that the call had been made, and that unfortunately waivers could only be gotten until 8:00 or 8:30pm. However, this being July, it wouldn’t even be dark by 8:00 or 8:30pm.

   So that the children could work despite the late hour, the co-defendants decided to go ahead with Landis’s plan to hire children which—they say—happened with Marshall’s explicit support.

   Landis testified about the meeting as follows:

   JL: Frank told us that they had called the labour board and the labour board said they would give a waiver but only until eight or eight-thirty, which to our purposes then, our state of mind then, wouldn’t accomplish what we needed because it was still light at eight-thirty.

   James Neal (Landis’s trial attorney): Was any decision made at this time regarding the use of children?

   JL: Yes.

   Neal: What was that decision, John?

   JL: We decided to break the law. We decided, wrongly, to violate the labor code.

   Neal: John, what was your thinking at that time?

   JL: I thought, and we discussed, that we would honor not the letter of the law but the spirit of the law. And I thought, and we discussed, that we would find children whose parents—we would explain to them that we were doing a technical violation, that we were working them without a teacher on the set—explain to them what we were going to do. And if we could find people who would fulfill that function as we thought, and I can only speak for my state of mind then, and I understand that was wrong—but we decided to go ahead and try to find parents who would fulfill that, what I thought would be the spirit of the law, and be the guardians, be there with them on the set.

   Neal: John, that was wrong. You recognize that?

   JL: Yes.

   Neal: Out of this meeting or as a result of this meeting, John, was anybody given the task of obtaining the children?

   JL: Frank [Marshall] and George [Folsey, Jr.] volunteered to try and find people.

   In the end, they say, the task fell to Folsey.

   Folsey later told LaBrecque:

   We wouldn’t have hired the kids on a Spielberg picture unless either Spielberg or his people knew it. I mean, that would have been a terrible thing to do, put them in that position. The fact that Frank [Marshall] agreed to do it made me feel that it was okay, that it was really his responsibility, too. (14)

   And legally speaking, Folsey was correct—a point confirmed by Allingham’s attorney in 1985. According to standards set by the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement (DLSE), the production company was deemed the sole employer of minors and crew members, with liability for their employment and supervision falling squarely on the company’s officers.

   By July 9th, Folsey only had twelve days until the last scheduled day of shooting, July 21st, and scrambled for solutions.

   After the third draft had been typed back in June, Landis ordered his studio-assigned typist (Alpha Campbell) to keep it under lock and key. This created an operational bottleneck as various production personnel attempted to get a copy of the latest draft from the production coordinator (Donna Schuman) who herself was being denied by Campbell.

   Schuman asked Folsey (a family friend outside of work) about the reason for the secrecy, and he told her:

   “Because John has written two children into the script. We’re going to have to work them without permits. And we don’t want that information getting out.” (qtd. in Farber and Green [hereafter F&G] 70)

   The conspiracy soon expanded to include a production secretary (Cynthia Nigh); the 1st AD (Elie Cohn); the 2nd AD (Anderson House); and a DGA intern (Hilary Leach, acting mostly as a PA).

   House had clocked the violation as soon as he was brought on board and read the script:

   “I assumed that there was stage work and that we’d be working with the children on a stage so that the children would not be working after hours—later than 6:30. He [Unit Production Manager Dan Allingham] responded that, no, they were going to be working ‘night for night.’” (Grand Jury)

   In Leach’s words, “as a member... of the DGA we know the rules, I know the rules, and I knew that we were not following the rules.” (Grand Jury)

   However, comprehension of the seriousness of the action they were entering into varied, with many unaware of how Landis actually intended to shoot the scene. Perhaps he had devised a way to do so safely.

   Schuman assumed that the children would obviously not be placed in any proximity to the conflagration Landis had been hyping up around the office for weeks.

   It was always described as a big, huge explosion. John said he was going to blow that village off the face of the earth. You couldn’t put two little kids in the middle of that. (qtd. in F&G 82)

   At Folsey’s request, Schuman even volunteered her husband (Dr. Hal Schuman) as a pipeline to LA’s Asian community. Dr. Schuman had previously managed a community mental health center predominantly staffed by and serving Asian clientele, and remained friendly with several of the counsellors still working there.

6. July 12th–14th: Children solicited.

   Dr. Schuman called Dr. Peter Chen. He kept it brief, explaining that his wife worked for “Warner Brothers,” and that they were looking for two Asian children, a boy and a girl, ages 6 to 8, for a few face close-ups, and to be carried across a river by an actor (Dr. Chen to the NTSB). He was calling to ask if Dr. Chen knew of any suitable families that might be interested in participating.

   (Dr. Schuman may or may not have mentioned special effects and a lack of permitting—on this point Dr. Schuman and Dr. Chen disagreed.)

   Dr. Chen thought about his own 6-year-old niece, Renee, and referred Dr. Schuman to his colleague, Dr. Daniel Le, a Vietnamese refugee-immigrant himself, who had two sons, 4-year-old Christopher, and 7-year-old Myca (short for “America-Canada,” in recognition of the family’s asylum nations).

   Dr. Chen relayed the opportunity to his brother and Dr. Le, respectively, who each presented it to their children, who were thrilled by the prospect. Each family confirmed their interest with Dr. Schuman. Subsequently, Dr. Schuman passed along an invitation to visit the set to meet the producers (Landis and Folsey), who would give them more details and answer their questions. The studio would send a van to take them there and back, northwest through Los Angeles, two days later on Friday, July 16th.

   Meanwhile, Folsey’s search had taken him to Elysian Heights Elementary School in a then-predominantly Asian neighbourhood (Echo Park) where he was put in touch with an educational support worker, Ms. Julie Hua, whose two children and her sister’s four were suitable for the roles. They were invited to the set the following night, Thursday, July 15th—the evening before the Chen and Le families were set to arrive.

7. July 15th–16th: Casting sessions at Franklin Canyon.

   Folsey picked up the Hua sisters and their six children in a limousine (Chain, ch. 24), and accompanied them across town to Franklin Canyon Park, near to Warner Bros. and Universal Studios. The bona fide Hollywood movie set was buzzing with about a hundred cast, crew, and guests passing through, filming the 1954 Alabama KKK timeline. Landis looked over the children, and selected the two youngest for the roles.

   On Friday, July 16th, the Chen and Le families were picked up by a driver in a white van and driven across the city to Franklin Canyon Reservoir for their meeting with Landis and Folsey. Only Dr. Le was absent among the four parents, as he was assured by Folsey that there was no need for him (or his wife for that matter) to miss their usual Friday night professional development workshop. It was the first of many times Folsey would casually suggest separating the children from their parents.

   About 15–20 minutes after the families arrived, Folsey approached, along with John Landis’s mother (Shirley Levine). Introductions were made, and then, as they waited for Landis to become available, Folsey summarized the sequence:

   Hoa-Kim Le (HKL): He showed me who is Vic Morrow, I never met him before. And, “that man is Vic Morrow” and he said, “Vic Morrow walk up in village and he saw only two Vietnamese children, one boy and one girl, and they are the only two survivors in the village and then we pretend like the helicopter come over and shoot at the village. Shoot and bomb the village.” And in my mind, I thought the village was bombed. Oh, yes, he told me, “The village was bombed, was destroyed and there are only two children, two survivors from the village. So, and then after that, the helicopter was come out, and Vic Morrow just take the children and run across the river.”

   Sheriff’s Department (SD): That was after the village was bombed?

   HKL: Right. After the village was bombed. Because the children are the only two survivors in the village after the bomb.

   SD: This was who telling you this again?

   HKL: George Folsey, the producer, co-producer. That’s why he told me only two survivors in the village. And then, he said “Vic Morrow will walk across the river and we put a little,” ah, just like he said, “a little things on the river bed and something — Like a firecracker sound. ... it must be a little scary but it’s very safe.”

   The Chens remembered Folsey’s summary in less detail.

   NTSB: So as far as you knew, the children were only going [to be] carried across the river?

   Mark Chen: Carried across the river. That’s all. That’s why he said the children didn’t have to speak anything. The actor just carries the two children across the river.

   Only Hoa-Kim Le (interviewed again a few days after the above) recounted an ending in which, after Vic and the children reached the safety of a shed across the river, a helicopter was to “pick them up.”

   George Folsey Jr. told Mr. & Mrs. Le that they needed Vietnamese children for the movie; that the two children would be the last two (2) survivors left alone with actor Vic Morrow. Morrow was to pick up the two (2) children, and run across a stream or river to a shed for safety. A helicopter was to pick them up. (DLSE summary, August 2nd, 1982)

   Folsey maintains that he did tell the families about the explosives, which is consistent with the accounts of the production secretaries (Schuman and Nigh) who overheard Folsey mentioning the explosives in broken English over the phone as he described the scene to parents of prospective actors, although downplaying the pyrotechnical aspect of the sequence as “like watching fireworks.”

   Schuman asked Folsey why he bothered to mention the explosives to parents if they would not affect the children. “It is the right thing to do,” she quoted him as saying. “When we are going to have explosions on the set, you ought to tell everybody up front. I mean, you know, God forbid anything goes wrong, and then if you tell everybody then you are covered.” (qtd. in LaBrecque 21)

   Finally Landis arrived with Morrow in tow; more introductions were made, and then Landis told Folsey to hire them.

   Folsey broke the news to Mrs. Hua the following day, that her sister’s two children were no longer being considered for the roles.

   Mr. Folsey said in a very low and sorry voice that our children had not been chosen... He said Mr. Landis had found children younger and smaller. We were very disappointed. (qtd. in F&G 116)

   He’d already promised the Huas some money for their trouble, however, and said he would drop it off that Wednesday evening (July 21st) along with an additional $300, if she and her family could stay on standby until 9:00pm in case the two smaller children couldn’t act.

8. July 19th: The production moves to Indian Dunes.

   The production migrated to Indian Dunes on Monday, July 19th.

   That evening, according to the 1st AD (Elie Cohn), he, Landis, Folsey, and Allingham held a clandestine meeting to discuss “what day to bring the children, and to make it as short as possible.”

9. July 20th: First day of filming at Indian Dunes; live ammunition used on set.

   On the morning of Tuesday, July 20th, a 75-year-old Warner Bros. accountant (Jim Henderling) received a call from Bonne Radford.

   Radford is listed in the Twilight Zone production directory as an “accountant” from the “Warner Bros” faction of the production. Radford was later the longtime paymaster/accountant of Amblin Entertainment, and sister of Mary Radford, who is listed as the “Ass’t to Frank Marshall”.

   Pursuant to the deal memo negotiated between Spielberg, Landis, Marshall, and Warner Bros., all production expenses above $500 needed to be co-signed by two gatekeepers. (1) Henderling, a 75-year-old payroll watchdog on the side of the studio, and (2) Marshall, on the side of the two Producer/Directors, and their and his various production companies.

   Henderling told investigators that Radford asked him “how they could hire children without going through the Screen Extras Guild.” (Police Report)

   He told her that he didn’t know, but would make some inquiries. He called the Screen Extras Guild but remained in the dark. He then mentioned the request to his boss, the Warner Bros. VP of Production assigned to the film, Ed Morey, who disapproved.

   But before Henderling could get back to Radford, she called him, explaining that they would not be using children in the end after all, so the point was moot. Instead, she asked if Henderling could co-sign a $2,000 cheque payable to George Folsey, Jr., for a “personal cash advance,” that she would courier to Henderling immediately.

   Henderling said he would ask Morey and call her back. He apprised Morey of the situation and that he suspected the production intended to use the money to hire children illegally. “The whole method seemed unorthodox,” Henderling testified; “I didn’t feel like signing it.” (176)

   But Morey advised him that an Associate Producer had every right to request such an advance, and told Henderling to sign the cheque.

   The cheque, with Henderling’s and Marshall’s signatures on it, became a key piece of evidence linking Twilight Zone Productions, Inc., as well as the production’s payroll entity, DISC Management Services Group, Inc., to the illegal hiring.

   Meanwhile, at Indian Dunes, the production had begun shooting the story’s Vietnam sequence, in which Morrow’s character emerges from a tropical swamp before hearing a Viet Cong patrol, and hiding himself behind some reeds. But his rustling is noticed by a U.S. Army patrol, who halt, and wait for him to settle, before spraying the plants with machine gun fire.

   During the production of this scene, Morrow (who’d agreed to do most of his own stunts) was waiting behind the plants for Landis’s signal, at which point he would leap out of the way, and then the special effects team would fire with semi-automatic marble guns. But the pressure was weak, and they weren’t punching through the leaves. The Special Effects Supervisor (Paul Stewart) offered to replace them with squibs (small explosives) but when Landis found out that it would take fifteen minutes, Stewart suggested they use live ammunition instead. He happened to have three Remington shotguns and ammo in the back of the special effects truck.

   

   Many of the crew were startled by the practice at the time, even in the context of a shoot already fraught with technical snags, safety violations, and near-misses, and among Landis’s notoriously rough, ramshackle—and loaded—production team.

   Surely Marshall was aware of at least some of these red flags?

   According to Chain, in August 1982, Marshall’s lawyers downplayed his involvement to Cal/OSHA, emphasizing the distinction between Spielberg’s group and Landis’s group, which kept separate offices on separate lots. Marshall was dismissed from consideration for indictment on the basis that he had only been on the set three or four times, when in fact it had been at least eight of the twelve days of production (Chain, ch. 31).

   

10. July 21st–22nd: First night of filming with the children.

    

    According to Farber & Green, “As they entered the gates of the park, George Folsey turned to Dr. Le. He was relieved to be on private property... The county officials would not be able to get in.” (118)

    As of Wednesday, July 21st, the Chen and Le families were still under the impression that their obligation to the filmmakers was only for six hours, 7:00pm–1:00am. Mrs. Chen had made clear at the July 16th meeting that she was mindful of her son’s sleep schedule.

    But unbeknownst to them, the timeframe the filmmakers had given them was unrealistically ambitious: subsequent to their 7:00pm arrival on-set, the production—still bogged down shooting a tracking shot of Morrow walking into the village—required the children to shoot a dramatically significant scene inside the hut. After that, they still had the full rescue/river-crossing sequence—involving three distinct multi-camera helicopter-and-explosives setups—along with a short scene in a shed, and various pick-up shots.

    The families, meanwhile, were being sequestered in a trailer a mile away from the set, bewildered by the long delay.

    Mark Chen:

    When we got there, we were waiting until midnight. What we had been told was the hours we would be there was only from 7 to 1 o’clock in the morning. It’s over midnight. We said, “How come, there’s nothing to do for our children?” So they say, “Well, just be patient, there will be.”

    Hoa-Kim Le:

    I keep asking him until now he said “We cannot do it. We have to do it after dinner.” I said, “what you mean by dinner? When is dinner? I never have dinner. A man there said twelve o’clock.” I said “Midnight? Dinner? This is strange to me and I expect he finish before midnight.” but then he said. “We worked day already.” We already got there and what can I say, “No I don’t want it? I go home?” I’m not that type woman. He said there’s no danger. So we stayed there, we stayed in the mobile home.

    The Special Effects Supervisor (Paul Stewart) told LaBrecque, “I knew by one o’clock that we would never finish... When you do a motion picture you know the Assistant Director is gonna say, ‘Oh, yeah, we’re gonna finish.’ But you walk away knowing he’s full of it. I know what I gotta do and it’s not humanly possible.” (30)

    Folsey was advised by 1st AD (Elie Cohn) at 2:00am that it would be impossible to complete everything that had been planned for the night.

    Landis testified that, at 4:30am,

    “Elie came to me and said the dolly shot had taken so long and we were behind, and he felt that once we finished the dialogue scene, he recommended that we send the actors home and not rush anything and just go a day over schedule.”

    “Alright. What did you say about that?”

    “I thought it sounded like a good idea and I went to Frank Marshall and George Folsey and we talked about it and agreed to do it.”

    Once again, Spielberg’s right-hand man (allegedly) appears at the locus of decision-making concerning the 6- and 7-year-old children. Marshall, having just finished work on Poltergeist and E.T., involving myriad children working at night among special effects, would have been well-aware of the relevant labour laws. Indeed, he could fairly be described as a “highly placed... acknowledged expert,” as Landis’s first trial lawyer, Harland Braun, would later point out to the DA’s Office.

    Folsey informed the parents on the set, provisionally asking them if they would consider returning the following day. He secured confirmation back at the trailer as he was paying them out for their children’s night’s work.

    NTSB: You were saying that Mr. Folsey was talking to you about that the children just need to show up by themselves, and that the parents, you and your wife, didn’t need to come. Is that correct?

    MC (Mark Chen): That’s correct.

    NTSB: What was your response to that?

    MC: To be a parent, we really want to be with the children.

    NTSB: I understand.

    MC: It was the first—the face shoot. It looked very simple. You know, they didn’t have to talk, they didn’t have to open their mouths. They just looked at the actor, Vic Morrow, that’s all. When he says it’s going to be very quick, they tried to finish earlier, so actually the parents don’t have to come, just have the children show up, that’s all.

    NTSB: You mean they didn’t say anything about any other shot? They were going to re-take the shot, just taking a picture of the children that evening?

    MC: We hadn’t seen the actor carry the children across the river. So we know that would be the next shot. After that, that will be completed. They take so long. He says, “Just come back tonight, and they will try to do it as soon as they can.”

    NTSB: Have your child back home, is that what you’re saying?

    MC: He said he’d try to make it before 3:30 a.m.

    NTSB: 3:30 in the morning? That would be Friday morning?

    MC: Friday morning. Since I was very tired, so I say, “okay.” I told my wife I’d have her come with Renee. The same thing with Le’s family. The father was the one to take My-Ca on Thursday.

    The Chen family knew they were committing to another late night, but had no idea that the roll-over day would be of an entirely different tenor, reserved for the segment’s pyrotechnical and helicopter shots.

    The Le family, however, were under the impression they were going to be finished within an hour or two.

    “The first thing,” Dr. Le reminded her of the exact words Folsey used.

    “The first thing tomorrow when you come back,” Mrs. Le said. They would be paid the same rate, $500, even if they finished early.

    Mrs. Le begged out of it, explaining that although their children had enjoyed the experience, they, the parents, were very tired. Folsey had advised them to nap while they waited, but it hadn’t been so easy—and the next day (today) being Thursday—she and her husband had to go to work, as did Mr. Chen.

    HKL: And well we look at each other and said, “I have to work, my husband has to work, and Mark had to return back to work. We cannot bring the children here.”

    And George said, “Well, if you cannot bring the children here, I will pick up the children and bring them here and after the movie I will bring them back, and will treat them like my children. I promise with you.” And after he left there, his children were there too. I met his wife and his boy. He is playing the same as my boy so, well, I thought there was no danger, nothing, just like that. The children happy, giggle, laughing. One more day, maybe. I ask my husband, come back with the boy. ‘...we will pick you up at six o’clock and we finish early, by hour and a half hour, we finish.’ (Le family, NTSB)

    In any case, Dr. Le conceded that he had mostly just taken the filmmakers at their word.

    I don’t know the law. We are the new immigrants into this country. I trust Dr. Schuman and Mr. [Peter] Chen, what they are doing. I do not question them... Folsey appeared to be very honest, nice person and I trust him. And I thought in my mind, because I am ignorant about the movie industry in this country, I thought this may be the way the movie industry working at dealings in this country.

    (qtd. in LaBrecque 32)

    In the end, the families decided they could accommodate the beggarly filmmakers.

    Meanwhile, the 2nd AD (House), as he was wrapping up, was recognized by one of the six Fire Safety Officers on set, Jack Tice. Tice recognized House from a commercial they had worked on together. House couldn’t place him, so Tice reminded him that he had been working on that project not as an FSO, but in his capacity as a studio teacher/children’s welfare worker.

    This was a fateful opportunity, as House had already petitioned Allingham three times and Landis once on the illegality and seriousness of the hiring.

    Tragically, however, when the critical moment arrived, House didn’t tip Tice to the illegal hiring. Instead, he sent a note back to the production office, warning Allingham about a possible fly in the ointment, hoping that he would be the one to call off the risky plan.

11. July 22nd–23rd: Second night (unscheduled roll-over); fatal accident occurs.

    About six hours later, the crew began arriving back on set.

    Mr. Pittman stated in substance that he is a Teamster truck driver and was performing his duties as driver of the special effects 10-ton truck during the filming of the Landis episode of the “Twilight Zone”. Mr. Pittman stated that the afternoon preceding the accident, he arrived on the set at approximately 12:00 o’clock in the afternoon and that prior to arriving at the location, Indian Dunes Park, he had purchased a case of Budweiser beer and soda pop for the special effects crew. He stated that he kept these beverages in a cooler on the back of the 10-ton powder truck. He stated that the 10-ton powder truck was positioned in the area of the Chapman crane and for most of the evening, this is where he spent his time. (Police Report)

    Meanwhile, back at the office, a production assistant, Carolyn Lee-Epstein, testified that she was instructed by Folsey to go over to the Burbank Studios and contact Bonne Radford to pick up petty cash which was going to be paid to the Asian children for their participation in the final scene. Lee-Epstein said that Folsey instructed her that “no W-2 forms would be filled out for the children.”

    ... Miss Epstein stated that she drove to the Burbank Studios and contacted Bonnie Radford who appeared to be expecting her. She said she picked up petty cash and believed that she had signed for it. She stated that the money was inside a sealed brown envelope.

    On Lee-Epstein’s return, she observed the envelope to contain $1,000, an amount she remembered discussing in the days leading up to the transaction, during numerous conversations she overheard about the hiring.

    Miss Epstein stated that around the beginning of July 1982, approximately 1800 hours, she was asked by Folsey to drive her to a mechanic’s garage in the San Fernando Valley so that Mr. Folsey might pick up his car which was being worked on. Miss Epstein stated that during this drive, a general discussion about the “Twilight Zone” movie was taking place. During this drive, Mr. Folsey asked Carolyn if she knew any Oriental children that “we” can use. Miss Epstein stated that although Mr. Folsey did not refer to the final scene of the movie, she knew that this was what he was referring to. She had read the script. She stated that she didn’t understand why Mr. Folsey was asking her if she knew any Oriental children, however, possibly because she was Oriental and maybe had family or friends with Oriental children. She stated that it didn’t seem too out of the ordinary at the time. She told Mr. Folsey that she didn’t know anyone who had Oriental children, and that Mr. Folsey responded in a nonchalant manner, “Well, we have to be careful about this.”

    Meanwhile, Allingham got back to House, advising him not to panic about the FSO in question, and to tell the Location Manager (Richard Vane) to keep tabs on his movements.

    Vane testified at the grand jury in 1983 that he knowingly complied.

    By the time the DGA trainee (Hilary Leach) returned to the set, Landis’s inner circle had developed a new operating protocol.

    Hilary Leach, the Directors’ [sic] Guild of America trainee, whose job included escorting the children on the set, was told by House to refer to My-Ca and Renee on her walkie-talkie only as “the Vietnamese,” just in case any of the fire safety officers overheard the radio transmissions. (LaBrecque 35)

    Dr. Le, Myca, Mrs. Chen, and Renee were picked up by the same white van, traversed Los Angeles once again, and arrived back on set by about 7:40pm.

    NTSB: When you arrived, did anybody talk to you?

    SC (Shyan-Huei Chen): No.

    NTSB: When was the first time anybody talked to you or the children, that evening?

    SC: The heavy-set lady with the walkie-talkie talked to us.

    Chen family lawyer: I believe her name is Hilary Leach.

    NTSB: She was the trainee director?

    Lawyer: Correct.

    NTSB: What did she say to you?

    SC: She say the children should go to make-up and change their clothes.

    Peter Chen: So then she took the children to another trailer, is that right?

    NTSB: She took them to a trailer?

    SC: Right. Then we took popcorn and a soft drink for the children. After a while, the lady, the same lady, said the children were to go to the scene.

    NTSB: The children were to go into the village, to the scene, to be filmed?

