Bob Z Can Read Your Mind

We Live in an Era of hero directors. It began in the Seventies, when movies such as Jaws, The Godfather and Star Wars established a category of entertainment called the blockbuster and catapulted the people who made them to positions of eminence that Frank Capra, John Ford or even Alfred Hitchcock could not have imagined. Now, ordinary moviegoers, along with card-carrying members of Hollywood's guilds, drop such names as Spielberg, Coppola, Lucas or Scorsese and other moviegoers nod sagely in response.

All the more refreshing, then, when Robert Zemeckis stood up earlier this year at the Directors Guild of America's annual awards ceremony and told an audience of his peers that producers, agents and studio executives "don't know exactly what it is that we do." This got a big laugh, as did his assertion that actors think they know, while critics never know. Later in the evening, Zemeckis' friend Steven Spielberg, who was once his mentor, presented him with this year's top prize for directing Forrest Gump. Two weeks after that, Zemeckis copped the all but inevitable Oscar.

His win was popular within the motion picture community. Most producers, agents and studio executives consider the boomingly genial Bob Z, as many call him, a perfect example of what directors ought to do: He makes movies that make mountains of money. In less than a decade, he has directed seven feature films--Romancing the Stone, Back to the Future and its two sequels, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Death Becomes Her and Forrest Gump--that have had worldwide grosses in excess of $2 billion, a record exceeded only by the movies of Spielberg himself. Gump alone has passed the $600 million mark in earnings, which makes it the fourth most successful movie of all time, following such family fare as Jurassic Park, The Lion King and E.T.

Oddly enough, given his Midas touch, the 44-year-old Zemeckis has come slowly to public prominence. Until recently, most moviegoers would have found it easier to recall Tom Hanks' last two pictures than the name of the man who directed Forrest Gump. This has changed in the past several months, of course. Now his is a name heard in households far beyond Hollywood or Montecito, the elegant suburb of Santa Barbara where Zemeckis lives with his wife, the actress Mary Ellen Trainor, and their nine-year-old son, Alex. Still, what he said at the Directors Guild remains true: Most people don't know what directors do, let alone what special qualities certain filmmakers bring to their films.

Zemeckis' specialty has long been technological razzle-dazzle. First came all that flux-capacitated time travel via Doc Brown's DeLorean in Back to the Future, then the strenuous interweavings of cartoons and live action in (continued on page 82) Bob Zemeckis (continued from page 78) Roger Rabbit, then the derangements of human anatomy in Death Becomes Her, including Meryl Streep's backward head and Goldie Hawn's napkin-ring body. Most recently were the remarkable trompe l'oeils of Forrest Gump, which, in addition to placing Gump in the same frame with JFK or LBJ, used invisible digital stitchery to put him in a crowded football stadium and a Washington mall overflowing with antiwar protesters, to fill the air over Vietnam with helicopters and to relieve actor Gary Sinise of his legs.

Yet Zemeckis' success can't be ascribed only to special effects. As director and co-writer, with Bob Gale, of Used Cars, a surreal piece of slapstick that came out in 1980, Zemeckis sought something sleazy in every character and succeeded to a degree that evoked the misanthropy of W.C. Fields. For all the beeping, flashing, steaming gizmos of Back to the Future, which he also co-wrote with Gale, the film is a great screwball comedy, with unexpectedly touching oedipal twists and an intricate plot--everything turns on a lightning bolt hitting that clock tower at the right time. Nor do tricks alone explain the appeal of Forrest Gump. When a movie opens spectacularly and keeps getting stronger--it took in its first $100 million in just 18 days--you know the guy running the show has plugged into an energy source no less potent than lightning, and a lot more marketable.

On the morning I show up at Zemeckis' house, he has just learned that Forrest Gump received 13 Oscar nominations. Greeting me with a big "Hello, Jess," he seems abstracted and keeps calling me John even after I tell him my name is Joe. I ask how this level of success feels, and he replies expansively: "I must say, I'm starting to learn how to take yes for an answer. It feels good. It feels great to be recognized."

Stately on the outside and California casual on the inside, his huge house is perfect for a director who likes to mix things up and find new life in old formulas. "My wife and I like houses that already have a style on the exterior," he tells me. "But then we do the interior just the way we want it. This place was built in 1928. On the outside it's like a classic mock Tudor"--I laugh at the idea of a mock anything being classic, and after a beat he laughs with me--"but how would you describe the inside? It's Mediterranean, almost."

