Steven Spielberg

The Unauthorised Biography

STEVEN SPIELBERG

JOHN BAXTER

Further reviews for Steven Spielberg:

‘Diligent, perceptive and with every available anecdote’

SIMON HATTENSTONE, Guardian

‘riveting… retains a healthy objectivity throughout his enthralling account’

PENELOPE DENING, Irish Times

‘… a film-lover’s book, a review of a remarkable era, an exhaustive filmography – a movie about the evolution of Hollywood, with Spielberg as the central character’

JEREMY LESTER, Jewish Chronicle

‘Baxter may have a blockbuster on his hands.’

RICHARD E. GRANT, Sunday Times

‘highly entertaining, packed with interesting information. If you want to know how a Spielberg film was made, what shenanigans went on during the making, or who fell out with whom, it is all here.’

WILLIAM RUSSELL, The Herald (Glasgow)

‘Its usefulness lies in Baxter’s shrewd assessment of Spielberg’s relationship with the wider context of the entertainment industry in general and Hollywood power-politics… the account of Spielberg’s unsettled early years… is illuminating in terms of his later preoccupations.’

HUGO DAVENPORT, Sunday Telegraph

‘Baxter is quietly professional… and makes good use of the copious interviews Spielberg has given throughout his career.’

ANTHONY QUINN, The Observer

‘A very valuable book… the thing that most impresses in his book is the calm, careful and nearly gentle way in which it builds up our disquiet that the movie kingdom and our society as a whole should be so ordered that Steven Spielberg is its Gatsby, its Kane, and such a shining young example… it is Baxter’s most intriguing point that Spielberg not only caters to youthfulness, but extends and preserves it… What is so clever, I think, is Baxter’s sense of a man too narrowly focused to amount to a villain… Baxter’s success is beyond question.’

DAVID THOMSON, Independent on Sunday

‘An impeccably professional film-biographer (he’s already done Buñuel, Fellini, Ford and is now working on Kubrick), Baxter leaves no document unrifled, no fact unchecked, no anecdote untold.’

Sight and Sound

‘… a full, frank and readable account of a man who the public regards as one of the greatest enchanters in the history of film.’

STUART GILLES, Manchester Evening News

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Praise

1 The Man who Fell to Earth

2 The Boy who Swallowed a Transistor

3 Amblin’ Towards Bethlehem

4 Universal Soldier

5 Duel

6 The Sugarland Express

7 Jaws

8 Close Encounters of the Third Kind

9 1941

10 Raiders of the Lost Ark

11 Poltergeist and E.T: The Extraterrestrial

12 The Twilight Zone: The Movie

13 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

14 The Color Purple

15 Empire of the Sun

16 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

17 Always and Hook

18 Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List

19 The Dream Team

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

Pre-Credit Sequence The Sandcastle

Filmography

Copyright

About the Publisher

1 The Man Who Fell to Earth

Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today.

I wish that man would go away.

Traditional rhyme

THE FORCE of American popular art lies in its directness, its simplicity, its economy of means and of scale. Analysis may uncover cultural and autobiographical references, sophistications of technique, even profundity of intellect, but the first appeal of a George Gershwin song, a Walt Disney cartoon, a Norman Rockwell painting is, and must be, commonplace delight.

Steven Spielberg embodies this tradition. His films, even the sombre Schindler’s List, are machines for delighting us. Almost always they succeed in doing so. It’s not hard to see why. He traffics in what authors of science fiction, his preferred form, call ‘a sense of wonder’, a heightened apprehension of physical possibilities. It has been said that the universe is not only stranger than we know but stranger than we can know. Spielberg dispels this idea. His vision, like that of the best science fiction writers, is of a welcoming, explicable place.

Writing about Ray Bradbury, whose books like The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked this Way Comes share Spielberg’s simplicity of vision and sureness of technique, the critic Damon Knight, in a passage that could well refer to Spielberg, remarked:

To Bradbury, as to most people, radar and rocket ships and atomic power are big, frightening, meaningless names; a fact which, no doubt, has something to do with his popular success, but which does not touch the root of the matter. Bradbury’s strength lies in the fact that he writes about the things that are really important to us: not the things we pretend we are interested in – science, marriage, sports, politics, crime – but the fundamental pre-rational fears and longings and desires; the rage at being born; the will to be loved; the longing to communicate; the hatred of parents and siblings; the fear of things that are not self…

People who talk about Bradbury’s imagination miss the point. His imagination is mediocre; he borrows nearly all his backgrounds and props, and distorts them badly; wherever he is required to invent anything – a planet, a Martian, a machine – the image is flat and unconvincing. Bradbury’s Mars, where it is not as bare as a Chinese stage setting, is a mass of inconsistencies; his spaceships are a joke; his people have no faces. The vivid images in his work are not imagined; they are remembered.