    SC: Right. (Chen family, NTSB)

12. 9:30pm shot

    The script supervisor (Kathryn Wooten) recalled seeing the children in the “9:30 rescue sequence,” assuming they were “pretty much put in at the last minute and taken out right away.”

    The helicopter hovered at approximately 60 feet overhead, well above the frame, generating propwash for the scene below. As well, the Unit Production Manager (Allingham) was using it as a platform for the unwieldy (as he had been warned) “Nite-Sun” spotlight the production had rented specially for the segment. He was aiming it out the pilot’s side window (the pilot was flying from the passenger side so that he could keep watch on the nearby cliff face), struggling to keep Morrow centered and in focus; making the hovering helicopter both a technical platform and a dramatic set-piece.

    Morrow can be seen approaching Renee and Myca behind a hut—where they’d been placed in wait next to two armed, hair-trigger explosives—and scooping them one under each arm, before running out of frame moments before the explosives are detonated.

    One hundred feet away, across the water, Mrs. Chen was startled; she and Dr. Le stood beside Folsey as they watched two fireballs roll up the face of the cliff.

    NTSB: There was one explosion during this period of time. Where was the helicopter?

    SC (Shyan-Huei Chen): Here.

    NTSB: Over this area, so the helicopter was—

    SC: Just right on top of the hut.

    NTSB: On top of the number 4 hut. Now, one explosion only. Did that surprise you?

    SC: Yes.

    NTSB: ...were you surprised, Mrs. Chen, when an explosion went off?

    SC: I’m very surprised, because it’s too noisy—

    NTSB: Too noisy and your eardrums hurt?

    SC: And the sand.

    MC: The sand was all over.

    SC: Yeah, my eyes.

    MC: She was scared.

    SC: Scared, very scared. Then I saw my daughter was crying.

    MC: Renee was crying at that moment.

    SC: Renee had sand in her eyes.

    MC: John Landis went over and picked up Renee and held Renee in his arms.

    Lawyer: Because she was crying.

    NTSB: Okay. So; Mr. Landis, after your daughter was crying, picked her up, calmed her down, and—

    SC: Came to me.

    NTSB: And then came to you? What did he tell you?

    SC: He didn’t say anything.

    PC (Peter Chen): Mrs. Chen was asking Renee to come over to her side, and then she asked Renee whether she was afraid. Renee said yes, she was very scared. Renee’s clothes were wet. So Mrs. Chen was afraid Renee might catch a cold, so she took Renee to have her clothes changed. Then Mrs. Chen asked a lady with the pair of glasses [Hilary Leach] whether the filming was all over, and the lady said she did not know. Then she asked Mrs. Chen and Renee to go inside of the trailer and rest there.

    NTSB: Did you complain to Mr. Landis or anyone about the first explosion, the first time you heard it?

    SC: Yeah, I just told George Folsey. He just said no, not dangerous. Everything’s okay.

    PC: Mrs. Chen says that she did ask George Folsey whether it was going to be dangerous, and George told her that no, it’s going to be noisy, but not dangerous.

    Lawyer: Let the record reflect that when Mrs. Chen was explaining what Mr. Folsey said, that she put her right hand on her husband’s shoulder, and I think that meant that Mr. Folsey touched her on the shoulder and said it’s okay. There’s no danger.

    Dr. Le later testified, as well, that he “had thought that the work was over after the nine-thirty shot and asked if he and his son could go home, but Folsey said, “It’s not quite ready yet. You need to stay behind. We have some other things to do.” (LaBrecque 173)

    Shyan-Huei Chen NTSB interview, cont’d:

    NTSB: After Renee went back into the trailer and changed clothes, did you go out and take another shot, or what were the events after that?

    PC (Peter Chen, translating for SC): By the time they changed Renee’s clothes and put her back to sleep, it was about 10 o’clock. About midnight, the heavy-set lady with the walkie-talkie woke them up.

    NTSB: That would be Hilary Leach?

    PC: Hilary Leach, yes. It was break time, lunch break. So she asked Mrs. Chen and Renee whether they wanted to have anything to eat. She said no, we’re fine. She left, and after a while, George Folsey came back.

    NTSB: What did he say?

    PC: George Folsey stopped to talk to Mr. and Mrs. Chen. Let me summarize what he said. If you are approached by a fireman, just mention that you are friends, you are here to help out. Don’t mention anything about the money that’s been paid. This was the major content of Mr. Folsey’s conversation with them.

    NTSB: Now. You arrived at about 7:30.

    PC: Yes.

    NTSB: At about 9:30, you brought the children out—

    PC: After the first explosion—

    NTSB: And then brought them back to the trailer, changed their clothes, and put them to sleep in the trailer. You were awakened—

    PC: Awakened at about midnight.

    NTSB: That’s where I want to go. Between the time you arrived and midnight, there was only one explosion?

    PC: Yes, according to her memory.

    Peter Malone (Fire Marshal’s Office): May I just ask one thing. How far away was the trailer from where the village was, approximately?

    MC (Mark Chen): Can I answer that? It’s more than a mile.

    NTSB: Oh, is it that far away?

    MC: Right in front of the park.

    NTSB: That’s where Vic Morrow’s trailer was at?

    MC: Vic Morrow, actually, even Vic Morrow’s trailer is very close by the scene, but ours is far down, by the entrance. You can see the old houses. That’s why we didn’t know what was going on. [We] were all in the trailer.

13. 11:30pm shot

    

    

    The spectators that night were dazzled by the major 11:30pm helicopter and pyrotechnics spectacle. Although the filmmakers were compelled to deny that any of the evening’s shots constituted “stunts,” per se, the NTSB later determined them to be such, according to the standards of the industry.

    Cynthia Nigh, Folsey’s assistant, recalled Folsey’s rather incriminating aside as they watched the 11:30 shot (Grand Jury):

    DA (Kesselman): Did Folsey say something as explosions going off.

    CN: Well, he said that he was glad his wife and kids didn’t come, they were going to come.

    DA: Did he [appear] to be surprised or shocked at their magnitude.

    CN: Yes.

    DA: What did you understand Folsey’s comment to mean?

    CN: That it was—I guess, that it was dangerous, and also that it was so late.

    DA: Before the explosions went off, he didn’t say, “it’s late, I’m glad they didn’t come?”

    CN: He could have, he said he was waiting for his kids and wife to come.

    DA: First time he said glad wife and kids didn’t come was as these explosions were going off?

    CN: Yes, it is.

    DA: Matter of common knowledge among many spectators that this last scene was going to be a spectacular series of explosions?

    CN: Yeah, it was just going to be a big finale with five cameras. Just big.

    DA: This is what Landis had expressed even in the office, that this was going to be a big, big explosion or explosions?

    CN: A big finale.

    By the time the rattled flight crew set back down, most of the rest of the crew had migrated to the cast and crew “lunch” taking place at the canteen about a quarter-mile away.

    The spectators were unaware that during the shot the pilot (Dorcey Wingo)—a Vietnam War veteran, who had never worked a film before, and neglected to walk the set beforehand to learn the location of the explosives—had a startle response, and turned to his left, into the village, opening up its flank to the next explosive blast, which he had no idea was coming. Flames roasted the open cabin.

    The flight list for all three shots that night was:

    1. Dorcey Wingo (Pilot)—later charged with three counts
    2. Dan Allingham (UPM)—later charged with two counts
    3. Gary McLarty (Stunt Coordinator)
    4. Kenny Endoso (Stuntman #2)
    5. Roger Smith (Camera D)
    6. Randall Robinson (Camera D Ass’t)

    DW: Chickenshit! Chickenshit! Chickenshit!

    DA: That’s too much, let’s get out of here!

    DW: This is bullshit! They didn’t tell me about that! They didn’t tell me about that!

    As they landed, the Pilot (Wingo) complained to the Unit Production Manager (Allingham) about the near miss, and demanded that further precautions be taken. He was furious and wanted to address Landis himself, but the UPM said he would take it up with Landis directly. Typically, Unit Production Manager is an office job—and indeed Allingham was only charged on the “office counts,” pertaining to the illegal hiring. However, on this occasion, Allingham was helping out the production by manning the heavy “Nite-Sun” spotlight, functioning (narratively) as the helicopter’s searchlight, tracked on Morrow and the children as best it could.

    DA: You’re right, Dorcey, safety first. I’ve got a vacation to start this weekend. Safety first.

    RR: He was as startled as I was. Yeah it wasn’t much fun. I didn’t want to have to do that again. And I wanted to make sure that...—and I knew that Dorcey was angry because he was fuming about it all the way down, to Dan Allingham, about it. Dan kept saying, “no, no, you’re right. Safety first. ‘Ta-da-ta-da-ta-da,’ so forth.” (Grand Jury)

    By the time the helicopter landed, Landis was across the water at the village set, but only Allingham had on his waders. Wingo and Robinson bided their time to hear their concerns addressed. Eventually they found Landis up in the basket of the Chapman crane, working out the angle of Camera B (Wide master, Steve Lydecker) for the final shot.

    RR: I wanted to be there when this meeting went on to let them know we weren’t too happy about it. So I went down to the shore there and stood with Dorcey, and Landis was in the water wading just in front of us.

    RR: I asked Dorcey about it and whether the intensity was a little much. I mean, I was trying to get feedback from the people on the ground as to whether or not I actually went through what I just did. And he showed me his face and said, “It practically scorched my face when I looked out the window.”

    RR: And right at that moment Landis turned around with kind of a grin on his face and said, “Well, that’s just a warm-up for what’s coming later,” and just sort of laughed like it was a joke. Then they broke for lunch, and then they left. That was the end of that.

    RR: When Landis turned around he said, “That’s nothing, that’s just a warm-up for what’s coming.” Something like that.

    District Attorney (Kesselman): What was your reaction to that?

    RR: Well, you know, I tried to put all this down. I was trying to get feedback on the ground from everybody during lunch whether or not I really was a little wrong about the intensity, or if that was just average, because it seemed a little much to me.

    RR: I’d worked in the film industry 16 years, since I was 19. I had worked on MacArthur and shows like that where they were blowing things up all the time. But they blow up cork. Never have I been anywhere near any intensity like that ever, period, in my life.

    The dozing families were woken up some time after midnight.

    Dr. Le:...About one-thirty. We slept right through lunch. They had lunch at twelve-thirty. We slept right through. Nobody came and woke us up. We slept right through. This about two o’clock, not very long before the accident, about two o’clock they come. The lady, I have her name, this Hillary Leach.

    NTSB: Yes.

    Dr. Le: She come with walky talky, she come to the trailer. She knock at the door. Now time to take children to go to the set. So, I and My-Ca were sleeping. We were awakened by her coming and knocking on the door.

    NTSB: Then they brought you to the set?

    Dr. Le: So, she took children to the trailer next door to get dressed and make up again. They put the old clothes, that were wet, so they put those clothes on. Then they took us by the Jeep to the set, straight to the set. And then I was standing there with George Folsey and a lot of people right at the set to see they get ready for the shooting. And then Rene’s mother, at that moment she was a little bit scared. She was standing near to me. And then George came right over and talked to me and her at the same time. “It may be scary but very safe, don’t worry.”

    NTSB: What was scary?

    Dr. Le: We look at it. The people get ready for the shooting. Rene’s mother had some senses, feeling there may be danger to her daughter. And then George came and reassured me and Rene’s mother...

    Shyan-Huei Chen NTSB interview, cont’d:

    NTSB: After lunch, when was the next time that Renee then went out for more filming?

    PC (Peter Chen, translating for SC): About 1 o’clock. Mrs. Chen and another lady with a pair of glasses took the children and their parents to the scene. At that time Mrs. Chen smelled the gas. They took the children from the scene and then brought the parents back to the other side of the river bank, and at that time Mrs. Chen again asked George Folsey as to whether it’s going to be dangerous, and George again said it’s going to be noisy but no danger.

    Note that Mrs. Chen herself (through Dr. Peter Chen’s translation) reports asking Folsey about the danger on two separate occasions: after the 9:30pm shot (when Folsey put his hand on her shoulder), and before the 2:20am shot.

    After being informed of the helicopter’s frightening near miss, around 12:30am or 1:00am, Landis led a small group of technicians with waders through the village shoreline, which included one wooden “sampan” boat attached to a long flimsy dock, four closed-air huts, and one open-air fish-drying hut. Somehow two additional explosives were placed close together, one on the shore, and one under the bamboo floor of the fish-drying hut.

    This is significant because the helicopter pilot directly warned both the director and the Special Effects Supervisor that there must be no debris whatsoever under his rotors; and the Special Effects Supervisor had told the Fire Marshal that there would be no detonations inside any of the huts, per the conditions of their fire permit.

    Stewart, interviewed on August 4th, 1982, suggested the open-air fish-drying hut didn’t actually count as a “hut”:

    “This really was not a hut, it was just a four legged thing with a cheap thatched roof.” (Police Report)

14. 2:00am shot (footage intended for Executive Producer’s documentary)

    

    At approximately 2:00am, a shot was taken (Camera C), slated “DOCU/2:00,” for the sake of Marshall’s intended “The Making Of...” documentary. This shot, apparently documenting technical preparations of some kind, was later used by the defence to support their contention that the fatal scene had been well-planned.

    Shortly before 2:20am, the DGA trainee (Leach) led the kids once again from the makeup trailer to the village, where Landis gave them and Morrow their final remarks, as he prepared for his heroic 100-foot dash.

    Landis then returned to his spot near Cameras C & F as the helicopter took flight. Standing with him were the 1st AD, Elie Cohn; Jerry Williams; and the propman, Mike Milgrom.

    Milgrom had just finished his last official duty of the night by giving Renee the “broken and naked Barbie doll” prop called for by the fourth draft, and had been recruited by the Special Effects Supervisor (Paul Stewart) and an SFX technician (Jerry Williams) to fire a powerful marble gun along Morrow’s path to simulate the helicopter’s guns strafing the water.

    He wasn’t the only crew member moonlighting that night: one of the truck drivers was also manning a marble gun, the Unit Production Manager, Dan Allingham, was managing the Nite-Sun up in the helicopter, and the Stunt Coordinator, Gary McLarty—who was also Vic Morrow’s stunt double—was firing one of two machine guns full of blanks from the helicopter. (Since he was not classifying the shot as a “stunt” per se, he was free to work as a technician.)

    Williams had wrapped himself in a blanket as protection from the sheets of dust that had stung his eyes during the 11:30 shot. The other SFX technician triggering explosives (James Camomile), standing downriver, was wearing a welder’s mask. He was standing with the SFX Supervisor (Stewart), whose role in the shot was to cue Camomile when it was his turn to fire, and then to radio a third SFX technician (Harry Stewart), further downriver, for his cue to fire two very large mortars near the dam.

    Standing further behind Landis was Production Designer Richard Sawyer. He was proud of the set he’d built. Earlier in the night, “one of the biggest producers in Hollywood” had put his arm around him and welcomed him to the big time (Cursed Films, S01E05). He’d just rebuilt the set, following the disarray of the 11:30pm shot, and lacquered the huts’ thatched roofs with liquid cement used as “fire fuel” in preparation for the final shot.

    Fourteen “mortars”—iron pots filled with gunpowder, gasoline, and sawdust—had been dug into the ground. The plan was that once Morrow and the kids were about 15 feet away from the village, the three members of the SFX team would begin triggering their respectively assigned series of explosives.

    Using the large white bullhorn, Landis turned towards the spectators gathered around the crane.

    He was widely witnessed to announce something to the effect of “I do not want anybody sitting down, I mean it.”

    The 1st AD (Cohn) told the grand jury:

    ...He [Landis] turned around and with a bullhorn he asked people “to stand up rather than being sitting down. I went to him and I said “why did you say that?” I definitely don’t remember that he said that before. And he said “because of the shock wave of the explosion. It will be easier for people to deal with.”

    DA (Kesselman): From that did you infer that he was expecting shock waves?

    EC: Yes.

15. 2:20am shot

    

    “Lower, lower, lower...!”

    “Fire, fire, fire...!”

    

    

    Camera A was standing in the water below, getting the close-up. Camera B was the Wide/Master, filming from the platform of the Chapman crane.

    Meanwhile, two more cameras (C & F) were positioned to get nearly redundant profile shots of Morrow and the kids traversing from left to right, bathed in the Nite-Sun spotlight (the very same one used in the truck scene in Close Encounters) as they pass a wooden “sampan” boat, and explosions go off at their backs, and then in the distance behind them, so that the flames illuminated the water in the foreground.

    

    

    

    The last two cameras (D & E) were aerial shots to be used as cutaways: one a 90-foot bird’s-eye view from over the cliff, and the other from the helicopter, getting one of the two machine gunners’ POV downwards.

    

    

    Morrow stumbled to his knees and was struggling to hold onto Renee, who had momentarily slipped out of his grasp and into the water below.

    The fourth explosion propelled a fireball up through the bamboo floor of the fish-drying hut, destroying the tail rotor of the helicopter and sending it into an uncontrolled spiral, just as the entire village began to thunder from a fresh, climactic round of background pyrotechnic blasts.

    

    NTSB: After the third explosion, after the third explosion, you said you felt some concussion, some forces on you, when you fell to the ground.

    Dr. Le: Yes.

    NTSB: And you mentioned some debris.

    Dr. Le: Yes.

    NTSB: Do you remember what type of debris that you felt?

    Dr. Le: Dust.

    NTSB: Dust?

    Dr. Le: A lot of dust flew over me, a lot of dust, and, I think, the wind; just like a strong wind blow.

    Thankfully, Folsey, Jr. was there to help, and just in the nick of time.

    And I grabbed the two parents of the two children who were standing with me and turned and pulled them and ran and dove into some bushes that were about 25 feet away from where we had been standing. And then we came back the helicopter was down. And I noticed that the... I didn’t realize this until I testified before the NTSB... that the—that rotor blade, that I think is part of the tail rotor of the helicopter—ended up exactly where the parents and I were standing to observe. (Grand Jury)

    Despite the accident being witnessed by some one hundred crew and guests, by the time the first police officer arrived at 2:45am, fewer than a dozen remained (F&G 145).

    

    

#02. Extreme negligence

California Penal Code...

Homicide...

Manslaughter...

This section partially consolidates clear warnings, negligence, and escalation leading to the fatal helicopter crash, supporting the California Penal Code §192 involuntary manslaughter charge.

Landis and his subordinates conceded that they had hired the children illegally (the unlawful act) but not that their actions met the standard of “gross negligence.” That is, a serious deviation from the standard of care expected from an industry professional (or even citizen layperson) in the same situation.

The state concedes that although the defendant(s) didn’t intend the harm done, their actions were still of a criminal character. This is because, if the substantial risk of harm was foreseeable (when measured against the actions of a hypothetical reasonable person acting in their place), and yet the defendant(s) proceeded anyway, they either noticed the danger and behaved extremely recklessly in disregarding it; or, if they didn’t notice the danger, should have if not for some prior act(s) of willful ignorance, or carelessness that predictably rendered them unable to perform their work at the accepted professional standard. The charge only gets stronger as the defendants admit or can be shown to have been conscious of the danger (approaching, finally, “implied malice”).

Although one would expect that the basic elements of the scene (explosives, helicopter, night, water work) would make danger obvious, Landis et al. claimed ignorance, citing their confidence in their technicians to get the shot safely: namely, the Stunt Coordinator (Gary McLarty); the SFX Supervisor (Paul Stewart); the pilot (Dorcey Wingo); and six Fire Safety Officers.

1. Early warnings

   June 16th & 18th — Marci Liroff’s warnings

   
   

   Marci Liroff (casting agent) warned Landis, Folsey, Allingham, and Marshall about Landis’s plans to hire children “off the street.” She said the scene “sounds kind of dangerous.” Marshall told her that he would “take care of it.” (Police Report; Trial testimony)

   June 13th–July 23rd — Office conversations overheard

   
   

   Donna Schuman, Cynthia Nigh, and Kathryn Wooten reported statements by Landis and Folsey.

   Schuman and Nigh overheard Folsey on calls to what they assumed were the parents of Myca and Renee. Folsey was heard saying: “It is going to be like watching fireworks.” He claimed the helicopter and explosions would not be dangerous to the children.

   Schuman asked why he mentioned the explosives if they weren’t dangerous. “It is the right thing to do,” she quoted him as saying. “When we are going to have explosions on the set, you ought to tell everybody up front. I mean, you know, God forbid anything goes wrong, and then if you tell everybody then you are covered.” (LaBrecque 21)

   Schuman asked what the penalty was for using children without permits. Folsey replied: “A slap on the wrist and a little fine—unless they find out about the explosives, and then they’ll throw my butt in jail.”

   Nigh recalled Folsey joking to Landis after a closed-door meeting: “We’ll probably be thrown in jail after this, just because of the kids.”

   On another occasion, Nigh and Schuman said Landis walked down the hall and threw up his arms, saying: “Arrrgghhh, we are all going to jail.”

   June 17th–22nd — Anderson House tries to intervene during pre-production

   
   

   1. June 17th–19th: After reading the script, House asked if they were using a soundstage. Allingham told him they would shoot night-for-night, even though it was illegal. (Grand Jury)

   2. June 19th–21st: House researched alternative stunt performers or dummies. Allingham dismissed the suggestions. “His indication was vague, but it seems to me that although it was vague it was also clear.”

   3. June 20th–22nd: House made one final call. Allingham said the decision was closed and not House’s responsibility.

   July 15th–22nd — Anderson House tries to intervene on-set

   
   

   1. July 15th–16th: At Franklin Canyon, House again raised the issue, warning that Warner Bros. could lose its license. Landis turned around and said, “Oh.”

   2. July 22nd: After the 9:30 shot (the second time Morrow had dropped a child into the water), House told Cohn to warn Landis about drowning risk. Cohn said he had talked to Landis already: “No problem.” (Chain, ch. 20; cf. ch. 26).

2. Prospective helicopter pilots

   The Unit Production Manager (Allingham) was tasked with vetting potential helicopter pilots for the segment.

   1st Pilot/Rental House—Clay Wright:

   
   

   Clay Wright had flown stunts for a similar segment in The Exterminator (1980), which was also shot at Indian Dunes, also used SFX Supervisor Paul Stewart, and provided John Landis creative inspiration for the sequence. Bid: $1,200/hour.

   2nd Pilot/Rental House—John Gamble:

   
   

   After hearing the scene described, Gamble told Allingham, “the most dangerous position for a helicopter is to be in a hover.” As well, he asked, “What about all this wood and debris? I doubt if you will crash the helicopter, but you’re certainly going to do severe damage to it.” According to Gamble, Allingham never mentioned to him that there would be children in the scene (Trial testimony).

   3rd Pilot/Rental House—Dick Hart:

   
   

   Allingham told Hart that the Nite-Sun was to be used to shine a light down on Vic and the kids in the dramatic exploding village scene. “Hart happened to have the same Nite-Sun Spielberg used in Close Encounters in the famous shot where the light shines down on Richard Dreyfuss and his car gets lifted up.” (Chain, ch. 4).

   Bid: $900/hour.

   Allingham eventually declined, but returned to rent the Nite-Sun spotlight. Hart advised him that the heavy spotlight was difficult to manoeuvre, and offered himself as an experienced technician at no additional cost, an offer Allingham also declined.

   4th Pilot/Rental House—Dorcey Wingo:

   
   

   Experienced Vietnam combat helicopter pilot with no experience flying in films but eager to get into the industry.

   Bid: $800/hour (accepted).

3. Disorder and danger on the set (in general)

   Early July—Extras locked in railway car during electrical fire:

   
   

   July 5th–7th (Universal Backlot): Bob Westmoreland (Makeup Artist) reported an incident in which extras were locked in a railway car when an electrical fire broke out. The director had to be located, and the key found before they could be released. (Chain, ch. 20)

   Mid-July—Guns used around trained dogs without warning:

   
   

   July 12th–16th (Franklin Canyon): Dog trainer stated there was no prior mention of gunfire in the scene involving dogs. Just before filming, Cohn offhandedly mentioned shotguns would be fired overhead. The trainer objected, noting the dogs were gun-shy. Cohn spoke briefly with the director, then insisted they needed the shot. The trainer reluctantly agreed. As expected, the dogs were terrified. She said the gunfire came as a complete surprise. (Police Report)

   July 20th—Live ammunition used on set

   
   

   During production of the Vietnam sequence, live ammunition was proposed and used on set after simulated effects proved inadequate.

