The Steven Spielberg Interview (1982). Plus: Quick Updates, Wimbledon, Theaters, and More!
Issue 41: Schedule Change, Upcoming Collabs, Spielberg, Wimbledon, and more!
Hi friends,
Hope your holiday week is off to a great start. In a couple of weeks, we’ll publish our first ORIGINAL interview as part of a semi-regular series of conversations with innovators, experts, and icons from the past and present. This interview will be part of our first unique collaboration, and we’ll share more details soon. For now, here’s a hint: Make art, not merch.
Right now, we’re hard at work in production on two different podcasts. While we LOVE bringing you this newsletter each week, our main focus is creating awesome, entertaining podcasts. To ensure we continue producing high-quality shows, we’re adjusting the release schedule of this newsletter a bit. Call it improved focus, quality control, or opportunity costs, but don’t call it a cop-out! As I’ve said before, we value your time, and unlike many media companies, we won’t publish just for the sake of it. We’re still figuring thing out, but we’ll likely publish once a month until season two of You Had To Be There begins this fall. Rest assured, we’re not going anywhere; we’ll continue bringing you original and curated work in this newsletter, along with awesome stories in our podcasts, Notes, YouTube, Instagram and more. Please follow along!
The next time you hear from us, it’ll likely be for our first original interview and collaboration on this very newsletter. But since my tomorrow’s my birthday and I always watch Jaws on my birthday, I figured, why not curate a vintage interview with the filmmaking legend Steven Spielberg (below)? This one comes on the heels of the release of one of Spielberg’s many timeless films, E.T., amidst an incredible run of iconic films from 1975 to 1982, including Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T. It’s excellent. I think you’ll enjoy it!
Have a great Independence Day weekend!
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If you’re interested in learning more about Hi Barr or sponsoring Season 2 of You Had To Be There, shoot me an email / DM—I’d love to talk.
Looking Forward!
Wimbledon! (ESPN+): I love Wimbledon! In fact, I love it so much that we just recorded an episode of You Had To Be There covering a moment from The Championships (coming this Fall). This year’s tournament kicked off yesterday and is full of intrigue. Honestly, the field seems wide open on both sides, but it’s hard to bet against Alcaraz, Sinner, and Iga considering their form and the injuries to other players like Djokovic (knee) and Sabalenka (out).
For a great look from a player’s perspective on what it’s like to play at Wimbledon and why it’s so unique, check out this excellent episode of Andy Roddick’s podcast. Listen here.
Odds & Ends
“Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown”: Hall-of-Fame screenwriter Robert Towne is teaming up with David Fincher and Netflix to create a prequel TV series on the early days of Jake Gittes, Jack Nicholson’s character from Chinatown. Now, I’m skeptical it’ll ever exit development, but apparently Towne has already written the scripts and everyone’s on board. Apparently, this is real but with Hollywood trade publications, you never know!
Aemond One-Eye hasn’t seen Game of Thrones! Ewan Mitchell’s decision to avoid watching Game of Thrones in order to bring originality to his performance as Aemond One-Eye seems pretty smart!
Silver Lake Owns 29% of Minor League Baseball?! Silver Lake-backed Diamond Baseball Holdings now owns 35 minor league clubs, which is 29% of the teams in the minors.
Utah! Get Me 2…Recommendations!
What A Century (Plus a Pandemic) Does to Moviegoing and Why It Matters: Matthew Ball delivers another excellent, well-researched essay on the entertainment industry, this time focusing on the theatrical business from 2000 through today. Full of awesome details, insights, and great charts.
A Rare, In-Depth Profile on LVMH + Bernard Arnault (Bloomberg)
Conversations from the Past.
The Steven Spielberg Interview
INTERVIEW BY MICHAEL SRAGOW
ROLLING STONE
JULY 22, 1982
ROLLING STONE: Do you mean that making movies is a way of showing off?