The conversation turns, naturally, to Forrest Gump. Zemeckis notes that no one could have predicted the picture's popularity. "At the outset we had only Tom Hanks. There were no exploitative elements in the script--no creatures, no action, no ticking clock, none of the stuff that ordinarily sells tickets. I mean, yes, we had those great images on paper, and yes, I had a good record, but that's an unrealistic way of thinking. Just because my previous films made money didn't mean I could control this one. But I never felt that it was a suicide mission. People thought we had a good chance to make our money back. Still, nobody knows in advance what the pop culture mentality is."

This is an apt reminder of how risky moviemaking can be, though I'm surprised to hear it from a man who stands, like a California-casual version of Sir Edmund Hillary, at the summit of his profession. "I've been fortunate that my movies have clicked," the director says matter-of-factly. "But I don't think that's anything a filmmaker can do by design. It's terrifying. There are two ways of looking at it: Are filmmakers constant, and does the world catch up with them but then quickly pass them by? Or is the filmmaker able to continue to grow today, to stay in touch with himself and his audience?"

Right now, Zemeckis is on a one-year sabbatical he decided to take last fall, when he was exhausted after shooting five $50 million movies in a row. Soon he'll have to commit to a new project, and Forrest Gump could impede, just as well as expedite, his artistic growth. "I'm afraid anything I do will have a Gump spin on it. Here's how the next project will be announced in Variety: 'Coming on the heels of the tremendous success of Forrest Gump, Bob is going to do . . .' followed by the title of the new project. You know, 'Gump director Zemeckis is signing on to do whatever.' It's good to have a problem like that, right? But it's a double-edged sword."

•

Zemeckis pronounces Jean-Luc Godard's last name with two hard "d's." This is not offered as a comment on his Chicago accent nor on his ear for languages--who knows how Godard would pronounce Zemeckis--but as an index of his fix on film culture. "My love of movies started with spectacle," he says. "'How did they do that?' I grew into an understanding of emotion and drama later on. When Bob Gale and I were in film school we were the guys who loved the James Bond movies, as opposed to the graduate students who were always talking about the latest Godard film, or Death in Venice. I remember thinking Death in Venice was one of the most boring movies I'd ever seen."

Gale recalls that the Bob Zemeckis of their film school days was always interested in making Hollywood movies: "He's got an outrageous sense of humor, a great sense of showmanship and a healthy cynicism about the world, which may be because he grew up in Mayor Daley's Chicago." Zemeckis is also "someone whose artistic side is accompanied by pragmatism," says Gale, who recently directed Mr. Payback, the first interactive film for theatrical release. "He's never gone out and spent a ton of money just for the hell of it. He knows we first off have to figure out how to get people to go to the movies, how to get the asses in the seats."

Growing up as the son of a construction worker on Chicago's South Side, Zemeckis fell heedlessly in love with lowbrow comedy. "I was one of those kids who sat in front of a television set all the time. When Bob Gale and I would do interviews back in the Used Cars days, people would ask about our greatest influences and we'd say Jules White, who directed all that great stuff with the Three Stooges. I'd memorized every episode. The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, I watched those constantly. Jerry Lewis movies. I watched all that stuff, never missed any of it." (Film buffs might want to check the January 1995 issue of Film Comment for a piece by Zemeckis called "Guilty Pleasures," in which he confesses his love of other low-rent movie landmarks, such as Macabre, House on Haunted Hill, You'll Like My Mother, Two on a Guillotine and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which he calls "one of the most brilliant and funny movies I have ever seen--truly an American classic.")

His horizons broadened at the University of Southern California. There, he and Gale, who came from St. Louis, discovered they had almost identical tastes and got to gorge on American classics. "You have to remember, when we were in film school there was no videotape, so we thought retrospectives were the greatest things in the world. We would sit and watch all of Frank Capra's movies, like four on Saturday and four on Sunday, and then (continued on page 98) Bob Zemeckis (continued from page 82) we'd watch all of John Ford's movies, or screwball comedies. This was in the early Seventies, when there was a big comedy resurgence and they brought back the Marx Brothers, and W.C. Fields was big, too. Remember how all the head shops would sell W.C. Fields posters?"

The early Seventies was a great time for films, and for film school students. "We were in the right place at the right time," Zemeckis says, "because the class before us was the George Lucas class. They had the same sensibilities as we did, and they were blazing a trail for us, so we fell right into that slipstream." Fell, or jumped. Zemeckis' first bid for glory was directing a 15-minute student film called The Field of Honor. Its hero, a whacked-out kid, shoots up a town as soon as he's released from a mental institution. The protagonist's Strangelovian father, a World War Two vet, sits in his wheelchair by a window, waiting for the Commies to invade.

