Lessons from 1982 for Modern Hollywood

Hey, this is Tanya, back with a fresh air bonus episode just for you as a plus listener. Steven Spielberg has a new movie out. It's called Disclosure Day, and it has him going back to his sci fi roots . Which got me thinking about the summer it all really took off, nineteen eighty two . In the span of a few months, audiences got ET, Poltergeist, Blade Runner, Tron , and the Thing , movies we're still talking about more than forty years later. Spielberg was right at the center of it, directing ET and co writing and producing poltergeist. So I wanted to go back to my twenty twenty four conversation with entertainment writer Chris Nashawati, who wrote a whole book about that one extraordinary season . He told me why the summer of ' eighty two was a turning point for Hollywood and for fan culture , and how Spielberg reshaped the tone of ET along the way , and the controversy that still shadows the making of poltergeist. Let's listen back. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Moseley. In the summer of nineteen eighty two, my guest today, entertainment writer, Chris Nashawati, was a thirteen year old burgeoning film geek who spent the entire summer that year in movie theaters watching eight feature films that would go on to change the face of cinema as we know it, movies like Blade Runner, Conan the Barbarian, Poltergeist, and a sweet movie about an alien trying to find his way back home. E phone ET phone home Eaty phone home . Eaty phone home wants to call somebody , it's all this? Eight day . Thank God he's talking ET phone home ? E phone home and look home ET, the extraterrestrial is a classic, of course , and was a huge hit when it was released the weekend of july fourth in nineteen eighty two , making it at the time the biggest box office hit in Hollywood history. Some of the other movies that made a splash were Tron, The Thing, Star Trek, Wrath of Con, and Mad Max The Road Warrior. Chris Nashawati has written a new book about the significance of that summer called The F uture was Now , Madman, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci fi summer of nineteen eighty two. Up until that point, Hollywood executives, he says, were baffled by the sci fi fantasy genre until these movies showed them the potential of tapping into a rabbit fan base, eager to spend money on merchandise and endless sequels. Chris Nashawati is a writer, editor, and former film critic of Entertainment Weekly. His work is appe ared in Esquire, Sports Illustrated and Vanity Fair. He is also the author of Caty Shack, The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella story. And Chris Nashwari, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you for having me. I'm very excited. Yeah, well, you know, what is so interesting about this conversation right now is that the movies that are making a splash today are reboots and part two, three, four's, many of the same movies that we're going to be talking about today . It's like the summer of nineteen eighty two brought with it both an expansion of our thinking, but also kind of created a monster. That is one hundred percent the argument of the book. You know, it's interesting that this was that summer was a real turning point . It was the beginning of Hollywood really catering to fan culture , which is something, you know, right now as we're talking, you know, Comic Con is still fresh in the news. That's right. Yeah. So it's interesting that that summer sort of was a reaction to what had gone on with Star Wars , proving that there was an audience for a genre that was in many ways dismissed as geeky or kid stuff or whatever. A subculture.. Yeah And the subculture sort of became the culture that summer. So Star Wars nineteen seventy seven, Jaws , nineteen seventy five are two films that they're usually talked about as the birth of the summer blockbusters we know it . And it opened up this world of sci fi and fantasy. How did those two films though set the stage for this summer of nineteen eighty two? Yeah, I mean, I think that Jaws and Star Wars were potent examples of movies that people didn't just pay to see in the summer , but paid to see over and over again . They were movies that appealed to , as you mentioned, in the intro, a rabid fan base. And the studios saw how much money that those movies were making and knew that they needed to tap into this audience. They needed to follow that trend as Hollywood always does . But that takes time. It's like turning a battleship, right? So after usually when you want to find out where a trend came from in terms of movies, just look back five years earlier because that's how long it takes to develop and make a movie and release it . So five years earlier before nineteen eighty two was nineteen seventy seven, hello, Star Wars. So that's what they're all reacting to in the summer. Okay, let's talk about what films actually came out the summer of nineteen eighty two. So there was Tron . There was the Thing . The Thing, Blade Runner , the Road Warrior , Conan the Barbarian, Star Trek the Wrath of Kon , and what ET ? Poltergeist ? How many of them were original screenplays and how many of them were based on books or comics . Well , I