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It’s one of the greatest horror films of the 1980s, but there’s one controversy about it that will never die.
was the biggest commercial hit of the director’s career, but the circumstances surrounding its creation attached an asterisk next to the film’s place in his filmography even before the movie arrived in theaters.
Asking him to “set the record straight” created the only awkward moment in an otherwise pleasant interview and Industrial Light and Magic.appreciably larger than those used for Hooper’s . This last detail prompted Hooper to complain to the Directors Guild of America, which awarded him $15,000 on the grounds that the trailer “denigrated the role of the director.
”Still, even with Hooper’s outreach to the DGA, all this might be conceivably chalked up to a series of innocent mistakes, the sort of unintentional credit-grabbing Spielberg would learn to avoid with future collaborations, were it not for a Dale Pollock–penned article that appeared in the Los Angeles Times on May 24, 1982 headlined, “” Per Hooper, this is where the confusion about the film began.
“The genesis of it,” Hooper told me, as he told other interviewers over the years, “came from an article in The L.A. Times”: When we were shooting the practical location on the house, the first two weeks of filming were exterior, so I had second-unit shots that had to be picked up in the front of the house.
I was in the back of the house shooting Robbie and the tree, looking down at the burial of the little tweety bird, so Steven was picking those shots up for me.arrived on the set and printed something like, “We don’t know who’s directing the picture. ” The moment they got there, Steven was shooting the shot of the little race cars, and from there the damn thing blossomed on its own and started becoming its own legend.
That sounds reasonable, only it’s not what Pollock’s article describes. Instead, Pollock quotes producer Frank Marshall as saying, “The creative force on this movie was Steven. … Tobe was the director and was on the set every day. But Steven did the design for every story board … and he was on the set every day except three days when he was in Hawaii with Lucas.
” Marshall then goes on to describe a post-production process in which Hooper essentially did not participate, including in supervising the final edit, the mixing, and composer Jerry Goldsmith’s score. Per Pollock’s article, this seems to have been an extension, and amplification, of the dynamic on the set. JoBeth Williams, who played Diane Freeling, the mother of the central family, describes making the film as “a collaboration with Steven having the final say. ” He was also apparently quite hands-on.
Years later, Williams would describe Spielberg wading into the water with her for a late-film scene in which Diane finds herself surrounded by skeletons in an unfinished swimming pool, saying, “. ” Zelda Rubinstein, who played the clairvoyant Tangina, was even more frank in a 2007 interview, saying simply, “.
I only worked six days on the film and Steven was there. Tobe set up the shots and Steven made the adjustments. ” , that give credit to Hooper—it’s impossible not to see Spielberg’s influence on the film, from the clutter-filled Freeling home that serves as a companion piece to similar spots into the editing rhythms of the film’s set pieces. Spielberg’s presence is never stronger than the moment the Freeling family watches spirits descend their suburban home’s central staircase with the signature look of wordless wonder Kevin B. Lee would dub “star Craig T. Nelson as Hooper stands beside him, holding a can of Coke.
It’s easy to conclude that the image pretty much sums up their working relationship and that perhapsshould be considered a Spielberg film in all but name. Even Spielberg’s attempt to settle the issue via anto Hooper published in the Hollywood Reporter days before the movie’s release feels a bit qualified thanks to phrasing like “Through the screenplay you accepted a vision of this very intense movie from the start, and as the director, you delivered the goods.
” It reads less like high praise than a pat on the head. It’s not that simple, however, and the same Spielberg Face moment also works as groundwork for a counterargument. A creator doesn’t have to be Spielberg to draw influence from Spielberg. It’s not like Spielberg needed to be present on, say, the set offor the many Spielbergian moments found throughout that series’ run.
And, of course, even if he wasn’t standing by his side, Hooper would have to be influenced by Spielberg, an era-defining artist who was already one of the most powerful people in Hollywood in 1982. What’s more, Spielberg was personally invested in the film, having commissioned a screenplay from writers Michael Grais and Mark Victor thatin the paper’s Hooper-less profile.
“It’s me when I was scaring my younger sisters half to death when we were growing up. ” It only makes sense that the film’s elements would bend Spielberg’s way. Even Goldsmith’s score resembles the work of Spielberg’s usual collaborator, John Williams, in ways not evident in the inventive composer’s other work.counts. He seems to have needed Hooper to explore that genre with him, if not for him.
Though Spielberg gets, and undoubtedly deserves, the film’s story credit, Jacob Trussell’s describes a Hooper-Spielberg collaborative process that goes beyond Spielberg handing the director a script and marching orders.script from John Sayles that he ultimately decided not to make. But he did farm one element of it out to screenwriter Melissa Mathison to develop into its own film: a subplot involving a friendly extraterrestrial that would becomeis a justly revered horror masterpiece, one rarely equaled in intensity, dread, and just plain ickiness.
Hooper’s 1976 follow-up,, proved less distinguished, but he’d gotten past that to direct an eerie 1979 miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s, a thoughtful, offbeat twist on the slasher movie released in 1981. Whatever Spielberg’s role in the creation, production, and postproduction of, but each makes a case for Hooper as a gifted stylist with a puckish sense of humor all his own.became instantly infamous as the film with the naked space vampire, and understandably so.
As “Space Girl,” Mathilda May begins her conquest of Earth in the nude and stays that way for much of the film. But the fact that’s Dan O’Bannon, serves as a fun, visually impressive riff on campy ’50s sci-fi and the apocalyptic British strain of the same genre, got overlooked amid the giggles.
Also largely overlooked: Hooper’s 1986 remake of the ’50s classic, which doubles down on the original’s Freudian symbolism with the help of first-rate effects by Stan Winston and John Dykstra. Released the same year,attracted more attention for its graphic violence than the way Hooper and writer L.M. Kit Carson reinvented the original’s cannibal family as the ultimate product of the consumerist ’80s.
“Tobe isn’t what you call a take-charge sort of guy,” Spielberg told the Los Angeles Times in the same article Hooper saw as the source of all the confusion about his role in making. But these films suggest otherwise. Given a chance to take charge, Hooper produced a string of strange, memorable films that were distinctly his own.? No thorough accounting suggests that, per the strictest definition of a director’s job, anyone but Hooper deserves the credit.
But the same accounts also suggest that Spielberg played a part in the making of the film that went well beyond the bounds usually observed by producers and screenwriters. Nonetheless, Spielberg and Hooper would work together again, on bothIn the end, it seems like the question itself might be flawed.
No matter how strong a stamp a director might put on a film—and Spielberg’s stamp presses deeper than most directors’—a film is a collaborative process, one born of the contributions of many. Maybe Spielberg hit the mark in his open letter when he referred to the two having a “unique, creative relationship. ” Maybe it’s better to put discussion of who the film belongs to to rest.
Regardless of who shaped a given shot or influenced a particular performance, the product speaks for itself. We can wonder what conflict rumbled inside it, or we can simply look at it from the outside, admire the result, and remember that some things are possessed by more than one creative
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