It's the movie Hollywood was born to make, and was born making. It has buried treasures and Nazi villains, poison darts and mystical wraiths, damsels in distress and Arabian swordsmen, snake pits, submarines, booby-trapped jungle caverns, Himalayan taverns, Egyptian bazaars and an archeologist hero with the grit of Bogart, the dash of Gable and the fearlessness of Superman. It's a movie that harks back to the cliffhanging thrills of The Perils of Pauline, that reinvents the Saturday-matinee serials of the 1930s and 1940s with an edge-of-the-seat style that will hypnotize kids and reawaken in adults their primal memories of what moviegoing was once all about. It's called Raiders of the Lost Ark, and it's about as pure an example of the Hollywood summer movie as anything since Jaws and Star Wars.Funny thing is, it was conceived by the guy who made Star Wars (and The Empire Strikes Back and American Graffiti) and directed by the guy who made Jaws (and Close Encounters of the Third Kind). George Lucas and Steven Spielberg have done it again, this time together. Having already tossed off four of the top ten film-rental champions of all time (Nos. 1,2,3 and 7 on Variety's list), they have dreamed up yet another concoction that seems destined to hold the American imagination hostage—-at least from June through August.
Ever since Hollywood discovered a few years ago that its biggest market was the kids, summer has become the gold-rush season. It's blockbuster-or-bust time, and after a dismal spring that had only a few reasonable hits like Excalibur and Friday the 13th Part 2, the major studios are nervously putting their commercial acumen on the line with some 60 movies. As usual, the message of this avalanche is crystal clear: from now until Labor Day, anything resembling real life will be banished from the screen. A high-inflation economy means low-risk filmmaking, and the moguls are convinced that escapism is the only thing that sells. As an indicator of how drastically the culture has changed in ten years, consider the summer product of 1971: Carnal Knowledge, Klute, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Devils, Billy Jack, The Panic in Needle Park and The Go-Between. This year the audience has two basic choices: action or yucks. If it's thrills you want there's Superman II, the new James Bond flick For Your Eyes Only, a sixth-century sword-and-sorcery fantasy called Dragonslayer, John Travolta in Brian De Palma's murder mystery Blow Out, John Carpenter's futuristic Escape from New York, a dip into Greek mythology called Clash of the Titans, two World War II dramas, Eye of the Needle and John Huston's Victory, and an erotic rock-scored scifi animated feature, Heavy Metal.
The comedies are no less afflicted with a sense of deja vu: another Cheech and Chong escapade, another burlesque from Mel Brooks (History of the World—Part I), another caper from the Muppets and another Burt Reynolds cross-country race (The Cannonball Run). Bill Murray is on hand in Stripes, Chevy Chase joins a cast of midgets in Under the Rainbow, George Hamilton turns from Dracula to Zorro, the Gay Blade, Dudley Moore and Liza Minnelli team up in the romantic comedy Arthur. And the most telling comment on all this may be Blake Edwards's S.O.B., a satirical broadside at Hollywood about a successful producer who releases a $30 million summer movie that bombs so badly he tries to kill himself.
Boy's Adventure: Whether these movies prove to be timeless masterpieces (any bets?) or instant fiascoes, two trends are clear: the widespread infantilization of pop culture and Hollywood's increasing tendency to cannibalize itself. Raiders of the Lost Ark can stand accused of both these tendencies. There's little in it that can't be grasped by a 6-year-old, it aims solely to entertain, and it is a virtual encyclopedia of old movie devices. Then why is this adventure such a tonic? What separates it from most of the by-the-numbers commercial offerings isn't only a matter of its creators' talent but a matter of spirit. If Raiders proves to be the summer movie everyone wants to see, it's not because these movie-mad maniacs studied their demographics charts, but because they made the movie they wanted to see. It's a boy's adventure made by the genre's two greatest fans, fans who happen to have a touch of genius.
