TIME MAGIZINE
"I Dream For A Living"
Steven Spielberg, the Prince of Hollywood, is still a
little boy at heart
BY RICHARD CORLISS
July 15, 1985
All is darkness -- as dark as a
minute to midnight on the first day of creation, as dark as a
movie house just before the feature starts. Then the movement
begins, a tracking shot down the birth canal of a hallway,
toward the mystery. Suddenly, light! A bright room filled
with old men in beards and black hats: sages, perhaps, from
another world. At the far end of the room, on a raised
platform, is a blazing red light. The senses are suffused;
the mystery deepens. There is only one persuasive explanation
for this scene. It must be from a Steven Spielberg movie.
Well, no. And yes. It is Spielberg's earliest memory, from
a day in 1948 when he was taken in a stroller to a Cincinnati
synagogue for a service with Hasidic elders. "The old
men were handing me little crackers," Spielberg recalls.
"My parents said later I must have been about six months
old at the time." What a memory; and what profitable use
he has found for his memories and fantasies. If this
synagogue scene has never made it into one of the
director-producer's movies, still the mood and metaphor it
represents -- of fear escalating into wonder, of the ordinary
made extraordinary, of the journey from darkness into light
-- inform just about every frame Spielberg has committed to
film.
He is, of course, the world's most successful
picturemaker. E.T. The ExtraTerrestrial (1982) has
earned more money than any other movie in history. Jaws
(1975) is fifth on the all-time list, Raiders of the Lost
Ark (1981) seventh, Indiana Jones and the Temple of
Doom (1984) eighth, Close Encounters of the Third Kind
(1977) 15th, and Gremlins (1984), which he did not
direct but developed and "presented," 17th. Only
his pal George Lucas, with whom he collaborated on Raiders
and Indiana Jones, approaches that patch of box-office
ionosphere; and Lucas, at least since Star Wars eight
years ago, has delegated the directing of his films to other
hands. Spielberg is very hands-on; as Director Martin
Scorsese puts it, "Lucas became so powerful that he
didn't have to direct. But directing is what Steven has to
do." Spielberg admits, "Yeah, I'm a mogul now. And
I love the work the way Patton loved the stink of battle. But
when I grow up, I still want to be a director."
This summer, as director and mogul, he has more than
enough work to keep him happy. Two new comic adventures bear
the "Steven Spielberg Presents" imprimatur. The
Goonies, directed by Richard Donner from a Spielberg
story, earned a healthy $41.4 million in its first 24 days'
release; Back to the Future, a spiffy time-machine
comedy from Director-Writer Bob Zemeckis, opened last week to
positive reviews and audience acclaim. But that is just for
openers. Next week E.T. will beam back down to 1,500
theaters for a saturation rerelease. At Amblin Entertainment,
Spielberg's studio-within-a- studio on the Universal Pictures
lot, he is shepherding another pair of pictures, Young
Sherlock Holmes and The Money Pit, toward
Christmas premieres. September will see the debut of
Spielberg's NBC anthology series Amazing Stories. He
is directing four of the first season's 22 shows, and has
written the stories for 15.
Last month he took two giant strides toward answering
critics who say he refuses to grow up, artistically or
personally. On June 5 he began directing The Color Purple,
an adaptation of Alice Walker's stark, poetic novel about
Southern blacks. Eight days later, his live-in love, Actress
Amy Irving, presented him with 7-lb. 7 1/2- oz. Max Samuel
Spielberg, whom the proud father describes as "my
biggest and best production of the year."
That will sound like gentle facetiousness to anyone who
does not realize that Spielberg's movie productions are his
children too. He can be criticized for photocopying the
boy-meets-his-better-self wonder of E.T. in his more
recent films; the copy is rougher and darker in the comic
nightmare Gremlins, a bit crumpled and smudged in the
fun-house frenzy of The Goonies. But the films' very
limitations are identity badges on a body of work as
personal, even as obsessive, as that of Ingmar Bergman, David
Lean or any other monarch of cinema academe. Spielberg the
director is supposed to be a movie machine, and if that is
so, fine. We need more artisans with his acute eye and gift
for camera placement and movement, lighting, editing and the
care and feeding of actors. But he is also a compulsive
teller of stories about himself as he once was and still is.