4. Landis’s bullying at Indian Dunes

   Helicopter Pilot (Dorcey Wingo)

   
   

   While Wingo was positioning the aircraft, Landis launched into a tirade over the radio. “What the fuck are you doing up there?” “Tell him to keep his shirt on,” Wingo said to Allingham. Wingo later told investigators, “There’s no mistaking John when he talked. He was pretty abrasive at that point. And I was a little surprised to hear that kind of language over the radio because the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] does monitor radios. And it’s a good way to lose your ability to use radios.” (qtd. in LaBrecque 29)

   Camera B (Steve Lydecker)

   
   

   Camera B (Steve Lydecker) testified that on Tuesday, July 20th, he expressed concern to Landis that the concussive effect of bombs detonated in front of the cliff could be reflected back over the village. Landis replied (albeit in jest) “well we may lose the helicopter,” and the matter wasn’t raised again.

   Mr. Lydecker stated that on that particular night [July 20th] when the helicopter came over the cliff, the rotor wash had apparently caused some scaffolding, on which this arc light was placed, to sway. Mr. Lydecker stated that he heard the “best boy” voice this concern to the director, John Landis, telling him that the scaffolding should be tied off. He said Mr. Landis’ response was to the effect, “Where am I going to find someone who isn’t chicken shit to climb up on those lights?” He stated that the “best boy” got very upset and told Elie Cohn that he was angry at John Landis. He stated that Dan Allingham interrupted this conversation and that Mr. Allingham and the “best boy” walked away together, yelling back and forth at each other. (Police Report)

   Camera C (John Connor)

   
   

   Camera C (Ass’t) (Lee Redmond) told of an incident involving Camera C (John Connor) who was asking Paul Stewart if his camera placement was safe in relation to the upcoming mortar explosions. According to Redmond, before Stewart could answer, Landis testily interrupted and said, “It will be safe and if you don’t want to operate the camera you can go home and I will do it for you.” (qtd. in LaBrecque 28)

   Make-up (Virginia Kearns)

   
   

   On 1-6-84, Sergeant Budds interviewed VIRGINIA KEARNS, ████ █████████ ██████, █████ █████████, (███) ███-████. Ms. Kearns stated that she had been hired by Robert Westmoreland as a hairdresser for the Landis Segment of the “Twilight Zone” Movie. She stated that she was on the set the night of the crash. During the 11:30 filming, she was in the vicinity of the man-made dam in the village side of the movie set. While standing in the area of the village and the dam during the 11:30 filming, the heat from the fire balls, generated from the special effects explosions, singed her hair. After the 11:30 filming, she overheard Katherine Wooten tell John Landis that they couldn’t do the next shot, because it was too dangerous to bring the helicopter in lower. Ms. Kearns stated that Mr. Landis’s response was to tell Katherine Wooten to shut up. (Police Report)

   Camera D Ass’t (Randall Robinson)/Pilot (Dorcey Wingo):

   
   

   Camera D Ass’t (Randall Robinson) and pilot (Dorcey Wingo), after the nearly disastrous 11:30pm flight, finally tracked down Landis around 12:15am, while he was checking the B camera up on the Chapman crane platform.

   Wingo: “What the hell are you trying to do? Kill us?”

   Robinson (Camera D Ass’t): “Do they realize how intense that blast was?”

   Landis: “That’s just a warm-up for what’s to come. You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

   Wingo: “How would you like a fireball under you right now?”

   Landis: “Now, don’t be squeamish.” (LaBrecque 42–43; cf. Chain, ch. 5)

5. One of the children tells Landis they can’t swim (9:30pm)

   
   

   During the 9:30pm shot, 2nd AD Anderson House, and Morrow’s stand-in, Robert Liddle, witnessed Morrow scoop up the children, one under each arm, and then run out of frame before two explosives were fired. Morrow didn’t slow down: he ran approximately 50 feet into the middle of the man-made lake before stopping. Renee had fallen out of his arms into the water; an issue that would repeat itself during the 2:20am shot. In a previous, unfilmed practice-run for the 9:30pm shot involving the children, with the same staging, House had observed Morrow that time drop Myca into the water.

   House told a grand jury that he raised his concerns with 1st AD Elie Cohn, who informed him that he had already made this concern known to Landis: “No problem.”

   Landis testified that after this shot, “I asked the children if they could swim. One could and one could not.”

   Why, then—to say nothing of everything else—did Landis continue to subject that child in particular to night-time “water-work”?

6. The 11:30pm near-miss

   
   

   During the second (11:30pm) setup of the night, the pilot (Dorcey Wingo) was startled by an explosion and nearly crashed.

   He along with several others among the crew complained to Landis about the close call.

   Which, if any, safety precautions were taken?

7. Unrehearsed last-minute story change (“The Stumble”)

   
   

   Landis testified that Morrow’s stumble during the fatal shot had been staged. Landis claimed they improvised it together about twenty minutes prior to the fatal shot, during the 2:00am technical rehearsal.

   But if this was true, then neither the children, nor their parents, had been apprised of this last-minute change of plans.

8. Drugs and alcohol

   The bulk of the hard evidence gathered by Budds, however, spoke against the likelihood that drugs or alcohol were a relevant factor. Kesselman calculated that he and Budds devoted more than one thousand investigative hours solely to the issue of drug and alcohol use. (LaBrecque 92)

   See also Beer and liquor runs for the SFX team.

9. Fire permit violations

   “The actual sales records, overlooked for over five years by the police and DA’s investigators, showed that the smallest-sized explosive charges purchased for the fatal scene were 8-oz. charges. Also overlooked was special permit No. 55926 issued by the fire department to Paul Stewart ten days before the crash. It gave him permission to purchase 200 feet of 100 grain prima cord. This amount of “high” explosive was capable of knocking down as many as 70 telephone poles, “like matchsticks,” according to special effects experts. Both of these pieces of evidence ran contrary to all SFX accounts that the highest-powered explosives on the set of the TZ crash were 6-oz. “low” explosives. A “high” explosive far more lethal than the black powder bombs admittedly on the set that night, the prima cord was never mentioned by SFX crew members.” (Chain, ch. 29)

#03. Five corporations and nine individuals

On August 2nd, 1982, within two weeks of the incident in question, a civil action Chen et al. v. Warner Bros. et al. was filed in pursuit of damages estimated at $200 million. The complaint, filed in the Superior Court, named numerous entities—corporate and individual—as defendants. Such breadth in initial filings is consistent with litigation arising from complex incidents involving multiple parties, where ensuring inclusion of all potentially liable contributors is a strategic necessity. (see LaBrecque 68; F&G 177)

On May 23rd, 1983, the Le family was added to the action. While no specific monetary figure was sought, Dr. Le indicated that part of any resulting award would be contributed in Myca’s memory toward the establishment of a safety education department at USC’s School of Cinema-Television (alum.: George Lucas, Robert Zemeckis, Ron Howard).

The matter was settled out of court on May 7th, 1987—two days prior to a scheduled deposition by Spielberg (Chain). At the time, the defence in the criminal trial had entered its closing phase. Terms of the settlement included $2.3 million awarded to the Le family and $1.7 million to the Chen family, with the difference owing only to legal minutiae.

#04. Serious threats of blacklisting

Twice, Landis was seen menacing witnesses in plain view of the court:

• Gail Rochlenback:

  Landis pointed his finger at a witness like a gun, as witnessed by one of the lawyers for the defence, Eugene Trope (Wingo’s counsel) (LaBrecque 156–157).

  “Yesterday while I was escorting Ms. Rochlenback (a friend of Donna Schuman’s who corroborated her “unless they find out about the explosives” testimony) upstairs in the elevator, she indicated to me that during the break, while she was still sitting on the witness stand, Mr. Landis looks at her and goes like that toward her. Like she was being shot.” The detective extended his right hand, as if in the shape of a pistol, index finger straight out, thumb raised, and the remaining fingers closed. “My concern is it’s been difficult enough getting these witnesses here, let alone having them put under . . . what I feel is intimidation.”

  Neal angrily interrupted Budds, saying, “I would like the court to hear from Mr. Landis on that. I mean, I deny that.”

  Boren quickly concluded the gesture was “not in contempt of court at this point, because I did not see it. If, in fact, it occurred, that would be cause for grave consequences.” He then looked up at Neal, and waved him to warn Landis.

  “I wouldn’t even finish the trial if he did something like that, and I’m satisfied that he didn’t,” Neal said.

  What Neal and Landis apparently didn’t know is that Eugene Trope could easily have put the Nashville lawyer to the test on that rash promise.

  “Yes, I saw the gesture,” Trope later told me. [...]

• Marci Liroff:

  Landis blocked the path of a key witness as she returned down the well of the courtroom, witnessed by LaBrecque himself.

  I watched Liroff stop when she saw that Landis impeded her exit. “Excuse me,” she said, standing inches away and looking down at the director. Landis continued writing and did not look up. Liroff hesitated only a few seconds before awkwardly stepping over his legs. Her annoyance was apparent as she concentrated on keeping her balance. She walked briskly out of the courtroom, shaking her head angrily, followed by a glaring stare from Landis, who had looked up as soon as she had passed him. When Neal stood up a few seconds later, Landis quickly pulled his legs back to let him pass. (161)

  According to Chain, Liroff said she felt that she had suffered professionally as the result of her testimony. Farber and Green note that “although she had cast several films for Steven Spielberg and Frank Marshall before Twilight Zone, she has not worked for them since 1983.” (F&G 378)

In all, eleven witnesses before the grand jury claimed that their work time had fallen off drastically since the accident (F&G 216).

#05. A grand jury hearing, a preliminary hearing, and an appeal gone awry

#06. Missing evidence

1. One of two audio recordings

   The lone recovered audio recording was used as evidence in the preliminary hearing.

   Two separate audio teams were hired to record the sound for the 2:20am shot. In the chaotic aftermath of the accident, for several days, the footage and sound recordings were withheld by the studio. One of the audio recordings had gone missing. This was of particular significance in the earliest stages of the investigation, as investigators hadn’t determined who was calling the action through a white bullhorn.

2. The on-set photographer’s negatives

   On 3-10-86, Sergeant Budds interviewed MORGAN RENARD, via telephone. Mr. Renard stated that he was employed as a Photographer to take still publicity photographs of the “Twilight Zone” movie. Mr. Renard stated that he had taken approximately 108 photographs. Following the fatal crash, Mr. Renard took his three rolls of film with 36 photographs each, to Mr. Robert Friedman, Director of Publicity for Warner Brothers. He stated that he personally handed these three rolls of film to Mr. Friedman.

   On 3-10-86, Sergeant Budds telephoned MR. ROBERT FRIEDMAN at Warner Brothers Studios. Mr. Friedman stated that he will try and locate the above photographs. As of the writing of this report, the photographs had not been located. (Police Report)

3. The Executive Producer’s “Making Of...” documentary

   Marshall had overseen the production of The Making of Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Making of Poltergeist, used to promote the movies to theatre owners, but which had been surprising hits on hospitality TV services and pay-per-view.

   He was also making The Making of Twilight Zone... but only a single shot was ever released. It had been slated: DOCU/2:00.

   Kathryn Wooten (Script Supervisor) to the NTSB:

   NTSB: Do you remember any documentary shots being taken?

   KW: They were supposed to fire those off when they could. Prior to that shot, I don’t know if any of them did or not. They were real bad about letting me know so I could enter it in my journal. I said tell me if you do it but all the time they would do it, and Frank Marshall would run around and say, oh, shoot this real fast, you know. You might say make a doctored shot of this or there is John directing the (Unintelligible). Sometimes they would tell me about them and sometimes they would just, you know, they don’t bother by doing that and so they would just sort of roll it and the cameras would print it, but I don’t know if they did any that night or not. I don’t know. Nobody told me if they did.

   NTSB: But in any event under normal shooting, you would be told if they were doing documentaries so you could log it in your journal?

   KW: Yes, I could log it, but they were just constantly real bad about that, you know, unless I happened to be right there and know they were rolling. Sometimes they would yell out, you know, oh, we just shot, you know, such and such and I’ll put a tail plate on it when you want me to call it and I was keeping a log, you know, docu 1, docu 2.

4. The fourth draft of the script

   
   

   After the third draft was written and Landis set his intention to go about casting it illegally, he ordered his studio-assigned secretary/typist (Alpha Campbell) to keep it under lock and key. Later on, after the disaster, he ordered her to destroy all remaining copies.

   

   Campbell, however, who was discovered as a witness in March 1983, simply kept them locked away, and was therefore ultimately able to provide investigators with all four of the different drafts.

   

   However, Sergeant Budds’s original police report lists only the third draft (6/13/82) as evidence. The fourth (6/26/82) survives, with the other drafts, in LaBrecque’s archive, but it appears never to have been examined by the prosecution.

5. Several “thumbnail sketches”

   
   

   On July 28th, 1982, Landis was grilled by Cal/OSHA and the NTSB during a panel interview.

   “He was asked whether there were any written plans for the sequence with the helicopter flying and the explosions going off. Cavalierly, the director allowed, ‘There were lots of thumbnail sketches.’ As for blueprints, he couldn’t remember.” (Chain, ch. 16; cf. ch. 26)

   These sketches, however, never turned up.

6. All graphic and visual materials relating to the film’s production

   
   

   With the additional $200,000 budget, especially for such a technically involved shot, the scene would certainly need to be planned out in some respect, and indeed designers were hired for the task: Richard Sawyer, Gregory Pickrell, and Tom Southwell. They worked in Southwell’s garage. (Chain)

   Still, when the state requested the defence turn over all visual materials pertaining to the segment, such as scripts, notes, and graphical layouts, they resisted, until ordered to do so by an assistant US attorney on behalf of the NTSB, and only turned over a single drawing, known as the spotting plan.

#07. “The spotting plan”

The spotting plan looked very much like a top-down diagram of the set.

Remarkably, it included a helicopter that appeared to be labelled “crashed.”

Budds had been puzzled by the image.

#08. Twilight Zone crew list

#09. You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again (index locorum)

At the 46th Academy Awards, The Sting (1973) celebrated a monster year. It had been a surprise hit at the box office, stealing The Exorcist’s thunder by opening faster and wider. Then, the word of mouth made the movie into an experience, and had friends and families coming back all summer long.

Julia Phillips became the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Picture, and remained the only one until Wendy Finerman became the second in 1995, with Forrest Gump.

Phillips would go on to produce—alongside her ex-husband, Michael Phillips—Taxi Driver and Close Encounters, two of the defining movies of the late ’70s. While her ex-husband took the lead on Taxi Driver, Phillips took the lead on Close Encounters.

At the same time, since about 1973, she was maintaining an escalating cocaine addiction, which peaked in about 1978–79 as a freebase addiction. She eventually went through a successful rehab process, and began working again in 1981 with a new development deal at MGM.

Her relationship with Spielberg was never the same, and the two went from close friends to cordial strangers in a matter of years, without so much as a conversation in between.

In 1991, Phillips, with the encouragement of her friend, the author Anne Rice, finished her memoir, You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, which went on to be a New York Times bestseller, and to sustain a lingering cultural relevance.

“Steven” is one of the story’s main characters, who travels with the protagonist along the story’s central arc. On September 13th, 1977, at the tail end of post-production for Close Encounters, while renegotiating merchandising rights with a beleaguered studio, Phillips is banned from the Columbia lot, which quickly becomes a gossip column headline and an embarrassment to the production, before descending further into—and eventually escaping—her addiction, to write her own book about her own experiences.

“Don’t get mad, get even,” a career rival, Dan Melnick, had told her early on, after she’d piqued his professional interest in The Sting, only to use that interest as leverage for a better deal with Universal. And Melnick had been there too, that day, September 13th, 1977.

#10. DISC Management Services Group, Inc.

The crew were being paid by “Twilight Zone Productions, Inc.” and their pay stubs were stamped “DISC Management Services Group.”

It had a dull, frequently mistaken name. But what was the role of this obscure corporate entity?

According to Ed Morey, the Warner Bros. VP assigned to the project, Twilight Zone Productions had its own payroll system, independent of Warner Bros., named “DISC Management Systems, Inc.” [sic] (Grand Jury)

The Production Coordinator (Schuman) testified: “George Folsey instructed DISC Management to issue a check for petty cash.” (Grand Jury)

Not much is known about DISC Management Services Group, Inc. Its name only appears in the credits of a single released feature film—Amblin’s Arachnophobia (1990). Its corporate address was at the fringe of the Warner Bros. lot.

#11. The stumble

During the final shot, Morrow is captured on film stumbling to his knees, just seconds before the helicopter hits the ground. Had he been standing, it’s possible that he could have run for cover.

When Landis took the stand in February 1987 as the first witness for the defence, he spent several days telling his side of the story, from how he got his start in the industry, all the way up to the accident. It was at this point that Landis testified that Morrow’s stumble had in fact been staged, improvised by the two of them about twenty minutes prior to the fatal shot, during the 2:00am technical rehearsal.

On the one hand, the claim that the stumble had been planned helped substantiate the general claim that the 2:20am shot had been adequately rehearsed.

#12. Beer and liquor runs for the SFX team

The NTSB had found two beer cans in the cabin of the helicopter.

Budds’s initial investigation:

#13. No longer eligible for prosecution

In the immediate aftermath of the accident, Marshall is reported by Chain to have emerged from his point of cover beneath a nearby truck, and joined the many dazed crew members wading towards the wreck looking for survivors. Chain also reports that Marshall was the one to retrieve Renee Chen and carry her back to shore; that he told the 2nd AD, Anderson House, to clear the set and to make sure the film was on the truck; and that he and Folsey led a wailing Mrs. Chen, and a shell-shocked Dr. Le to separate production vehicles headed for the Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital in Valencia.

That morning, Landis’s studio-assigned typist (Alpha Campbell) documented in her callbook that at 10:15am Marshall called and “needs a lot of things,” and showed up to the office fifteen minutes later and took—at least—several rolls of film.

Farber & Green report that, “Right after the accident, Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy left town to spend two weeks at Marshall’s retreat in Idaho. When they returned, Marshall stayed only a short time in Los Angeles; then left the country with Spielberg to scout locations for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” (158).

On August 2nd, the Chen family filed their lawsuit, naming both Marshall and Spielberg.

By October, according to Chain, Marshall had already been informed by Cal/OSHA that his name was not being passed to the DA’s office for indictment. In the initial confusion after the accident, with the jurisdictional considerations splitting the investigation into three factions, the NTSB interviewed some thirty-one witnesses to the accident, but Marshall was not among them. According to Chain, earlier, Marshall’s attorneys had lobbied the Cal/OSHA investigator, Marilyn Levine, to exclude Marshall from her investigation, emphasizing the distance between Marshall and his people (who operated on the Warner Bros. lot), and Landis’s people (who operated on the Universal Studios lot). Allegedly, Marshall’s counsel misrepresented the number of days their client appeared on set, claiming he had only stopped by three or four times total, when in fact he had been present at least eight days of twelve (Chain, ch. 31).

And then in late November/December, Spielberg and Kennedy at least were in town: finishing Spielberg’s Twilight Zone segment; hosting a Japanese television crew making a documentary; and having an early-December story bootcamp with Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck establishing the plot for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

By this time, Budds had been trying to circle back to Marshall for several months, with Marshall’s attorney assuring him Marshall was out of town and unavailable but would cooperate at his earliest possibility. Then Budds heard Marshall was back in town. But Marshall was never at his legal residence. And whenever Budds stopped by the Warner Bros. lot and the booth operator called ahead to the Amblin office, Budds was always informed by Bonne or Mary Radford that Marshall was not on the lot at the moment.

By February 1983, Marshall’s attorney informed Sgt. Budds that his client had decided not to cooperate with investigators willingly. A domestic subpoena was issued for his testimony, but Marshall couldn’t be located at his home or work despite repeated visits by Sgt. Budds, and the case’s lone investigator had bigger fish to fry (LaBrecque 95). In the years to come the DA successfully navigated a grand jury hearing (June 1983), a preliminary hearing (February 1984), and an appeal (November 1984).

Spielberg and Kennedy at least were in L.A. for a disappointing 1983 Oscars, when Spielberg’s E.T. failed to win the big award—the movie’s aura tainted, perhaps, to whatever degree, by its association with the tragedy.

The filming for Temple of Doom took place beginning April 18th, 1983, in Sri Lanka, and continuing through September 8th, 1983, at Elstree Studios in London.

Cal/OSHA had decided back in the fall of 1982 that legally speaking Marshall wasn’t culpable for the hiring. But they were mistaken, as discovered by Allingham’s attorney Leonard Levine in 1985, when posing as a film producer and asking DLSE (Division of Labor Standards Enforcement) Chief of the Entertainment Work Permit Unit, Howard Bacon, whether in the case of an accident on-set the crew would be responsible, or the corporation and upper-level management, receiving an unequivocal answer that:

Marshall was almost certainly a corporate officer at both Twilight Zone Productions, Inc. and DISC Management Services Group, Inc. (the payroll company contracted to oversee the production’s spending).

This, along with Braun’s two letters to the DA in November 1985, alleging that knowledge of the hiring was widespread, led to increased interest in Marshall’s testimony. With the statute of limitations expired, Marshall was no longer eligible for prosecution.

Braun later told Farber & Green:

In June 1986, the DA and the Sheriff’s Department tracked Marshall to London, England, where he was staying at St. James’s Hotel and Club, a luxury boutique hotel, working on Amblin’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit at the famous Elstree Studios. Sgt. Budds was sent overseas to personally serve Marshall a new subpoena, but because of his lack of jurisdiction, Budds had to enlist a young legal attaché from the American Embassy to serve the legal document.

Sgt. Budds listened as she called Marshall from the front desk. Marshall assured her he would be right down. They waited for him for half an hour but he never showed up. A report from Scotland Yard said that Marshall was in Paris, where Spielberg also was at the time, promoting Amblin’s The Money Pit. The report speculated—based on the absence of Marshall’s name from any public flight records—that he had taken a private jet operated by Amblin Entertainment (cf. LaBrecque 128, F&G 241–243, McBride 348, Chain, ch. 42).

Given the seriousness of the multiple-homicide trial at issue, Interpol became involved, and Marshall’s name was added to an international “stop and hold” list, along with his longtime girlfriend, Kathleen Kennedy. In fact, Kennedy was intercepted after landing in Barcelona in February 1987, and Marshall on April 7th, 1987, in Madrid (LaBrecque) for pre-production on Empire of the Sun.

But by this time the prosecution had rested their case and Marshall’s testimony was no longer of any help.

#14. A short scene still to come (the shed)

The shed scenes are significant for providing plausible deniability to the Location Manager (Richard Vane), who was the highest-ranking member of the production to admit to participating in a conspiracy to conceal the children from a Fire Safety Officer known to work also as an on-set teacher and child welfare worker.

#15. Chain claims

In Fly by Night (2021), journalist Steve Chain claims to have sourced several inter-departmental Warner Bros. memos documenting interviews conducted by their legal team with various Warner Bros. employees, including Marshall, Lucy Fisher (Warner’s head of creative), Vane, Radford, Henderling, Morey, and Cohn.

Although this is an audacious claim, and Chain’s book has no notes, references, or sources, there are several reasons to find it plausible. (1) Chain attended the trial at the time and is recommended by other journalists who attended the trial; (2) Harland Braun, Landis’s pre-trial lawyer, endorses the book with a glowing blurb; (3) If Cohn was questioned by Warner Bros.’ legal counsel in a non-privileged context and without independent representation, and records of that questioning existed, it’s plausible that his later counsel—or other defence attorneys—could have obtained access to those records, making it possible that Chain, through defence cooperation, encountered them; (4) All of Chain’s findings are consistent with established evidence.