Raiders starts at a level most movies reserve for a climax. We're in the depths of the Peruvian jungle, the year is 1936 and our hero, an adventurous professor of archeology called Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), wanders into a forbidden cave in pursuit of a fiendishly well-guarded gold idol. Not since Sabu went after the All-Seeing Eye in The Thief of Baghdad has any sanctuary been so lethally mined: besieged by tarantulas, attacked by poisoned arrows, trapped by a descending stone wall, pursued by a mammoth rolling boulder, Indy escapes with his prize by a hairsbreadth—only to have it stolen away by his archrival, the unscrupulous French archeologist Belloq (Paul Freeman).
Hidden Chamber: Peru is just a warm-up to the real story, but Spielberg has set the tone and breakneck pace for what follows: Indiana's search for the lost Ark of the Covenant, the chest containing the original tablets of the Ten Commandments that disappeared thousands of years ago from the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. U.S. Army intelligence has reason to believe that Hitler's archeologists have discovered the lost city of Tanis in Egypt, where the ark may rest in a hidden chamber under the sands, and if the legend is true that the ark contains the power of God, it must be kept at all cost from Nazi hands.
It's pure Saturday-matinee balderdash, and Spielberg, Lucas and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan offer it up with no condescension or apologies and with a twinkle in their eyes. It's a hip classicist movie: traditional action filmmaking knowingly informed by all the movies that have preceded it. In Nepal, where Indy hooks up with an old love, Marion (Karen Allen), a hard-drinking, tough/tender woman of the world, the movie's laconic romanticism has the hard-bitten heart of an old Howard Hawks movie like Only Angels Have Wings. The lovers reunited, the story whisks them off to Cairo (an arrow on a map traces their route, '30s-style) where they are pursued by an asthmatic, Peter Lorre-like Nazi sadist (Ronald Lacey) and double-crossed by a monkey with Hitlerian sympathies. Every sequence has at least three smashing set pieces, and here Ford and Spielberg pull off their funniest twist: a showdown between the whip-brandishing Indy and an Arab swordsman that hilariously turns convention on its head by having Indy act with real-life logic instead of a swashbuckler's derring-do.
Quiet Masculinity: You keep expecting things to sag, Raiders to run out of tricks, but that never happens. Spielberg doesn't overwork the material (as he did in his last movie, 1941), he lets the events not his virtuosity astound us. Raiders doesn't have anything approaching the emotional resonance of Close Encounters, and it's not as gut-wrenching as Jaws. But it has a devil-may-care spontaneity that's new in Spielberg's work. The spirit of the piece is beautifully captured in Harrison Ford's performance. If he had tipped his Fred C. Dobbs hat too far toward camp, the adventure could have derailed into archness. He's a wry hero, but he's a real one — exuding just that quiet, sardonic masculinity that made stars like Bogart and Gable at once larger than life and down to earth. Karen Allen, in a much more active role than the genre usually allows women (she punches out her boyfriend at their first reunion), is no less delightful: she's cunning and beguiling, but always comfortably life-size.
Indy does have one weakness -- a terrible fear of snakes. And wouldn't you know, when he finally discovers where the ark is hidden, the buried chamber is crawling with more snakes than there are in Hell; cobras, pythons, asps (2,000 of the snakes are fake but 6,000 of them are quite real, as an assistant director bitten by a python can attest). Once again Indy and Marion get inescapably trapped and escape for further adventures: a bravura fist fight under twirling propellers; an astonishing truck chase modeled on those classic Western scenes where a cowboy leaps from his horse onto a moving stagecoach; a charming love scene made up on the spot by Spielberg in which Marion searches for a place on her wounded hero that isn't too sore to kiss; a visit to a Nazi sub base reminiscent of Dr. No's island, and a climax that spins this earthly tale of greed and lust for power into quasi-religious mysticism.
Wild Leaps: The scale is vast, but it's the loving details that make all the difference: an adoring student of Indy's who pencils I Love You on her eyelids, a monkey who raises his paw in a Heil Hitler salute. Everyone seems to be working toward the same end, from the ingenious visual effects supervised by optical wizard Richard Edlund to Douglas Slocombe's crisp, unfussy cinematography and Norman Reynolds's grand fun-house sets. Once again composer John Williams (Star Wars) whips up a frenzy with a stirring, brassy score.