Each new film he directs or oversees is like another chapter
in the autobiography of a modern Peter Pan.
The self-referential touches start with jokes on his own
name. As Critic Veronica Geng has noted, Spielberg translates
from the German as "play mountain." The hero of Close
Encounters finds his way to the starship by molding a
mountain out of a dirt hill. At the beginning of both Raiders
and Indiana Jones, the hilly Paramount Pictures logo
dissolves into other fantasy mountains. More directly
autobiographical is the genesis of several of his films. Close
Encounters was born one night when young Steven's father
woke the six-year-old and drove him to a large meadow to see
a meteor shower. E.T. and The Goonies find
their wellsprings in the need of a young outcast for a
playmate, real or imagined. Poltergeist, which
Spielberg describes as being "all about the terrible
things I did to my younger sisters," also emerged from a
spooky encounter (ethereal figure, shivery bedroom, car that
wouldn't start) that the filmmaker experienced in 1972. Each
picture has allowed him to remake his own childhood, then to
generalize it so it touches millions of once-again kids.
Take the word of another eternal youth, Michael Jackson.
For years the pop megastar was rumored to have been chosen by
Spielberg to play Peter Pan in a new adaptation of the James
M. Barrie tale. It was not to be, and at the moment Jackson
is working with Lucas on a project. But the reclusive young
thriller declares it "my honor" to speak about
Spielberg. "I must have seen E.T. around 40
times, and Jaws a good hundred or so," Jackson
says. "You feel loved in his films. Steven never sleeps,
never rests at ease. Last year, during the Victory Tour, I
was on vacation with him in the Hamptons. But instead of
vacating like everybody else, he found a Betamax and we made
movies. He put a plastic bag around the whole camera, taped
it up and shot underwater scenes in the swimming pool. I
worked the lights. He is constantly creating, because making
movies is like playing. He will always be young. I love
Steven so much, it almost makes me cry. He inspires me more
than anybody on earth today."
Hear, from the other end of the age scale, the evidence of
David Lean. The director of Lawrence of Arabia and A
Passage to India had seen Spielberg's 1971 TV movie Duel,
released as a theatrical feature in Europe, and
"immediately I knew that here was a very bright new
director. Steven takes real pleasure in the sensuality of
forming action scenes -- wonderful flowing movements. He has
this extraordinary size of vision, a sweep that illuminates
his films. But then Steven is the way the movies used to be.
He just loves making films. He is entertaining his teenage
self -- and what is wrong with that? I see Steven as a
younger brother. I suppose I see myself in him. I have rarely
felt so at ease with anyone. Curious thing, that."
Or maybe not so curious. Spielberg has that tonic effect
on a lot of people. Prowling the bustling Amazing Stories
set in his blue baseball cap, brown leather bomber jacket,
salmon-colored jeans, pink socks and gray running shoes with
SPIELBERG stamped on the heels, the Mogul of Magic looks just
old enough to be the classmate-coach at a college
touch-football scrimmage. He has time for everyone, with a
few jokes in between: "TV stands for Tender Vittles.
That's what we're givin' 'em, folks, Tender Vittles."
Spielberg's noncombative vitality infects everyone he works
with. Says Richard Donner: "Steven is over your shoulder
the whole time. He always bows to you because you're the
director, but he's got so many good ideas that you want to
grab every one of them. It's as if he's 17 going on 18. Next
year he's going to learn to drive."
The drive is there already, four on the floor, nonstop.
"I dream for a living," Spielberg explains.
"Once a month the sky falls on my head, I come to, and I
see another movie I want to make. Sometimes I think I've got
ball bearings for brains; these ideas are slipping and
sliding across each other all the time. My problem is that my
imagination won't turn off. I wake up so excited I can't eat
breakfast. I've never run out of energy. It's not like OPEC
oil; I don't worry about a premium going on my energy. It's
just always been there. I got it from my mom."