#16. Alternate versions

Joe Dante, the director of the movie’s third segment, “It’s a Good Life,” said that originally the concept was that “all the stories were going to connect.”

The second draft of Landis’s script (May 24th) reflects this original continuity, ending with the lines:

“Matheson” is Richard Matheson, the writer of the other three segments. Besides Landis’s prologue and segment, all three were going to be written by Matheson, an original Twilight Zone screenwriter, who also wrote Spielberg’s riveting TV movie Duel (1971), about a malevolent truck pursuing a terribly anxious man. Spielberg was working closely with Matheson on an original segment about a neighbourhood bully who on Halloween becomes prey to supernatural forces.

Little is known about Spielberg’s originally planned segment, except that it was substantial and well under way at the time of the accident.

Spielberg described it as follows:

Matheson summarized it as “a bully who’s mistreating all these young trick-or-treating kids, and the supernatural world gets him for it. Creatures—real live monsters—start chasing him around.” (qtd. in McBride, ch. 13) And then the mask becomes fused to his face. According to McBride, it was based on a feature Spielberg had been developing for MGM (343).

Work on the Spielberg-Matheson project proceeded well into the summer of 1982. During an interview for Starlog magazine, Spielberg said of his upcoming Twilight Zone segment, “[W]e have all these monsters we have to build.” (Starlog 62; cf. McBride 342) The creature effects were going to be done by Craig Reardon, who did the effects for Landis’s prologue, “Real Scary,” and for “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” in the finished film (Rob Bottin did the creatures for “It’s a Good Life”).

And then at some point before the accident (according to McBride, who may be mistaken) Spielberg decided he would remake “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” another original series classic, about a small town whose paranoia about outsiders ends up tearing them apart... just as the outsiders planned. After the accident, Spielberg changed his sequence again, to another classic episode, “Kick the Can.”

All four of the segments in the finished movie are loosely unified by characters caught in schizoid states.

If both “It’s a Good Life” and “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” passed through Spielberg’s hands, as Dante reports, Twilight Zone would have been Spielberg’s third movie in a row to feature supernatural beings that disrupt suburban life, and a blonde girl with a doll.

i. Twilight Zone—Landis Segment

In “Time Out” I wanted to be true to the spirit of the old TZ show and to inject a lot of Serling’s own politics and morality into that episode... It’s the only political or moral episode in the film, actually. (John Landis, Twilight Zone Magazine, Oct. 1983)

Bill’s dialogue in the bar scene is more significant than it seems. We learn that he has been working at his job for seventeen years (since 1966 or 1967); that the promotion he lost is going to cost him $6,000/year, and that he was “counting on it”; that his house is owned by a Japanese bank; that he was “in the war” and “paid to kill [Asians]”; and that he has to go home early to meet his in-laws. We have a cohesive character sketch of a man using racism as a way of venting his domestic burden; making it someone else’s fault besides his own. He blames the same “Asians” whom, in his estimation, America let off easy in “the war.” He recites religious, racial, and gender stereotypes about Jews, African-Americans, and women. Over the course of his journey, Bill experiences what it really means to be victimized by a powerful other, showing his complaints to be a screen for continued aggression. However, by the end of the story, once it reaches its “root” in his Vietnam reversal, we sense that Bill’s racism and the personal failures it masks are a coping mechanism for guilt he feels over what he did in the war and what it implies about him as a person and the state that paid him. But what exactly Bill did back in the war, if anything, is ambiguous. Did he fail to save two children, out of cowardice? Was he part of the 1st Cavalry Division, associated with the firebombing of villages and shooting at villagers indiscriminately? Was it the Battle of Ia Drang (1965)? Or is the transmission intentionally vague?

The third draft, which introduces the village segment and the two children, brings Landis’s episode into line with the rest of the segments. Spielberg, famously, often incorporates children into his work.

But a change in the fourth draft (6/26/82), the two-line addition of a “MacGuffin” (in storytelling terms, an emotionally charged object of desire) is even more peculiar.

BILL
I won’t hurt you baby. I’m just as lost and scared as you are.

The little Girl hands Bill a broken and naked Barbie Doll.

BILL
(genuinely touched)
Thank you honey. Thank you very much.

This simple prop substantiates the emotional reversal established in the previous revision, giving the audience a clearer point of focus for the projection of their own petty grievances and allowing them to participate in Bill’s spiritual purification.

The second draft of the script (and the second draft only) had a more vivid description of the helicopter attack.

25 EXT. LAKESIDE - NIGHT Bullets splash all around him. When he looks up he’s startled to find himself back in the lake with the Klan on shore. He summons all of his strength and swims to the other side of the lake. As he nears the shore he can hear the baying hounds. Pulling himself from the water he lays on the ground exhausted. A BLINDING LIGHT comes from the sky accompanied by tremendous winds and a deafening roar. Bill looks up in terror as a HUEY HELICOPTER descends on him. 26 INT. HUEY - NIGHT Two G.I.’s man the machine gun mounted in the copter.

PILOT

V.C. dead beneath us. The G.I.’s open fire. 27. EXT. JUNGLE SWAMP - NIGHT Bill runs stumbling and falling through the Viet Names [sic] marsh as the copter hovers overhead, it’s [sic] machine guns splitting [sic] death. 28 INT. HUEY - NIGHT

G.I. #4 (Shouts to be heard over the noise) Give me a mortar. I’m going to drop it down his pants!

The G.I. pulls the pin and fires the mortar out of the copter. 29. EXT. JUNGLE SWAMP - NIGHT The explosion sends Bill flying into the air. He hits the side of a building hard.

Another small change in the fourth draft is the omission of the line: One after another the buildings blow up in flames as the helicopter systematically destroys the village in its search for Bill.

The third and fourth drafts both also successively tweak the ending. In the third, he’s hit by a truck offscreen, just in time for his friends to see, and “pinned under the rear tire of a truck.” In the fourth revision, his friends call out to him but it’s too late, and he’s “clipped by a car in the street in front of the bar” and “thrown violently to the curb.”

Bill looks at Ray and the Black Patron in wonder. He then looks down at the broken Barbie Doll in his hand.

The Driver of the car comes up to Ray who’s cradling Bill’s head.

DRIVER He just stepped in front of me. I didn’t see him. It wasn’t my fault.

Bill just looks at the Doll.

Crane up and back as a police car pulls up—pan up to the sky.

The MacGuffin takes on a second significance in this draft, providing the evidence of a final O. Henry moment—maybe it wasn’t bad acid after all; maybe Bill really had been back there again, for a moment, in Vietnam.

Each of the three historical narratives follows Morrow as he flees the dominant social group in a life-threatening manhunt, until he’s finally seized by the police in the Nazi timeline. According to Allingham, the narrative function of the spotlight was to induce a fear of the “police state” in the film.

• 1941 timeline: “The beam falls on him, pinning him in its harsh spot-light.” (all drafts)

• 1954/196? timeline transition: “A BLINDING LIGHT comes from the sky accompanied by tremendous winds and a deafening roar. Bill looks up in terror as a HUEY HELICOPTER descends on him.” (2nd draft only)

• 196? timeline: “The helicopter turns on a powerful spotlight and hovers over the village sweeping it with its beam.” (3rd and 4th drafts)

Is the implication that Bill’s journey was a near-death hallucination after stepping into harm’s way, in the moment before his friends got outside? In this vision, he is instantly cured. His delusions are countered by the reversal, and he is confronted by the emotional denial that is the source of his cycling depression and hyper-reactivity.

There’s also another, hypothetical, ending, which Mrs. Le reported hearing from Folsey on July 16th during the children’s audition. Morrow carries the children across “a stream or river to a shed for safety,” and then “a helicopter was to pick them up”: a rescue, which makes the helicopter something other than the hunter. Whose helicopter, and what exactly the skirmish was, the account doesn’t say. This ending survives only in the DLSE’s summary of its August 2nd interview with the Les; in her shorter NTSB interview with Llorente, Mrs. Le says only that the children were to be carried across to safety.

George Folsey Jr. told Mr. & Mrs. Le that they needed Vietnamese children for the movie; that the two children would be the last two (2) survivors left alone with actor Vic Morrow. Morrow was to pick up the two (2) children, and run across a stream or river to a shed for safety. A helicopter was to pick them up. (DLSE summary, Le family interview, August 2nd, 1982)

But it’s even unclear exactly which version Landis was making, or whether he was revising it as he went. In the movie, for instance, there is no spotlight used in the Nazi-era ledge scene. In the fatal 2:20am footage on July 23rd, the Barbie doll can be identified in Renee’s hands in the final shot. Because of the accident, Landis and Warner Bros. decided not to include the added segment with the children; this effectively reverted Landis’s segment back to its pre-June 13th state.

ii. Kick the Can

Spielberg’s final segment, “Kick the Can,” follows a new resident, Mr. Bloom (Scatman Crothers) of Sunnyvale Retirement Home. The residents of the home are old and lifeless, particularly Mr. Conroy, who associates maturity with dour seriousness. Bloom rallies the residents to a moonlit game of kick the can, which magically grants their wishes of being restored to youth. Soon, however, they each, save one, decide that they can’t be bothered to do it all again, and embrace aging playfully instead.

In the end, Mr. Conroy tragically finds out that magic is real, but that his bitterness has caused him to miss the miracle of eternal youth.

INT. SUNNYVALE REST HOME - NIGHT

All of the Sunnyvale residents who were young have returned to their current ages, except for Mr. Agee who is still a boy.

Conroy, who missed out on being young again, pleads to him.

MR. LEO CONROY Please, take me with you. I wanna go too.

YOUNG MR. AGEE You can’t come with me, Leo. You’ll have to stay with yourself. ‘There’s a destiny that shapes our ends, rough-hewn though it may be. I’m sorry.’ Well, let’s away.

MR. LEO CONROY But... but I’m ready now. I’m ready.

YOUNG MR. AGEE It’s wonderful being young again. Beware the thrust of my steel! Tally-ho!

Agee leaps from the window and vanishes into the night.

The next day, Mr. Conroy knocks the can around again himself, feeling lighthearted again for the first time in memory. The itinerant stranger, Mr. Bloom, sees himself off, and on to the next rest home.

“It was a very emotional time for Steven,” Dante recalls. “Steven was very affected by the accident. Then he felt somewhat betrayed by it. He felt he couldn’t understand what happened, and he suddenly became the brunt [of bad publicity]. I think he deeply resented it.” (qtd. in McBride, ch. 13)

According to Farber and Green, “the director did not even attend the pre-production meeting on the segment. ‘His heart just wasn’t in it anymore,’ says Patrick Kehoe, the first AD” (174).

“It probably is accurate to say that Mr. Spielberg’s heart wasn’t in the movie after the accident,” stated Spielberg’s then-secretary Kathy Switzer. “[A]t the time, I didn’t know Mr. Spielberg well enough to make a judgment about how he felt emotionally. I do know it was a very sad time.” (qtd. in Ross Plesset, “Visions Lost in the Twilight Zone”, Twilight Zone Museum)

Spielberg was so busy preparing detailed sketches for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom... that he delegated some of his usual directing duties on Twilight Zone. ...he asked the script supervisor, Kathryn Wooten, and his friend Melissa Mathison (the screenwriter of E.T. and [later] the wife of Harrison Ford) to block out the action with the performers and work with them on their line readings. (F&G 174)

The original episode (by George Clayton Johnson) was adapted by Matheson, who removed the scenes in the woods. Then, Spielberg had it reworked by Melissa Mathison (working under the pseudonym Josh Rogan), who gave it a whimsical A Midsummer Night’s Dream gloss.

#17. The four screenwriters of Jurassic Park (1990–1992)

Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler are paleontologists on a dig, used to brushing fossils by hand. They’re introduced to a seismic camera that takes a ‘shot’ into the dirt, and then they crowd around a set of monitors to watch a computer render an image. The technician tells us that within a few years it’ll make digging unnecessary, to Grant’s dismay.

But he only realizes how radically the world is changing when Hammond arrives and flies them off to his kitschy jungle resort on Isla Nublar (“Cloud Island”). Once there, Hammond displays his miraculous creative technology before taking them to a movie theatre to show them how it’s done. The movie theatre is also a theme-park ride that turns to reveal it’s adjacent to a genetics lab and a computerized control room.

And all of this reimagines the way the real-life filmmakers encountered seamless CGI. One of Jurassic Park’s defining quirks is the way it mythologizes its own unprecedented technological powers. We will see that this repetitive meta-reference functions as a new kind of surface distraction, obscuring deeper dynamics.

Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs were originally going to be achieved using a combination of animatronics, puppeteering, and stop-motion animated models, with CGI only to be used for subtle background work.

The form of stop-motion they were using was called Go-Motion. Phil Tippett had developed it at George Lucas’s special effects company, Industrial Light and Magic, before starting his own company, Tippett Studio. Go-Motion worked by using a computer to synchronize a camera with motorized puppets, allowing for a motion blur effect that improved realism compared to traditional stop motion. ILM was going to help implement it.

But when ILM received the commission in June ’91 a few of their engineers thought they should be in charge, most notably Steve Williams and Mark A.Z. Dippé, who had been directly responsible for the astonishing but conspicuous CGI work on The Abyss, and Terminator 2, which won ILM two Oscars. Williams and Dippé thought CGI was ready, finally, to become invisible. But Dennis Muren, ILM’s VFX Supervisor, wasn’t so sure. He also didn’t want to venture in the direction of poaching a high-profile contract from a friend and colleague.

Working in secret, Williams built a T-Rex skeleton from scratch—the same method he’d used for the T-1000. By November ’91, he’d given it a walk cycle, in time for an anticipated visit by Amblin producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall. He kept it playing on a monitor where they couldn’t help but notice it. To Kennedy, “it was immediately very clear that we were going to get realistic movement to these dinosaurs that was going to be far advanced from what we were doing with stop motion.” (The Making of Jurassic Park, 1995) They commissioned further tests.

First, ILM delivered a demo of a herd of running Gallimimus skeletons. Spielberg was astonished. The footage reminded him of National Geographic. “I looked at it and I couldn’t speak after watching it. I just couldn’t even catch my breath. I had never seen anything like it. Because even though it was just a skeletal frame of Gallimimus, this herd of Gallimimus was moving just as realistically as if we had taken a camera and filmed them for real.” (The Making of Jurassic Park, 1995)

But he needed to see a T-Rex walking in broad daylight before he could be sure. The engineers at ILM made 3D scans of the dinosaur models to make matching digital versions. That highly anticipated test was screened for Spielberg, Kennedy, Marshall, Tippett, and Lucas, among others.

Everyone who was there to see it says they felt like they were witnessing the dawn of a new age. A computer-generated entity passing for real.

As Lucas said:

As the story goes, Tippett declared himself “extinct,” although he was soon brought back into the fold as the dinosaur motion supervisor.

Spielberg took the frisson of this world-historic moment and fed it back into the story.

We can track this development in the changes that happened to the story between the first draft—developed with Michael Crichton and others through 1990 and 1991, before the decision to use CGI—and the final draft, developed with David Koepp through 1992.

In October ’89, Spielberg was chatting with Michael Crichton in his office about another project, when he found out about Crichton’s latest book, Jurassic Park, which Crichton had just delivered to his publisher. Crichton had written a screenplay about a graduate student cloning a pterodactyl from fossil DNA in 1983, but required several years to work out the kinks. Spielberg asked to read it, and the next day the two agreed they wanted to make it together.

But in May 1990, as the book was getting ready for print, Crichton’s agents started a bidding war. Spielberg went to Universal Studios to secure the funding, emphasizing the property’s franchising and theme park potential. They were especially interested in the T-Rex river chase.

In addition to $1.5 million, Crichton was paid $500,000 to write the first draft of the screenplay. Crichton said he was sick of the dinosaurs and the characters at that point, but Spielberg said they just needed someone who could pare it down fast. Crichton said he’d do it, with the provision that he’d eventually hand it off to someone else for the character polishes. He got started in July 1990, even before the book was released.

Crichton delivered his first draft seven weeks later, on September 7th, 1990. Although this draft has never been published, in 2022, archivist Derrick Davis summarized its contents. By Spielberg’s request, and Crichton’s intention, the first draft is a straightforward adaptation that “has all the big scenes retained and has the logical flow that appears in the much longer and more extended argument.” (Crichton, qtd. in Davis, From Novel to Screenplay 23)

Spielberg wasn’t satisfied with it. He said that it “start[ed] too fast.” The next draft included a prologue, and pushed back the scene where the visitors first see the sauropods, delaying the gratification of seeing the “monsters,” like in Jaws. Crichton turned in his final “chunk” on January 19th, 1991, and said he had taken his best shot.

The plot was still rough around the edges. But besides that, Crichton’s draft had flat characters, weak laughs, and lacked inspiration, failing to punctuate its emotional moments.

Spielberg began shooting on Hook on February 19th, 1991, which ran over schedule and budget, occupying his attention until the summer. Soon after starting, Malia Scotch Marmo, who had just successfully reworked the character of Captain Hook, was enlisted to work on Jurassic Park. She found out from her husband that Amblin had optioned Crichton’s novel; she got a copy and was reading it outside the studio one day, when Kennedy noticed, started a conversation, and invited Marmo to try a rewrite. Marmo and Spielberg talked a lot about the story while shooting the movie, but Marmo only officially started her draft in October, and only finished it on March 14th, 1992.

Although Marmo read Crichton’s draft, she decided to start fresh and work from the novel. She said her principal contribution was to make Sattler and the children more assertive. Crichton had prioritized scientific verisimilitude, as he had in the book, but Spielberg said that “effects are only as good as the audience’s feeling for the characters.” (Crichton, qtd. in McBride, ch. 16)

Marmo also brought out the romantic comedy and “mating ritual” between Grant and Sattler, who’d already been married in Carter’s version. Jurassic Park gained much of its colour during her tenure. But overall her take was too juvenile. Spielberg said, simply, “I’ve read it twice, and I think it’s a miss.”

At this point, Koepp was brought on from Robert Zemeckis’s Death Becomes Her (1992), and quickly pulled the script into shape in time for the production’s August start date. Koepp said he never even read the previous drafts.

So goes the surface history of Jurassic Park. But a closer look, aided by other materials unearthed by Davis, including early storyboards, story memos, and a lost draft by Production Designer Rick Carter (Back to the Future Part II), suggests a far more continuous development largely governed by Spielberg himself (storyboards and concept art via Davis’s Jurassic Time Memoirs, now collected in his Jurassic Time Research Files; corroborated against other copies).

Months before his first script meeting with Crichton in July ’90, Spielberg was already working out the story. He’d pored through his copy of the book, highlighting his favourite passages and scribbling notes in the margins. Spielberg said, “What I wanted to do was boil the book down and choose my seven or eight favorite scenes and base the script around those. So we crunched the book.” (qtd. in Shay and Duncan 12)

Carter was the first creative professional brought onto the project, within weeks of acquiring the property. They hired seven artists to help conceptualize the story: five primarily doing storyboards (Marty Kline, Ed Varreaux, Tom Cranham, David Lowery, John Bell) and two primarily doing paintings (Dave Negron and Craig Mullins).

After they crunched the book and established its major set pieces, Spielberg started to dig in.

Carter observed that Spielberg begins by envisioning a physical layout: “once he knows what the space is—that’s very important, to know where things are—he’ll just start playing a projector in his head. He’s open to contributions and he’ll talk it through, but he’ll actually draw these funny little frames which are incredibly detailed if you know how to look at them.” (qtd. in McBride, ch. 16)

In this frame, for example, we see an older Tim (11) and a younger Lex (7 or 8). These were their ages in the novel, and they were only reversed with Koepp’s draft, since Spielberg wanted Joseph Mazzello as a younger Tim, and “realized that if I cast Lex younger than Tim, she would look about five years old—which was much too young to put in jeopardy with these dinosaurs. It would have turned the audience against us completely.” (qtd. in Shay and Duncan 73)

But here Lex is drawn with dark hair, while in Crichton’s novel (earlier) and his drafts (later) she’s described as a blonde. She’s also holding a doll, rather than the baseball mitt she has in Crichton’s novel and both of his drafts. No accessory is mentioned in Carter’s version, and by Marmo’s it’s a flashlight instead.

In Crichton’s first draft, the kids are described as being protected from the invading T-Rex by a plastic bubble that “falls over them like a shield.”

Afterwards, the T-Rex lifts the car into her jaws, attempting to eat the children alive. Lex falls out of the car into the mud, still holding her doll. Unlike in the book, however, she lands just underfoot of the T-Rex.

Crichton’s first draft introduces more mutilation than exists in the corresponding scenes in the book. In the first draft, and only the first draft, the T-Rex is described as chomping down on Malcolm’s legs, and then pinning Ed Regis (a deleted tour guide character) into the mud with her claws. Then, according to Davis’s summary: “The rex grabs him in his jaws, and lifts him above the limbs of the tree. We don’t see what happens. Body parts seem to fall, but it’s hard to tell in darkness.” (Davis, From Novel to Screenplay 10) Then the gore showers onto Grant and the kids below.

In Crichton’s second draft, Nedry’s body is discovered ripped into parts.

In Marmo’s, the dismemberment is expressed as comic relief.

Even before finishing his first draft, Crichton was told to drop the pterodactyl scene that had made the initial crunch. It was eventually used in Jurassic Park III.

Finally, Crichton’s first draft contains a new ending. In the book, Hammond stumbles into a ravine, and is eaten alive by ‘compys’, small dinosaurs with narcotic venom.

In Crichton’s first draft, this happens instead in the rotunda, after the hanging dinosaur skeleton and scaffolding crash down onto him, pinning him to the ground.

Crichton turned in his second draft on January 19th, ’91. Three days later, Spielberg, Carter, and Steve Starkey met to discuss the script with an eye to reducing the budget. And six weeks later, Carter turned in a draft of his own.

While each of Spielberg’s writers attests to his close involvement, his exact influence is obscured by their product. Carter’s draft—a “collage” of notes and storyboards that claims mostly to reflect the state of the story pre-Hook—suggests a more transparent view into Spielberg’s vision for Jurassic Park as it existed after Crichton and before Marmo.

Carter’s version is the only one bookended by helicopter scenes, beginning with the InGen helicopter, and ending with a military helicopter.

Carter’s opening adapts the prologue from the book, in which some of Hammond’s men deliver an injured worker to a jungle clinic. Ed Regis tells the doctor that the worker was injured in a construction accident and mentions a “backhoe” but she suspects that he was mauled. In a line not in the book, she conveys her doubt by remarking that “it looks like he was eaten by a bulldozer.” The patient moans “lo sa raptor” before dying and then Carter cuts from the bite marks to the raptor jaws Grant is uncovering. The association between industrial machines and dinosaurs is echoed later on in a description that says that a trail deforested by dinosaurs looks like a “giant bulldozer went berserk.”

Marmo’s draft introduces a similar analogy, this time between the helicopter and the dinosaurs, during the Nublar landing scene. (Marmo’s analogy is ambivalent—it’s difficult to entirely distinguish whether it refers to a T-Rex, a velociraptor, or some hybrid with a mosquito or a dragonfly. As a symbol, then, it reflects Freud’s principle of condensation.)

In Koepp’s first draft (the only other version to contain the helicopter opening)—as in the book—the doctor looks up the definition of “raptor” and learns that it means “bird of prey.” Then, in Koepp’s early versions of the dig scene, the ROAR of the arriving helicopter is described as sounding “like some giant beast descending on the camp.” But Koepp also retains the bulldozer; he opens with a newly imagined scene that shows the accident itself, when a bulldozer, which also ROARS, attempts to push a crate into a holding pen, and an attending worker is slashed by whatever’s inside.

In Crichton’s second draft, the lawyer who approaches from the helicopter is told that he’s standing on top of the skeleton. In Carter’s version, the helicopter lands “right on top of the dig site.” In Koepp’s early versions, the helicopter arrives at night. Grant “looks up at the helicopter and shouts, shaking his fist.”