This short film is a fascinating preview of Zemeckis' subsequent work. Ambitious and startlingly accomplished, it's laced with black humor and bursting with the sort of random violence that Zemeckis had already seen and admired in Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch--and that another young filmmaker, Martin Scorsese, would explore several years later in Taxi Driver. The Field of Honor also served Zemeckis as a calling card, winning him an internship with Steven Spielberg. Soon Zemeckis and Gale were writing an anarchic comedy, 1941, for Spielberg to direct.

"Bob started about five years after me," Spielberg recalls. "I brought him along with me at first, but then he grew his own branch, and now he has his own trunk and roots. He makes Hollywood movies, but Zemeckis Hollywood movies are distinctive in their social relevance and irreverence. Bob has always been amused by American history. He doesn't take it that seriously, though he is reverential about the structure of society and what makes it function. Part of Bob's values are not unlike John Wayne's, yet most of Bob would have offended John Wayne, starting with 1941, which did offend him. I'd sent him the script and asked him to play General Stillwell, and when he called back he spent an hour trying to persuade me not to direct it."

As Spielberg protégés, the two Bobs then started making movies on their own. Zemeckis directed, and he and Gale wrote, their first feature, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, followed quickly by Used Cars. I Wanna Hold Your Hand is, to use one of the vilest epithets known to marketing executives, a sweet little film. It's a comedy that deals with a bunch of New Jersey teenagers who want to meet the Beatles during the group's first visit to New York. (In its clever intercutting of dramatic and documentary footage, the film can be seen as a finger exercise for some of the techniques in Forrest Gump.) Used Cars, which stars Kurt Russell as an exuberant, ethics-free used-car salesman, is anything but sweet. Pauline Kael hailed its "wonderful, energetic heartlessness" and called it an "American tall-tale movie in a pop art form."

Both films, however, were box-office flops. Zemeckis and Gale bounced back enough to write Back to the Future, but they couldn't get it produced. The script was widely perceived as being too innocent for an audience that, at the time, was lapping up the mindless raunch of such comedies as Animal House. (Actually, Spielberg had seen the script's potential from the start, but Zemeckis felt he couldn't ask his mentor to produce another movie after the first two had failed, and after 1941 turned out to be Spielberg's only box-office dud.) For the next three years Zemeckis and Gale were forced to scramble for decent work.

This changed for Zemeckis only after he crossed paths with Michael Douglas. Douglas wanted to produce a movie called Romancing the Stone, but he couldn't get a director. The joke was that when he reached the bottom of the directors' listings he called Bob Z. "The project was originally at Columbia," says Douglas, who eventually made it for Twentieth Century Fox, "and Bob had an office near us on the lot, so we got together and talked. I'd seen Used Cars and loved it. I thought he had a wicked sense of humor and a wonderful gift for telling a story."

Both qualities stood Zemeckis in good stead on Romancing the Stone, a kinetic comedy-adventure about the real-life perils of a writer, played by Kathleen Turner, who churns out romantic best-sellers. It was a punishing shoot, what with breakneck chases across tropical landscapes, but the young director's work was self-assured. "Even then," Douglas says, "you saw how Bob could hang on to all the facets of his vision, and you saw his stamina. He has such energy and humor, but he doesn't dwell on shots or great moments. He makes it look easy."

Looking back to the early Eighties, it's hard to imagine that studio executives failed to see Back to the Future as a winner. But fail they did, until Romancing the Stone came out in 1984 and took off at the box office. Suddenly the studios were competing for the privilege of financing Zemeckis' next project, a situation that relieved him of any misgivings about his friend Steven Spielberg producing it. So Spielberg produced it through his Amblin Entertainment at Universal.

Back to the Future is filled with deft touches. One of the best has to do with the resolution of the oedipal romance between the time-traveling Marty McFly and the oversexed teenager destined to become his mother, a relationship that could have turned smarmy, to say the least. "We had struggled for months with how to keep this from being grotesque," Zemeckis tells me. "All these events were coming together, but we didn't know how to get out of them. We were locked in because we felt it was Marty who had to end the oedipal story, because he knew she was his mother. But he kept looking very perverse. Then came the great inspiration--it was his mother who would end it. Some cosmic thing happens when she kisses her own son and it doesn't feel right. That was the perfect solution. I remember being so exhilarated when we came up with the idea that she doesn't want to do it, and she says, 'This is like kissing my brother.' That's my favorite line in the movie."