In 1987, cartoonist Jules Feiffer drew a panel for the magazine Village Voice. A writing professor lauds a student for his ‘Joycean gift of language coupled with a Hemingwayesque spareness’. He goes on to compare him with Fitzgerald, Bellow, Updike, Styron, Mailer, then asks him what he’s working on. ‘A screenplay for Spielberg,’ the boy says airily. The professor is suddenly a beaming enthusiast. ‘Do you know him?’ he demands. ‘What’s he really like?’

The public urge to know what Spielberg is really like has never abated. His personality and appearance are so unremarkable, his public statements so bland, that everyone feels there must be a secret Spielberg hidden under the ramshackle exterior.

If you were to ask Spielberg what he is really like, he would probably reply that he is just like his audience. He is like everyone. But the image of Just Plain Steve is simply one aspect of his public persona. Examine that persona, and it fragments into a jigsaw puzzle where real memories slot into fabricated ones, and where childhood enthusiasms jostle for space with the structures of corporate power.

Spielberg’s indifferent communication skills don’t help to explain him to his public. His voice has never quite lost the self-absorbed gabble and stammer of the teenager drunk on ideas. ‘He has all the virtues – and defects – of a sixteen-year-old,’ one colleague remarks. Over the years he’s learned to smile and to pause occasionally for others to speak, but the interpersonal still daunts him. He communicates best from behind a protective grille of technology. On that level, he radiates competence. Everyone notices it. The novelist Martin Amis almost mistook him for the man who’d come to fix the Coke machine. Someone else described his image as ‘chemistry-student-next-door’. Both Amis and actor Tom Hanks compared him to the high school audio-visual assistant who alone understood 16mm projectors. (Spielberg worked his way through three years of college, in part by projecting classroom films.)

His mastery of cinema technology, what critic Pauline Kael called ‘a film sense’, is innate and effortless, his innocent flair and enjoyment disguising the complexities of what he does. ‘I got the feeling,’ said Julian Glover, who acted for him in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, ‘that, if he wanted to, he could have built the set. He knew as much about lighting as [director of photography] Douglas Slocombe. And he operated the camera himself.’ The worst sin for a Spielberg collaborator is to fail in technique. When that happens, Spielberg can be scathing. ‘There is no, “Nice try, guys – better luck next time,”’ complained one crew member. ‘He says things like, “You didn’t get it right. Think about that when you go to bed.”’

Partly by chance but increasingly by design, Spielberg has immured himself in the prison of his facility. It is the central irony of his life that the more he is driven to employ his skills, the more they destroy the very spontaneity he strives to capture. The audience which follows him, and which he helped create, is perfectly happy, however, with technique. To them, not understanding his systematic methods, his ability to engineer entertainment machines like Jurassic Park can seem almost miraculous, and it’s to a god that many of them compare him. Or an alien. When American Premiere magazine entitled one article about E.T. and its maker ‘Steven Spielberg in his Adventures on Earth’, they articulated a sense shared by many that he does not belong here. With his rodigies of imagination undermined by physical fragility and social clumsiness, he recalled the soft-spoken extra-terrestrial played by Michael Rennie in Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, or David Bowie’s Martian, fragile as a stick insect, in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth.

Spielberg makes a credible alien. He’s most comfortable with those who live in private worlds. When stories of eccentric habits and lifestyle accreted around Michael Jackson, Spielberg, who planned to film Peter Pan with the singer and spent hours playing games with him at his Disneyland-like estate, remarked wistfully, ‘It’s a nice place Michael comes from. I wish we could all spend some time in his world.’

Spielberg’s need for protection and distance has its roots in a genuine fragility. Since he was four years old, he’s bitten his fingernails. Despite his technical ease, he was for most of his early adulthood a white-knuckle flier who had nosebleeds at high altitudes. For many years he so disliked elevators that he’d walk up half a dozen flights of stairs rather than enter one. The man who terrified the world with Jaws also hated and feared the ocean, and the director of that archetypal night-time film Close Encounters of the Third Kind admits, ‘I’m scared of the dark except in a motion picture theatre.’