In Carter’s version (only), during the Nublar helicopter descent, when the pilot loses control, Ellie asks Hammond if they’re going to crash. In Crichton’s second draft (only), it’s Lex who asks. In Marmo’s version (only) the helicopter is twice described as shaking violently.

Carter’s draft closes by introducing the new “T-rex finale” that “came from Spielberg’s fertile mind” during the January 22nd ’91 story meeting. In previous versions, the park had either been blown up by an army helicopter in a series of fiery explosions (Crichton’s first version) or destroyed by a genetically engineered lysine deficiency akin to a plague (Crichton’s second).

The T-Rex leaps up and grabs the helicopter by the skids, causing the pilot to lose control.

This version lasts through Marmo’s draft (in which it becomes an “army helicopter”), but is gone by Koepp’s: “I was not privy to that one. Steven must have moved on from that one before I got there.”

On Marmo’s request, Spielberg lent her his personal copy of the galleys, with highlights and margin notes. She also stayed in touch with Crichton. Her version includes a description of a bearded Grant, and storyboards from this era feature Grant with glasses, an Asian Ellie (although Marmo is quoted as saying she pushed for Dern as Ellie), and the dark-haired Lex.

Marmo’s version introduces the electric fence as an ominous new obstacle, and the roadside wall-drop sequence.

But it’s only with Koepp’s version that Tim is electrocuted by the fence and stops breathing, before Grant resuscitates him.

By the time Marmo finished her script, Koepp had already been given his assignment and Spielberg’s full attention. He decided to start fresh from the novel rather than modifying earlier drafts. But he worked from the copious storyboards and ideas generated by the creative team in conjunction with the previous screenwriters and Spielberg. As well, during the writing, he received story notes from Marmo, and ongoing input from Spielberg, whom he found to have “wonderful suggestions for action scenes.”

Spielberg had emphasized to Marmo that each scene should be “weighty with narrative ingenuity,” and Koepp continued the process of compressing the story. He refined the movie’s pairs of opposites, such as chaos–order, nature–artifice, man–woman, parent–child, science–religion, carnivore–herbivore, creator–creation, etc.

Koepp turned in an early working draft sometime between April 23rd and May 1st, 1992; a draft on May 26th, of which only ten pages have been released; an update on June 30th (full script); followed by numerous revisions during principal photography, with a Final Shooting Script dated November 11th and a Final Draft dated December 11th, 1992.

Koepp’s version, like all previous versions but Marmo’s, expands on a moment of criminal negligence from Crichton’s novel. The novel includes three separate dinosaur incidents on mainland Costa Rica: (1) the arrival by helicopter of a young (“no older than 18”) injured worker to a jungle clinic; (2) the attack of a young girl by compys (later used in The Lost World); and (3) a fatal attack on an infant by compys while a nanny is distracted. Eventually word of the strange lizards is funnelled to Columbia University, where it’s redirected to Dr. Grant for his expert opinion. This coincides with the arrival of Grant’s research funder, Hammond, whom Grant has been informed has been buying up amber. Later in the movie, Grant spies baby velociraptors stowing away on the supply ship. Besides Crichton’s second draft, which includes the second incident (a scene discarded within days), the drafts focus on the first incident.

Koepp’s first draft drops the idea of the raptors already having made it to the mainland, but opens for the first time with the “bulldozer accident.” He then reintroduces Carter’s jungle clinic scene, including Crichton’s beat of the doctor learning that a “raptor” is a “bird of prey.” And he continues with a scene at an amber mine, first conceived in Marmo’s draft, but now with Hammond learning that the injured worker is suing them for $2 million. In every subsequent version this is adjusted to $20 million. By the May version, Koepp and Spielberg realized that the jungle clinic beat was just a rehash of Jaws’ “This was no boat accident!” They omitted it, but allowed the original accident to remain as a catalyst for the investors to pressure Hammond, who must then court Grant’s approval to smooth over the disturbance.

Koepp’s crucial tweak was making Dr. Grant hostile towards children, creating a dramatic tension that doesn’t exist in the novel or previous versions. Grant uses his prop claw (introduced in Crichton’s second draft) to slash at and terrorize a child—already re-enacting the opening scene. Critic Henry Sheehan finds this moment to be echoed again in the main road T-Rex attack, in which Grant interrupts his own “barely suppressed murder fantasy” by snapping out of a trancelike moment of indecision.

Koepp finally removed the raft sequence, which he found “rather redundant.” The Jurassic Park River Adventure at Universal Studios had been in development since at least May 1990. Spielberg called it “a three-dimensional chance to live the movie,” although he admitted he would be stepping out before the steep drop at the end, being, himself, afraid of heights.

Koepp also continued to develop the ending. Each draft since Crichton’s first develops a scene involving the collapse of the T-Rex skeleton in the rotunda (not in the book). In Crichton’s first draft, we recall, it collapsed onto Hammond. In his second, it collapses as Grant climbs it, and serves as a distraction. In Carter’s, Tim and Lex try to escape the raptors by climbing into the T-Rex’s rib cage, to no avail; Grant arrives at the last minute, presses some control buttons, which causes the skeleton to collapse, with the T-Rex skull crushing one of the raptors. Marmo’s version is similar. Koepp’s refines the concept further, introducing a “Condor” crane that Grant manoeuvres to knock down the skeleton, ripping it from the ceiling and sending cables and bolts down like bullets, and with the skull decapitating the raptor—beheading the raptor with a beheaded head. (cf. Aristotle, Poetics 9.1452a)

In the final draft (the change was only made on-set) the skeleton collapses on top of Tim—marking the third time that a chassis has done so, a conspicuous repetition.

Koepp also completes the rehabilitation of John Hammond. After Hammond was crushed in Crichton’s first draft, he distracts the raptors in the second, sacrificing himself in a final act of redemption to save the kids.

Carter’s version is similar, except that Hammond admits to knowing the DNA was unstable and that the park was never tenable. In Marmo, he admits it but blames it on his employees, and is left behind and dies. In Koepp’s first draft, he admits he knew, but blames it on himself, and stays behind but we don’t see him die. By Koepp’s June 30th ’92 draft, the DNA isn’t inherently unstable, Hammond’s culpability for the park and bringing the kids there is unclear, and he is brought along on the helicopter. Koepp speaks to the softening of Hammond directly: “Steven identified with him, whether consciously or not.”

Marmo said, “I thought [Hammond] was insane because he made a park that had raptors and T. rexes in it and still he brought his grandchildren to it before it had a real safety check. He took his own grandchildren to a potentially lethal park to use them as pawns.” But, “Steven wanted a sunnier captain of the Jurassic ship; he was clear about that.”

By the final draft, the question of culpability for the story’s concrete acts of negligence—the young worker mauled by a raptor whose family is suing Hammond for $2 million or $20 million; the boy and girl repeatedly threatened with violent death—is overshadowed by Hammond’s idealism and the ultimate rescue of the children.

But Koepp’s versions also enact a more fundamental reframing. In the book, Dr. Wu compares DNA to photography: “The DNA of the dinosaurs was like old photographs that had been retouched, basically the same as the original but in some places repaired and clarified...” (Crichton 137). The analogy begun in the textual form of Jurassic Park the book only comes to full reflexivity in Jurassic Park the movie which is, of course, a sequence of hundreds of thousands of retouched “old photographs.” Koepp’s draft marks the arrival of a meta-consciousness concerning not only the movie’s own character as a theme park attraction, but as a state-of-the-art technology demonstration.

Reconstituting the components of the miracle at ILM, Koepp’s first draft restores the early brachiosaurus scene from Crichton’s first draft and sequences it next to the movie theatre/computer lab/genetic nursery, amalgamated into a single rotating theme park ride.

This conscious, ironic meta-reference became the finishing layer of Jurassic Park’s aesthetic.

Spielberg was dreaming himself into his movies—as he always did—but had intuited a strange new hook. It was a dream about discovering a new power for making dreams come true—just as, in reality, he was.

As a celebration of the historical turning point and their new ability to create seamless CGI, they showcased it.

Throughout the story, they remind the spectator of their newly harnessed powers for capturing the imagination. As critic Nigel Morris puts it:

This shifting was both cause and effect, a mesmerizing feedback loop that bounded the spectator’s sense of being both safely protected behind a screen and completely enveloped in the story.

This allowed a new transparent dimension that could be saturated with advertising that didn’t feel like advertising. By pretending it was criticizing itself, it disarmed the spectator, whose criticisms they heard addressed, and neutralized.

It obscured the apparent absolution fantasy of a grown man haunted by the death of two children in an unforeseeable industrial accident.

#18. The Fabelmans (2022) is about the limits of honesty

Spielberg’s most comprehensive biography to date is Joseph McBride’s Steven Spielberg: A Biography, first published in 1997. But it was “unauthorized.” Spielberg has always discouraged potential biographers, telling them that he was planning to write his autobiography at some time in the future.

McBride notes Spielberg’s desire to “control the telling of his own life story.” He writes:

McBride details some of these “misleads” in his work. Spielberg has a habit of telling “fibs.” Most famously over the years, for example, he’s told various more-or-less elaborate versions of how he got his break at Universal Studios. The template is that he sneaks off a tour, hides in the bathroom, and then occupies an office and gradually insinuates himself into the studio. The truth (which is no less impressive) is that his father’s colleague contacted the Universal Studios librarian, Chuck Silvers, who got Spielberg a day-pass and offered to show him around. Spielberg made a strong impression on him, and Silvers offered him a summer internship, but couldn’t get him a pass, and so Spielberg had to find his own way onto the lot.

It may seem trifling to address such imprecisions, but many of these fibs sustain a weird purchase in reality. Once he began making inroads in Hollywood, Spielberg subtracted a year from his age, an adjustment he maintained in the media and on documents like his driver’s licence until 1995 (past the time of Jurassic Park), when a lawsuit finally prompted his representatives to acknowledge that he was born in 1946. In 1975, according to the suit, his adjusted age allowed him to claim that an unfavourable contract, signed in 1968 with Denis Hoffman, the producer of Amblin’, was unenforceable, on the basis that he’d signed it as a minor, before he was twenty-one; in 1977, Hoffman accepted a $30,000 buyout. It was only in 1994, when McBride, researching his biography, mentioned Spielberg’s real age in an interview with Hoffman, that the counter-party obtained the birth certificate and pressed the claim, leading to an exchange of lawsuits in October 1995. (McBride, ch. 2)

Spielberg started making good on his promise of an autobiography as early as 2002, with Catch Me If You Can. Of course, as we have seen, Spielberg’s work generally has a strong autobiographical tendency. But Catch Me If You Can signalled a “more literal” reflection of his own family trauma. (McBride)

Despite his frequently told anecdote suggesting his lack of susceptibility to Freudian analysis, he also began to admit the opposite. In conversation with Scorsese about the film at the time of its release, Spielberg noted that:

In 2017, HBO produced Spielberg’s first authorized documentary: Spielberg (2017). Spielberg’s mother, Leah Adler, encouraged him to turn his family’s story into a movie.

Spielberg has always been fascinated by coming-of-age stories, but in 2022, with The Fabelmans he finally turns the lens onto himself—still displacing his story onto fictional characters but to a minimal degree. And it’s precisely by undermining this apparent transparency that he begins to reveal the distortions that characterize his technique.

In an interview with director Paul Thomas Anderson, Spielberg once again describes his working relationship with screenwriter Tony Kushner as a sort of therapy session, acknowledging his first (but not his second) therapy experience.

The Fabelmans begins like Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage—a 1973 six-part TV series about the disintegration of a marriage—before finding its shape or “splitting” as Paul Thomas Anderson puts it.

Spielberg has previously used Scenes from a Marriage as a shorthand for the difference between him (and George Lucas) and Scorsese (and the rest of New Hollywood). One style, he says, is introspective, and “concentric” while the other is a “complete thought” and “more linear.”

The story unfolds in the vein of Malick’s The Tree of Life or Tarkovsky’s Mirror. Spielberg mythologizes his own biography as a genesis of myth-making, turning the particulars of his life—like having three younger sisters, being a Jew among Christians, and the child of an unstable marriage—into elements of a paradigmatic creation myth populated by the gods and goddesses of cinema.

The movie opens with one of Spielberg’s earliest memories: his mother and father taking him to the movies.

His parents are emblems of the Greatest Generation; his mother is a creative spirit playing the role of a housewife, and his father is an engineer laying the foundations of the personal computer.

When describing the memory elsewhere, Spielberg emphasizes two impressions: feeling overwhelmed and feeling deceived.

But in The Fabelmans this moment is played for awe. It’s superimposed over another, more primal memory, which he described to Time magazine in 1985: being wheeled down the aisle of a synagogue towards the red light of the Ark of the Torah, while elders on each side chanted prayers in rhythm and handed him crackers. And when asked in 1991 to choose a “master image” that recurs throughout his work, Spielberg chose that of Barry, the toddler from Close Encounters, approaching “that beautiful but awful light, just like fire.” Spielberg’s first memory is also his “master image,” and here he layers it under the later memory, rendering the cinematic image as the ultimate expression of the divine fire.

These two memories give way to a third: inspired by the train crash in the middle of The Greatest Show on Earth, Spielberg begins to crash his own trains together by flashlight.

His mother reflects on the artistic fulfillment she feels while playing Bach, especially when she descends into the lower octave of one of his laments, describing it as “making a world you can be safe and happy in,” and infers from this that crashing trains is her son’s way of gaining a sense of control over his life. His father isn’t conscious of it, but he takes just as much pleasure in tinkering with his machines.

The subsequent scene plays like Freudian pornography. And later, when the family goes camping just after he turns sixteen, his mother dances in a nightgown as the men of the family gaze on. His father’s best friend tells Sammy that he should be filming this, and turns on the headlights of the car behind her, making her gown transparent. Once again the illuminated moving image is infused with ambivalence. The embarrassed elder daughter tries to block her, but Sammy urges her to sit down, which the father doesn’t overrule.

Later, while editing the dancing footage on his father’s request, he notices evidence of his mother having an affair with the friend. This is the moment that gives the movie its “shape,” echoing the earlier “secret,” and splitting Sammy from the rest of his family.

Sammy and his mother, as co-conspirators, play out an emotional affair in parallel to her actual affair, which eventually results in the parents’ divorce. Spielberg had been accused of making Disney movies about incest before, with The Color Purple and Back to the Future, and now the veil is even further lifted.

As Jocasta says to Oedipus in Sophocles’ tragedy, “many a man has slept with his own mother in a dream.”

But even when the movie’s psychosexual elements are made explicit, they hardly register until they become so loud that they’re hard to ignore. Once Sammy reaches senior year in Saratoga, his power to control reality becomes activated, not only within the story, but conspicuously in its telling.

After being bullied by two blonde antisemites, Sammy later finds himself in a private, playful moment in the library with one of their girlfriends and her friend. When the girlfriend points out that he’s Jewish, he replies, in close-up, “I mean, yeah, since the day I was circumcised.” The friend becomes attracted to him, associating him with Jesus (who was also Jewish, and circumcised), and invites him over to her room, covered in posters of Jesus and Elvis, so that Sammy might let Jesus “come inside him,” the first of many such double entendres.

Eventually Sammy gets his revenge on the bullies by screening a movie of the senior beach day that he’s edited to show the smaller Aryan as a thieving loser, and the bigger one as an Olympic god, including a close-up of his lower body while running. The bewildered pair turn against each other, and after Sammy admits his exact motives are unclear even to himself, he promises never to tell of the humiliation, “unless I make a movie about it.”

The autobiography is too Freudian to take at face value. Spielberg is playing with us the same way he says he played with his first therapist. The meta-implication is that Spielberg is showing us what it means to have a power to manipulate reality to make it safer for himself. It was in Saratoga that he realized that his movie camera could be used not only as his vehicle to social acceptance but as a “defensive weapon.”

Spielberg’s making conspicuous of his power for shaping reality is his way of telling us that there are some things he still can’t talk about, even at the sunset of his career....his Kurosawa years...

#19. And, as a corollary, all artworks

1. Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) recently celebrated its 30th anniversary. In the years since its release, its intellectual property has grown into a “cottage industry,” encompassing theme-park rides, toys, apparel, video games, product placement, and six sequels, the latest of which, Jurassic World Rebirth (2025), began a new “Jurassic era.” While Spielberg had already directed other movies that were hugely profitable, some, like Jaws (1975), Close Encounters (1977), and E.T. (1982), weren’t “toyetic,” as Kenner’s Bernard Loomis told Spielberg of Close Encounters in 1977 (Jones 258); and the other, Indiana Jones, belonged to George Lucas. Jurassic Park was the first, and last, enduring merchandising empire that Spielberg could call his own.

   At the time, Jurassic Park represented a breakthrough in cinema technology, marking the first time that a blockbuster depended on CGI that looked and moved realistically. It became the herald for the coming digital revolution, which Spielberg talked about with a mixture of excitement, melancholy, and trepidation. (Rufus Sears, “Making Jurassic Park,” Empire, no. 50, August 1993)

   The filmmakers integrated this energy into Jurassic Park’s brand identity. At the same time as Jurassic Park movies operate at the cutting edge of creative technology, their stories are about the perennial danger of cutting-edge creative technologies, adding a new meta-referential gloss to the classic technology-critical story archetype (e.g., Prometheus, Golem, Frankenstein, Godzilla).

   But Jurassic Park also had a more personal significance. By 1992, Spielberg was in his mid-40s and onto his second marriage, with Kate Capshaw, who had just converted to Judaism, renewing Spielberg’s faith in the process. They had one child each from their previous marriages, one adopted son, and two children of their own. But he was still facing a transition to adulthood: both in his upcoming responsibilities of running a major Hollywood studio, DreamWorks SKG; and in the seriousness required by Schindler’s List (1993), which was being treated by Sid Sheinberg, Spielberg’s mentor at Universal Studios, as Spielberg’s arrival into his own identity as a mature filmmaker. It was his cinematic bar mitzvah and an emotional breakthrough.

   According to biographer Joseph McBride, Spielberg’s movies of the late ’80s and early ’90s reflected the filmmaker working through several of his well-publicized neuroses: his resentments towards his father (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade); his divorce from his first wife, Amy Irving (Always); and his own Peter Pan complex (Hook). It was around this time that Spielberg had been trying some psychotherapy.

   All my friends went to therapy and I thought that maybe I would learn something about myself, so I went for a year. But I can’t say that I found the discoveries conclusive. Everything I learned about myself I knew already or I’d guessed for myself. (qtd. in McBride, ch. 15)

   Spielberg was reportedly in talks with celebrity self-help author John Bradshaw, a guru specializing in healing the inner child, by imaginatively regressing his subject(s) back to their early childhood. According to Bradshaw, Spielberg was deeply impressed by his work. Los Angeles magazine reported that in February of 1992, they met at Spielberg’s house to discuss a TV show Spielberg had been convincing him to do. Bradshaw says, “Steven looked at me on the set of Hook and said, ‘This could be the most powerful television program of all time.’” (qtd. in Sally Ogle Davis, “Oh, Pablum!,” Los Angeles, April 1992) Spielberg must have valued something about Bradshaw’s analysis, as he hired him as an on-set consultant for Hook, and cast his daughter in the movie.

   In this context, Jurassic Park always seemed like one last summer vacation. Sheinberg had insisted Spielberg get Jurassic Park done before Schindler’s List: “he knew that once I had directed Schindler, I wouldn’t be able to do Jurassic Park.” (Spielberg, qtd. in McBride, ch. 16)

   Critic Kim Newman summed it up as follows:

   The paring-down of a monster best-seller into a suspense machine (Jaws); the tackling of a popular-science childhood sense of wonder perennial with state-of-the-art effects that re-imagine 1950s B-science fiction (Close Encounters of the Third Kind); the all-action jungle adventure littered with incredible perils and gruesome deaths (Raiders of the Lost Ark); and big-eyed creatures who range from beatifically benevolent to toothily murderous (Gremlins, E.T. , qtd. in Morris, Empire of Light, 256.).

   But what if Jurassic Park wasn’t a break from Spielberg’s therapeutic phase, but its most pivotal moment?

   

   Close Encounters was produced by Julia Phillips and Michael Phillips for Columbia Pictures.

   Spielberg had been developing the premise for a while, but Paul Schrader was originally hired to write the screenplay. Spielberg outlined the premise and key images for Schrader, who interpreted it as a retelling of the conversion of St. Paul: an unbeliever has a spiritual encounter that changes the direction of his life. Spielberg hated Schrader’s script (“Kingdom Come”), which he called “one of the most embarrassing screenplays ever professionally turned in to a major studio or director... a terribly guilt-ridden story... not about UFOs at all.” (qtd. in McBride, ch. 11)

   Schrader said, “The only thing I deserve a credit for... is changing Steve’s mind about doing the film as a UFO Watergate. I thought it ought to be about a spiritual encounter. That idea stayed and germinated.” (qtd. in McBride, ch. 11)

   After another rewrite or two, Spielberg decided to write the screenplay himself. Spielberg and Phillips honed the idea of a climactic moment of transcendence they referred to as “The Experience.” These pockets of spiritual denouement would become a characteristic feature of Spielberg’s work.

   Kael found Close Encounters to be a “kids’ movie in the best sense.” It was joyous and optimistic. But while she was dazzled by its mixture of the transcendent and the infantile, she was beginning to see Spielberg less in Dreyfuss’s “man looking for answers” and more in the toddler Barry, a “light-worshipper who sees the sky as a giant toy shop.”

   In the wake of Star Wars’ transformation of the cinematic landscape, and the rise of SNL, Spielberg became more assured in dispensing with the pretensions of his New Hollywood milieu and exploring his comedic sensibilities. He was fostering two younger filmmakers, Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis, who specialized in screwball comedies steeped in Americana. He had recommended them to the most conservative of his New Hollywood cohort, John Milius, whose A-Team Productions hired them to develop the script that would become Spielberg’s next movie, 1941 (1979).

   The foursome began hanging out together, skeet shooting and then going out for chili-burgers and doing bigfoot impressions while Spielberg filmed it all on his Super-8 camera. “Great howling mad evenings... out of which came 1941,” said Milius.

   1941 was the third time in a row that Spielberg had gone over time and budget, but this time it was a bomb. Spielberg soon disavowed the movie, the first of three times that he would do so (Temple of Doom (1984) and Hook (1991) being the other two).

   Spielberg said, “I plunged into [1941] with such wild abandon that I didn’t really focus on the story I was telling, to know whether it was funny or simply stupid or whether the film was getting too overblown... On about the hundred and forty-fifth day of shooting, I realized that the film was directing me, I wasn’t directing it.” (qtd. in McBride, ch. 12)

   At the time, he blamed his writers, telling the New York Times that they “caught me at a weak moment. I’ll spend the rest of my life disowning this movie,” although he apologized to them shortly after (qtd. in McBride, ch. 12).

   Indiana Jones was first suggested to Spielberg by George Lucas in 1977. Spielberg would direct and Lucas would produce. Lucas negotiated a sweet deal with Paramount (allowing him to keep the rights to the franchise) that was highly contingent on Spielberg being able to deliver the movie on time and on budget.

   He accomplished this with a renewed production regimen, involving an expanded storyboarding practice, newly capable and reliable producers, in Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, and a willingness to shoot to get the job done.

   Spielberg and Lucas jointly worked out the story in a series of meetings with writer Lawrence Kasdan, in which they wrestled over whether the character should be more Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart.

   Both Spielberg and Lucas saw themselves—and each other—in Indiana Jones. Lucas said that “If I could be a dream figure, I’d be Indy,” and Spielberg later poked fun at Lucas being “a kind of dweeby Indiana Jones.”

   He loved Melissa Mathison’s draft (“E.T. and Me”), and they rushed it to production. He had been planning to do Poltergeist next, based on a script called Night Skies, a sort-of sequel to Close Encounters based on an account that came up in his research about a farmhouse family terrorized by malevolent aliens. At some point he’d hired John Sayles (Piranha (1978), dir. Joe Dante) to turn it into a screenplay. Eventually he wrote it himself, incorporating several of his childhood memories.

