STACK NZ Jan-Feb #59

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Interview with BOB GALE .

B ob Gale was attending the USC School of Cinematic Arts with classmate Robert Zemeckis in 1974 when he first encountered a young filmmaker named Steven Spielberg, who was screening his movie The Sugarland Express . “This kid comes in who has just directed this huge feature with all these police cars, and it’s got Goldie Hawn – a big movie star – and all this production value. We were amazed that somebody who didn’t seem to be much older than we were had pulled this off,” Gale recalls. “That was the first time we became aware of him, although I may have seen one of his Night Gallery episodes when I was in high school.” The next time the Bobs crossed paths with this talented young director was after they’d snuck into an exhibitors’ screening of Jaws (1976), several months prior to the release of the film. “We were absolutely enthralled, blown away, terrified, etc. We were so excited, we burst into Steven’s office the very next day and told him how great we thought it was,” Gale explains. “He was playing back an audiotape of the audience’s reaction at the time – just to hear if they gasped and jumped at all the right moments – because he would still have time to make some changes in the editing. One of the things that we told him was that we thought that when the shark devoured Robert Shaw, it was so great that we laughed out loud. And Steven said, ‘so it was you guys. I heard somebody laughing on the audiotape – that was you!’” Following graduation, Zemeckis encountered Spielberg again whilst screening his student film to various producers and directors.

with such a negative response. “Steven was up against a hard release date in 1979,” he says. “The movie had been promoted and advertised as a big Christmas release, and there was no way he wasn’t going to get the movie out for Christmas, and I think it got short shrift in the editing room – a few more sneak previews would have helped the movie, I think. Steven was concerned about the audience’s attention span – he wanted to get right to as many action set pieces as he could, and that was at the expense of character development. “One of the lessons that Bob [Zemeckis] and I learned from that was to not be afraid to take the right amount of time to set things up, which of course we did with Back to the Future . We spent all the time that we needed with the McFly family in 1985 so that you understand everything about them, so it all makes sense later on when history starts to get messed up.” At 146 minutes, the extended version of 1941 runs significantly longer than the theatrical cut (118 mins), with some major character development and interplay restored to the first hour. “You really get a much better sense of who these characters are and how all these events are building and on a collision course,” notes Gale. With the extended cut now available on Blu-ray (together with the theatrical version) as part of Universal’s Steven Spielberg Director’s Collection box set, 1941 is ready for reappraisal. “I’m gratified that Steven and Universal saw fit to include the extended version,” says Gale, “because I think people will watch that and have a better opinion of the movie than they did when it came out in the theatre. “I watched the Blu-ray myself and was elated at how good it looked, how great it sounded, and how nicely the movie flowed in the extended edition. I was very proud of it – I’d always felt that Steven had cut some of the heart out of the movie for the theatrical version. But I feel much better about it now.”

Jaws

who fear that the Japanese will attack Los Angeles following their assault on Pearl Harbor. The film begins with a spoof of Jaws ’ opening scene (featuring original victim Susan Backlinie), setting the tone for the slapstick lunacy that follows, which includes ninjas disguised as Christmas trees, a ventriloquist dummy sentry, and fighter planes screaming down Hollywood Blvd. A screwball spectacular that plays more like something Joe Dante would deliver, 1941 is Spielberg’s sole venture into the realm of zany comedy, and Gale agrees that it’s the director’s most atypical film. “In terms of Steven doing broad comedy, for a sustained amount of time, it is a departure for him, and maybe the reception that the movie got kept him away from that.” 1941 was poorly received by both critics and audiences when it opened on 14 December 1979, but Gale is quick to point out that the movie wasn’t the box-office disaster many believe it to be. “It earned a profit, it just wasn’t anywhere near as profitable as Jaws and Close Encounters were,” he explains. “So in American baseball

terminology, Steven hit two home runs in a row and then 1941 was a single, but not a strike out.” Gale believes that if the film had been released in a longer version initially, it may not have been met

Impressed by Zemeckis’s work, Spielberg suggested

that they stay in touch, leading to a longtime association that began with Spielberg executive producing Zemeckis’s directorial debut, the Beatlemania comedy I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978) – which he’d co-written with Gale – and ultimately the pair’s Back to the Future trilogy. But prior to conceiving the adventures of Marty McFly, Gale and Zemeckis would collaborate on the screenplay for Spielberg’s fourth theatrical feature, the World War II comedy 1941 (1979). Set during the titular year, the film follows a group of paranoid Californians

• Steven Spielberg Director’s Collection is out now on Blu-ray

Nancy Allen andTim Matheson on the set of 1941

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