There have been some recent rumors that Kane Parsons and Curry Barker didn’t direct Backrooms and Obsession, respectively. Thankfully, these claims were insanely easy to debunk, thanks in no small part to Backrooms star Mark Duplass. They did, however, bring the granddaddy of ghost director debates back to the surface.
In this edition of Urban Legend: Fact or Fiction, we are going to talk about why some people think the late Tobe Hooper didn’t direct the 1982 classic, Poltergeist.
The Story
Despite Hooper’s credit as the only director, many still believe that Steven Spielberg actually ran the show on Poltergeist.
Variants
There seems to be three main theories here. The first is that Hooper took credit as director for his pal Spielberg, so the project would be protected from a rumored Directors’ Guild strike. That strike not only never materialized, but would have affected Hooper, too. So that claim is already out the window. The next two are where several cast and crew members’ accounts start to conflict.
Around the time Poltergeist was being made for MGM, Spielberg was also making E.T. for Universal. Some claim that due to a non-compete clause in his contract, he couldn’t direct the movie, only produce. In this version of events, Hooper attaches his name to allow his friend to make a movie he really wants to make. So, on paper, Spielberg doesn’t break his contract.
The other is that Spielberg came on to the project because Hooper’s drinking made him incapable of finishing the film. They kept his name on it so they didn’t have to explain why a different director had to finish the film, given the stigma around addiction.
Developing Poltergeist
To answer the question of who directed Poltergeist, we have to look at how the film came to be. Spielberg initially wanted to make a project called Night Skies about aliens terrorizing a family. John Sayles was tapped to write a script that was never developed, but he pulled some concepts he liked out of it.
One was a subplot about a friendly alien and a family. Screenwriter Melissa Mathison was asked to develop the idea, ultimately becoming E.T. The script’s menacing aliens terrorizing a suburban family turned into ghosts. Spielberg commissioned a screenplay from Michael Grais and Mark Victor, which he rewrote. Boom, you’ve got Poltergeist.
“Poltergeist’ is what I fear and ‘E.T.’ is what I love,’” Spielberg told the New York Times in a profile. “It’s me when I was scaring my younger sisters half to death when we were growing up.”
Around that same time, Spielberg was also building Amblin Productions and its ultimate visual identity. The studio has gone on to produce films like Gremlins, Goonies, Back To The Future, and Batteries Not Included. These movies have “Spielbergian” styles, but are directed by Joe Dante, Richard Donner, Robert Zemeckis, and Matthew Robbins, respectively. And no one has ever debated that fact.
Unfortunately, Hooper’s role in Poltergeist was diminished, seemingly by being an early Amblin-produced film, along with irresponsible marketing.
Confusing Marketing
On March 28, 1982, over a month before Poltergeist hit theaters, MGM ran a two-page ad in the L.A. Times. In the three paragraphs of text, Hooper isn’t mentioned until the second. The opener mainly focuses on Spielberg as a co-writer/producer, an… odd choice.
“As producer and co-author of “Poltergeist,” Spielberg is joined by co-producer Frank Marshall, with whom he made “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” co-authors Michael Grais and Mark Victor, director Tobe Hooper, and the special effects wizardry of Oscar winner Richard Edlund (“Star Wars”) and Industrial Light and Magic,” it reads. Hooper is called the director in no uncertain terms. The focus on Spielberg’s role was more than likely due to how popular he was at the time. But it clearly confused audiences, which may have also been its intent.
A trailer for the film says, “Steven Spielberg crosses a frightening new threshold into a world within our own.” The writer/producer’s name is then shown over the film’s title, not Hooper’s. This did cause Hooper to report the ad to the Directors Guild of America, which awarded him $15,000 because the trailer “denigrated the role of the director.”
The New York Times then ran the aforementioned article, called “The Two Faces Of Spielberg-Horror Vs. Hope,” about Poltergeist and E.T. The article never calls Spielberg the director. However, it also never mentions Hooper, despite extensively discussing the movie.
What Sparked the Rumor?
If all of that wasn’t enough, on May 24, 1982, the Los Angeles Times ran, “‘Poltergeist’: Whose Film Is It?” Which Hooper believes is what started the whole debate.
“When we were shooting the practical location on the house, the first two weeks of filming were exterior, so I had second-unit shots that had to be picked up in the front of the house. I was in the back of the house shooting Robbie [actor Oliver Robins] and the tree, looking down at the burial of the little tweety bird, so Steven was picking those shots up for me. The L.A. Times arrived on the set and printed something like, “We don’t know who’s directing the picture.” The moment they got there, Steven was shooting the shot of the little race cars, and from there the damn thing blossomed on its own and started becoming its own legend,” Hooper told Slate before he passed in 2017.