   At the same time, he’d been wanting to do a movie about children. Spielberg reported that Truffaut had told him: “You must make a movie about keeds. You must stop all this big stuff and make a movie about keeds! If it’s the last thing you do!” (qtd. in McBride) Spielberg had tasked Gale and Zemeckis with writing the project, but didn’t give them much guidance except that it should be about kids. The three of them worked briefly on a script called After School, but Spielberg’s agent advised him against making it—the comedy was too juvenile.

   In Night Skies, one of the aliens, a benevolent one named Buddy, befriends an autistic boy. This side-plot provided the axis for Spielberg’s movie about kids, E.T., while Poltergeist remained the “hostile” successor to Close Encounters.
2. An Unresolved Syllogism in Freud?

   The patient would lie down on a sofa, while Freud sat behind him. The patient agreed to “say whatever came into his head, while ceasing to give any conscious direction to his thoughts.” (Freud, An Autobiographical Study) The purpose of free association was the same as that of its predecessor (therapeutic hypnosis): to isolate maladaptive tendencies in the patient’s unconscious mental processes and resolve them. But it had been modified for a very specific purpose: to isolate a subtle form of what Freud called “transference.”

   

   In the early 1880s, Freud was an early-career medical scientist. Rather in the way that Aristotle makes an analogy of a bent stick—i.e., the displaced, faint, quivering reflection of a stick—for an image (cf. Aristotle, On Dreams 3, 461a), Freud studied, not delusions, per se (the quivering reflections), but their underlying physical causes.

   One day, his friend, a medical doctor named Josef Breuer, told him about a woman he was treating who suffered from “clouded” mental states. Breuer had figured out—after she once fell into one of these states in his presence—that he could engage her while she was in it, and even talk through it so that her waking condition would improve.

   Freud speculated that these memories were ordinarily clouded because considering them directly would be so shameful by the patient’s own standards that some part of their mind was somehow, actively, keeping it at bay, unbeknownst to the patient. The patients felt guilt in the form of displaced anxiety. If they could just be brought back to the original incident, and urged through it “with a free expression of emotion,” the pent-up energy would be released (“catharsis”) and their condition resolved.

   But Freud suspected that some of his patients’ traumatic recountings were embellished. And one day, one of his female patients, as she was waking up from her trance, tried to kiss him. The same thing had happened to Breuer.

   Freud realized that he’d failed to account for a key variable. His patients were responding to his analysis in exaggeration of what was reasonable, which either took the form of intensified positive feelings (compliance, love), or of intensified negative ones (criticism, anger). Either way, this exaggerated “transference,” since it was woven into the therapeutic relationship, was difficult to detect, and even harder to prove to the patient. He realized that he’d only ever been part of his patients’ own distorted re-tellings. And indeed, although the patients had seemed to improve, over the short-term, their symptoms soon returned.

   Considering this problem, he reframed his method. Instead, he would ask his patients to talk about their dreams. To the contemporary skeptics, then (and there were many)—who believed that the so-called realm of the unconscious was nothing but random epiphenomena—this provided a perfectly random sample. It was nonsense material, given meaning only in the patient’s interpretation.

   But if they agreed with Freud’s speculation—that dreams must provide the closest interface between the waking world and the “clouded” self—then all the better.

   And now, when the inevitable moment of transference occurred, the practitioner would be better positioned to see it for what it was, and explain it using the patient’s own associative links, which could be traced all the way back to early childhood experiences.

   Freud, reflecting later, observed that, by way of logical corollary, he’d also discovered several other sciences at the same time. If psychoanalysis was a science, he realized, for example, then so was dream analysis. In other words, both could trace an apparent, “manifest” narrative back to its underlying, evolutionary “motive.”

   Freud, by analyzing his own dreams, outlined the basic ways the dream’s real purpose concealed itself. It expressed itself through an ongoing narrative, with multiple people from life being “condensed” into singular dream figures, and the actual functions of the dream “displaced” onto seemingly minor details. It was then finished with a “deceptive secondary revision,” with the relatively conscious side of the mind doing a bit of extra polishing. It was only as the analyst paid attention to the patient’s associative patterns, rather than their interpretations, that the underlying story became visible.

   And if dreams were basically stories, you see, then this implied two more sciences: art criticism, and consumer psychology.

   Poetry, like dreams, could be decoded as the imaginary gratification of the artist’s unconscious wishes. The analyst just needed to factor out their conscious orientation towards an audience: poems were “calculated to arouse interest in other people and were able to evoke and to gratify the same unconscious wishes in them too.” (Freud, An Autobiographical Study)

   But did Freud’s bilateral syllogism really hold together the way Freud said it did?

   Isn’t the real story the underlying ahistorical assumption that the basic evolutionary drives are human beings’ primary motivators? And—willfully or not—coming to see everything through that “lens”?

#20. Pauline Kael: Musing on the problem for years

This section collects Kael’s mainline reflections (mostly in the New Yorker) on Spielberg’s (and Lucas’s) influence on the American cinematic mainstream, 1974–1985.

1. 🔗 Sugarland and Badlands (March 18th, 1974)

   “The Sugarland Express” is like some of the entertaining studio-factory films of the past (it’s as commercial and shallow and impersonal), yet it has so much eagerness and flash and talent that it just about transforms its scrubby ingredients.

   
   The director, Steven Spielberg, is twenty-six; I can’t tell if he has any mind, or even a strong personality, but then a lot of good moviemakers have got by without being profound. He isn’t saying anything special in “The Sugarland Express,” but he has a knack for bringing out young actors, and a sense of composition and movement that almost any director might envy. Composition seems to come naturally to him, as it does to some of the young Italians; Spielberg uses his gift in a very free-and-easy, American way—for humor, and for a physical response to action. He could be that rarity among directors[—]a born entertainer—perhaps a new generation’s Howard Hawks. In terms of the pleasure that technical assurance gives an audience, this film is one of the most phenomenal debut films in the history of movies. If there is such a thing as a movie sense—and I think there is (I know fruit vendors and cabdrivers who have it and some movie critics who don’t)—Spielberg really has it. But he may be so full of it that he doesn’t have much else. There’s no sign of the emergence of a new film artist (such as Martin Scorsese) in “The Sugarland Express,” but it marks the debut of a new-style, new-generation Hollywood hand.

   Maybe Spielberg loves action and comedy and speed so much that he really doesn’t care if a movie has anything else in it. But he doesn’t copy old stuff. He isn’t deep, but he isn’t derivative, either.

   
   The scriptwriters are living off the past. I think it’s likely that being part of the TV-and-young-moviemaker generation affects a director—changes his perceptions—much more basically than it affects writers. It may turn writers on so that they want to work in movies, but they tend to draw upon old movies for their ideas, and this is particularly true of the film-school and American Film Institute troops (which Barwood and Robbins belong to), whose education has been sitting around and looking at movies, and who are now selling scripts to the major studios. They’re not really writers, any more than most of the other Hollywood writers are. They’re synthesizers of other people’s ideas, even when they write an “original” like “The Sugarland Express.”
   
   Spielberg is a bit leaden with some of the older actors, and can’t always redeem the low-comedy effects—the sort of squalls and antic outrage that got laughs in “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.” There are hero-worshipful views of Ben Johnson, who plays the captain who leads the pursuit; the camera regards him as if he were a diva and his face the big aria. The captain’s excesses (breaking the weapons of a pair of right-wing nuts, shooting the tires of a TV-crew truck) are in a too cute old-movie style. I’m not a great fan of Ben Johnson’s acting in general; he holds positions like a pointer—imparting an air of deliberation and importance to every move he makes. Some of the comic touches that pull down Spielberg’s style are probably the result of the editors’ leaving a nudging extra beat; their work is mostly split-second right, but they leave a beat on an art effect, too—on the Teddy bear in the road near the end of the picture (the shot featured in the ad campaign). Spielberg can’t redeem it all, but he gets away with it; he’s one of those wizard directors who can make trash entertaining. That’s what “The Sting,” for example, tries to do, and though I may be lonely in this, I think it fails. Spielberg savors film, and you respond to that. “The Sugarland Express” has life to it. Not the kind of life that informs a young film like “Mean Streets”—probably the best American movie of 1973—but the vitality that a director with great instincts can bring to commercial entertainment.
2. 🔗 Notes on Evolving Heroes, Morals, Audiences (November 8th, 1976)

   In “Jaws,” which may be the most cheerfully perverse scare movie ever made, the disasters don’t come on schedule the way they do in most disaster pictures, and your guts never settle down to a timetable. Even while you’re convulsed with laughter, you’re still apprehensive, because the editing rhythms are very tricky, and the shock images loom up huge, right on top of you.

   
   There are parts of “Jaws” that suggest what Eisenstein might have done if he hadn’t intellectualized himself out of reach— if he’d given in to the bourgeois child in himself. While having a drink with an older Hollywood director, I said that I’d been amazed by the assurance with which Steven Spielberg, the young director of “Jaws,” had toyed with the film frame. The older director said, “He must never have seen a play; he’s the first one of us who doesn’t think in terms of the proscenium arch. With him, there’s nothing but the camera lens.” It’s not only the visual technique of “Jaws” that’s different. The other big disaster movies are essentially the same as the pre-Vietnam films, but “Jaws” isn’t. It belongs to the pulpiest sci-fi monster-movie tradition, yet it stands some of the old conventions on their head. Though “Jaws” has more zest than a Woody Allen picture, and a lot more electricity, it’s funny in a Woody Allen way. When the three protagonists are in their tiny boat, you feel that Robert Shaw, the malevolent old shark hunter, is so manly that he wants to get them all killed; he’s so manly he’s homicidal. It’s not sharks who are his enemies; it’s other men. When he begins showing off his wounds, the bookish ichthyologist, Richard Dreyfuss, strings along with him at first, and matches him scar for scar. But when the ichthyologist is outclassed in the number of scars he can exhibit, he opens his shirt, looks down at his hairy chest, and with a put-on artist’s grin says, “You see that? Right there? That was Mary Ellen Moffat—she broke my heart.” When Shaw squeezes an empty beer can flat, Dreyfuss satirizes him by crumpling a Styrofoam cup. The director, identifying with the Dreyfuss character, sets up bare-chested heroism as a joke and scores off it all through the movie. The third protagonist, acted by Roy Scheider, is a former New York City policeman who has just escaped the city dangers and found a haven as chief of police in a resort community on an island. There, feeling totally inadequate in his new situation, he confronts primal terror. But the fool on board the little boat isn’t the chief of police who doesn’t know one end of a boat from the other, or the bookman, either. It’s Shaw, the obsessively masculine fisherman, who thinks he’s got to prove himself by fighting the shark practically single-handed. Shaw personalizes the shark, turns him into a fourth character—his enemy. This fisherman is such a macho pain that it’s harrowingly funny when he’s gobbled up; a flamboyant actor like Robert Shaw, who wears a proscenium arch around him, has to be kidded.
   
   

   The high point of the film’s humor is our seeing Shaw get it; this nut Ahab, with his hyper-masculine basso-profundo speeches, stands in for all the men who have to show they’re tougher than anybody. The shark’s cavernous jaws demonstrate how little his toughness finally adds up to. If one imagines George C. Scott or Anthony Quinn in the Robert Shaw role, these anti-macho jokes expand into a satire of movie heroism.

   If “Jaws” represents a new affability about the tough American male, it also contains a token of a new ruthlessness. There’s a lull in the action, a becalmed interlude, which is filled by a long monologue delivered by Robert Shaw. He tells the ultimate shark horror story—it’s worse, even, than anything that we see in the movie. [...]

3. 🔗 Contrasts (September 26th, 1977)

   The loudness, the smash-and-grab editing, the relentless pacing drive every idea from your head; for young audiences “Star Wars” is like getting a box of Cracker Jack which is all prizes. This is the writer-director George Lucas’s own film, subject to no business interference, yet it’s a film that’s totally uninterested in anything that doesn’t connect with the mass audience.

   
   There’s no breather in the picture, no lyricism; the only attempt at beauty is in the double sunset. It’s enjoyable on its own terms, but it’s exhausting, too: like taking a pack of kids to the circus. An hour into it, children say that they’re ready to see it all over again; that’s because it’s an assemblage of spare parts—it has no emotional grip. “Star Wars” may be the only movie in which the first time around the surprises are reassuring. (Going a second time would be like trying to read “Catch-22” twice.) Even if you’ve been entertained, you may feel cheated of some dimension—a sense of wonder, perhaps. It’s an epic without a dream. But it’s probably the absence of wonder that accounts for the film’s special, huge success. The excitement of those who call it the film of the year goes way past nostalgia to the feeling that now is the time to return to childhood.
4. 🔗 The Greening of the Solar System (November 28th, 1977)

   “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” is the most innocent of all technological-marvel movies, and one of the most satisfying. This film has retained some of the wonder and bafflement we feel when we first go into a planetarium: we ooh and aah at the vastness, and at the beauty of the mystery. The film doesn’t overawe us, though, because it has a child’s playfulness and love of surprises.

   
   [...] This vision would be too warm and soul-satisfying if it weren’t for the writer-director Steven Spielberg’s skeptical, let’s-try-it-on spirit. He’s an entertainer—a magician in the age of movies. Is Spielberg an artist? Not exactly—or not yet. He’s a prodigy—a flimflam wizard-technician. The immense charm of “Close Encounters” comes from the fact that, for all its scale and expense (nineteen million dollars), this is a young man’s movie—Spielberg is still under thirty—and there’s not a sour thought in it. (The title is from a book by the astronomer Dr. J. Allen Hynek—close encounters of the first kind are sightings, the second kind are physical evidence, and the third involve actual contact. Sightings aren’t necessarily close and they’re not encounters, and physical evidence isn’t an encounter, either, but the title sounds good, anyway.)

   “Close Encounters,” too, is a kids’ movie in the best sense. You can feel the pleasure the young director took in making it. With his gift for investing machines with personality, Spielberg is the right director for science fantasy.

   
   He made a malevolent character of a truck in “Duel,” his famous made-for-TV movie. In his first theatrical feature, “The Sugarland Express,” he had cars dancing, feuding, bonding. In his second film, “Jaws,” he turned a computer-operated shark into a personal enemy. And now he’s got his biggest mechanical toys: the mother ship and the flying-saucer herald angels—whirring through the skies, flashing their lights. Some are intergalactic Pucks teasing earthlings and leading them on fools’ chases; some are stately geometric forms spinning languorously. Each is like a musical divertimento, a delight unto itself. “Jaws” was a nightmare movie; this is a dream. In “Jaws,” the harrowing terror kept building; here the mystical good humor builds—the story envelops you. [...]

   Roberts Blossom has the look of a true believer. That’s what Dreyfuss lacks. Spielberg is far more successful with Barry, the three-year-old, whose pure lust for otherworldly entertainment is delicately funny. Barry, the toddling light-worshipper who sees the sky as a giant toy shop, is closer to the heart of Spielberg’s vision than Roy, whose “looking for answers” Dreyfuss strains to represent.

   “Close Encounters” shows an excess of kindness—an inability (or, perhaps, unwillingness) to perceive the streak of cowardice and ignorance and confusion in the actions of the authorities who balk the efforts of the visionaries to reach their goal.

   
   Having devised a plot in which the government systematically covers up information about U.F.O. sightings, Spielberg is much too casual about how this is done and imprecise about why. He has a paranoid plot, but he hasn’t dramatized the enemy. The obstacles here are just Air Force and Army men doing their duty, and these authorities are shrugged off by the cranks, or humbly accepted. Roy and the others don’t have the incapacitating hatred of smooth-talking authority which would make us respond to their frustrations—would make us feel what was unhinging them. Impersonality doesn’t enrage Spielberg, because he hasn’t got at the personality hidden in it. Stock villainy isn’t what’s needed—something deeper is. He had similar trouble with the corrupt local merchants and politicians in “Jaws;” their corruption was tired, ritualized—it was necessary for the plot, that was all. In “Close Encounters,” there is nothing behind what the military men do except bureaucratic indifference. But that means they don’t know what they’re doing—and to be so totally blind is tragic, crazy emptiness. Spielberg has a genuine affection for harmless aberrants, but he doesn’t fathom the dangerous aberrance of authority—particularly an authority that in its own eyes is being completely reasonable.

   “Close Encounters” is a beautiful, big, enjoyable film that sends you out happy. It might be even better if there weren’t so many people at the end looking upward with transfigured faces.

5. 🔗 Whipped (June 15th, 1981)

   The marketing executives are the new high priests of the movie business. It’s natural.

   They’re handling important sums of money. And they dispense the money dramatically, in big campaigns that flood out over the country. It’s not unusual for more to be spent on marketing a picture than on making it, and this could become commonplace. (Everybody takes it for granted that more is spent selling soap than manufacturing it.) Right now, the easier a project looks to market, the easier it is to finance. And the scope of what these priests think they can sell becomes narrower all the time.

   These marketing divisions are a relatively new development. (In earlier years, there were two much smaller departments—advertising and sales.) Their growing power isn’t in any special effectiveness in selling pictures; it’s in their ability to keep pictures that don’t lend themselves to an eye-popping thirty-second commercial from being made or, if they’re made, from being heard of. In the new Hollywood wisdom, anything to do with people’s lives belongs on TV. (As a result, television now makes contact with us in ways that movies no longer do.)

   Like poor relations, the print media are the residual legatees of the huge marketing campaigns for pictures.

   This month, God knows how many publications are featuring “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” a collaboration between George Lucas and Steven Spielberg—both still very young (Lucas is thirty-seven, Spielberg only thirty-three), and each responsible for some of the very top box-office successes in the history of movies. If anybody has a chance to turn movies around, it would seem to be these two (or Coppola).

   
   But “Raiders” is a machine-tooled adventure in the pulp-esoterica spirit of Edgar Rice Burroughs; it appears that Lucas and Spielberg think just like the marketing division. According to modern movie legend, Lucas, who had watched the serials of the thirties and forties on television in the fifties, has long cherished the idea of a hocus-pocus series “following the exploits of an adventurer/archeologist, Indiana Jones,” but he got more interested in his other idea—“Star Wars”—and put “Raiders” aside, for later. Over the years, he worked up the story idea with Philip Kaufman—the first picture was to be set in 1936, in order to take advantage of Hitler’s well-known interest in the occult—and in 1977 he offered it to Spielberg to direct. Spielberg, who was then finishing “Close Encounters” and was committed to making “1941,” agreed to do it after that, and Lawrence Kasdan, who had done the rewrite on “The Empire Strikes Back,” prepared the screenplay.

   But “Raiders” is so professional and so anxious to keep moving that it steps on its own jokes. You can almost feel Lucas and Spielberg whipping the editor to clip things sharper—to move ahead.

   
   (I say the two, rather than just Spielberg, because this picture gets dangerously close to cancelling itself out, in a way that recalls “More American Graffiti,” which Lucas also produced.) The effect of the obsessive pace is that the picture seems locked in. Our eyes never have a second just to linger on a face or on an image of planes coming out of the clouds. The frames fit into each other, dovetailing so tight that sometimes it seems as if the sheer technology had taken over. It’s all smart zap—a moviemaker’s self-reflexive feat.

   Despite its daring surface, “Raiders” is timid moviemaking: the film seems terrified of not giving audiences enough thrills to keep them happy.

   
   It’s an amalgam of Lucas’s follies—plot for its own sake, dissociated from character or drama; the affectless heroine, who’s a tougher version of Carrie Fisher’s spunky Princess Leia in “Star Wars”—and effects that Spielberg the youthful magician has already dazzled us with. I kept wondering if it was the drubbing that the press had given Spielberg on “1941” (where he was trying new things) that made him so cautious. He seems to have accepted the Lucas pulp-repulped format as a safety net. It’s not right for him. The movie comes alive in the kinetic comedy: in the lowdown, rowdy slapstick, when the Nazi sadist Toht, played by Ronald Lacey, picks the medallion up out of the fire, drops it from his blistering hand, and runs out screaming; and in the balletic slapstick, when Marion is the prisoner of the Nazis and Toht arrives and takes out a metal apparatus that Marion—and we—think is an instrument of torture but turns out to be a coat hanger. But Spielberg fumbles a lot of his action sequences, such as the ones on a tramp steamer and a U-boat, and even the early chase, in which Marion disappears. And some of the episodes are simply tired: a fight between Indy and a huge, sadistic German wrestler; a sequence with Indy jumping on a moving Nazi truck that’s full of soldiers, chucking them off one by one, and ramming other cars in the convoy, to the accompaniment of soul-grinding music. Seeing “Raiders” is like being put through a Cuisinart—something has been done to us, but not to our benefit.
   
   

   It’s a shocker when the big-time directors provide a rationale for the marketing division—when they say, as Spielberg does, that “the real movie-lovers are still children.” And there’s no doubt he means that in a congratulatory sense. The whole collapsing industry is being inspired by old Saturday-afternoon serials, and the three biggest American moviemakers are hooked on technological playthings and techniques.

   Behind “Raiders” is the soft-spoken George Lucas, who says things like “I’m really doing it so I can enjoy it. Because I just want to see this movie.” I believe him. I wish I didn’t. I wish I thought he talked that way just as a come-on for “Raiders,” because if Lucas, who is considered one of the most honorable people who have ever headed a production company, weren’t hooked on the crap of his childhood—if he brought his resources to bear on some projects with human beings in them—there’s no imagining the result. (There might be miracles.) I don’t think the deterrent to his producing movies with human characters is just financial risk. Lucas, who keeps a tight rein on budgets, probably wouldn’t stand to lose too much of his own or other people’s money. The bigger deterrent may be Lucas’s temperament and tastes. It’s not surprising that he takes pride in the fine toys that “Star Wars” generated, and controls their manufacture carefully; essentially, George Lucas is in the toy business.

6. 🔗 The Pure and the Impure (June 14th, 1982)

   [...] If the film seems a continuation of “Close Encounters,” that’s partly because it has the sensibility we came to know in that picture, and partly because E.T. himself is like a more corporeal version of the celestial visitors at the end of it.

   
   Like “Close Encounters,” “E.T.” is bathed in warmth, and it seems to clear all the bad thoughts out of your head. It reminds you of the goofiest dreams you had as a kid, and rehabilitates them. Spielberg is right there in his films; you can feel his presence and his love of surprises. This phenomenal master craftsman plays high-tech games, but his presence is youthful—it has a just-emerged quality.

   [...] Elliott (his name begins with an “E” and ends with a “T”) is a dutiful, too sober boy who never takes off his invisible thinking cap; the telepathic communication he develops with E.T. eases his cautious, locked-up worries, and he begins to act on his impulses.

   
   When E.T. has his first beer and loses his inhibitions, Elliott, at school, gets tipsy, and in biology class when each student is required to chloroform a frog and then dissect it he perceives his frog’s resemblance to E.T. and sets it free. (His classmates follow suit.) The means by which Elliott manages to kiss a pretty girl who towers over him by at least a head is a perfectly executed piece of slapstick.

   [...] As [if] to offer positive proof of how confounding people can be, Spielberg has also made an anything-for-a-scare movie—“Poltergeist,” a suburban gothic in which the children’s paradise turns into a children’s hell.

   
   Although the writing credits are shared, he wrote the initial story and rewrote the other writers’ work on the script, and he produced the picture and supervised the final edit. And although he picked Tobe Hooper to direct, he storyboarded the shots and, it appears, also took over, in considerable part, on the set. Whatever the credits say, he was certainly the guiding intelligence of “Poltergeist”—which isn’t a high compliment.

   [...] At first, Spielberg’s skill may get your hopes up—you think everything will come together in some wonderful sneaky-clever way.

