“My mother would be embarrassed”: Why did Dennis Weaver refuse to work with Steven Spielberg?
It’s been the case since the dawn of the moving image that if a director works with an actor once and has a great time, they’ll make a point of hiring them again. Steven Spielberg is no different in that regard, only to be rejected by the star of his breakthrough feature, and they never shared another set.
Tom Hanks, Richard Dreyfuss, Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise, Martin Dew, Mark Rylance, Geno Silva, Roger Ernest, Dan Aykroyd, Pete Posthlewaite, Peter Stormare, and Morgan Freeman are just some of the names who’ve made at least two films with Spielberg, and he’s the sort of filmmaker people don’t turn down.
After all, if the single highest-grossing director in cinema history and a three-time Academy Award winner with a litany of classics covering multiple genres to his name offers anyone a role in one of his pictures, there won’t be many who’d turn him down. However, Spielberg was at the beginning of his career when one of his early leading men knocked him back, and that was the end of their professional relationship.
1974’s The Sugarland Express may have been Spielberg’s first theatrically released feature, but Duel had already put him on the map three years previously. The made-for-TV thriller was a hell of a calling card, and it introduced several of the signatures and recurring motifs that would become a key part of his style.
Jaws elevated him into the stratosphere when it changed the industry forever, and a first ‘Best Director’ nomination for Close Encounters of the Third Kind proved he wasn’t a flash in the pan. Nobody evades failure forever, though, and Spielberg’s first major misfire was the unwieldy wartime comedy 1941.
John Wayne, James Stewart, and Charlton Heston all turned down the movie, so Dennis Weaver wasn’t alone. Then again, they were all Oscar winners and living legends, whereas his career hardly soared post-Duel. Still, as much as he wanted to reunite with Spielberg, his initial thoughts on the script he was presented with turned out to be right on the money.
“He sent me the script, and I said, ‘Steven, this is just not funny, it’s just not there. It’s got nudity in it that I think is superfluous, you’re just reaching for something here that just isn’t there,'” he told Empire. “And I turned it down. He said, ‘I’m gonna change all that. I couldn’t shoot this story with this script because my mother would be embarrassed’. So I said, ‘Well, send me a final script’. Six months later, he sends me another script, and he hadn’t changed anything. And I said, ‘No, Steven, this is not gonna work.'”
If anything, Weaver was prescient. Spielberg has admitted that 1941 was the first time he’d flown too close to the sun, and the film’s failure hit him hard. It would be an understatement to say he rebounded, considering his follow-up was Raiders of the Lost Ark.
