Look who showed up, late to the party and making no excuses. That's right, folks. Joe Morgenstern is now returning David Edelstein's calls and answering that pressing question, "Did George Lucas and Steven Spielberg ruin the movies?" with satisfyingly Murrow-like You Are There elan:
Certainly Spielberg and Lucas changed the movies fundamentally, in some ways for the worse. But I'm with you on Jaws—if only we could see new films of such flair and power today—and I was even more excited than you were about the first two Star Wars films.
My first encounter with Spielberg's material predated the movie. I snatched the basic story from the jaws of Peter Benchley—who was a colleague and a friend at Newsweek—who was writing mainly about TV when I was the magazine's movie critic in the '60s and the early '70s. On long Wednesday and Thursday nights when we had to wait for dilatory editors to edit our copy, Peter would regale us with lurid facts and extravagant tales of sharks he'd heard about or maybe even seen on Nantucket, where his family had a summer home. I can't say I was entranced, but I did grasp the essentials—big, dumb, insatiable, pitiless, dangerous. (Four of those five adjectives describe many studio executives.) Then came Peter's novel, which I read, so I hardly expected to be surprised when the movie came out. Yet I was, to a degree that spoke—and I'd like to think still speaks—well for my childishness.
A fun fact to know and shout: Morgenstern once was married to Piper Laurie--around the time when she was in Carrie. Stop and think about that for a sec. Yeah, I did the whole involuntary-shudder thing, too.
Even though it is unfolding with all the alacrity of an epistolary romance, I look forward to reading the next sally, don't you?
