October is haunted at Film Seizure! It’s a whole month of ghost movies kicked off by perhaps the most famous of them all, 1982’s Poltergeist from Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg.
Three old friends get together to talk about movies.
Three old friends get together to talk about movies.
October is haunted at Film Seizure! It’s a whole month of ghost movies kicked off by perhaps the most famous of them all, 1982’s Poltergeist from Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg.
Film Seizure Podcast 
Nice pick!
Regarding the directorial credits thing, I’ve gathered what I can on it over the years, because it’s always thorny, and usually argued by passion rather than facts. Going by intuition, auteur-wise, mine says this is ~90% Spielberg, not only including, but especially with, the spots of gore, given Poltergeist’s placement between Jaws & Raiders and Temple of Doom. The first time I saw it, when the guy pulled his face off, I thought, “Yup, now this is a Spielberg movie.” It turns out those hands are Spielberg’s, too – it’s very much his scene.
The performances are the kind we get from Spielberg, and maybe Salem’s Lot, but nothing else I’ve seen in Hooper’s movies come close; they tend to be more genre-acceptably silly, or (in Chain Saw, particularly) documentary realistic. These are warm, engaged, connected people in ways not even common in most movies, but very common in Spielberg’s. The shot setups are very Jaws and Raiders, specifically in how he films conversations. Even without a John Williams score, the movie just drips and feels all Spielberg all the time.
But that’s intuition, and if I just had the film to go by, no credits, I would have a hard time accepting Spielberg’s direction of most of Schindler’s List, or George Miller’s of Happy Feet, or Wes Craven’s of Music of the Heart. People have exceptions.
So these are from interviews and reports:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FTWITe21L0s6d9itl1aSs-NhUxrwyegC/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=108827368707254123936&rtpof=true&sd=true
(Wikipedia is there, too, from whenever I grabbed it)
Only the first half is really worthwhile. The second half is forum post stuff, mostly involving someone claiming to have worked on the film, Q&Aing accordingly. You know, he probably did, but it can’t be verified, so I would discount it, even though it favors my view. The idea that Spielberg did pickups here and there loses credibility when counting all of the perspectives. Hooper has his backers. I like Mick Garris, but he was a publicist at the time, and Hooper was a friend. Meanwhile, I see the accounts supporting Spielberg’s heavier hand tending to be more specific, less “Here’s what I think,” and more “Here’s why I know what I know.”
On our podcast, I asked Bruce Botnick, who’d engineered the scoring sessions with Goldsmith (and over 60 other Goldsmith scores), and worked on 11 Spielberg productions, three of which he directed. Since he knew them both well enough, as an aside to the show’s topic, I asked, and he initially said, “Oh, Steven directed that one.” I mentioned some of the contradictory stuff in that document and he retreated a bit and said, “Well, really they both directed it.”
That’s where I have to fall, too. It’s as much a Spielberg film as is Raiders; as much not a Hooper film as Raiders is not a George Lucas movie. Even though the roles are reversed, they compare well. Raiders IS somewhat a George Lucas movie. If you had Sugarland Express, Jaws, Close Encounters and E.T. on one side of the shelf and Star Wars and Empire on the other, Raiders sits closer to which of those sets? It feels more a cousin to the Star Wars movies than that other group (even with Jaws’s second half in the mix). But we also know that George Lucas couldn’t direct his way out of a wet paper bag by then. George and Carol could, but George alone was a hot mess, so Raiders, produced and co-written by Lucas, and co-written and Directed by Spielberg, is, no one questions, A Spielberg Joint.
It seems like Hooper did a lot of pre-production, then Spielberg re-did a lot of that, but, not allowed to direct while working on the overlapping production of E.T., had to have another director on set in that role, while he was also on set, and for me, the more credible accounts give the creative guiding, and the bulk of the direction, to Spielberg, whether Hooper was ‘coked out’, just abdicated directing with eye-rolling deference, or really partnered with Spielberg, as Lucas did on Raiders, and it’s a true collaboration. For me, “It’s Tobe Hooper’s film” is the least likely option. “They both directed” is the likeliest, even though the evidence suggests that the weight of that leans Spielbergward. That would make the most sense out of the most of the varying accounts. Less likely, but still more so than that it was all Hooper’s, is that it was all Spielberg’s.
If I was watching a Spielberg marathon, skipping this would be a bigger omission than many films he’s fully credited with.
Anyway, it’s one of my favorite movies. I agree with everything positive you guys said about it.
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