   
   When you realize that it won’t, your whole relationship to the movie changes. You’ve become the director’s target: you’re being subjected to thrills, bombarded by them, as you were in “Raiders.” And so, since the director puts you in the position of being a connoisseur of special effects, you sit back and turn bitchy—at least, I do. It doesn’t take long for the principle of diminishing returns to set in: after a while your anticipation of a grisly new horror is more fun than what is delivered—ectoplasmic manifestations, spinning rooms and flying objects, gooey stuff that extrudes around closed doors, ambulatory cadavers, and angry, roiling skies and a mean tornado. The spectral effects are so varied that the film turns into a showcase for fancy opticals. And when we get into that jaded mood any effects that actually carry an emotional charge—such as the little boy in the family having nighttime terrors of a gnarled old tree with clawlike moving branches that’s outside his bedroom window, or the boy’s anxiety about a ghastly stuffed clown doll (its eyes seem to light up)—may be irritants. These effects don’t have any clearer connection to the poltergeists than the others do, but they bother some of us because we associate them with our own childhood fears, and so we respond to them on another level than connoisseurship—and it seems almost callous for the movie to toss them in with skeletons popping up and other “Boo!” effects.

7. 🔗 Hysterics (July 25th, 1983)

   When stories like the ones that were told on the Rod Serling TV show “The Twilight Zone” grow up, they become Borges fables—metaphysical hoodwinks.

   
   I didn’t expect (or want) “Twilight Zone—The Movie” to be Borgesian, but I did rather hope that John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, and George Miller—the four young directors who are paying homage to the TV series—would tease us with more artful macabre games than the ones on the old shows. It’s a naive (and dubious) sort of tribute that sets out to do essentially the same thing with the implicit expectation of doing it better; what they’ve given us is simply a remake.

   Written and directed by John Landis, this prologue is a beauty, but the happy rush of fright we get from it has to sustain us for a long stretch, because the first two episodes are embarrassments.

   
   The first, which was suggested by some of the old shows (rather than adapted from them, like the three others), is a painfully blunt sermon on the evils of racism and prejudice. The central character, a loudmouthed bigot, is played by Vic Morrow, who, along with two Vietnamese-American children, was killed in a helicopter accident during the filming; that may be why we don’t get the turnaround that we expect—when this bigot, after experiencing the terrifying plight of being a Jew trapped by the Nazis in occupied Paris, and a black chased by a lynch mob in the South, and a Vietnamese gunned down by G.I.s in a paddy, would metamorphose into a decent person. I assume that the moviemakers considered the possibility of dropping this segment, but that its writer-director, Landis, who was co-producer (with Spielberg) of the whole film, probably felt that it would be a memorial to Vic Morrow—that he wouldn’t have wanted his last performance to be scrapped. It is, after all, a starring role in one-fourth of an A-budget movie. And there’s nothing the matter with his scowling bad-guy performance, except there’s no shading in it—that would probably have come with the twist.

   In some ways, the lump of ironclad whimsy directed by Spielberg, which follows, is a worse embarrassment.

   
   [...] With the gloppy rich music, and what might be (laughingly) described as the ensemble acting, the tone here is sentimental-comic, and horribly slick. It’s as if Steven Spielberg had sat down and thought out what he could do that would make his detractors happiest.
8. 🔗 A Breeze, A Bawd, A Bounty (June 11th, 1984)

   “Temple of Doom” probably has to be called a pre-sequel, or prequel, to “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” which was in 1936, but it isn’t pulpy in the way that “Raiders” was. It doesn’t have the serious undercurrents that “Raiders” had; it’s less “sincere”— and that’s what is so good about it.

   
   The two films have the same adventurer-archeologist hero, Dr. Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), who wears a brown fedora and carries specs and a bullwhip. Indy seems more assured now, and more formidable physically—he’s a professor with the chest of a horse. The plot is minimal this time: the action starts in Shanghai, at the Obi Wan night club, where the lusty blond Willie (Kate Capshaw), in a line of tap-dancing chorus girls, belts out the film’s keynote song, “Anything Goes,” in English and Chinese. After a scramble at the club that features a diamond, a dose of poison, a vial of antidote, a lazy Susan, a pack of Oriental gangsters, and a rickshaw, and turns into a full-blown masterpiece of cheerful slapstick, Willie and Indy and his tiny, daredevil sidekick, the Chinese orphan Short Round (Ke Huy Quan), make a fast getaway by plane and drop off (literally) in India.

   The subject of a movie can be momentum. It has often been the true—even if not fully acknowledged— subject of movies. In “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” it’s not merely acknowledged, it’s gloried in. The picture has an exuberant, hurtling-along spirit. Spielberg tried kinetic comic-strip routines in his “1941” and couldn’t quite make them work; here comparable routines come off just about perfectly. Spielberg uses old wheezes like the lazy Susan and you’re charmed by it, remembering how, as a kid, you were nuts about these spinning discs. “Indiana Jones” is the kind of comedy in which the hero, in the middle of terrifying circumstances, and with his foot smoking, yells for water, and a deluge comes at him. The film sets the comic-book context for the hyperbolic perils that the three central characters get into, and keeps us laughing at the very fact that they don’t get a chance to catch their breath. The whole movie is designed as a shoot-the-chutes, and toward the end, when the heroic trio, having found the sacred stone and freed the stolen children from the maharajah’s mines, are trying to escape in a tiny mine car, and a shift in camera angles places us with them on a literal roller-coaster ride, the audience laughs in recognition that that’s what we’ve been on all along.

   Spielberg and his team come up with sequences that have an elusive mixture of comedy and wonder.

   
   At night in the jungle, the three travellers pause on the way to the palace; Indy and Short Round sit on the ground playing cards, squabbling amicably, and ignoring Willie, who has thus far been nothing but a shrill, complaining nuisance to them. It’s like a nostalgic American campfire scene or picnic on a Saturday Evening Post cover, but Willie, in the background, is being attacked by vampire bats and menaced by baboons, iguanas, snakes, and even an owl. She rushes around shrieking; the man and the boy are oblivious. This gag may have seemed terrific even on paper, but the look of it—the American small-town-boys’-world images it recalls—is inspired. Kate Capshaw’s Willie is the clown on the team; she has routines right out of burlesque. There’s a classic cockeyed-comedy bit involving her and her elephant, who treats her as derisively as the others do—the elephant likes to come up behind her, nudge her, and spray her with water. Willie gets so fed up that she grabs at what she thinks is its trunk, and throws a python at Indy. (She’s too exhausted to marvel at how she managed to detach it.) And there are sequences that are like what children dream up when they’re having a gross-out and trying to top each other: the three hungry travellers sit down to a banquet, with the boy maharajah at the head of the huge table and the high-ranking members of his court in evening dress, and the servants bring platters of delicacies—slippery, squirming baby eels, baked beetles, eyeball soup, and, for dessert, chilled monkeys’ brains to be scooped out of the skulls.
9. 🔗 Passion of a Critic: Kael on Mediocrity, Risk and American Movies (December 18th, 1985)

   Pauline Kael: In the beginning of the review of Raiders of the Lost Ark, I did a piece on the management people taking over the decisions about which movies should be made. That was four or five years ago, but it’s still the most recent and awful development I’ve covered. The only new wrinkle is that the young moviemakers who really are in a powerful enough position to do something have gone in the direction of making old-fashioned movies for kids. It’s certainly true for Lucas and what he’s produced, but it’s also become urgently true for Spielberg, that the movies he sponsors rip off his own work. And he doesn’t seem to realize that he’s cheapening his own imagination that way.

   Michael Sragow: Have you seen Amazing Stories?

   PK: Yes, I have. There was a comedy, one I quite liked, called “Mummy, Daddy.” I also watched that hour-long one that Spielberg directed about two months ago, “The Mission.” It was like a World War II movie. I thought of A Guy Named Joe and all those awful World War II movies that Spielberg has gotten hooked on. And it was absolutely brilliant technically. It’s very funny—I stood in front of the set staring at it, because I knew if I sat down I wouldn’t be able to sustain any interest in it because it was so stupid. But standing right in front of the set, it was technically so brilliant that I just looked at it shot by shot. Also, the kid was so much like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters. It’s as if Spielberg wants this slightly stocky, infantile kid image, that he’s in love with that image, and he sees something noble and saintly in it.

   MS: [...] like a lot of Spielberg and Lucas movies. But when I was trying to think of when movies hit this awful plateau, I came up with 1977—the year Star Wars came out.

   PK: I had hoped with The Goonies that audiences would really start falling off to the point where those two guys would be forced to grow up. But it’s still the dominant thing in American movies, and it’s so convictionless, so empty. You see One Magic Christmas, and it’s imitating some flop movies of the ’50s, and it has nothing fresh, nothing that pertains to this period.

10. 🔗 Pauline Kael: “And you can quote that...” (December 22nd, 1985)

    
    

    Why are movies so bad? One hates to say it comes down to the success of Steven Spielberg, but... It’s not so much what Spielberg has done as what he has encouraged. Everyone else has imitated his fantasies, and the result is an infantilization of the culture. Spielberg, with his TV series (“Amazing Stories”), now rips off his own things. I can’t think of any other director who’s started paying homage to himself so early.

#21. Jaws, Close Encounters, Raiders, Poltergeist, E.T.: Stunts, danger, and negligence on Amblin movies (1974–1981)

“Amblin” here covers both of Spielberg’s production companies: his loan-out company, Amblin’ Productions, Inc. (1970), and Amblin’ Entertainment, Inc. (1980), which was trading in 1982 as Amblin Productions. Cases are dated by shooting year.

Spielberg first saw the galleys for Peter Benchley’s novel, Jaws, on his Universal Studios producer Dick Zanuck’s desk in 1973. He begged to make it, and it was only after Universal won the rights that Spielberg realized how difficult it would be to shoot. Because of its technical challenges, Jaws went several times over its originally planned shooting schedule and budget at Martha’s Vineyard. Although Benchley wrote the first draft, it was quickly discarded. A second draft by Howard Sackler was more successful at reducing the story to its elements. The final pages were written by Carl Gottlieb with Spielberg every night after dinner at Spielberg’s cabin, with the extended schedule affording them time to workshop scenes with the leads (McBride 238–9).

...As much as Pauline Kael liked Jaws, there was something about it that nagged at her. It was what she called “the hidden confusion of historical fact and sadistic fantasy.” It was about Quint’s monologue.

But Kael didn’t know the half of it.

1. 1974 (Jaws)—Susan Backlinie

“Nobody from the press asks us at all about their leaders. They really want to know about Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, and how Steven got the girl in the beginning of Jaws to go this way and that so violently in the water. (Fearless stuntwoman, ten men, ten harnesses, pushpullpushpull, lacerations and bruises for years to come, don’t ask.)” (Julia Phillips, You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again p319)

Backlinie was a professional stuntwoman who played Jaws’ first victim.

BACKLINIE: “The first jerk-down, Steven did. He had a cable that went to the front of my stomach, and went to an anchor that was laying at the bottom of the ocean. And he wanted that pulled he would just pull. He wanted to use an electric wench [sic], and I wanted to have more control, so we used manpower. So I put cut-off Levis on, and had cables running from me out to the side to two pilings and all the way out to the beach. We put marks on the beach and put 5 or 6 guys on each line and they would run back and forth from mark to mark. So I didn’t have the hard work to do, I just sat there and got pulled around. The guys were running back and forth on the beach.” (The Making of Jaws, 1995)

SPIELBERG: “She’s praying, then she comes into a close up, then she’s gasping for air, and then she’s pulled down, and I was on the rope for that last tug.” (The Making of Jaws, 1995)

DREYFUSS (albeit in jest): “Susan and Steven were looping the screams. And he had her tilt her head back and he poured water down her throat while she screamed. Which is now known as waterboarding.” (ibid)

Backlinie, for her part, happily participated in the stunt and dubbing session, and later in the ensuing fandom circuit.

2. 1974 (Jaws)—Jeffrey Voorhees

Voorhees was an “extra” recruited from the local community to play Jaws’ next kill. However, because Voorhees kept coming up for air too soon, divers were sent to hold him under water. Without rehearsal, this easily constitutes a drowning hazard.

JV: “...when it blows up, go under water and stay there as long as you can... So, I’m 12-years-old, I’m lying on this... it’s full of blood, they’re saying it’s going to blow up. I’m lying there and this thing blows up and there’s blood going all over your face and I went under water, and I heard ‘cut.’ ... The first time my arm was showing. Finally I think after 4 tries they said we have a man in a wetsuit under water he’s going to grab ahold of you and lift you up and down a couple times and pull you under water.” (The Making of Jaws, 1995)

Voorhees, as well, participated gladly in the stunt, and in the ensuing Jaws fandom circuit.

3. 1974 (Jaws)—Carl Rizzo

Rizzo was an adult, “little person” stunt performer who appears in Jaws 2nd Unit footage taken in Australia in February 1974.

The issue for the production was getting a shot of a human diver (Hooper, in the story) in the water for a diving scene. In the book and script mid-production, Dreyfuss’s character, Dr. Hooper, is meant to be fatally attacked by Jaws during a dive. The production needed second-unit footage for this scene. Spielberg was fascinated by the work of husband and wife Ron and Valerie Taylor, who’d been featured in an acclaimed Great White Shark documentary (Blue Water, White Death, 1971). The Taylors were sure to get first-rate footage; but a great white off the coast of Australia might be only 10 to 15 feet long, while the book’s shark was 25 feet.

Zanuck came up with an Old Hollywood solution: by shooting with smaller-sized stunt people they could make the sharks look larger by comparison.

They found a very short stuntperson (4′11″) to perform the job, named Carl Rizzo (Time, “Summer of the Shark,” June 23rd, 1975).



Rizzo had misrepresented his scuba training when auditioning for Spielberg. The production sent him down in a miniaturized cage with miniaturized tanks, holding a correspondingly small supply of air. On an early dive, with a great white rushing the cage, he lost his regulator and was trapped underwater while the small boat struggled to winch the heavy cage up (Gottlieb). On another, as he was about to be lowered, a shark struck the boat and wrecked the cage; Rodney Fox pulled him clear. “Had Rodney been two seconds slower,” Valerie Taylor wrote, “the little stuntman would have been killed” (qtd. in McBride, ch. 10). Rizzo seemingly never worked again.

Jaws co-screenwriter Carl Gottlieb tells the story in The Jaws Log (ch. 4): ...

“By this time—it was January 1974—and although the final shooting script was nowhere near completion, it was certain that crucial action sequences would remain in whatever script was finally approved. Specifically, the encounter between Hooper, the young ichthyologist in the book, and the great white shark—the climactic struggle between men and shark that the book is all about—would be in the film. Since chances are we would not be so lucky as to cast an actor to play Hooper who was also a shark expert and an accomplished scuba diver, it looked like a job for second unit. And then we began to see some real creative planning. The villain in the book, the monster shark, is described as being twenty-five feet long. Now, there are few great whites that size. They have been reported that big, but rarely. The chances of the second unit getting onto a boat and finding one were nil. Great whites of ten to fifteen feet were relatively commonplace in Australian waters, but how were we to make them look twice their size? Well, if the sharks aren’t going to be big, let’s make the actors small...

And so Carl Rizzo got a free trip to Australia and almost didn’t come back. Carl Rizzo is an ex-jockey, a rugged little guy about 4′9″ who used to ride second string to Johnny Longden and raced horses for the likes of Harry James and Betty Grable, for a trainer named William Molter. He got onto a picture as a technical advisor for some horse-racing jockey sequences back in the Fifties, and stayed in, doubling children and young Indians, doing horse falls and other physical stuff too dangerous to risk principals on. He is still an active guy, and hopes someday to own and train and run his own horses out at Del Mar and Santa Anita and Hollywood Park. In the meantime, he’s got more than twelve years of stunt work and is working toward a motion picture pension, trying to work the required number of days each year. He was the guy in the diving helmet in the underwater scenes in Mame, and when he was asked if he had any diving experience, he naturally answered “Yes.” (Actors and others have long ago learned to say “Yes” to any question involved with casting, figuring they can get a few quick lessons in between the time they get the job and the time they actually have to dive, or ride, or fence, or do whatever it is they’re going to be asked to do.)

Movie schedules being what they are, Carl Rizzo and a Universal production man left two weeks earlier than expected, and after seventeen hours in a trans-Pacific flight, they shlepped out to Port Lincoln, Australia, and got on a boat to shoot man-eating great white sharks.

It’s safe to assume that it’s more than Carl Rizzo bargained for, but a job’s a job, and he’s a pro. On the end of one of the reels of film sent back by the second unit from Australia, there’s a cute little home-movie kind of shot, panning from the portico of the Port Lincoln Motel, down to Ron and Valerie Taylor, and a couple of shark cages that were doubles of the one finally used in the film. One of the cages is about 5/8 scale, and another is less than 1/2 scale. The 5/8-size one is for Carl; the little one is loaded with a three-foot doll wearing a perfect little wet suit and teensy air tank, carrying the cutest little spear gun. Carl had his own matching wet suit, with undersize air tanks and miniaturized scuba gear specially made by the Universal Studios special effects shop.

The first week they were lucky, with good weather and plenty of marauding sharks. They lowered the littlest cage, with the doll, and shot a lot of footage of great white sharks biting dead horse hindquarters in half, nosing around the cage, and behaving in a properly threatening manner. Carl is sick from his vaccinations and jet lag, and has had maybe two or three scuba lessons when it’s his turn in the cage. The cage is made of tough steel, carefully welded and braced, and it is heavy. Carl gets in, they lower away, and so far everything is fine. Ron and Valerie are in position, in another cage of their own design, with their underwater cameras turning, and here comes a great white, rushing the cage like it’s a free lunch. Carl chokes up a little, loses his regulator (the device that controls the flow of air from his tanks), forgets how to clear the water from a filled breathing mouthpiece, and is trapped in this cage surrounded by about 1,200 pounds of hungry shark snapping away. Panic sets in, he pulls his safety line, frantically signaling “Take me up,” and they begin to winch him in. Unfortunately for Carl, the cage is so heavy that the little auxiliary powerboat responsible for him is having a hard time getting the cage out of the water, which is too bad for Carl, since as long as he’s in the cage, he’s safe from the shark, but he’s not safe from being underwater without air. Eventually, they distract the shark, get the cage up, and Carl is a little shaken up but not incapacitated. Fortunately, they’ve run out of blood and dead horse, so it’s time to head back for Port Lincoln to stock up on bait.

Now they’re out again, but the weather’s a little rougher than before and it’s getting hard to find the sharks. Carl makes a few dives, getting used to the scuba gear and learning how to clear his mask and regulator. But there’s no usable film, so it’s heigh-ho, back to port, then out again. This time, they’re filming off an underwater area known worldwide as Dangerous Reef. Appropriate, no? Carl is feeling pretty good, Ron and Valerie Taylor and their crew are happy, but there’s some trouble with local abalone divers, who are grumpy about shark bait getting loose and into the fishing grounds. (Keep in mind the national sport in Australia is punching people, so some surly abalone divers off Port Lincoln and Dangerous Reef are probably a little hairier than they are off Carmel, California.)

But movies must be made, and eventually a big mean great white appears, really hungry for some week-old dead livestock and fish heads. Well, as soon as he’s sighted, out comes Carl’s 5/8-scale cage, and his cute little air tanks and scuba gear and ineffectual little spear gun, and it’s over the side for the chap. Only the shark is not waiting for anyone to say “Action.” He’s got two or three million years of evolution saying “Lunchtime!” and pointing at the commotion on the surface, where Carl is trying to enter the cage from the top so they can fasten it down and send him under. Then the shark goes for Carl and the cage and gives the whole arrangement a mighty gnashing of teeth and a great lashing of tail, and Carl is bashed out of the cage onto the boat. The shark gets tangled in the lines, half in and half out of the water, and begins to tear things up. A 1,500-pound great white can bite through oak planking, flatten things with his tail, and generally create more fuss than an army of beer-crazed Australian abalone divers. He can also kill you quicker than you can bite a cocktail frank, and in much the same way. In the second-unit footage shot with the surface camera, you can see the folks in the auxiliary launch scrambling to avoid the mighty tail, with taut nylon lines popping like thread and scraps of aluminum and steel and wood flying through the air. The steel cage sinks to the bottom, with no one sure if Carl is in it or not. If he’s under it, he’s got to stay there for fear of being gobbled. If he’s under out of it, he’s a goner. If he’s under in it, he’s also in deep trouble because his little 5/8-scale air tanks only hold a little 5/8-scale air supply, assuming he’s remembered to clear his mask and keep his regulator straight. Fortunately, the shark breaks free without killing anyone, although the solid steel cage is totaled by the action and brought up from the bottom in pieces.

Carl is intact, but here’s where stories differ. According to Carl, he was shaken up pretty bad, but he realized it was like getting thrown off a horse or going through the rail—you’ve got to get back on. So he went down a few times after that. According to anonymous reports, the next time Carl was scheduled to dive, he was nowhere to be found, which is no mean trick on a thirty-five-foot fishing boat. It makes a better story to say he was located cowering in the forward chain lockers with the anchor, developing a drinking problem and going home vowing to never dive again, or even eat seafood. But when I talked to him in a neat little Hollywood apartment, he related simply that they went back to port because of bad weather and to repair their damaged equipment, and went out again without incident a week later.”

4. 1980 (Raiders of the Lost Ark)—Karen Allen
Spielberg describes procuring a realistic scream from his female lead by dropping a snake onto her.

Spielberg: I guess the scariest part of making the movie was a sequence where Harrison Ford and Karen Allen are thrown into a chamber with 7,000 live snakes.

Cavett: Yes, I thought that was a press agent’s invention when I read about that, but, ah… And how did they decide on 7,000, rather than 6,000, or 6,500?

Spielberg: Well, first we budgeted 2,000 snakes, but the problem was when you put the 2,000 live snakes on the floor they all huddled into a corner, and it looked like just a little dust swept under the rug. We realized to cover the floor of the rather large set we would need about 7,000 snakes

Cavett: Who has those available in the yellow pages? How do you get them?

Spielberg: It was the British yellow pages. And they came from all over the place. They came from Scandinavia. They came from France. They came from Germany.

Spielberg: A lot of them were garter snakes, but a lot of them were deadly snakes. The cobras we got from India. And we got the boa constrictors I’m-not-sure-from-where. And the pythons came in.

Cavett: Is there a snake wrangler?

Spielberg: There were many snake wranglers. We had four of them. They were always being bitten by everything, but cobras of course, because that’s deadly. But the pythons were going after everybody.

Spielberg: And in the movie when something bites, and snaps, and takes hold of the character, those are real teeth, and that’s a real actor going, “Why am I here? And why did I make this movie?” That’s really happening. That’s not fake.

Cavett: ... In one scene I saw— I mean, it was an outtake, documentary style. It looks like something bit her on the leg, but did she get bitten at all?

Spielberg: She wasn’t bitten. She was terrified all through the movie because of the snakes. She hated snakes, as did everybody else—most everybody else. And when she got involved in the movie, she couldn’t scream loud enough, because sometimes when you’re terrified, you [go to] scream [and no] noise [comes] out. It’s very real; it’s real, and nothing [comes] up. So I thought I needed something to get [it]. So once [she] least suspected, I dropped a snake from the scaffold over[head]; [it] came around her neck and she let out a scream that I was able to use all [through] the movie. I made eleven copies of the scream and kept cutting it in. That’s a good scream. That last [scream]—you’ll never beat that one. And, uh, it was a terrible, cruel trick to play on her. But ever since then, she never— When she didn’t see me around the side, she would always look up when I wasn’t around. [Unclear.] Yeah. Yes. It’s sort of a method—method acting, method directing.

5. 1981 (Poltergeist)—JoBeth Williams



A 2022 Vanity Fair article, What Really Happened During the Making of Poltergeist revealed that during the 1981 making of Poltergeist, JoBeth Williams was placed in a muddy swimming pool with what she only discovered later were real cadavers.

The same article revealed the physical brutality Williams suffered during the filming of the “rotating room” practical effects shot, for which she says Spielberg was in full participation.