would I mean there are two ways to answer that question. I think of them all as original because they were not based on like today the concept of what's original is very different from back then. Some of them were bas ed on books. Like for example, The Thing was based on a science fiction story called Who Goes There . You know, Blade Runner was based on a Philip K. Dick novel called Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep . You know, they were all ET was completely original. Rodware was completely original. I mean, it was a mix, really, but none of them were based on what we consider today as, you know, popular intellectual property. You know what I mean? They weren't these huge IP things . They would become those, but they weren't them. And so to me, it's very telling that in one summer you had all these fresh bold original ideas , which is sort of the exact opposite of where we fall right now. Yeah. Well, this book is a fun read because you give a lot of behind the scenes , history . And people love hearing those stories about like who was thought of to cast for who and then who ended up getting the role and then some of the fights and things like that. But the stories that I love the most the stories behind the writing of these stories that are enduring stories that we love . Take us back to when Steven Spielberg was conceptualizing ET at the time he was, considered the golden boy. He was like the it director in town at the time. Yeah , yeah, he had just done jaws, which obviously was a massive hit and he could really do anything he wanted after that. So he decided to make close encounters. And the reason I bring that up is that it's in a way sort of a cousin, a pretty close cousin to this movie, ET . You know, you've got this really promising young director dealing in science fiction. And in a way, he sort of legitimized it, right? With him and him and Lucas sort of legitimized the genre by making really great movies in what was seen as a very populist , maybe low genre . And you know , with ET , that was really a story that he had been carrying around for a long time, really since his childhood. He had a very lonely childhood. His parents split up . And he never really understood why , only understood much later. And I think he felt like an ugly duckling at school . He was Jewish in an area that wasn't, you know, didn't have a very large Jewish population. I think he felt like, you know, like an outsider and a lonely outsider. So created, you know, these sort of pretend friends . And ET is really the outgrowth of that story. I mean, it's as great as a science fiction tale as it is. It's also this really sort of touching story about growing up in the suburbs alone , you know, you've got your siblings, but really like it's a broken home. It's a broken family. But there's a lot of love there. And it's it's, you know, he had this story inside of him. And he's told it a couple of times in various ways most recently with the Fablem ans, but like he taps into his own life, which makes the stories especially resonant and personal . He also had a screenwriter who really brought a lot to the project, and that was Melissa Matheson . She had written The Black Stallion, and she was dating Harrison Ford when they were making Rade as the Lost Arc. And that was the movie that he made right before ET and while they were on the set they met and he knew that he needed an emotional sort of assist on the script for because the initial the initial screenplay didn't have some of these . Yeah, it was very different in what way. It was more of a horror story, really. I mean, it was it was about a group of aliens that are left behind at the time it was being called Night Skies . And it was a darker story. And in fact, he actually hired a writer to sort of pursue that . He hired John Sales as a great screenwriter to sort of go down that path . And he wrote that script. And I think by the time he delivered it, Spielberg had had a bit of a change of heart and realized that he wanted it to be a more emotional sort of kinder gentler story for kids. The way you say it in the book is that what came of that is where that story Night Skies ends is where ET begins. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, it's a it's a great making of story. And Spielberg, you know , I'm especially fascinated by him at this period of his career because is having so much success so quickly. And he's really working at the height of his powers. He has all this energy. He's going hopping from one project to the next. He's sort of this unstoppable force of nature. And yet someone did turn down ET initially, an executive. Yeah, I mean that's a great story too. I mean he had a deal with Colombia to make ET there And they had signed on for the scarier, darker version because they wanted this sort of hard science fiction dark story from the director of Jaws. That they could sell, right? And then he told them that he was shifting it in a different direction, you know, into the softer story . And when they read the script they just said this is a wimpy kids Disney movie. We can't we don't we're not interested in this. We're not interested in this. And they basically said, you know, we're