•

As a measure of the director's new artistic status, another recent issue of Film Comment carries a glowing appraisal of his work by movie critic Dave Kehr, who describes the oedipal joke of Back to the Future as "Zemeckis' most subversive moment, an attack on the American mommy fixation as represented most vividly (and disturbingly) in the ravishing young moms who populate the films of Steven Spielberg." Kehr also sees Marty as "a product of Eighties malaise, of an American dream gone mysteriously wrong."

People who remember Back to the Future as screwball science fiction may be astonished to hear it was actually a searching, even subversive, piece of social commentary. Yet Kehr isn't making up his tribute from whole cloth. As he points out in intriguing detail, Zemeckis' (continued on page 147) Bob Zemeckis (continued from page 98) movies are filled with dark, discordant themes. The most vivid presence in Back to the Future is the most troubling: Crispin Glover's portrayal of the teenage George McFly, Marty's wretched misfit of a father-to-be, who is endlessly terrorized by Biff, the high school bully.

In the nightmare world of Back to the Future Part II, Biff temporarily hijacks the American dream. He has become a loathsome and humorless robber baron based in Las Vegas. In Roger Rabbit, the malevolent Judge Doom is an all-devouring developer whose freeway extension will wipe out Toontown. In Death Becomes Her, immortality becomes a grisly joke. Unable to die, the two rival beauties simply rot out.

The question posed by all this discordant stuff is the same one Zemeckis raised at the Directors Guild: What is it that directors do? Is Zemeckis as deeply thoughtful an artist as some would have us believe? Or is he a man with an abundant comic gift who, like most directors of comedy, including Jules White, simply rings in every wild plot twist and hateful villain he can think of? Until recently, such distinctions were debated mainly among film buffs and academic critics; ordinary people went to Zemeckis' movies to have fun, and they were rarely disappointed. Then came Forrest Gump, which, in the course of capturing a vast audience, also stirred lively debate.

Many people have loved Gump. They have been moved by what they see as the sweet innocence of its hero, who lopes across a vast historical landscape he comprehends only partially. Others have sought to turn Gump into an audiovisual book of virtues. Pat Buchanan hailed it as "a morality play where decency, honesty and fidelity triumph over the values of Hollywood" (as if Hollywood didn't understand what it had brought forth).

Others have found Gump resistible or worse. Janet Maslin, writing in The New York Times, saw "the elements of an emotionally gripping story," yet she concluded that the movie "feels less like a romance than like a coffee-table book celebrating the magic of special effects." Jonathan Rosenbaum, in the Chicago Reader, called it "the most pernicious movie of the year," one in which "obliviousness parading as purity, stupidity parading as honesty and xenophobia and narcissism parading as patriotism triumph over gross misrepresentations of the countercultural values of the Sixties and Seventies."

For Spielberg, it's a clear call: The movie is an admirable mirror of the man who made it. "The closest to who Bob really is is Gump," Spielberg says. "He takes advantage of how important certain moments in American history have been in his life, including Vietnam--even though he wasn't old enough to serve. The most serious parts of the movie are about Vietnam, and I think they're every bit as good as Platoon. At the same time, a lot of the movie has that irascible social irreverence, especially when Gump becomes an American icon as a long-distance runner."

Bob Gale sees similar reflections of the same man. "I got a kick out of going to the first screening of Gump," he tells me, "and hearing people say, 'My God, it's so unlike Bob Zemeckis.' I look at it and think, This is Bob Zemeckis. It's the perfect expression of his sensibilities. When he was a kid he loved Kurt Vonnegut, and Forrest Gump is full of Vonnegut's cynical existentialism. That's his sense of humor. I mean, come on, a movie that sees all the important events of an era through the eyes of a guy with an IQ of 75? That's a cynical thing to say, it's funny and outrageous."

Talking with Zemeckis himself, I look for manifestations of this social irreverence, this cynical existentialism, but they're hard to find. Like many directors, he speaks freely about feelings--"One of my first reactions when I read the screenplay was that it was very emotional and compelling"--and about such familiar ingredients as suspense: "At first I was mystified by how compelling the story was, because it had none of the conventions of a dramatic screenplay. I learned in the course of breaking it down that the true suspense comes from Jenny and Forrest--that's the dramatic glue that holds the movie together."

