Animal House Goes to War

Steven Spielberg makes 1941, a "stupidly outrageous"film

Comedy is not my forte. I don't know how this movie will come out. And yes, I'm scared. I'm like the Cowardly Lion, and two successes back to back have not strengthened my belief in my ability to deliver." Surely that Cowardly Lion can't be Director Steven Spielberg, whose blockbusters, Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, have already grossed $630 million. It is, however, and he has an explanation for his chattering teeth: "All the movies I've made are different. Jaws was not like Close Encounters, and neither has any bearing on 1941."

As far as a visitor to the set can see, 1941 has no bearing on any other film, and certainly no bearing on 1941 as the history books have recorded it. "We're taking history and bending it like a pretzel," says Spielberg. "I would use the words stupidly outrageous to describe this movie. It's really a celebration of paranoia. I hope that you'll come away saying that hypertension is fun."

Spielberg's big pretzel is bent in Los Angeles on the night of Dec. 13, 1941, six days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The city is engulfed by the fear of invasion, and it is hard to separate the real paranoids from the merely cautious. A sergeant (Dan Aykroyd) steals a tank and starts a blackout by zapping the brightly lit Santa Claus decorations on Hollywood Boulevard. A crazy pilot (John Belushi) flies a P-40 fighter-bomber to search for enemy aircraft but succeeds only in creating panic below. A riot breaks out between native whites and Chicano zoot suiters, and General Joseph Stilwell--yes, the General Joseph Stilwell (Robert Stack)--is in charge of restoring order. Meantime, a periscope, looking suspiciously like the snout of a shark, pokes out of the Pacific, and a submarine commanded by Toshiro Mifune slithers toward shore. Oh, my God! The Japanese! Then . . . but Spielberg refuses to reveal the rest, other than to say he hopes it is funny. In other words, Animal House meets John Wayne, and just about any war flick of the '40s.

The sets, including a fancy art deco U.S.O. dance hall, all look real, and a few of the facts are real. A lone Japanese sub marine did bombard the California coast not long after Pearl Harbor, and a kind of panic resulted. There were also zoot-suit riots in Los Angeles, but they did not occur until later on, and it was not Stilwell who put them down (though he commanded the Third Corps at Monterey in the early days of the war). Spielberg has simply brought everything together in one mad moment. Says he: "It's about a week where everybody put his worst fears and dreads together."

Spielberg began working on the picture before Close Encounters. His pal John Milius (The Wind and the Lion) brought around two young writers with their script about the California invasion scare. "I gagged on it," Spielberg recalls, "but I was leery. When a script is so funny that you gag, that's really the kiss of death because it usually doesn't film that way." But when Milius backed out he took it on. Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, the scriptwriters, flew to the Close Encounters location in Alabama and the three would rearrange schemes and characters. Says Spielberg: "I was being dragged helplessly through the streets by this crazo script."

The budget is a little crazo too, up $4 million from the original $20 million because of the stunts and Spielberg's quest for perfection. "The most expensive habit in the world is celluloid, not heroin, and I need a fix every few years," says Spielberg, 31, who neither smokes, drinks, nor touches all those drugs that are served like hors d'oeuvres at Hollywood parties. But then Spielberg and his live-in companion for the past three years, Actress Amy Irving (Voices), hardly ever go out. Most of the time they stay in their house in Coldwater Canyon, and when they do eat out, they like ordinary junk food. Spielberg turns up his nose at "quality pizza," for example. "I like pizza that curls at the edge like Aladdin's shoes."

Milius says that there is a "wonderful innocence to Steven," and it seems to be true. Adds Milius: "We don't take ourselves seriously. We're just a bunch of stupid kids making toys." Spielberg doesn't go quite that far, but he doesn't mind being called a "popcorn" director. "It's what I've chosen to do," he says. "I like to see people jump out of their seats. In that sense, I'm as much of a whore as the vaudevillians were, and proud of it."

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