going to not make this movie and they put it in turnaround, which means that another studio if they, paid what Columbia had invested in the property already , they could take the picture. So Spielberg called up his buddy at Universal, Sidney Scheinberg , who had worked with him on jaws he said, look, can you write a check for a million bucks to take this project? I really want to make this movie and Columbia's not going to make it. And he was like, yeah, of course. So what's interesting is that Columbia made a huge mistake, obviously, because ET became the biggest movie of all time . And they retained five percent the film's profits , but the funny thing is and the ironic thing is that Columbia, just from their five percent , that made more money for that studio for the studio that year than any of their own homegrown movies . So I mean, they really screwed up. Spielberg also wrote Poltergeist, which is about a young family that's visited by ghosts in their home. And at first the ghosts appear friendly, but then they get more sinister. And it turns nasty and they start to terrorize the family before they kidnap the youngest daughter . In this scene, I'm about to play , a medium named Tangina, played by Zelda Rubenstein, tells the parents of the little girl that the spirits won't leave their daughter alone . Let's listen There's one more thing . A terrible presence is in there with her . So much rage , so much betrayal . I've never sensed anything like it . I don't know what was over this house , but it was strong enough to punch a hole into this world , take your dog away from you It keeps cal ying very close to it and away from the spectrum light It li es to her . It says things only a child can understand . He has been using her to restrain the others To her , it simply is another child . To us it is the beast That was a scene from the nineteen eighty two movie poltergeist written by Steven Spielberg, and we'll get to the director situation a little bit later. But Chris , is it true that poltergeist and ET were kind of like two sides of the same coin. They were kind of like an embryo that split into twins. Yeah. Okay, that's a better way to do. The good and the evil twin. Yeah . Yeah, they both sort of emerge from the same idea . It's interesting the movie began as a science fiction story about an alien visitation and how the aliens terrorized . Yeah , exactly . And along the way, it sort of evolved into the story about spirits, the supernatural . And you know, I think that's probably a good thing. I don't know that Spielberg would have wanted to have two science fictions movies in the same summer . Well, how did they even how did it even come to be that they both came out the same summer? Because I don't think I've ever heard of that before. Yeah, Spielberg, I'm telling you, Spielberg at that point in time prolific energizer bunny who just wanted to wake up and go to a movie set, shoot a movie, go to bed, repeat the next day . And so for him, making ET was obviously a f ull time job, but he had this great idea and he wanted to make it now . So director's guild rules prevent someone from directing two movies at the same time . So he signed on to Poltergeist as just the producer. He also co wrote the script. But so he really had two movies going at the same time and he hired a director, is it Toby ? Yeah, Toby Hooper. Yeah. He had directed the Texas Chainsaw Massacre , which , you know , anyone who hears the title immediately thinks that that's the most sort of satanic movie that's ever been made , but it's really a work of art. You know, it's if you're into genre cinema, Texas Chainsaw Masker is a work of art. It's a beautifully made movie . It's been inducted into the Museum of Modern Art. You don't have to . I don't have to sell you on text . But it's funny to hear it in that same context. No work of art. Really, it's a great movie. And I think a lot of movies makers at the time really thought he was someone to bet on Toby Hooper . But there was a bit of a, you know, what you call it between Toby Hooper and Steven Spielberg because Steven hired him to be the director of poltergeist. Right . But really he never directed it. Well, that's that is a question mark. Okay , there's a lot of speculation about this . Some people who were involved with the making of the movie feel that Spielberg was on the set every day, but three days of the making of Poltergeist, even though he was just a producer . There are a lot of people who say that he really took over the directing of the film from Toby Hooper. Maybe Toby Hooper wasn't up to directing such a big major studio movie or that he didn't have a forceful enough personality to sort of make the movie the way it should be made . Other people say that no Toby Hooper did direct it . It seems to me after the people I've spoken to and what I've read and that all facts sort of come down on the side of Steven Spielberg was a very hands on producer . And Steven Spielberg did not help himself out by making some statements during the time of the film's release , implying that he was a much larger he had a much larger a much larger role in directing the film than he may or may not. He wanted credit for it. He did. And I think