STACK NZ Jan-Feb #59

60 / 60

Interview with BOB GALE.
1 2
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.
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
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
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 versio
But I feel much better about
it now.”
Jaws
Nancy Allen andTim Matheson
on the set of1941