Some recent rows on the interweb, what with the imminent release of new entries in the Indiana Jones and Star Wars franchises, rehash the same old myth about how Spielberg and Lucas brought about the Death Of Serious Cinema.
You know the drill, right? The massive successes of Jaws and Star Wars somehow brought about the end of the seventies Hollywood Renaissance, the director-driven era in which the likes of Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Paul Mazursky, Brian DePalma and so many more were allowed to commit their sacred visions to celluloid.
Yeah, there were a lot of great movies made in that era, but the myth of Spielberg/Lucas is simply untrue. To illustrate why, let's imagine an alternate filmic universe.
Let's say George Lucas--who, it's easy to forget, was once rightly considered the most talented member of the film school generation--followed up his debut, THX-1138, with the project he'd spent some time developing: Apocalypse Now.
Hard to imagine what Lucas would have done with it. (Or maybe it's not: Even in Coppola's hands, Kurtz is still presented as a noble warrior who somehow turned to "the dark side"--Hmm...) He reportedly wanted to shoot it hand-held, documentary style, with a cast of unknowns. Though still influenced by Joseph Conrad, Lucas apparently thought of the project as something of a black comedy, and expressed admiration for the Vietcong.
Lucas worked on Apocalypse Now both before and after the massive success of American Graffiti, and his inability to find funding led him to develop a little science fiction movie you may have heard about. But what if he'd made it? It may have been great, it may have been terrible, but it's unlikely it would have been a commercial hit. Even if it had proven hugely influential--and Lucas' bold plans suggest it would have impressed his fellow filmmakers, if not general audiences--and he had ascended to his rightful place in the auteurist pantheon, he would have remained just another hungry filmmaker.
He would, in other words, have been a lot like Steven Spielberg. His first theatrical film, The Sugarland Express, was absolutely astounding. But boy was it bleak, and audiences stayed away in droves. Like his fellow movie brats Scorsese and DePalma, he needed a hit if he wanted to keep working.
Scorsese's grab for success was a blatantly commercial "woman's picture" Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, so mainstream it could be adapted into a sitcom, and DePalma made Carrie, a teen-targeted horror movie based on a popular novel. Both great movies, but neither one particularly personal.
Spielberg, of course, also made a horror movie based on a popular book: Jaws. But it's not like he set out to make the biggest blockbuster of all time. Universal, which owned the rights to Jaws, originally visualized it as something closer to the disaster movies so popular in the seventies, and courted Charlton Heston for the lead. Spielberg certainly wasn't the first choice to direct; in fact, he really only took the gig because he needed work.
What if he hadn't taken that particular job? He'd spent a lot of time hanging with his New Hollywood contemporaries, including producers Michael and Julia Phillips, who later produced Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, and writer Paul Schrader, later hired to write the initial script of that same film. At around the same time Spielberg mulled the offer for Jaws, Michael Phillips sought a director for a script of Schrader's: Taxi Driver.
True, there's no evidence anyone offered Spielberg the chance to direct it. But it was offered to other directors before Scorsese got ahold of it (apparently Robert Mulligan was set to make it with Jeff Bridges in the lead!), so it's possible. It could have happened.
And it might have been great--people tend to forget how brilliantly Spielberg assembled his early films. (No, 1941 isn't all that funny, but it's clearly the work of a born visual stylist.) And coming on the heels of The Sugarland Express, it would have marked the director as a Serious Artist. Again: So what?
But Spielberg didn't direct Taxi Driver, of course; Scorsese did. It was more a success d'esteem than a commercial blockbuster, but it got Scorsese a huge budget to make whatever the hell he wanted: A depressing anti-musical starring the box-office dream team of Liza Minnelli and Robert DeNiro. I'm one of the few people who believes New York, New York to be a masterpiece, but undeniably it was a misbegotten project in commercial terms, and Scorsese turned the filming into a coke-fueled nightmare.
It flopped, of course, as did Peter Bogdanovich's At Long Last Love and Nickelodeon, and these failures, along with the long delays and whispers of disaster coming from the set of Apocalypse Now--which Coppola, of course, hijacked from Lucas--really brought about the end of the Hollywood Renaissance. It wasn't the success of Jaws and Star Wars--which caught their own creators by surprise-- so much as the arrogance of the artists, blowing millions of other people's dollars on coke, whores and movies nobody wanted to see.
The director-as-superstar era ended as a result of hubris--Heaven's Gate, anybody?--but the rise of the blockbuster era was bound to happen, with or without the help of Spielberg and Lucas. Studios which once functioned more or less autonomously were swallowed by huge corporations, which were in term swallowed by larger entities still. Risk would be minimized, safe bets would be the rule. Production budgets would be measured against projected profits. Studios would be charged to follow the money, which would mean cranking out time-killers for teenaged boys.
Spielberg and Lucas didn't bring about the Death Of Serious Cinema--Paul Thomas Anderson is working, right?--and they didn't create the blockbuster era, either. So stop blaming them. For that, at least. On the other hand, if you want to blame Spielberg for Hook or Lucas for that whole Greedo-shoots-first thing, be my guest.