that's what it boils down to is that that was a story that really came from him. And I think he had a hard time giving up credit. Because he said about poltergeist, he says, Poltergeist is what I fear and ET is what I love. One is about suburban evil and the other is about suburban good. And both of these stories live in my heart. Yeah , yeah. I mean, that's that's exactly it. And I think , you know there are two sides of him. One is the Mary Prankster who used to like scare the wits out of his sister and the other one is someone who's interested in making heartwarming, you know , entertainment for kids because he deep down he is a kid. And you know, I think that poltergeist or the sort of scandal that erupted from it over this people two different people taking sort of credit as the direct or was really the first public black eye that he had ever gotten . His career had been charmed up to that point, and it's been charmed ever since, but there was this brief hiccup, right, where he had a bit of a public relations nightmare on his hands. About these movies, did he ever share with you the impact of that year or those movies in particular about his career and artistic choices from that point on . Yeah, I mean, I think he told me that ET is one of his most personal and favorite movies . And he also mentioned the fact that working with the kids was really the high light , including a very young Drew Barrymore. That's right. And it really he had been sort of a loner, single guy for a lot of his life and making this movie with these kids every day really sort of made him want to be a dad , which he's done several times over since then. There's also the emerging technology that I'm really fascinated by because when we think about the sci fi and fantasy genre, so much of the visual is really dependent on the ability to articulate visually all that's happening. Tron is a really interesting story that you write about. But there was this movie in nineteen seventy nine called The Black Hole . So it was Disney's stab at sci fi like to try to get it the Star Wars magic and it was a dud, right? Yeah, well, yeah, it was a dud e. Artistically, it was certainly a dud, commercially, I think it probably broke even, but it certainly wasn't the result that Disney was looking for without a doubt. You know, it's funny because Lucas and Spielberg reportedly brought, I mean, Lucas rather brought Star Wars to Disney. Yeah, you know, when he was trying to find someone to bankroll it, and they passed. They passed. And you know , they got it later. They got it later eventually today. Overpaid . But it's funny because he got the last laugh there. Yeah, they did. But Disney at the time, you know, we think of Disney as sort of like this monolithic movie studio now that's sort of like the alpha dog among all of them . But back in nineteen eighty two , this was a studio that was really on its last legs. It was you know and what was it holding on to? Talk about the executives at that time period. Yeah, they were really of another generation. They were. And they were all sort of still living in Walt Disney's shadow. You know, he had died in nineteen sixty six after presiding over, you know, the biggest animation powerhouse in the history of movies . You know, Disney was just the greatest studio that you could imagine in the forties and fifties. And but by the, you know, the seventies , it was just a place where they were , you know, releasing rereleasing old movies , you know, like, oh, you want to watch Snow White again. Here it is. Bambi. Yeah, Bambi, for example , which I know you saw in the summer of nineteen eighty two, that was actually a movie that was out during that year. That's right. It was, you know, they put out a lot , they re release a lot of those golden age movies, but in terms of like fresh ideas, this was not the place to go . And agents knew that. It's not like they were going to like shop , shop, go to Disney to, you know, to get a good deal. Disney was notoriously cheap, and they weren't making good movies. And so they knew because of Star Wars that this was their chance to get into the major studio sandbox and try to make some money. And they had this property the Black Hole and they rolled the dice on it and paid a lot of money to make it. And it just didn't do that well. It didn't do that well. Well, a couple of years later then there's Tron, which is about a computer hacker who is abducted into the digital world . What did Disney learn from the black hole that then maybe helped them with the success of Tron? Yeah, I mean, I think it learned that it has to gamble in order to stay alive . And yes, Black Hole had been sort of an unsuccessful gamble or at least a push , but they knew that this is the way they had to go in order to stay relevant and to stay in business . And so when it was time for Tron to happen , they didn't fully get the ideas that the director of Tron Steven Lisberger had in mind for this movie because it was made in a very radically new process , which is called backlit animation , which makes, you know, the images look like there's they're backlit by neon. It was trying to look like video games. It was yeah. And in a way it was perfectly timed , you