“I had to be on a 360-degree turning set, which I had never even heard of. And when they said, ‘You’re going to just ride this thing and slide along the ceiling,’ I went, ‘Okay, I see.’ What they didn’t say was that I’d be doing 50 takes of it and by the end, my elbows and knees were bleeding,” she recalls.

The scene happens at a point when her character is most relaxed, and most vulnerable. She has just taken a soothing bath, and is wearing little more than a baggy sleeping T-shirt. So, there was no way to hide padding.

“And the poor cameraman who had to ride the thing like a Ferris wheel...” she adds. “He was strapped in, and several times, he had to get off and go throw up because it was literally making him physically sick, but he carried on. And when I got off after a few takes, I said, ‘Steven, I’m bleeding. My elbows and knees are bleeding!’ And he said, ‘That’s all right. We can just wipe the blood off. It’ll never show.’ And I said, ‘Oh, I feel much better now. Thank you.’ I had to laugh.”

6. 1981 (E.T.)—Rachel Brown

In this clip, E.T. co-Producer Kathleen Kennedy discusses (albeit in jest) compelling a highly resistant 4-year-old girl into the foam latex E.T. costume (presumably a suffocating hazard) for the sake of getting a video of the costume in motion for Spielberg.




“But we did get to a point where I finally just kind of threw up my hands and I said I just don’t know how this is going to work. I don’t know how in the world we’re ever going to get E.T. to move in a way that you’d believe without putting somebody in a suit. So I called up Steven’s lawyer’s partner, Harold Brown, and he had a four-year-old daughter, at the time, she’s now I think graduated from Harvard, or something. I said, “Look, I just want to test this, I feel that if I can put somebody in a suit, and I can video it, and I can show Steven, and it works on some level, we certainly don’t need to rely on it, but he’s never going to go for this unless we can show him. Would you be willing to bring Rachel to Carlos’s shop and we’ll put her inside the suit? So Harold says okay. So by the time he arrives, this four-year-old is completely hysterically crying, and is not into doing this at all. And Harold comes over to me and he goes I don’t know, I don’t know if it’s going to work, I’ve tried to bribe her with two McDonalds, and it’s not working. I told her we go to McDonalds after she does this, she can have two burgers, she can have any milkshake she wanted, and she still doesn’t want to do it. So I go over and I try to talk to Rachel. She gets a little bit calmed down. She gets the suit on. By the time we get the head on, she is completely hysterical again. And she’s jumping up and down and screaming and crying again. So Harold just says “roll camera!” “...and he bought it. He said, I agree, this may be the way we have to go.” Kathleen Kennedy, The Making of E.T.

#22a. Lunch

MALCOLM (cont’d)
You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you knew what you had, you patented it, packaged it, slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you want to sell it.

Malcolm argues that Hammond has inherited powerful knowledge, and delivered it over to commercial interests.

Hammond replies that, by that logic, any technology would have to be considered problematic, even those which are uncontroversial goods, like saving an endangered species.

And Malcolm clarifies: technology is only good when it complements natural selection, rather than man-made problems (deforestation, the building of a dam).

At opposite extremes, Hammond calls Malcolm a “Luddite,” and Malcolm suggests that Hammond is engaging in “the rape of the natural world.”

Surprisingly, it’s Grant, the computer-hating traditionalist, who comes to Hammond’s defence. Grant expresses ambivalence, saying only that they can’t know what to expect—not that what Hammond has created is an abomination.

These fractured positions set the stage for the rest of the story.

Grant already sees Jurassic Park as a grand petri dish. It brings the objects of his imagination to life, so that he can better consider his research interests. Recall that Grant’s key positions are (1) that dinosaurs evolved into birds, and weren’t wholly obliterated by a meteorite, or disease, as maintained by his academic rivals. And (2) that some dinosaurs move in herds (i.e., maintain mammalian family structures).*1

Grant’s research parallels his personal anxieties. This is important to understand up front because Grant’s strategy for addressing Malcolm’s critique of technology will be by considering it against an analogous problem in his (Grant’s) personal life. Genetic engineering (inorganic man-made creation) on the one hand; parenthood (organic man-made creation) on the other.

Although the story plays it low-key, Grant and Sattler are romantically involved and she’s nudging him towards fatherhood. Despite what he says (“they’re noisy, they’re messy, they’re expensive, they smell”), his hesitations obviously go beyond the superficial.

Jurassic Park displays fatherhood in both its tender and violent dimensions. Organic genetic replication is no less ambivalent than the artificial kind. The children in the story present as liabilities. If they’re not taking swings at Grant’s theories (his life’s work), then they’re hanging around his neck.

The relationship is just as frightening from the child’s perspective. After a kid mocks Grant’s description of a raptor as fearsome—calling it a “six-foot turkey” instead—Grant tears into him, punctuating the dressing-down with a swipe of his fossilized raptor claw.

Sattler—who cringes as she watches (oooh)—tells Grant that if he really wanted to scare the kid, he could’ve just pulled a gun on him. Later, Malcolm tells Hammond that he (Hammond) wields genetic power like “a kid that’s found his dad’s gun.”

Hammond says he insists on being present whenever one of his genetic creations is being born. But he “denies” them the hormonal expression that would allow them to become male. Fathers exert more or less control over their sons’ ability to express themselves. To what extent is this a fostering? To what extent is this a subjugating? The fall of Jurassic Park arguably stems from a resentment between Hammond and his chief engineer, Nedry—who snarks “thanks, Dad”—before plunging the park into darkness and chaos.

Malcolm acts blasé about his cycle of marrying, procreating, and divorcing. Tim and Lex, Hammond tells us early on, are there to be distracted from his daughter’s divorce.

“It’s just like coming out of a tree house. Did your dad ever build you a tree house, Tim, eh?”
“No.”
“Me too.”

It’s no wonder that Grant is paralyzed about whether or how to participate in the great chain of creation, preferring to deal instead with fossils.

This is how Spielberg’s perennial themes of fatherhood and divorce manifest in Jurassic Park. But what’s surprising here is how the analogy between inorganic and organic man-made creation reveals—as though hovering in thought above—their common factor: creation, or creativity.

The arguments in the Lunch scene articulate the dramatic tensions structuring the rest of the story.

Malcolm criticizes Hammond for “standing on the shoulders of geniuses.”

But the traditional saying is “standing on the shoulders of giants.” Historically, the saying reflects optimism about problems concerning knowledge-accumulation. Even though a dwarf is smaller than a giant, together they may see further, by a few feet at least.

Malcolm, here, is inverting that traditional analogy, in line with Nietzsche.*2

“Standing on shoulders” leads to a blindness insofar as the undisciplined dwarfs mortgage their inheritance to corrosive marketing interests (“...and then you slapped it on a lunchbox...”) without even realizing what they’re doing.

Hammond replies:

Condors. Condors are on the verge of extinction—if I’d created a flock of them on the island, you wouldn’t be saying any of this!

Hammond is saying that if he had propagated an endangered species, rather than dinosaurs, Malcolm would have to recognize that his accomplishment is beneficial. He is pointing out that “standing on shoulders” alone can’t preclude a power’s goodness, or else all uses of technological power, even the seemingly uncontroversial ones (like saving “Condors”), would be bad.

And Malcolm accepts, but narrows Hammond’s objection:

Hold on—this is no species that was obliterated by deforestation or the building of a dam. Dinosaurs had their shot. Nature selected them for extinction.*3

Malcolm makes a distinction between: (1) species that were obliterated by technology (deforestation, dam), and (2) those that were “selected for extinction” by nature.

But the significant implication is that Malcolm’s argument has aligned itself with the position of the religious fundamentalist.

This is because dinosaurs didn’t fail natural selection. According to scientists (like Grant’s academic rivals), they were destroyed by cosmic accident. If, according to Malcolm, condors should be resuscitated but dinosaurs shouldn’t, they must have failed natural selection in the sense of having some flaw in their design that resulted in them dying by meteor. This flaw would make them as the dodo is to the condor—in Malcolm’s account. But do dinosaurs deserve this association?

I mean: what sort of flaw could result in death by meteor? This sort of causal relationship only exists in religion.*4

Grant sees another possibility: between Hammond’s unbridled techno-commercialism and Malcolm’s reactionary Luddite-conservatism. Grant thinks the critical question is in the presumed relationship between two premises: that Hammond “stood on the shoulders of geniuses”; and then “slapped it on a lunchbox”.

Is “slapping it on a lunchbox” a necessary consequence of ‘following the guidance of dwarfs’?*5

At dessert, Hammond seems to accept Malcolm’s characterization of him. He reveals that his true motive was to make his mechanical flea circus real—to finally replace the world with his vision of it, a vision in which he (Hammond) has the power to make illusions real. He also says that he believes creation to be “an act of sheer will”—i.e., insisting that one can force one’s own conception of reality. The ‘force’ turns out to be a projection of man’s will, that permits him to do whatever he wants. It submits to him, and not the other way around. But this is exactly the weak force Malcolm has argued is susceptible to the perennial threat of commercialization. Hammond in the end concedes Malcolm’s conclusion. But not Grant.

How can man be judicious about those entities he summons into being, being sure that their creation isn’t simply to distract himself while he practices “the rape of the natural world,” without being fenced in by an apparently dogmatic appeal to Nature’s will?

#22b. Footnotes to “Lunch”

*1 A deleted line reveals they’re digging up not one or two skeletons, but four—a family.

*2 Malcolm believes that obliteration evidences cosmic disfavour, like the great flood that befell humanity when the Watchers fathered a race of giants in the Hebrew religious text, the Book of Enoch. (When dinosaur bones were first scientifically described, in 1824, some believed them to be the bones of these giants, validating the biblical account of history. Instead, in the years to come they would strongly support Darwin’s theory of evolution, which seemed to supersede it.) Malcolm treats Nature as though it were a willful entity. The argument between Hammond and Malcolm seemed to be about the corruptive limits of technology with regards to commercialism, but now seems to be about the secular-versus-religious mindset.

The analogy: “standing on the shoulders of giants,” was popularized by Isaac Newton, who used it in a letter around 1675. But it had a long continuity before that, dating through Isaiah di Trani, a Jewish Talmud scholar (13th century), Bernard de Chartres (12th century), a Christian theologian, and Priscian (5th century—who systematized the rules of Latin grammar). The saying generally reflects an optimism that “moderns”—despite being latecomers—are still at a frontier of intellectual progress.

The metaphor itself is a reference to a Greek myth about a dwarf (Cedalion) who helps a giant (Orion) regain his sight, at the request of Hephaestus.

Grant is therefore challenging the Promethean paradigm as the singular mode of interpreting technology. Another way of looking at this is that Grant has shifted the object of his search from the first technology, to the first technology that becomes necessarily corruptive. He is no longer satisfied with “fire” but must consider other candidates, such as optics, analogy, writing, money, and time-counting.

*3 This is one of Heidegger’s examples: “the hydroelectric plant.” (The Question Concerning Technology, 5) (“dam” is via Crichton).

*4 Or is collective psychology at play; and the collective will to self-destruction?

Jurassic Park has a strong food and food chain motif. Carnivores versus herbivores, turkey, Chilean Sea Bass, cows and goats, and so on. The portrait of Hammond sadly eating his ice cream is reminiscent of Thyestes, brother of Atreus. Thyestes steals the golden fleece from his brother by trickery, and as a result, by his brother’s vengeance, is unknowingly fed his own children. While there is critical debate concerning whether Thyestes (whom Aristotle identifies in his Poetics as a paradigmatic tragic hero, along with Oedipus) deserved his punishment (see Belfiore 167–68; Sherman 186), along one dimension of causality it seems that he receives his just desserts for neglecting his children. Do Malcolm and Hammond share a Thyestes Complex?

If we apply the analogy of genetic technology to film technology, Hammond is referring to the elements of filmmaking. The trapeze, or trapezoid—the shape of the cinema screen as seen from any position in the theatre, prior to perceptual processes that make it always look like a rectangle. The carousel—this is the rotating base of the Victorian instrument used to make drawings seem to come to life, symbolizing the persistence of vision effect. And the seesaw—this is the famous mechanical crane, attributed by some to Aeschylus, introduced into the ancient theatre of Dionysus to suggest the susceptibility of the dramatic action to meta-intervention.

*5 The height of Grant’s uncertainty comes in the scene where the T-Rex breaks through the fence. Critic Henry Sheehan reads this scene as an amplification of Grant’s earlier antagonism of the child.

When the tyrannosaurus rex attacks [Lex and Tim] in their stalled car, [Grant] sits still in his own vehicle for what seems endless moments, watching in horror as his (barely) suppressed murder fantasy is played out in front of him.

Sheehan analyzes Jurassic Park as strangely preoccupied by a link between children and death, a development he traces back to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

The power of the film’s coupling of children and death arises almost solely from Spielberg’s obsessive invocation of it. He hasn’t often pursued it from the child’s perspective: the exceptions being Empire of the Sun and The Color Purple, in which inconvenient children overcome death largely by their own initiative. In a comic variation, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade features an adult child entangled in a near fatal intrigue sparked in part by an ageing father’s competition with him. But more often it’s a case of the father or father figure trying to rescue a child just before it undergoes the death the father has unwittingly devised for it.

In any case,

Grant is eventually moved to action and with the help of Malcolm manages to escape with the kids. It’s an impulsive act, as obscure as the source of Grant’s dislike of children, although Neill’s squirming, coupled with his impassive features, does imply a deeper struggle.

The rest of the movie serves to explore this struggle. Grant enters a sort of prehistoric fever-dream, in which he must shepherd his surrogate children through the jungle and back to safety.

Sheehan says:

You could say that the rest of the film is a ritualistic enactment of Grant’s penance, like the police chief’s voyage in Jaws. [...] But you could also say that it is the automatic playing out of a pulp plot. All the digging in the movie is for fossils, not character.

But critic Thomas Goodnight describes Grant and Sattler (Alan and Ellie) as a “post-doc Adam and Eve”, returned to the creation by Hammond’s enterprise. Can both be true?

Henry Sheehan, ‘The fears of children’, Sight and Sound, vol. 3, no. 7 (July 1993) (https://archive.org/details/Sight_and_Sound_1993_07_BFI_GB). See also: http://id3481.securedata.net/henrysheehan/essays/stuv/spielberg-1.html.

Goodnight, G. Thomas (1995) ‘The Firm, the Park and the University: Fear and Trembling on the Postmodern Trail’, The Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, 3 (August), 267–90.

#22e. UNIX System

[Kathleen Kennedy: “ILM was in a building that they’re not in anymore, but it was basically a warehouse building that was in San Rafael. It was always interesting because when you took people to ILM I think they had something in their mind that they were going to see magic, but it was basically just a bunch of guys on computers.”] (Moments That Changed the Movies: Jurassic Park, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

We follow ILM through 1977–1986, as their spatial compositing technology is developed into a 3D modeling system and sold off to Steve Jobs.

It begins with George Lucas’s vision of fluid space physics. He conveys the concept with a reel of dogfights edited together from old World War II reels. This smoothness requires progress beyond stop-motion animation: motion control—moving not the object but the camera.

“I’m trying to make everything look very natural, a casual almost I’ve-seen-this-before look. Like the X-wing and TIE fighter battle, you say, ‘I’ve seen that, it’s World War II—but wait a minute—that isn’t any kind of jet I’ve ever seen before.’ I want the whole film to have that quality. It’s a very hard thing to come by, because it should look very familiar but at the same time not be familiar at all.” (Jones 232)

The next development is computer-based compositing, which soon requires a state-of-the-art Apple computer to log and locate each frame.

Lucasfilm starts a computer division. Lucas’s first hire is a computer scientist, Ed Catmull, the director of the New York Institute of Technology’s Computer Graphics Lab. There, he had developed a technology known as the “alpha channel”, which programs the dimension of opacity into imaging algorithms, so that composite images can have elements come in and out of visibility, allowing users to wander through them as though they were worlds.

We digress backwards to tag enabling computer technologies: the frame buffer, the graphic user interface, UNIX, ASCII. In short, the progressive generation of the simulative visual “interface” stemming from the capacity of numbers to be manipulated by letters.

Catmull, who admired Walt Disney nearly as much as he admired Albert Einstein, was hoping to persuade Lucas to let him devote some time to computer animation as well; Lucas, however, considered that scope creep. He wanted Catmull developing tools to make digital movies, not wasting his time on what Lucas regarded as high-tech cartoons. (Jones 289)

We arrive at the development of their new digital compositing computer “Picture Maker”, Pixar, and its sale to Steve Jobs.

Lucas was more interested in the computer game division. He was fascinated with the idea of interactive storytelling, in which the decisions a player makes directly affect the outcome of the story, making every trip through a game unique.

Finally, we speed through ILM’s big successes in the ’80s and early ’90s, to Jurassic Park.

Lucas: “I think we may have reached a level here where we have actually created reality, which, of course, is what we were trying to do all along.” (Jones 381)

Steve Williams, walking through a now abandoned ILM—“This room might not look like much, but every single frame in Terminator 2 was done in this room…—So I used to blast Beethoven and Bach in here. There was just something very strange about having Beethoven blasting. It would go right through my head and into my hands and against the keyboard and right into the Rex. It’s one of those weird things where you’re part of the machine.” (Moments That Changed the Movies: Jurassic Park, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

Steve Williams describes how he crafted the illusion of movement and three-dimensionality, and even how he positioned the monitors at just the right angle so Kennedy would see them despite Muren’s objections.

Steve Williams: “This was my seat right here, and this theatre is where we projected every one of the shots that we knew was going to change the entire film industry.”

“If I failed, I would be the one who failed, no one else, that was it. And I was shooting my mouth out that I could do it. And it was just a lot of pain. The divorces and problems and all this stuff to make sure the specular highlight on a fingernail of a creature looks proper on your monitor…. No one knows the pain you go through to do that.

Yeah, this place used to be alive, man.” (Moments That Changed the Movies: Jurassic Park, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

#02n. A Steven Spielberg Production?

Although several initial news reports stated that the tragedy occurred on “a Steven Spielberg production” (or similar), within days, Spielberg’s name was removed from the story. When the movie was finally released, it had no “Presentation credit.”

Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) was most likely originally going to be “a Steven Spielberg Production.” This is only significant as part of the broader argument that Spielberg had every likelihood of being invested in the film’s production.

The deal memo stipulates that “Steven may have a presentation credit,” and the initial highly researched NTSB report stated that “The film, ‘Twilight Zone,’ is a STEVEN SPIELBERG PRODUCTION funded by Warner Bros. Inc., Burbank California” (2); the revised edition (following several petitions from the defence) does not include this specification; perhaps because Spielberg never claimed the credit.

By July 1982, Amblin was still in its fledgling stages, sorting out its branding and product lines for the rest of the decade.

Spielberg’s first production entity was Amblin’ Productions, Inc. (incorporated December 17th, 1970; California entity no. 613679), named after the short film he’d just produced at the time. Spielberg would continue to use this as his personal loan-out company through 1980. During this time he produced the Gale and Zemeckis movie, I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978), as “Steven Spielberg Presents.” (He also produced Zemeckis’s Used Cars (1980) but without a presentation credit.)

After the incorporation of Amblin’ Entertainment, Inc. on April 1st, 1980 (California entity no. 955752), Spielberg produced Continental Divide (1981) as “an AMBLIN Production,” but this was a one-off, with “Amblin Entertainment Presents” occurring only once or twice through to the ’90s.

Poltergeist (1982) is “A Steven Spielberg Production.” E.T. (1982) is “A Steven Spielberg Film,” and The Goonies (1985) is a “Steven Spielberg Presents.”

By the mid-eighties, Amblin had established a two-tier product line: “Steven Spielberg Presents,” (for works not directed by Spielberg) and “A Steven Spielberg Film” (for works directed by Spielberg).

As well, it’s possible Twilight Zone was initially conceived by Spielberg as a potential franchise.

Ted Ashley, who was Serling’s agent at the time that the writer created The Twilight Zone, had graduated to the position of chairman of the board at Warner Bros. Following the success of Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Alien in the late seventies, Ashley decided the time was right to create a big-screen fantasy built around the concept of The Twilight Zone. Star Trek, another TV show that had a fanatical cult following, was being turned into a whole series of feature films. Ashley imagined the same future for Twilight Zone. (F&G 64)

“Before the accident, everyone was talking about sequels, and that idea was forgotten.” (Carol Serling, qtd. in F&G 172)

#06n. 11:30pm–2:20am: Testimony and forensics

Given the voluminous technical details pertinent to the beleaguered investigators, “what exactly happened,” in terms of the intended flight path of the helicopter, various technical cues, and so on, remained improperly understood. The disambiguation was greatly advanced in 2021 by Chain.

The FBI and Sheriff’s Dept established fairly early on that the fourth blast fired that night was the one that destroyed the helicopter’s tail rotor. This was the one that came through the “fish-drying hut.” The question became: who cued that blast?

There were two main candidates, each operating wired firing boards at a distance: SFX man Jerry Williams, and SFX man James Camomile. Camomile had been granted immunity for his cooperation early in the investigation. Williams was standing beside Landis; Camomile was standing off somewhere else. This had not been properly disambiguated at the time; though retrospective forensics determined it was Williams (see Chain).

Braun had favoured the “delamination theory”: that not debris, but intense heat had destroyed the tail rotor, creating a lack of precedent. But Neal sensed accurately that the disorganization abounding in the case meant almost anything would do.

The defence maintained that the helicopter had been intending to cross to the opposite shore before explosives went off destroying the village. But the helicopter was a character in the story, not just a technical platform.

Camomile—who wasn’t facing charges—was compelled by the defence (including SFX chief Paul Stewart) to admit he was the one to have fired the lethal explosive, without having looked up at the helicopter placement first. This let Williams—and Landis—off the hook.

Had the helicopter intentionally been called “lower, lower, lower,” for artistic effect vis-à-vis the fish-drying hut? Recreating the effect from The Exterminator (1980)?

#07n. “Fly by Night”

Allingham presented himself to prospective helicopter pilot Clay Wright as working for “Fly by Night” (Chain, ch. 4). According to Chain, “Fly by Night Productions” was the name that Landis had given his segment’s production company for Twilight Zone, in original contract negotiations with Warner, before the deal became structured so that no production entity specific to Landis was needed. According to LaBrecque, at least, it was a “joking tribute to Steven Spielberg, who had called his own production company by that nickname” (26). Chain points out, as well, its utility in telegraphing a thrifty indie film rather than a studio-backed major. “Fly by Night” was painted on the nose of the helicopter; its existence is noted by Budds in his Oct. 26th, 1982, supplementary police report: “The helicopter was olive-drab in color with a painted decal on the nose which read, ‘Fly by night.’” The decal was erased by an unknown person in the later morning hours of July 23rd, 1982. (see Chain, Exhibits, for photo)

#10n. Citizen Steve (December 1987)

“...First he worked on my dolls. He’d act out a Jack LaLanne scene, an exercise story, and then he’d rip their legs off, throw them against the wall, and beat them up until all the stuffing came out.” (Citizen Steve)

“We have a daughter, Janice, and he tore the head off her Barbie doll.” (Citizen Steve)

“I remember being totally scared of him,” says Janice Zusman, who lived in the house behind the Spielbergs. “One time Susie and I were playing Barbie dolls by the canal near our house, on Indian School Road. I would have been grounded for life if my parents knew I’d even gone near the canal. We were pretending it was the Grand Canyon. Steve was bugging us and teasing us: ‘If you don’t do whatever’—unfortunately, I don’t remember what it was he wanted us to do—‘then I’m going to throw your Barbie into the canal.’ He grabbed my Barbie doll and yanked the head off and threw it into the canal. The most important thing in my life was this Barbie doll! It was so traumatic I’ve been talking about it ever since. The worst thing was that I couldn’t tell my folks, so I had to go down and fish the head out of the canal.” (McBride 89ff)

Did the Barbie doll symbol hold any personal significance to the filmmaker, any at all, or was it just another shared relic of a bygone era?

Robin Williams at Steven Spielberg’s surprise party.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Gracious contributors, patient friends; my family; and Julia Phillips, who said it all first.