Like Star Wars, Raiders goes back to movie basics to transfix the audience, and with the same uncanny mixture of childlike innocence and stylistic sophistication. But in recycling the hoary cliffhanging cliches of serials like Spy Smasher and Terry and the Pirates and Tailspin Tommy with a light touch of irony, Lucas and Spielberg have transcended their inspiration: they give back more than they take. "Raiders is really about movies more than it is about anything else", says Harrison Ford, "which is true of Star Wars. It's why it was so popular. What I like about Steve and George, who are both grounded in film tradition, is that those old movies come right out of their own mouths. You trust this outrageous story because you trust the storyteller. For all its wild leaps and borrowings, Raiders speeds seamlessly from continent to continent, catastrophe to catastrophe, a dream of heroism that is too good to be true, but is nonetheless a true dream.
The inspiration for Raiders of the Lost Ark -- an old movie poster of a Zorro-like hero jumping from a horse to a truck -- came to George Lucas before he made Star Wars. "They're both based on the serial matinees I loved when I was a kid: action movies about adventurers set in exotic locales with a cliffhanger every second, like Tim Tyler's Luck", Lucas told NEWSWEEK'S Deborah Prager. "I wondered why they didn't make movies like that any more. I still wanted to see them." Lucas knew his hero would be an archeologist; he envisioned his hat and his whip and he knew the last shot of the movie. The idea of the lost Ark of the Covenant was supplied by his fellow northern California filmmaker Philip Kaufman (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), who shares story credit.
'I've Retired': Spielberg came in on the project in 1977. He and Lucas, friends since 1967, were vacationing together in Hawaii. "It was the week Star Wars opened," Spielberg recalls. "George had gone to Hawaii to escape the inevitable. He assumed the worst. Close Encounters' was in the post-production phase of optical effects. We were sitting on the beach one day building a sand castle, and we were fantasizing about movies we'd always wanted to make. I told George I'd always wanted to make a James Bond film, but much more like Dr. No, as opposed to the later, more technological Bond films. Lucas told me the Raiders story, and I just said, 'I'd love to do that,' and he said, 'Well, I've retired. I'm not directing anymore, so it's yours'."
Spielberg brought in screenwriter Larry Kasdan, and late that year the three of them met in Los Angeles for an intensive story conference. "We had a tape recorder going and George essentially guided the story process and the three of us pitched the entire movie in about five days. And that's where the fantasy of all our pent-up, wet-movie dreams coalesced. Most of the time we were on our feet, trying to out-shout each other with ideas." Kasdan remembers asking Lucas why he didn't direct Raiders himself. "Because then I'd never get to see it," Lucas replied.
The blockbusting combination of Lucas and Spielberg would seem to be irresistible to any hit-minded executive in Hollywood, but they were turned down by most of the major studios they approached. It wasn't the movie the studios rejected, but the deal the filmmakers proposed. "I hate to talk like a mercenary," says 33-year-old Spielberg, "but George came over to my house when we decided to make the picture and he said, 'Let's make the best deal they've ever made in Hollywood. And let's do it without the agents, just you and me.' We wrote it out on lined note paper and shook hands over the table. And then we presented that to our agencies and said, 'This is the deal we want. Now, fellows, go try to make it.' "
Some studios reacted with horror at what Spielberg describes as the "unprecedented profit definition" they reserved for themselves. But Paramount agreed to put up the $20 million budget, even though they are receiving a reduced distribution fee (less than the usual 35 per cent). Paramount president Michael Eisner admits that he was nervous about Spielberg's reputation for exceeding budget and schedule. "We built in tremendous penalties if they went over." he says. "and they agreed without hesitation. I figured either they don't care or they've got this thing figured out."