Mom is a stitch. At 65, Leah Adler still has enough vim to
run a kosher restaurant in West Los Angeles with her second
husband Bernie while moonlighting as an extra in the Amazing
Stories episode directed by Clint Eastwood. Back in the
early '60s, though, in the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale, Leah
Spielberg could summon just enough energy to ride the roller
coaster called Young Steven. "He was my first, so I
didn't know that everybody didn't have kids like him,"
she recalls with a happy shrug. "I just hung on for dear
life. He was always the center of attention, ruling his three
younger sisters. And me too, actually. Our living room was
strewn with cables and floodlights -- that's where Steven did
his filming. We never said no. We never had a chance to say
no. Steven didn't understand that word."
Spielberg's memories of his childhood are as dramatic and
fantastic as you might expect from a master fabulist. Could
real life have been nearly so much fun? "It was creative
and chaotic at our house," says Steven's father Arnold,
68, a computer executive with twelve patents to his name.
"I'd help Steven construct sets for his 8-mm movies,
with toy trucks and papier mache mountains. At night I'd tell
the kids cliffhanger tales about characters like Joanie
Frothy Flakes and Lenny Ludhead. I see pieces of me in
Steven. I see the storyteller."
In every Spielberg "family" film since Close
Encounters, the mother figure is the repository of
strength and common sense; Dad is either absent or a bit
vague, less in touch with the forces of wonder. As described
by Steven, Arnold was neither a hero nor a villain, but a
hardworking perfectionist. "Steven's love and mastery of
technology definitely come from our father," says
Steven's sister Sue, 31, a mother of two who lives outside
Washington. "Mom was a classical pianist, artistic and
whimsical. She led the way for Steven to be as creative as he
wanted to be. We were bohemians growing up in suburbia. And
everything was centered on Steven. When he was babysitting
for us he'd resort to creative torture. One time he came into
the bedroom with his face wrapped in toilet paper like a
mummy. He peeled off the paper layer by layer and threw it at
us. He was a delight, but a terror. And we kept coming back
for more."
Why not? Each evening alone with big brother meant a new
Amazing Story. The youngest, Nancy (now 29 and a jewelry
designer in New York City), remembers: "We were sitting
with our dolls, and Steven was singing as if he was on the
radio. Then he interrupted himself 'to bring us an important
message.' He announced that a tornado was coming, then
flipped us over his head to safety. If we looked at him, he
said, we'd turn to stone." Nancy played a featured role
in Steven's minimum opus Firelight, a sci-fi thriller
made when he was 16 and she was eight. "I played a kid
in the backyard who was supposed to reach up toward the
firelight. Steven had me look directly at the sun. 'Quit
squinting!' he'd shout. 'Don't blink!' And though I might
have gone blind, I did what he said because, after all, it
was Steven directing."
The fateful day when this movie-mad child got close to his
Hollywood dream came in the summer of 1965, when 17-year-old
Steven, visiting his cousins in Canoga Park, took the studio
tour of Universal Pictures. "The tram wasn't stopping at
the sound stages," Steven says. "So during a
bathroom break I snuck away and wandered over there, just
watching. I met a man who asked what I was doing, and I told
him my story. Instead of calling the guards to throw me off
the lot, he talked with me for about an hour. His name was
Chuck Silvers, head of the editorial department. He said he'd
like to see some of my little films, and so he gave me a pass
to get on the lot the next day. I showed him about four of my
8-mm films. He was very impressed. Then he said, 'I don't
have the authority to write you any more passes, but good
luck to you.'"
The next day a young man wearing a business suit and
carrying a briefcase strode past the gate guard, waved and
heaved a silent sigh. He had made it! "It was my
father's briefcase," Spielberg says. "There was
nothing in it but a sandwich and two candy bars. So every day
that summer I went in my suit and hung out with directors and
writers and editors and dubbers. I found an office that
wasn't being used, and became a squatter. I went to a camera
store, bought some plastic name titles and put my name in the
building directory: Steven Spielberg, Room 23C."
Two years later, Spielberg enrolled at California State
University, Long Beach, but it is safe to say he matriculated
at Universal U. Cramming 15 1/2 units into two frenetic days
of classes a week, he was able to spend three days on the
studio lot, asking executives to watch his films. "They
were embarrassed when I asked them to remove their pictures
from the wall so I could project my little silent movies.
They said, 'If you make your films in 16-mm or, even better,
35-mm, then they'll get seen.' So I immediately went to work
in the college commissary to earn the money to buy 16-mm film
and rent a camera. I had to get those films seen."