know, if you were a kid at that age at that time, video games were they were it. I mean, we used to go to the arcade with a roll of quarters and just spend the day defender or centipede . It was a glorious time and they tried to cash in on that with this radical idea , which with an almost experimental movie . And you know , in a way it was too ahead of its time. It was too perfectly timed because that audience would eventually be there. People would eventually go to see these movies about video games, but not , they weren't ready yet. They weren't ready yet. They weren't ready. So Tron was not as successful . It was a break even movie. It was a break. Wait, is it true that Disney used so much power? It caused a brownout in the city of Murbank film this movie? That's right. They had to the way they had to light a sound stage in order to make this digital process work required a huge amount of lighting , so much so that in Los Angeles, the precinct that they're in, there was a brownout and the power company had to go to Disney and be like, you got to cool it. You know, I'm thinking about this time period of nineteen eighty two in the context of today . And there's so many remakes and reboots and we're used to them coming and going and some of them are really good and some of them are not . You write about Star Trek and the attempt to remake a movie that was made a few years before nineteen eighty two . So Star Trek as we, know , was a show. And then a movie was made in the late seventies, it was horrible, right? It wasn't that good. I think it's horrible. Yeah, people did not like it. Yeah. Yeah. And then studios decided though that it still deserved another chance at a movie . And so there we had Wrath of Khan, which was a success. So much so that forty years later, I mean, the franchise is still a success . Yeah . What happened during that time period to really actually save it? Yeah, it's we really probably still wouldn't be talking about Star Trek if it wasn't for the Wrath of Kon, the second movie that did come out in summer the of nineteen eighty two. It's interesting because the first Star Trek movie was made because you know, Paramount had the sort of rights to this franchise because of the TV show And they had been playing the show with William Shatner from the sixties in syndication and it was, you know, yeah, it was doing really well. I mean, people loved it. had It this cult following and people really liked it. So they know they knew that this was a real potential gold mine that they had. Why not turn it into a movie? So they did in nineteen seventy nine with Star Trek the Motion Picture, and it's terrible. It's got really great special effects , which were cutting edge for the time. Now look a little cheesy, but the movie is just not good. It's long . It doesn't have any of the things that we want to see in a Star Trek movie especi,ally after that long hiatus from what from the TV show , you want to check back in with the people that you love, Spock, you know, Sulu, you know, Ollie Kirk. Yeah, you really want to like see the interplay between that it.' Ands it's really just this excuse for a lot of expensive special effects and the story's lousy. And so the movie it did okay . It actually made money the first one because you know the merchandising and all of that . And people were curious , but no one liked the movie. Even Star Trek fans did not like the movie. Critics certainly didn't like the movie. What made them want to do it again? They tried again with Red Because they made money on it. Yeah, and they saw the potential. They didn't want like anyone else, they didn't want to leave money on the table. They thought there might still be some life in it, but if they did a second one, it was going to have to be made differently. I mean, the first one went way over budget . And just there was no real quality control on it. So I think they felt that they should do a sequel. It should be made less expensive ly, so there was less exposure. And they needed to have more quality control on it . And so that's what they set out to do. Now, the problem was is that Leonard Nimoy , Spock, probably the most iconic character, you know, maybe along with Car in the whole show and the whole franchise , Nimoy did not want to come back. He hated the first movie. He had sort of a love hate relationship with the character, even though it was the most iconic thing he had ever done, it was something that he didn't like being he felt like can't have a movie without him. You can't I don't see how. Yeah . And they had to really woo him to get him involved . You know, but it was really one sort of nightmare after another on the making of this movie. And it just feels to me like a terrific story , especially if you're a Star Trek fan, which I am . I think that this movie delivers you want from a Star Trek movie. It's got a great villain in Kan played by Ricardo Mountebon, it's got the effects don't overwhelm the movie, but they're very good. The story is terrific. It's about grappling with age and mortality, something that all the actors were doing. And it sounds like all of the actors and everyone involved were really, they were really motivated to make sure that this one was