April 8, 2018

Here’s why Spielberg was the only person who could have made ‘Ready Player One’

When I was a freshman in college back in 2012, Robert Zemeckis came to Philadelphia while promoting his upcoming movie at the time, Flight. That being said, everyone in the audience at the Kimmel Center was much more interested in the director’s more iconic projects like Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and Forrest Gump. After all, these are the films that have endured for so long while cementing Zemeckis as a bona fide Hollywood legend. My buddy David and I had walked all the way from West Philadelphia into Center City on the Jewish Sabbath (“Shabbat”) after lunch at the local Chabad house just to see him speak, and I even brought my Back to the Future poster with me in the hopes of getting it signed. Sadly, the autograph never came to pass.

Anyway, when the event’s moderator broached the topic of Roger Rabbit, Zemeckis offered up a really interesting behind-the-scenes explanation of how the movie came to pass. As you know, the film features famous cartoon characters, which are owned by various studios such as Disney, Warner Brothers, and Paramount. Normally, these companies are extremely competitive and would never have their properties overlap with one another for one simple reason: Money.

Intellectual property is the lifeblood of any Hollywood studio and it would take an army of lawyers and fine-printed contracts to, in the words of Marvin Acme, “loan” any characters between studios. Just look at the recent deal brokered between Disney and Sony over the use of Spider-Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Marvel got Peter Parker for a total of five films, but doesn’t get any box office returns from the standalone Spidey movies (e.g. Homecoming), but they do retain the merchandising rights to the character, and it only gets more complicated from there. Sony needs to hold on to Spider-Man purse strings because the franchise is one of the most important things they own, especially as they plan to launch a Venom-centric universe in October.

With that in mind, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was not only a groundbreaking mix of live-action and animation, but also an unprecedented event of inter-studio cooperation with Donald Duck, Daffy Duck, Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Sylvester the Cat, Tweety the canary, Pinocchio, Betty Boop, Pluto, Goofy, Dumbo, Foghorn Leghorn, and countless others sharing the big screen for the first time in, well, ever. Like I said, it takes a bunch of crack shot lawyers, or just one major Hollywood power player: Steven Spielberg.

Yes, according to Zemeckis, Spielberg, an executive producer on the project, was responsible for getting all the studios to agree to let their famous properties be used in the movie. By 1988, he was a titan of the entertainment industry, not just directing classic movies like Jaws, Close Encounters, E.T., and Indiana Jones, but producing tons of shows and movies from budding talents such as Zemeckis (Back to the Future), Tobe Hooper (Poltergeist), Joe Dante (Gremlins).

By the late 1980s, Spielberg had enough clout in Tinseltown to get Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny to share a frame. Of course, an army of studio lawyers were probably involved and it is well-known that Warner Brothers and Disney only allowed the usage of their cartoons if their respective characters appeared at the same time and shared the same amount of screen time. However, Spielberg got everyone to the table with his massive influence and who would ever want to say no to such a legendary filmmaker?

Fast forward nearly 30 years later and Spielberg decides to make a film adaptation of Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One, which basically mythologizes the era of pop culture that the director himself helped create. While he’d go on to change a lot of the book’s plot to make it more suitable for the screen, there was still plenty of hurdles to overcome, particularly about how so many movie, video game, and TV characters would be able to be put into one movie. If you’ve just seen the trailers for the film, you’ll know it’s fit to burst with pop culture Easter eggs and if you’ve seen the full movie, you’ll know there are more than can be glimpsed in a single viewing. From the Iron Giant to Madballs, the references range from large to small, mainstream to obscure.

Sure, the studio behind the project, Warner Brothers, owns the rights to a bunch of the stuff shown onscreen like any DC characters, Toho’s Akira, Gremlins, The Shining, and a bunch of other stuff I probably missed when watching it. But then you have to consider all the stuff Warner doesn’t own like the DeLorean from Back to the Future, the T. rex from Jurassic Park, King Kong, the Chestburster from Alien, Buckaroo Bonzai, Minecraft, Pac-Man, Chucky, and, again, so many more that they can’t all be listed here.

Still, all the things I mentioned are cornerstones of what we think of when we think of pop culture. They’re all iconic and they all have made boatloads of money for the studios to which they belong. Now, I’m not arguing that Ready Player One is the new Roger Rabbit for our generation because Now This Nerd already argued the point on their channel and beautifully, I might add; I should also add that their conclusion occurred to me before I saw their video, as I’m sure it did to a lot of people. What I am arguing, however, is that a film adaptation of Cline’s literary work needed a guy like Spielberg to facilitate this epic pop culture crossover.

Take, for instance, the “Zemeckis Cube” that Parzival (Tye Sheridan) uses against the Sixers in the zero gravity night club, The Distracted Globe. The artifact, which turns back time by 30 seconds, is in the form of a Rubik’s Cube with its name and effect serving as homages to Robert Zemeckis and Back to the Future respectively. Zemeckis probably got some money for the use of his surname, which is is synonymous with time travel and the inclusion of the Zemeckis Cube (or at least its name) might not have come about, had Spielberg (the man who basically mentored Zemeckis in the ’80s) not been involved with the movie. When the Cube is activated, we also hear a snippet of the instantly-recognizable Back to the Future theme by Alan Silvestri, who also scored Ready Player One; the director’s usual musical collaborator, John Williams, had to leave the project in order to work on Spielberg’s The Post instead.

Back to the Future (along with Kong and the Tyranosaur) is a property owned by Universal Pictures, whose lot in Hollywood houses the offices for Spielberg’s production company, Amblin Entertainment. The director’s had a long and fruitful history with Universal ever since legendary producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown took a chance on the young director and offered him the job of making Jaws in the mid-1970s. Since 1975, many of Spielberg’s most beloved works--E.T., Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, and Munich–were all co-produced by Universal, which also owns King Kong and the T. rex I mentioned earlier.

Some feel that Spielberg might not have been the right man for the job, that someone who grew up during the 1980s and loved the things that the director created during that time, should have made Ready Player One since, in essence, it’s a love letter to the 1980s, pop culture, and even Spielberg himself. I say Spielberg was the only man for the job because he’s amassed so much power in the movie industry, that only he could have made it the massive cultural collision that it is. While I’m not privy to any of the deals struck behind the scenes, Robert Zemeckis’s anecdote keeps coming back to me, that there was only man in Hollywood who could make such a movie happen in the first place.

And just because he helped create the popular culture that RPO venerates, doesn’t mean he doesn’t love it any less than you do. Indeed, he might love his works more than any of us, the way in which a parent loves their child more than anything else in the world. For over 40 years, Steven Spielberg has been crafting a veritable genre sandbox of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. With this project, he simply got to sit down and finally play with all of his toys.