Obsession and addiction: successful careers are built on
these qualities, whether or not they are accompanied by
talent. Spielberg had felt the craving ever since his first
day on the Universal lot: "I was on the outside of a
wonderful hallucination that everyone was sharing. And I
wanted to do more than be a part of the hallucination. I
wanted to control it. I wanted to be a "director."
And so, bankrolled by a young friend with hopes of being a
producer, he wrote and directed, in ten days, for $10,000, a
short film called Amblin', about a boy and a girl
hitchhiking from the desert to the Pacific Ocean. The day
after Spielberg showed the film at Universal, he was called
in by Sidney Jay Sheinberg, head of TV production, and
offered a seven-year contract to direct Universal TV series.
He was 20 years old. "I quit college," Spielberg
says, "so fast I didn't even clean out my locker."
Today, after 20 summers on and off the Universal lot, the
erstwhile trespasser practically owns the place. He might
deserve to: E.T. and Jaws have grossed $835
million on a $19 million investment. Moreover, Sheinberg, now
president and chief operating officer of Universal's parent
organization, MCA, has maintained a paternal relationship
with Spielberg. So, according to Sheinberg, "when Steven
called me about two years ago and said, 'I want to come
home,' I said, 'When?' and 'How much space do you need?'
" In this fashion the man who saw a boy's film called Amblin'
determined 15 years later to build that boy the movie
industry's most sumptuous clubhouse as headquarters for
Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment. The building is reputed to
have cost between $4 million and $6 million to construct and
furnish. Spielberg says he doesn't know, and will never ask,
the price tag, and Sheinberg won't snitch. "It would be
like telling how much the birthday present cost," he
says.
Playpen and sweatshop, summer camp and botanical gardens,
Amblin is where Steven Spielberg dreams for a living. The
two-story stucco building, on a far corner of the Universal
lot, looks like Walt Disney's Frontierland as it might have
been designed by a very hip Hopi. The studiously roughhewn
walls and ceilings refuse to form right angles; instead they
bend and breathe, going with the architectural flow. Native
artifacts are everywhere. A cave painting ornaments one wall
in the steam room; in the courtyard a pink marble bust of an
Indian madonna with children stands guard over an abandoned
plastic tricycle. The staff bustles about, casually garbed in
jeans and boots, like cowpokes at home on an impossibly
opulent reservation. You are reminded that in more than one
Spielberg movie, insensitive white folks get their
comeuppance when they build their homes on sacred Indian
ground. Amblin means to lift the curse: it is a big happy
tepee erected on the real estate of infidel Hollywood.
Inside and out, state-of-nature merges with
state-of-the-art. In the brick-lined conference room, a
massive oak chest conceals fancy video equipment that glides
up pneumatically with the push of a button. Across the path
from the front entrance, a giant weeping willow shades a
wishing well out of which Bruce, the Jaws shark, pokes
his snout. Behind the high-tech kitchen, and over the wooden
bridge that crosses a stream fed by a rushing waterfall, is a
clear-water pond stocked with fat fish, black and silver and
gold Japanese koi. As you walk through the voluptuous
gardens, a golden retriever named Brandy trots up to you and,
no kidding, smiles. She is the genial cerberus of Amblin, the
mascot that welcomes you inside Spielberg's paradise.
Without family, paradise is a house but not a home. So the
suburban boy has assembled a professional tribe remarkably
like his own in Scottsdale. The roles of his kid sisters are
taken by a sorority of doting, efficient junior staff
members. And Steven's "parents" are his fellow
Amblin bosses, Kathleen Kennedy, 32, and Frank Marshall, 38.
They share executive-producer credits on the films he
presents; they keep four sharp eyes on a dozen or so film
projects; they grease the tracks that connect Steven with the
studios and the press; they act as a DEW line to monitor the
unguided missiles of his imagination. Notes Kennedy:
"Ten times a week Steven will rush into my office and
say, 'Kath, I have a great idea.' And sometimes I feel like,
'Oh, not another one.' " In private life, Kennedy and
Marshall live together. Brandy is their dog.
Spielberg has gone his original nuclear family one better.
