TIME 100
The Moviemaker
Steven Spielberg
No director or
producer has ever put together a more popular body of work.
That's why the movies we're now seeing are made in his image
BY ROGER EBERT
Steven Spielberg's first films were made at a
time when directors were the most important people in
Hollywood, and his more recent ones at a time when marketing
controls the industry. That he has remained the most powerful
filmmaker in the world during both periods says something for
his talent and his flexibility. No one else has put together
a more popular body of work, yet within the entertainer there
is also an artist capable of The Color Purple and Schindler's
List. When entertainer and artist came fully together,
the result was E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial, a
remarkable fusion of mass appeal and stylistic mastery.
Spielberg's most important
contribution to modern movies is his insight that there was
an enormous audience to be created if old-style B-movie
stories were made with A-level craftsmanship and enhanced
with the latest developments in special effects. Consider
such titles as Raiders of the Lost Ark and the other Indiana
Jones movies, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T.
and Jurassic Park. Look also at the films he produced
but didn't direct, like the Back to the Future series,
Gremlins, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Twister.
The story lines were the stuff of Saturday serials, but the
filmmaking was cutting edge and delivered what films have
always promised: they showed us something amazing that we
hadn't seen before.
Directors talk about their master
images, the images that occur in more than one film because
they express something fundamental about the way the
filmmakers see things. Spielberg once told me that his master
image was the light flooding in through the doorway in Close
Encounters, suggesting, simultaneously, a brightness and
mystery outside. This strong backlighting turns up in many of
his other films: the aliens walk out of light in Close
Encounters, E.T.'s spaceship door is filled with light,
and Indy Jones often uses strong beams from powerful
flashlights.
In Spielberg, the light source conceals mystery, whereas
for many other directors it is darkness that conceals
mystery. The difference is that for Spielberg, mystery offers
promise instead of threat. That orientation apparently
developed when he was growing up in Phoenix, Ariz. One day we
sat and talked about his childhood, and he told me of a
formative experience. "My dad took me out to see a
meteor shower when I was a little kid," he said,
"and it was scary for me because he woke me up in the
middle of the night. My heart was beating; I didn't know what
he wanted to do. He wouldn't tell me, and he put me in the
car and we went off, and I saw all these people lying on
blankets, looking up at the sky. And my dad spread out a
blanket. We lay down and looked at the sky, and I saw for the
first time all these meteors. What scared me was being
awakened in the middle of the night and taken somewhere
without being told where. But what didn't scare me, but was
very soothing, was watching this cosmic meteor shower. And I
think from that moment on, I never looked at the sky and
thought it was a bad place."
There are two important elements there: the sense of
wonder and hope, and the identification with a child's point
of view. Spielberg's best characters are like elaborations of
the heroes from old Boy's Life serials, plucky kids
who aren't afraid to get in over their head. Even Oskar
Schindler has something of that in his makeup--the boy's
delight in pulling off a daring scheme and getting away with
it.
Spielberg heroes don't often find themselves in complex
emotional entanglements (Celie in The Color Purple is
an exception). One of his rare failures was Always,
with its story of a ghost watching his girl fall in love with
another man. The typical Spielberg hero is drawn to
discovery, and the key shot in many of his films is the
revelation of the wonder he has discovered. Remember the
spellbinding first glimpse of the living dinosaurs in Jurassic
Park?
Spielberg's first important theatrical film was The
Sugarland Express, made in 1974, a time when gifted
auteurs like Scorsese, Altman, Coppola, De Palma and Malick
ruled Hollywood. Their god was Orson Welles, who made the
masterpiece Citizen Kane entirely without studio
interference, and they too wanted to make the Great American
Movie. But a year later, with Jaws, Spielberg changed
the course of modern Hollywood history. Jaws was a hit
of vast proportions, inspiring executives to go for the home
run instead of the base hit. And it came out in the summer, a
season the major studios had generally ceded to cheaper
exploitation films. Within a few years, the Jaws model
would inspire an industry in which budgets ran wild because
the rewards seemed limitless, in which summer action pictures
dominated the industry and in which the hottest young
directors wanted to make the Great American Blockbuster.
Spielberg can't be blamed for that seismic shift in the
industry. Jaws only happened to inaugurate it. If the
shark had sunk for good (as it threatened to during the
troubled filming), another picture would have ushered in the
age of the movie best sellers--maybe Star Wars, in
1977. And no one is more aware than Spielberg of his own
weaknesses. When I asked him once to make the case against
his films, he grinned and started the list: "They say,
'Oh, he cuts too fast; his edits are too quick; he uses
wide-angle lenses; he doesn't photograph women very well;
he's tricky; he likes to dig a hole in the ground and put the
camera in the hole and shoot up at people; he's too gimmicky;
he's more in love with the camera than he is with the
story.'"
All true. But you could make a longer list of his
strengths, including his direct line to our subconscious.
Spielberg has always maintained obsessive quality control,
and when his films work, they work on every level that a film
can reach. I remember seeing E.T. at the Cannes Film
Festival, where it played before the most sophisticated
filmgoers in the world and reduced them to tears and cheers.
In the history of the last third of 20th century cinema,
Spielberg is the most influential figure, for better and
worse. In his lesser films he relied too much on shallow
stories and special effects for their own sake. (Will anyone
treasure The Lost World: Jurassic Park a century from
now?) In his best films he tapped into dreams fashioned by
our better natures.
Roger Ebert is the film critic of the Chicago
Sun-Times and co-host of TV's Siskel & Ebert
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