They had it figured out. After all the negative publicity about his soaring budgets on Jaws, Close Encounters and 1941, Spielberg was determined to bring his next movie in on time. Officially he was given an 85-day shooting schedule from Paramount. Spielberg, Lucas and producer Frank Marshall, however, had a secret schedule of 73 days, remarkably short for a film shot on three continents: in Hawaii, Tunisia and on English sound stages, and with enormously complex action scenes. Speilberg's detailed storyboards helped: he estimates that 80 per cent of the film was plotted out in illustrated panels and 60 per cent of that was filmed as planned. "The other 40 I pretty much made up as I went along." Needless to say, when the crew returned two weeks ahead of schedule, Paramount was appropriately overjoyed.
'Film-School Lesson': The experience was a kind of revelation for Spielberg. "Not only were we making a film in the spirit of the '30s, but I was stepping into the shoes of a director who might have made the film in the practical '30s. I felt kinda like I was playing a role. I was the Indiania Jones behind the camera. I felt I didn't have to shoot for a masterpiece. Every shot didn't have to be something David Lean would be proud of. I needed this picture to exorcise myself from a kind of technological rut I was falling into where I wouldn't walk away from a shot until it was 100 per cent of what I intended. On 1941 my average number of takes per shot was twenty. On Raiders it was four. To be able to walk away and say, 'I think that was good enough for what we're trying to do here,' was the most important film-school lesson a professional production has ever taught me. The other thing that was different was that I enjoyed making the movie. And I have never enjoyed making a movie as much. I'm the kind of guy that likes to call my friends and angst-out about the problems."
Spielberg's cost-consciousness got steady reinforcement from Producer Marshall and Lucas's co-executive producer Howard Kazanjian, who played a Hollywood variation of the "good cop/bad cop" in keeping their director on course. What was to be a 200 acre set of the archeological dig at Tanis (actually shot in Tunisia) was reduced to 70 acres, saving $750,000 in extras, cranes, period vehicles, sets and mechanics. Sometimes money was added if it was felt that it would improve the movie, Kazanjian told NEWSWEEK'S Martin Kasindorf. An extra 60 feet of film of the giant rock bearing down on Harrison Ford accounted for $60,000, and when Spielberg insisted that there weren't enough snakes on the set for his big horror scene, an additional 4,500 snakes were flown in from Denmark. The filming of that sequence alone required ten days, and had to be postponed when it was discovered at the last minute that the anti-venom for the cobras, which had come from India, was two years out of date.
Tunisia presented special problems: blistering heat that reached 130 degrees, constant swarms of flies and chronic dysentery that plagued the stars and crew. "The Tunisian extras were wonderful," recalls Spielberg, "except the time that I spent two hours putting down about 400 marks so they'd know where to go. We put the marks on the ground and couldn't get the shot before the lunch break. The extras picked up their marks and took them to lunch! After lunch they came back with their marks, wondering where to stand."
The collaboration between Lucas and Spielberg was no clash of titans, but a harmonious meeting of minds. Lucas himself was on location only part of the time (he shot some second camera material) but his most valuable input came in the editing stages, when Spielberg turned his own first cut over to his brilliant editor, Michael Kahn, and to Lucas to do as they wished. Having fought for his own freedom as a director, Spielberg is aware that sometimes a director can be given so much rope he'll hang himself. With a director's strike now threatening to shut down Hollywood, and the Directors Guild of America asking for more freedom for all directors, Spielberg is curiously ambivalent. "I think a director has to earn that freedom today. Having been a bloody veteran of the era of overinflated budgets, I can tell you there really is something good to be said for the days of David O. Selznick when there were healthy collaborations between producers and directors. I probably sound like the enemy, but there are some directors who definitely have to have a very strong hand working with them."