In Screenwriter Chris Columbus (Gremlins, The
Goonies) and the writer-producer-director tandem of Bob
Gale and Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future), he has
found the younger brothers and bright playmates he never had.
Columbus is now writing the third Indiana Jones film, which
Spielberg will shoot next summer. Of Back to the Future,
says Spielberg: "My main contribution was making Bob
Zemeckis aware of his own best work and getting him to do
it" after the script had been rejected by just about
every studio in town. "I'm not the bank," he
cautions. "Sometimes I'm the guy holding the flashlight,
trying to show filmmakers where the holes are so they don't
fall in." Zemeckis faced a gaping crevasse when he
realized that the performance of his star, Eric Stoltz, was
too intense for the picture's comic-romantic mood. After five
weeks and $4 million spent, Stoltz was fired and Michael J.
Fox signed to replace him. Spielberg calls this "the
hardest decision I've ever made."
Tough calls come with the territory of moguldom. Spielberg
insists that "George Lucas has an empire; I just have a
small commando operation." Yet Amblin is producing
almost as many feature films this year as Lucas has in a
decade. Often Spielberg will wait till the last minute before
deciding whether he will direct a film or not. The Goonies,
for example, was "a film I didn't want to direct but I
did want to see, so I asked Richard Donner to do it. I've
always been very zealous about directors' rights. I retain
final-cut privilege, but I won't exercise it unless the
director has a complete nervous breakdown, tries to burn the
set down and is found one morning in the corner eating Ding
Dongs."
Still not busy enough, Steven? How about masterminding an
anthology series for TV? Amazing Stories won a unique
guarantee from NBC: the network agreed to buy 44 shows, or
two years' worth instead of the customary six to 22 weeks,
and to pay a record-breaking license fee of $800,000 to $1
million an episode. Spielberg explains the series' origin:
"I get too many ideas, and I want to act on them all. Amazing
Stories is a foster home for ideas that will never grow
into adulthood, that aren't strong enough to stretch beyond
23 minutes." Spielberg has hired Eastwood, Scorsese,
Peter Hyams, Paul Bartel, Bob Clark and Irvin Kershner to
direct segments. (Eastwood says his involvement is the result
of "part friendship, part lark.") Spielberg has
also anointed four young film school grads for their big-time
directorial debuts.
Amazing Stories may not be an instant hit; with the
exception of the Walt Disney series, no anthology show has
finished in the Nielsen Top 25 since Alfred Hitchcock
Presents a quarter-century ago. But it could blaze trails, or
at least reopen them. With this show Spielberg is attempting
to transform the weekly series from a comfortable habit to an
event worth anticipating and savoring. Each Sunday night at
8, a new baby movie, with a spooky story, feature-film
production values and, often as not, a distinctive visual
style. One of Spielberg's own episodes, an hourlong drama
called The Mission, envelops its suspense in a visual
style that suggests Rembrandt on Halloween. More important,
it finds a new twist for the Spielberg credo: the miraculous
power of the artistic imagination. This story of a World War
II gunnery ace who, in the author's provocative words,
"literally paints himself out of a corner," is a
fairy tale for the technocratic 20th century. It should be
the first movie that Mom and Dad show to Max Samuel
Spielberg.
Fall in with Spielberg and you fall into a Spielberg
movie. Such is the testimony of Amy Irving, 31, as she sits
in the lavish Coldwater Canyon home they share (they call it
"the house that Jaws built"). In 1979 Irving
had broken up with the filmmaker after a four-year affair.
Then in 1983 she was on location in India and "one
night, in front of three friends, I made a wish. I said, 'I
wish I'd have a visitor, and I want it to be Steven.' Later
that night my assistant came to me and said, 'Steven arrives
in the morning.' " Irving then surprised Spielberg, who
was in India scouting locations for Indiana Jones and the
Temple of Doom, by meeting him at the airport. Says she:
"From that moment, I knew. Now we're really in love. And
here I am with the Prince of Hollywood. I guess that makes me
the Princess."
