The “disgusting” movie Steven Spielberg abandoned to make his biggest failure instead
Small, personal films are few and far between for Steven Spielberg, and the first time he set out to make one, he ended up abandoning it completely and walking headlong into disaster instead.
To illustrate the above point, Spielberg has always referred to ET the Extra-Terrestrial as one of the most personal movies he’s made. Obviously, it’s about an alien and became the highest-grossing release in cinema history, so from the outside looking in, there wasn’t much intimacy about it.
Even The Fabelmans, which is basically a filmmaker directing their own biopic, cost $40 million, which isn’t the cheapest form of therapy or catharsis available. Schindler’s List was arguably the first time that Spielberg tackled a subject that was genuinely close to his heart, but he’d tried a long time before then.
After four consecutive genre pictures, and with Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind earning megabucks at the box office to turn him into Hollywood’s ultimate populist, the director fancied a change of pace. He set his sights on something much smaller, so he enlisted his newfound closest collaborators.
Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis were given a task, one that wasn’t entirely clear. “I want you guys to write a movie I’m really passionate about, about kids,” the former recalled. “Great, Steven, what about ’em? ‘That’s it. Kids.'” That was all they had to work with, but they went ahead and cobbled together a script.
In February 1978, the picture, tentatively titled After School, was officially in the works, with Gale and Zemeckis penning an R-rated coming-of-age story. “We swore like truck drivers when we were 12,” he explained. “A lot of kids do that, and we thought that would be the way to go. It was the classic nerds against jocks story. The nerds had a dogshit bomb on a radio-controlled car.”
It wasn’t just personal, though, with Spielberg describing it as “my first vendetta film,” which he planned to use to “get back at about 20 people I’ve always wanted to get back at.” The start of production was scheduled for May of that year, with a $1.5 million budget and an unknown cast of youngsters, making it his smallest feature by far.
However, Gale suggested that “it was a little too much for Steven,” and that trepidation only intensified when his planned cinematographer, Caleb Deschanel, “read it and hated it,” and he really hated it. “He said, ‘This is disgusting,'” Gale added. “Steven didn’t really have a focus on what After School was going to be.”
Although the director insisted that he “wanted to do a little film,” he didn’t. In fact, he abandoned it completely and made a hard pivot directly into 1941, which was both his most expensive movie yet and his first genuine failure, with everything that could go wrong seemingly going wrong, and he may well have been better off cleansing his palate with After School, regardless of how disgusting his DP found it to be.