STEVEN SPIELBERG: With the exception of Close Encounters, in all my movies before E.T., I was giving out, giving off things before I would bring something in. There were feelings I developed in my personal life…that I had no place to put. Then, while working on Raiders, I had the germ of an idea. I was very lonely, and I remember thinking I had nobody to talk to. My girlfriend was in California, so was George Lucas. Harrison Ford had a bad case of the turistas. I remember wishing one night that I had a friend. It was like, when you were a kid and had grown out of dolls or teddy bears or Winnie the Pooh, you just wanted a little voice in your mind to talk to. I began concocting this imaginary creature, partially from the guys who stepped out of the mother ship for ninety seconds in Close Encounters and then went back in, never to be seen again.
Then I thought, what if I were ten years old again–where I’ve sort of been for thirty-four years, anyway–and what if he needed me as much as I needed him? Wouldn’t that be a great love story? So I put together this story of boy meets creature, boy loses creature, creature saves boy, boy saves creature – with the hope that they will somehow always be together, that their friendship isn’t limited by nautical miles. And I asked Melissa Mathison, who is Harrison Ford’s girlfriend and a wonderful writer, to turn it into a screenplay.
The thing that I’m just scared to death of is that someday I’m gonna wake up and bore somebody with a film. That’s kept me making movies that have tried to outspectacle each other.
- Steven Spielberg
RS: Did that scare you?
SPIELBERG: The thing that I’m just scared to death of is that someday I’m gonna wake up and bore somebody with a film. That’s kept me making movies that have tried to outspectacle each other. I got into the situation where my movies were real big, and I had a special-effects department and I was the boss of that and that was a lot of fun. Then I’d get a kick out of the production meetings— not with three or four people, but with fifty, sometimes nearer to 100 when we got close to production — because I was able to lead troops into Movie Wars. The power became a narcotic, but it wasn’t power for power’s sake. I really am attracted to stories that you can’t see on television and stories that you can’t get every day. So that attraction leads me to the Impossible Dream, and that Impossible Dream usually costs around $20 million.
François Truffaut helped inspire me to make E.T. Simply by saying to me, on the Close Encounters set, “I like you with keeds, you are wonderful with keeds, you must do a movie just with keeds….” And I said, “Well, I’ve always wanted to do a film about kids, but I’ve got to finish this, then I’m doing 1941, about the Japanese attacking Los Angeles.” And Truffaut told me I was making a big mistake. He kept saying, “You are the child.”
RS: Has a producer ever held you in line and helped you in the way, say, Darryl Zanuck is supposed to have helped John Ford?
SPIELBERG: George Lucas, on Raiders. He didn’t come in and cut my movie or dictate policy or style or substance. But he was always available to talk, and he was never lacking in ideas. You’ll laugh at this: the only similar experience I’ve had with somebody I trust and believe in is Sid Sheinberg [president of MCA]. Through the years he’s been an invaluable support and sounding board. But he’s corporately so high up that he actually has to struggle down the ladder to roll up his sleeves.
RS: You’ve said that you want to start a children’s crusade, leading new talent into the Movie Wars. Does it make sense to do it on your own? Or do you have a chance of making a huge and lasting change only if all the guys with power to do it — you, George Lucas, maybe Francis Coppola — joined forces?
SPIELBERG: I don’t know what it would be like to put George Patton, Omar Bradley, Mark Clark, Napoleon, Margaret Thatcher and Stonewall Jackson in a room together and say, “Okay, now we have to put our heads together and hire a great army.” I don’t know whether it would blow up in our faces or whether we would be able to consolidate and transform the motion picture business. Right now, we’ve all got our own universes to make movies in. Francis lives in a world of his own, George lives in a galaxy far, far away but close to human audiences, and I’m an independent moviemaker working within the Hollywood establishment. But all of us share one thing: each of us would like to do to the film industry what Irving Thalberg did to it fifty years ago.
RS: Is it possible to do that in Hollywood today?
