Sylbert showed common sense. Capable of adjusting his taste to the box office, he green-lit (reluctantly) The Bad News Bears and pushed for a film of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. But he would not pander to the brazenly commercial: “Science-Fiction is an escalating area that will offer serious competition,” he wrote, but he was “personally sick of this kind of pistol-pussy contrivance.” But Sylbert was no snob either: “It is the longest 125 pages I have ever read,” he wrote of Terrence Malick’s script, Days of Heaven. “Actually I don’t know if it is a screenplay; it often seems like a late Victorian novel out of its time, forced to be a screenplay almost against its will.”
Included in these discussions was Sylbert’s chosen executive assistant, formerly an out-of-work tennis hustler, Don Simpson. “When he’d lose,” said Simpson’s courtmate, actor Peter Cannon, “he’d rush up to the net, drop his pants and piss on the net. He’d say, ‘I can’t take this shit,’ and he’d piss on the net.” Simpson’s fury dated back to his father, who would make his son, at seven years old, hunt wild animals and slaughter them with his bare hands. In the Simpson household, there were consequences for failure. “He used to pick me up and throw me against the wall,” Simpson said, “and as I hit the ground, he’d kick me.” His mother was no better.
Simpson had worked his way up from the advertising end of Warner Bros. and came to Sylbert via businessman-producer Steve Tisch. “He’s the brightest, most interesting guy I’ve met here,” Tisch enthused to Sylbert, “and he knows everything about Hollywood. You have to meet him.” Simpson was so green and so hot, he moved up the ranks quicker than he could find a new wardrobe. It was his pal Jerry Bruckheimer who lent him a sport coat for his interview with Sylbert, a meeting that proceeded beautifully; they found they shared a love of fly-fishing, Sylbert’s instinct told him to go for it, and they got down to work.
It turned out fly-fishing was the only thing they had in common. Reading the script for the Love Story sequel, Oliver’s Story, Simpson suggested they leave the ending open—for a third Love Story film. Sylbert was appalled at the suggestion of one, let alone two more of these movies. He was more interested in Ingmar Bergman’s proposed remake of The Merry Widow, to which Simpson crassly protested: “Even the best Bergman is never strong at the box office.”
Attuned to the encroaching cinema of sensation, Simpson consistently sought the easy pleasures of so-called character likability and visceral intensity (“a picture like this should scare the shit out of an audience”). He and Sylbert clashed again over Moontrap, a Western Jack Nicholson wanted to direct. Predictably, Simpson didn’t think the project was “strong enough to make this a commercial movie.” Sylbert, guided by head and heart, was all in: “It is to the West what James Fenimore Cooper’s work is to the East,” he argued. And Jack was a friend.
“Dick knew he made a mistake hiring the odious Don Simpson,” Susanna Moore said. “Simpson spent the entire time that he worked for Dick undermining him and doing bad things to try get rid of him. It was absolutely a deliberate sabotage.” According to Simpson himself, “Dick never played the game you’ve got to play to be a successful studio executive. His attitude was, ‘I’m the best art director alive. If it doesn’t work out, so what?’”
Described by Bruckheimer as “someone who likes to be the center of attention,” Simpson didn’t believe in the auteur theory; he believed in cocaine.
Sylbert and Simpson were working for two different Paramounts, past and future. And the Paramount Barry Diller favored belonged to Simpson. To Sylbert’s great discomfort, Diller would bring on Michael Eisner, his former colleague at ABC, to serve as president. “When Eisner came in,” Sylbert said, “the atmosphere at Paramount changed completely. It was a group of people sitting down at a table, doing what they did for ABC. It was very difficult for me to get with what they made enormously successful, which is manufactured product aiming at your knees.” It was TV time.
But the writing was on the wall for Sylbert’s tenure only three months in, on June 20, 1975—a year to the day after Chinatown opened—when Jaws hit America.
In a dramatic break from the customs of movie promotion, Universal had spent more than $700,000, an enormous sum, to advertise Jaws on television, and opened the picture wide, incredibly wide, in more than four hundred theaters. À la The Exorcist, the combination—which carried Jaws to record grosses—furnished Hollywood with an infinitely repeatable, money-magical formula of more is more: giant advertising campaigns and wide releases to storm the public with high-intensity, thrill-packed entertainment, the cinema of sensation.
Hollywood had always been a gambling business, but Jaws demonstrated it could be a big business less gamble. An executive no longer needed a great, or even good, script; he no longer needed an actual story (was Jaws really about anything?), only the requisite thrills—“set pieces” in executive-speak—and the advance approval of the marketing department to assure the bosses he was choosing wisely. The tail would wag the dog: As promotional costs ascended, budgets increased, decreasing the funds once available for script development and preproduction—components “fundamental,” Howard Koch Jr. said, to the aesthetic mastery of Chinatown.
Equally dispiriting was Jaws’s—forgive the expression—political toothlessness. “The picture’s only villain, outside of the shark, is the mayor,” author Peter Biskind astutely observed. “An elected official, a politician. But Jaws was a film of the political center: of the three men who take on the shark, Quint, the macho man of the right, is killed, while Hooper, the intellectual Jew of the left, is marginalized, leaving Brody, the everyman cop, the Jerry Ford … to dispatch the shark.” For all its many virtues, Jaws ratified the growing trend in disaster pictures and the end of the Hollywood counterculture. “Vietnam is like cancer—people don’t want to be reminded of it,” said Robert Evans of the new audience. “They want catharsis, escape.”
Heretofore an outspoken adversary of the disaster picture, Evans himself tried Black Sunday, a thriller about a terrorist plot to blow up the Super Bowl. He labored to make the film as apolitical as possible: “Paramount thought it was going to be their Jaws,” he confessed, “and so did I.” It wasn’t. But still, he stayed on the bandwagon, developing yet another disaster movie, Blizzard.
Evans did, however, go one more round with the old Paramount. He produced Marathon Man, a picture born of the old Palm Springs decree—hip director, genre-based material—the revolutionary artistic-commercial strategy that gave rise to Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, and The Godfather.
“Try this,” Evans said to Howard Koch Jr. on the set.
Until then, Koch had always thought of coke as elite, “but [by then] the fucking craft service guy had it,” he said, “the prop guy had it. It was everywhere.”
* * *
A year into the job, Sylbert’s projects were regularly denied for the sort of “high-concept” ideas—Don Simpson’s term for an easily simplified, obviously commercial story—Simpson-Eisner-Diller could fit into a promotional tag line or TV Guide blurb. The double onslaught of Jaws and Eisner brought in “the television mentality,” Sylbert said, endless meetings, “and manufacturing stories and manufacturing movies.” “Until then,” Sylbert said, “We worked with writers on material we believed in.” Eisner’s orientation was not covert. In a memo Eisner would circulate through Paramount, he wrote: “We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.”