You can see how all this might muddy the waters with some pre-Internet audiences. It’s still murky even with several decades of interviews and access to more information.
So, Who Directed It?
Cast and crew accounts really only agree that Hooper and Spielberg were both on set. But the claims for the distribution of directorial responsibilities vary wildly. The L.A. Times article goes on to give several more accounts that do and do not line up with Hooper’s.
“”It all depends on your definition of director. The job of the producer is to get the film finished, and that’s what we did. The creative force on this movie was Steven. Tobe was the director and was on the set every day. But Steven did the design for every storyboard and he was on the set every day except for three days when he was in Hawaii with [George] Lucas,” says co-producer Frank Marshall.
“He [Tobe] dropped by one or two times, but he had no input whatsoever as far as our (sound) work was concerned. Basically, Tobe didn’t participate at all,” says Bill Varney, Sound Mixer.
“Some directors kick the producer off the set. In this particular case, that didn’t occur. It was an amicable situation-Tobe seemed to resolve Steven’s participation in his mind. But I’m sure inside he was hurting,” adds Dennis E. Jones, Production Manager.
“Did he [Tobe] direct the film? Not that I saw,” said Mike Fenton, Casting Director.
Composer Jerry Goldsmith says he worked exclusively with Spielberg, which is “unusual, because 99% of the time I work with the director.”
“Both people were on the set all the time, and Tobe was very much involved, as far as I could tell. But Steven was the creative force in my opinion; his stamp is on the film, even though there was a good, solid competent director there,” says Willie Hunt, Production Executive.
The Debate Continues
“Tobe gave me a lot of direction. It’s not fair to eliminate what Tobe did-he gave me a tremoundous amount of support because he’s a warm, sensitive, caring human being. Tobe was simply pushed out of the picture after turning in his cut,” explains Craig T. Nelson, who plays Steve Freeling.
“It was a collaboration with Steven having the final say. Tobe had his own input, but I think we knew that Steven had the final say. Steven is a strong-minded person and knew what he wanted. We were lucky because we got input from two very imaginative people,” says Jobeth Williams, who plays Diane Freeling.
“I can tell you that Steven directed all six days I was there. I only worked six days on the film and Steven was there. Tobe set up the shots and Steven made the adjustments,” Zelda Rubinstein, who played Tangina, told Ain’t It Cool News in 2007. “I don’t know how to say this… he allowed some unacceptable chemical agents into his work.”
She adds; “I felt that immediately. I felt that when I first interviewed for the job. Steven was there, Tobe was there, two casting people from MGM were there and I felt at that time Tobe was only partially there.” The “chemical agents” are believed to be a reference to Hooper’s struggle with alcoholism.
We know a sea of quotes can be boring to sift through, but as you can see, claims about who did what aren’t very consistent. First-hand accounts in this case seem to depend on what stage of production the film was in.
More Contract Issues
The same L.A. Times piece also expounded on possible Directors Guild conflicts for Spielberg directing, on top of the provable non-compete clause. “Even had it not, Directors Guild rules prevent anyone assigned to a production prior to a director being fired from replacing the director-including the producer. ‘There is a director of ‘Poltergeist‘ and he is listed as Tobe Hooper,’ said Michael Franklin, national executive secretary of the Directors Guild. ‘If something is going on that dereogates that credit, the guild would be concerned.'”
By June 1982, Spielberg wrote an open letter to Hooper in an attempt to clear up the messy marketing and the L.A.New York Times articles. However, his verbiage came off as condescending and dismissive to many. And obviously didn’t clear up anything since it’s 2026, and we are still talking about it. (You can read the full letter here.)
It’s clear that Spielberg went well outside the confines of the typical writer-producer role. If this were to scratch some deep itch that contracts were preventing him from doing, he’d never be able to admit to it. However, Hooper being entirely dismissed as a director is also ludicrous. Most cast members say he was there and directing. It seems like he mainly bailed on post-production duties for reasons we will never know.
At the end of all of this, it seems like Poltergeist was a collaborative film between two good friends that just so happened to give Hooper a 2nd genre defining title following The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. If the idea of filmmaking collectives were more common at the time, we probably would classify them there. Since it was 1982, though, a talented director has been robbed of credit for their most commercially successful film.
