(8 of 10)
It was too much, too fast, too easy. Few worried when Spielberg spent double his Jaws budget and then overextended himself by $6.2 million on Close Encounters; after all, everybody got rich anyway. With 1941 there was no such reprieve. Though the film eventually broke even—and though, frame for frame, it was every bit as adroitly assembled as his hits had been—1941 tarnished the boy wonder's luster. "Until then I thought I was immune to failure," he says. "But I couldn't come down from the power high of making big films on large canvases. I threw everything in, and it killed the soup. 1941 was my encounter with economic reality."
Fortunately for Spielberg, he soon had a closer, more crucial encounter, when George Lucas, whom Spielberg had known since 1967, asked him to direct the first film in a new adventure series called Raiders of the Lost Ark. With the Star Wars films, Lucas had demonstrated that energy, invention and an appealing ingenuity could somehow balance themselves on Hollywood's bottom line. "George knows how to put the most on the screen for the cheapest price," Spielberg says. "He did more than anyone to help me make a movie on budget. While we were preparing Raiders he would tell me, 'You've got a $50 million imagination with a $10 million thought behind it.' " Together, the two young tycoons built plenty of twists into their roller coaster of a plot, brought Raiders in under its $20 million budget and made it one of the top four money-earning films in the U.S. The other three: Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Jaws.
The problem, as Spielberg sees it, is the ambition for megabucks: "Everybody is aiming for the rightfield stands." But hatching a blockbuster may be the only way for a film maker to outsmart the deal makers running the big studios. Spielberg and Director Brian De Palma (Carrie, Dressed to Kill) recently haggled with two major studios over the rights to Michael Crichton's bestselling novel Congo. "A deal is a work of science fiction," Spielberg says. "I wasted three months learning how not to make one. Eventually, Brian and I walked away. The whole 'movie game' is just one more useless experience." He wishes the studios would put some of their profits into development of new talent: "If each studio would take $1 million profit per big movie and invest it in film schools and writing programs, we'd have the industry that David O. Selznick and Irving Thalberg created." The director has given $500,000 to the U.S.C. film program. "We must become like Walter Huston in Treasure of Sierra Madre—we must put the mountain back."