Fractious friendships, bitter rivalries and genius in-jokes…a behind the scenes look at
In March 1975, three months before the release of Jaws, Steven Spielberg attended a test screening of the film in Dallas.
The audience loved what they saw, so much so that as they left the cinema they hummed the theme tune and scared each other by pretending to be sharks. But later, as Spielberg listened back to a cassette recording of their reactions, he noticed a gap.
George Lucas and Steven Spielberg
He worked out that it was in the scene where a human head pops out of an abandoned boat. Realising it was because he hadn’t included a close-up of the head, he told colleagues: ‘We could get another scream here.’ But the studio refused to pay for a re-shoot. Undaunted, Spielberg spent $3,000 of his own money constructing a replica of the boat at the bottom of a swimming pool, spreading out a black tarpaulin to block the sunlight, emptying milk into the water to make it as cloudy as the sea, then shooting the dummy head emerging from the boat.
That summer, as Jaws was on its way to becoming the then biggest-grossing movie ever, Spielberg more than once visited a cinema in Hollywood, where the manager would let him in at the moment in question so he could stand at the back and witness the audience jumping out of their seats.
It was this sort of attention to detail that enabled Spielberg, along with his friends Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, to dominate cinema in the 1970s.
Thankfully, Paul Fischer has worked just as hard on his superb book about the three men, more than doing justice to a story as gripping as anything in the trio’s films.
A s a child, Coppola charged friends to see the movies he made with his 8mm camera. He also charged the inarticulate ones for writing love letters for them to pretty girls.
The young Spielberg, on the other hand, was afraid of everything: confined spaces, the dark, the tree outside his window. He saw his first film aged five and a train crash in one scene terrified him. But, at home, he recreated the crash with his train set, over and over again. ‘For the first time, he took a fear and asserted control over it.’
Spielberg in the jaws of ‘Bruce’
Coppola, Spielberg and Lucas met as young men in the Hollywood of the late 1960s. Coppola and Lucas, in particular, were determined to become independent of the studios who (literally) called the shots. The pair started their own company in San Francisco, Coppola explaining that in that city people made films whereas in Los Angeles they made deals. He claimed the enterprise would be democratic, though his colleagues soon noticed that while they were struggling financially, he was driving a Porsche.
At first, Coppola was reluctant to direct The Godfather, viewing the novel it was based on as pulp fiction. But Lucas persuaded him to do it purely to earn funds for their company. Things did not go well.
The studio (Paramount) was reluctant to cast Al Pacino, while Marlon Brando needed his lines written on cue cards, which in one scene were taped around fellow actor Robert Duvall’s body.
As Coppola sat on the toilet one day, he heard two crew members come in, one saying to the other: ‘That asshole director doesn’t know what he’s doing.’ Coppola quietly lifted up his feet so the men wouldn’t see and recognise his shoes.
Then the film was released in 1972 and became the biggest of all time. Coppola celebrated by buying the same model of Mercedes owned by the Pope, then sending the bill to Paramount.
George, Steven and Francis with Martin Scorsese
A similar story unfolded with Jaws. Spielberg wasn’t the only director in the running (one competitor blew his chances over lunch by repeatedly calling the shark a whale). Filming, scheduled for 55 days, took 150.
The support vessel wasn’t big enough – the crew’s verdict that ‘you’re gonna need a bigger boat’ ended up in the script. And the mechanical sharks (all called Bruce, after Spielberg’s lawyer) refused to work properly. The director showed Lucas one of the models in the workshop, and when his friend put his head inside the mouth to examine it Spielberg pulled the lever to shut it but was then unable to reopen it. Yet despite all this the film became the biggest ever, overtaking The Godfather.
Two years later, it was Lucas’s turn. His film was originally called The Star Wars and featured Luke Starkiller. ‘May the force be with you’ was taken from the Christian liturgy’s ‘may the Lord be with you’, while hairy co-pilot Chewbacca was inspired by Lucas’s dog who rode on the passenger seat of his car. (The dog was called Indiana, which later became the first name of Professor Jones in Spielberg’s Raiders Of The Lost Ark.)
Filming was, once again, a nightmare, with trials such as the elephant who played the bantha (a woolly mammoth-type creature) repeatedly throwing off its costume – and, once again, the movie broke the box office record.
What’s more, Lucas had kept the merchandising rights: in those days studio lawyers weren’t bothered about these, calling them the ‘garbage clauses’ of a contract.
The money Lucas earned from toy lightsabers and Han Solo duvet covers would eventually bring him that cherished ‘freedom from the studios’ status. In 2012, he sold Lucasfilm for $4billion.
Coppola, on the other hand, ended up going bankrupt, mainly because of his refusal to compromise when filming.
The Last Kings of Hollywood is available now from the Mail Bookshop
One From The Heart was the film that finally tipped him over the edge but, for sheer madness, it’s hard to beat Apocalypse Now. Coppola sacked his main actor (Harvey Keitel) after just a month, replacing him with Martin Sheen, who was so stressed and drinking so much that he had a heart attack.
R ain destroyed the sets in the Philippines and a hugely overweight Marlon Brando refused to shoot for days on end, despite a $1million-a-week salary.
Back in America, seeking to make sense of the huge amount of footage he’d shot, Coppola at one point invited a homeless war veteran into the office and had his drunken ravings transcibed word for word in case it inspired an idea.
For the rest of the 1980s, Coppola made films to pay off his debts, resenting Lucas for failing to bail him out. But the pair made up and have more than earned their place in movie history as, of course, has Spielberg.
Their stories intertwine on screen as well as in real-life: look closely at the hieroglyphs on the wall of the vault in Raiders Of The Lost Ark and you’ll see that two of them are – R2-D2 and C-3PO.