Turn a page of the storybook and see Steven and Amy
walking hand in hand through the rain toward Claude Monet's
house in the Paris suburb of Giverny. "Just as we
arrived," Irving recalls, "the rain stopped, so we
were able to walk around the gardens. When we walked inside,
it started pouring again. Then, during lunch, a double
rainbow appeared outside our window. It was very magical, and
then I threw up. That was the first time I realized I was
with child." As a memento of their visit, Spielberg
bought a Monet, which hangs on their living room wall. In the
den is the original Rosebud sled used in Citizen Kane. As for
the discipline of fatherhood, Spielberg will let history be
his guide: "My mom spoiled me. I'll spoil the baby. Amy
will be strong with Max, and I'll be the pushover." But
he promises a change. "Until now Amy and I have looked
elsewhere for our 400 cc of real life -- spell that r-e-e-l.
I'm great with a movie camera between me and reality. But
with the baby, I have an excuse to finally look real life in
the eye and not be afraid of what I discover."
Undoubtedly, tens of millions of moviegoers hope the
filmmaker stays the precocious little boy he seems to be.
Only the Hollywood graybeards and a flank of film critics
feel like shouting, "Steven, grow up!" Whichever
path he chooses, there are dangers. Walt Disney kept
recycling the magic of his animated fables until the gold
turned into dross. Charlie Chaplin got serious and lost his
audience. Spielberg, who says, "I want people to love my
movies, and I'll be a whore to get them into the
theaters," means to have it both ways: to mature as an
artist while retaining his copyright on adolescent thrills
and wonder, to blossom as a director while he diversifies as
a mogul.
Scorsese, who has known Spielberg since 1971, detects
"a pressure in Steven to top himself. The audience sees
his name on a project and expects more and bigger. That's a
tough position to be in." And Spielberg, who boasts that
"I can dump on me better than anybody else,"
confesses that "I find my leg stuck in the trap I built.
To have directed a movie like Young Sherlock Holmes would
have gnawed that leg right off."
He hardly needs to be told that fables about know-nothing
adults and feel-it-all children are not the only tales worth
spinning; that adults must face such plot twists as pain,
exultation and emotional compromise; that there is drama to
be found in the grown-up compulsions of power and, dare we
say it, sex. Sure, Spielberg knows there is life after high
school. "But after E.T.," he says,
"people expected a certain kind of film from me, a
certain amount of screams and cheers and laughs and thrills.
And I was caving in to that. I knew I could give it to them,
but I realize it made me a little arrogant about my own
style. It was all too easy. The whole titillation I've always
felt about the unknown -- of seeing that tree outside my
bedroom window and shutting the drapes till morning -- was
taken away from me. And I got scared. I don't want to see
where I'm going."
Enter The Color Purple, an epistolary novel about
incest, sexual brutality, sapphic love and the indomitable
will to survive. It did not seem the sort of material Steven
Spielberg would touch with a ten-foot wand. Which is
precisely why he went for it. "The Color Purple
is the biggest challenge of my career," he proclaims.
"When I read it I loved it; I cried and cried at the
end. But I didn't think I would ever develop it as a project.
Finally I said, I've got to do this for me. I want to make
something that might not be everybody's favorite but, this
year at least, is my favorite. The Color Purple is the
kind of character piece that a director like Sidney Lumet
could do brilliantly with one hand tied behind his back. But
I'm going into it with both eyes wide open and my heart
beating at Mach 2."
Perhaps The Color Purple will bring Spielberg the
one triumph that has thus far eluded him: an Oscar for Best
Director (though Clint Eastwood wonders if the industry may
not think Spielberg is "a little too young and too
successful. He has done so well, it may be a long time before
anyone bestows on him any brassworks for the
fireplace"). But even with that statuette, one suspects
that Spielberg would still be restless. He would still crave
those moments when he can spin amazing stories for himself,
his kid sisters and a world of children in the dark. To
demand that he revoke his inexhaustible thirst for wonder
would be like asking Dickens to be Dreiser, or Peter Pan to
settle down and become complacent old Mr. Darling.
But Spielberg has surprised us before: as an auteur
prodigy, as the thrillmaster of Duel and Jaws, as the savvy
director who could reinvent the movies' innocence. The man is
only 37 now, and his toughest audience is himself. You
needn't be a child to believe that this movie magician still
has astonishments in store.
Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York and
Denise Worrell/Los Angeles
|