good because they had already experienced that really it was traumatic for them to do it the other time. It's the thing that they're identified with and to put out a lackluster version of it after fifteen years away from the TV show , it really stung. So they wanted to get a do over. And that's what they got with Rathakon. Members of the cast that year, that summer then went on to go to Comic Con, right? Yeah . And I think this is so fascinating when we talk about just the fandom that then grew and built from this time period that we know today. So Kamikan was just over a decade old , right during that time period . So much money is put into fandom in merchandising and other types of things. And in reading your book, I just wondered if the success of nineteen eighty two was more about was more about teaching Hollywood executives how to cash in versus the art of it. We did have art that came out of it , but what is your takeaway? You stop short of bringing down like the lessons learned from that time period. Yeah, I mean, I'd like for people to maybe draw maybe that's laziness, but I do I like people to draw their own lessons from what happened. My big takeaway from this is that it was about cashing in, but at the same time the reason I like this story is because it really parallels what's going on with Hollywood right now. Okay , you've got the studios under threat . Okay. Now right now the studios are under threat from the streamers and a lack of theatrical attendance after COVID it never really picked back up entire ly. There are still movies that are doing well, but as a whole, the industry is sort of soft right now and the studios are freaking out . And the same thing was going on in nineteen eighty two. two there was obviously change afoot because of Star Wars and they all needed to get into that game of making event movies and they didn't know how to do it. Or if they did do it those movies were so expensive that they really needed them to hit. Now I feel like in nineteen eighty two the studios were really creative and took gambles to get out of the hole they were in. Okay? They made movies like the ones that are covered in this book , which regardless of whether or not you like them , you know, I obviously love them, but regardless of whether or not you like them, they are ambitious , they make They make statements , they're made , they're original . And right now, I feel like that's the exact opposite of what's happening in Hollywood. I feel like the studios are sort of curling into a fetal ball and hoping that the world, like all of these problems just disappear and blow past like a tornado and that they won't get too devastated during the tornado . And I just don't think that's the right way to the one take the opportunity, take the moment of opportunity. Right. And also though the one difference is they had Star Wars as a proof of concept and Jaws as a proof of concept, but what is the proof of concept today to say, Here's the thing that you should take the leap on? Well, I think that it's streaming. And I think that a lot of there are a lot of big studios and giant companies that are betting on streaming and are going to fail . I think that they think that the Netflix model will work for all of them and that there will be room for all of them at the table and there won't. There's just no way that the environment can nurture and sustain seven or eight different streaming services. You know, people are not going to pay an invisible ten dollars a month for eight different services forever. So we'll see a constriction. I think so, yeah. Will that make our choices better ? I doubt it. It never does. Monopolies never make your choices better . I mean, I don't want to get too gloom and doom about it, but I do think that the studios are going to have to get smarter and more creative and riskier about out of the situation that they're in. They need to make better movies and they need to get people to come to the theater and it's not by making sequels and prequels and sidequels and whatever, you know, it's just not. It's got to be something new. It's got to be an Oppenheimer or a Barbie and those need to come out more frequently in order for a rebound . But the thing I like about nineteen eighty two that there were movie studios being run by people who weren't in different businesses . You know what I mean? They weren't cogs in a conglomerate . They were being run by people who loved movies, not all of them, but I mean, you get my point. Like there's there was more less of a business . It felt like less of a business and more of an art . Well, this was really fun going down memory lane and also learning all of this background information that we didn't know about these movies that are enduring movies that still stay on the test of time. Chris Nashuwati, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. That was my interview with Chris Nashu ari, which was recorded in July of twenty twenty four. His book is called The Future Was Now , Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci fi Summer of nineteen eighty two . Our plus bonus episod are produced by Chao Too, and I'm Tanya Mosley. Thanks for your continued support of our work here at Fresh Air.