When we start to discuss the essence of the story, however, and the larger meaning of Forrest Gump's IQ, Zemeckis confines himself to the nuts and bolts of narrative technique. "I always assumed that Forrest's intellect being below average was a device that enabled me to take this journey, because it freed me up. I don't have to worry what Forrest's agenda is since he's an innocent. He's like a six-year-old. Who wants to see a story about a normal guy going through the Sixties and Seventies? You knew what he was going to say was the truth, and that allowed you to make these comments on historical events that I thought were ironic and dark and poignant."

I repeat the widely held concern that Gump flattened history by appropriating images of solemn events for the saga of a dim bulb. Zemeckis is courteous enough, calling it "an appropriate question," and insists, in his pragmatic way, that the question hasn't bothered him.

"I did it all as a joke. You know, none of it was presented as reality. As a matter of fact, that Lyndon Johnson sequence was built from seven different pieces of LBJ news film, so it's not even one single piece of history. What fascinates me about Forrest Gump is that it's the first time that the entire world shares these images of history. Because everything is recorded! Everybody knows what that shot of Kennedy riding in that limo means. Or, I'll use an image that isn't in Gump: Everybody knows what that space shuttle looked like when it blew up. I'm talking about everybody in the world! Everybody knows what that white Ford Bronco on the freeway looked like. Everybody knows what Rodney King's beating looked like. We share pop culture and historical images. That's something I love, and it allowed, certainly, one generation of people who saw the movie to have a lot of fun with it."

At first I wonder how literally to take this--did he really do the historical stuff as a joke and nothing more?--but then I realize that Zemeckis is telling me something else about himself and his generation, the post-Watergate cohort who became Forrest Gump's core audience. For him, and for them, historical images are inseparable from the collective pop culture. For him, and them, you can't really flatten historical events by folding them into an entertainment, because history--pictorial history, the tale told and endlessly retold by TV--already seems flat, with not much moral dimension.

Like his core audience, with whom he has deep and instinctive connections (another way to describe a Midas touch), Bob Zemeckis grew up bathed in cathode rays, bombarded by moving pictures, steeped in sitcoms, bemused by corruption and disinclined, or unable, to find the solemnity that an earlier, pictorially deprived generation found in such pre-Gump images as, say, the Stars and Stripes being raised on Iwo Jima.

What his contemporaries see as cynicism would have been an earlier generation's whimsy. He's not a social critic but a cheerful ironist, which is all to the good for commerce, because social criticism, like satire, is what closes on Saturday night. The tone he brings to a movie--and setting a tone may be the most important thing a director does--is predominantly light. But it's also marked by moments of darkness, irreverence and sweetness. This is not to say he's indiscriminate, only supremely pragmatic. Whatever works works, from the broadest caricatures of Used Cars to the most emotional passages of Forrest Gump.

"When Bob was a kid," Tom Hanks tells me, "he watched everything that was going on with the idea of, Isn't this a kick in the head? Just recognizing that what's going on is volatile and wild, neither good nor bad. 'Isn't that something? Isn't that wild?' There was stuff on our movie that never failed to slay Bob, and oftentimes it was the most obvious, like the look of the bar scene with Forrest and Lieutenant Dan on New Year's Eve. I was at the bar, which was very high, and Lieutenant Dan was in his very low wheelchair. Well, as they were setting up the shot Bob was back by the monitor, and he was just dying with laughter at the reality of this: 'One guy's up high, one guy's down low!' "

High and low explain a lot, so long as they're not equated with good and bad. Zemeckis treats lofty aesthetic or historical considerations as no more worthy, or unworthy, than the slapstick humor he grew up on. In the body of his work it's all a swirl: The Three Stooges meet Abbott and Costello, Alfred Hitchcock, JFK, Walt Disney, Jerry Lewis, Godzilla, The Great Chase, the Barrow Gang, Richard Nixon, Howard Hawks, Kurt Vonnegut, William Castle, Preston Sturges, Vincent Price and the first film he ever saw, The Blob.

"Bob's main love," says Steven Spielberg, "is to tell a really great, kicky story, with more twists and turns than the audience can ever imagine. When the lights go down I defy anyone to guess where he's going. His strategy as a storyteller is to be unfathomable. You can never outguess Bob Zemeckis."

He's plugged into an energy source no less potent than lightning, and a lot more marketable.

"Bob's values are not unlike John Wayne's," Spielberg says. "Yet Bob would have offended Wayne."