SPIELBERG: Let’s put it this way: if I decided to take two years off from my life, I’d do it only to run an independent studio for a couple of years. And somebody’s gonna have to gamble along with me; somebody’s gonna have to give me maybe $150 million. And they’ll either never see that money again, or they will multiply it by a factor of a hundred, maybe a thousand. It’s just a matter of whether Francis or George or I decide to step into the shoes that have been worn by agents for the last eight, nine, ten years and try to apply what we know about how important ideas are, and how important execution is, and how important the casting is, and hire the kinds of directors that would allow us to have as much input as the David O. Selznicks, the Louis B. Mayers, the Jack Warners and the Howard Hugheses of the past –— not by being tyrants, but by being experienced parents.
I don’t know of more than four executives in this town who know how to cut a movie and how to execute one. The people who are in charge today wouldn’t know how to save a Heaven’s Gate if indeed it needed saving. Now, I’m of the school that doesn’t think that Heaven’s Gate needed to be saved. I think that the overall attack that was launched on the director, Michael Cimino, is more interesting and worthy of analysis than the Heaven’s Gate cataclysm. Because Heaven’s Gate, which is a very, very flawed movie, is one of the most carefully crafted movies of all time.
Nobody wrote that Raise the Titanic cost around $30 million; everybody destroyed Cimino because his movie cost $30 million. Way down deep, I think the outcry was a primal scream from movie lovers, saying. “Please bring the budgets down, please give us better ideas and more entertainment, and give us more intellectual stimulation as well as the pleasure of butter on the popcorn. Don’t crush yourselves under the weight.” I wish Cimino had been left alone, because, of all the new guys coming up, Michael’s got a chance to be David Lean [Lawrence of Arabia]. Michael has a showman inside that doesn’t know where he’s at yet. Michael is maybe as technically skilled as Billy Friedkin, Francis Coppola, Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese. And once he gets himself a story that’s accessible to the masses, he’s gonna be hard to stop.
RS: Do you see any other directors breaking away?
SPIELBERG: The thing is, anybody who is being given the chance to make a movie has already “made it.” That’s why making films today is like walking a tightrope over a crocodile pit. The crocodiles are not the critics, they’re the economy. If a movie doesn’t make money, it’s harder to launch a second picture.
But to answer your question, Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale [Used Cars], Hal Barwood and Matt Robbins [Dragonslayer] – mark my words, they’ll break through. Bob Towne [Personal Best], Ridley Scott [Alien], Hugh Hudson [Chariots of Fire], John Carpenter [Halloween] will get there. De Palma certainly will, if he’s not already. John Milius [Conan the Barbarian] will have his breakthrough film some day. Certainly George Miller [The Road Warrior]. I like this guy Michael Mann [Thief], and Allan Parker [Shoot the Moon]. But they are more of the Scorsese-Coppola school than… our group.
RS: How do you respond to the idea that what Scorsese does is more adult than what you guys are doing?
SPIELBERG: Well, it is more adult, because it appeals to our anxiety riddled, darker side. It appeals to the unknown persona. My movies and George’s appeal to things that are lighter in nature. I think the difference is terrific. Can you imagine if everybody made Raiders of the Lost Ark last year? I think studios were spoiled the first day Gone with the Wind made more money than any movie ever. I think from that moment on, decision-makers wanted movies that would be hugely successful. So every time I see a small picture take off, whether it’s Animal House or Diner, I cheer. I think it’s bullshit when people say the success of Raiders precludes the success of Diner. I think a success like Raiders feeds the pocketbook that’s gonna finance Diner. You can’t have a Diner without Raiders. But you can’t have good movies without Diner. So, we need each other. Should we all join hands and sing, “I’d like to buy the world a Coke”? [Laughs.]
RS: Don’t let them get too comfortable with the resident genius.
SPIELBERG: Nobody’s a resident genius, but being a resident anything bothers me. Once you’re at a studio for more than three weeks, you’re just another name on a directory at the dead end of a corridor. That goes whether you’re Fellini, Francis Coppola or just getting started out of NYU.