Raiders of the Lost Ark is a happy example of maverick film-makers working within the old studio system, but for Spielberg and Lucas it may well be the last time. Lucas, who has always kept his distance from Hollywood, recently resigned from the DGA after being fined a whopping $250,000 for putting director Irvin Kershner's credit at the end of The Empire Strikes Back -- even though Kershner agreed to the end credit. While Lucas is building his gigantic moviemaking utopia in Marin County (page 67), Spielberg is hoping to make his own break. "I'm hoping to go totally independent and raise all my capital outside the studio system, only using the studios to distribute until an independent system can be established. Playing the studio game, sending your script out to companies that will bid on it, has become a shambles. It's dishonest for the filmmakers, it's dishonest for the studios, who are at times buying inflated merchandise just because of the bidding situation."
Alternatives: There is a growing feeling in the battle-scarred movie industry that the future lies with the independents. While the old studios play executive musical chairs, and United Artists is engulfed by M-G-M, the best talent is looking for alternatives. Francis Coppola continues to struggle to maintain his own studio, Zoetrope. Later this month, Robert Redford will hold a conference at his Sundance Institute in Utah to explore the alternatives of the independent filmmaker. "There are as many alternatives as there are people with a million dollars to give you to make a movie," says Spielberg. "I'm not for separating the industry from what it once was, but it will never be that way again, because economically it can't be. Too much freedom has been tasted by too many people, and everybody wants a largerpiece for themselves. So it's going to diversify. For every Fox and Columbia there'll be seven or eight companies on the outside who don't need to go through a corporate board of directors to make a decision on whether their movie is made or not. And hopefully without signing their soul away, they can make their money."
After the agonies of making Jaws and 1941, Spielberg wondered if he "might be a candidate for early retirement" like his friend Lucas. In fact, he is bursting with plans. He has written and will be executive producer of the horror film Poltergeist, which Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) is directing. It is a script written in seven days under the pressure of the imminent Writers Guild strike ("and on the eighth day I rested," he laughs). And he will finally make the little film he has threatened for years, an independently financed $9 million movie cast entirely with children under 14 which will start shooting in August, called ET ("but don't think that stands for extraterrestrial!"). He is also hoping to do an updated remake of the '40s love story A Guy Named Joe, called Always, and he may very well direct the fourth Star Wars episode. "The future Star Wars will be much more experimental and intellectually interesting", he predicts. If Raiders is a success, Spielberg also has first dibs on the next Indiana Jones adventure, which will take place in the jungles of Africa ("it's more like the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories"). On top of all this, he is anxious to get back to the place where he started out -- television. He has a historical story that would take at least ten hours to tell, and he'd like to enlist three top filmmakers to direct it as a movie for television.
A seasoned veteran at an age when most directors are starting their careers, Spielberg stands in an enviable but challenging position. "He's the Bjorn Borg of movies," says Larry Kasdan. "When his mojo is working, there's nobody better. Steve's in touch with a childlike wonder at the way things move and work it's the key to his uniqueness." That sense of wonder is a hard quality to sustain, especially in a profession as backbreaking and pressure-ridden as commercial filmmaking, where the future of whole companies sometimes rides on a director's storytelling abilities -- ask Michael Cimino (Heaven's Gate).
Youth Market: The other question to ask is whether Spielberg will be able to grow beyond the enforced adolescence of current Hollywood filmmaking. Having helped to create the powerful youth market, the American film industry now seems to be in its grip, a situation as culturally absurd as it is economically logical. But Raiders of the Lost Ark stands as a kind of recapitulation and apotheosis of the fun-for-all-ages entertainment film: Hollywood was built on just the kind of awe-inspiring adventures that Indy undergoes, and its financial future is riding on the inspiration of people like Lucas and Spielberg who have a genius for rejuvenating the archetypal movie myths. We have come full circle. The girl is still tied to the railroad track. The train approaches ... America wants fun, and fun they serve up -- with a generous spirit, exquisite craft and an almost mystical rapport with the popular psyche. So we will spend our summer hissing Nazis, screaming at snakes and cheering on the intrepid Indy (and Superman, Bond, Zorro and Burt) as they outfox death in the nick of time.
Copyright © 1981 Newsweek