It is only in the welcoming darkness of the cinema that Spielberg truly feels at home – and only with the myths of the movies that he is intellectually comfortable. Increasingly, it has been through and by myths that he has chosen to define himself. Admirers have been quick to add their own manufactured myths that confirm his role as an Honorary Outsider, and just another misunderstood teenager, like them; a Peter Pan of movies, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, but who invested hugely in preserving himself in artificial adolescence. As early as Jaws in 1974, rumour claimed – erroneously – that Spielberg’s jeans with their multitude of zipped pockets were specially made for him at $250 a pair. Even his pet Cavalier King Charles spaniels were pressed into the fantasy. Some people felt the turnover in dogs was curiously high. As Zalman succeeded Elmer, Chauncey succeeded Zalman and Halloween followed Chauncey, rumours grew that Elmer/Zalman/Chauncey/Halloween wasn’t a dog but a role: when the incumbent lost its puppy cuteness, another replaced it. Friends insist this is untrue. However, Spielberg’s reclusiveness fanned the story, and others like it.

Although Spielberg’s career is entwined with that of George Lucas, the two men are cultural and psychological opposites. Lucas, short, slight, seems habitually curled in on himself, arms often folded across his body. Spielberg, at five feet eight inches and 151 pounds, is fractionally taller, but contrasting body language exaggerates the difference. ‘Some people look at the ground when they walk,’ he says. ‘Others look straight ahead. I always look upward, at the sky.’

Lucas’s expressionless face and low, toneless voice emphasise the mask effect of his beard and moustache. Director John Badham calls him ‘a painfully shy person who hates dealing with people’. Writer Willard Huyck, another student friend, said, ‘George made a few friends at [the University of Southern California Film School], and decided that’s about all he needed for the rest of his life.’

As a director, he communicates even less. ‘George Lucas,’ confided a Star Wars actor, ‘is the worst director in the world. Never takes his nose out of the newspaper.’ The conventional view of film as a collaborative art – or an art of any kind, for that matter – isn’t his.

Lucas’s childhood in Modesto, California, was suffused with Methodism and German Lutheranism. He reacted against it in adulthood by creating a laid-back, feel-good home life. This ‘redwood tub mentality’ amused Spielberg, who joked about ‘LucasLand’. Spielberg himself is a product of the east coast suburbs, the rural midwest and the high desert of Arizona, but culturally he is archetypally Jewish; Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler’s List, talks of his ‘classic Central European map-of-Poland face’. His first memory is of being taken to a synagogue at six months, and he learned numbers from those tattooed on the arm of a relative who survived Auschwitz. Though he’d been bar mitzvahed, he didn’t practise his religion until well into adulthood. Long before that, however, he went out of his way to introduce a Jewish dimension into his films. In both Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, characters written as gentile were redesigned to accommodate Richard Dreyfuss, an actor proudly and obviously Jewish. It wasn’t until Spielberg’s second marriage, to the actress Kate Capshaw, that he integrated his cultural heritage into any system of belief, but since childhood, Judaism exercised a powerful influence of which even he wasn’t fully aware.

Being born Jewish also gave Spielberg an entrée to Hollywood which gentiles – and this included most of the USC group – could never possess. Along with Lucas, the film-makers who came to be known as New Hollywood included Brian De Palma (Carrie, Sisters), John Milius (Big Wednesday), the slightly older Francis Coppola (the Godfather trilogy, Apocalypse Now), husband and wife producers Michael and Julia Phillips (The Sting) and a group of lesser talents like writers Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, composer Basil Poledouris and cameraman/director Carroll Ballard.

Most emerged from that sixties phenomenon, the university film school, and elected to work inside the studio system rather than in the underground. Christened ‘Movie Brats’ by Michael Pye and Lynda Myles in their 1979 book The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took Over Hollywood, they rushed into the vacuum created when the US Justice Department forced the studios to shed their theatre chains and embrace the free market.

Old Hollywood had served the post-war baby boomers, now entering their thirties and looking for a Nice Night’s Entertainment. New Hollywood targeted their children, the teens and pre-teens in Nike and Adidas trainers, stone-washed Levis and New York Yankees caps, who spent homework time reading EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt or watching reruns of the TV series Twilight Zone, and queued every weekend outside multiplex cinemas across the country.

Spielberg’s technique to win this audience was to scavenge Hollywood’s scrapyard, salvaging genres and recycling them in widescreen, colour and stereo sound. His ability to resuscitate moribund material was unique. His approach to the shark of Jaws, to Puck, the ‘Little Green Man’ of E.T., Jurassic Park’s velociraptor dinosaurs and the Nazis of Schindler’s List was identical. In each case, he animated a cliché by showing that even cardboard thinks and feels. Not for nothing was he an admirer of Disney’s Pinocchio, in which a puppet is brought to life.

As an added guarantee that the audience would embrace his work, Spielberg preferred never to instigate an idea. The tendency of Lucas and Scorsese to push ahead with their visions, bulldozing all in their path, could produce successes, but Spielberg fed on consensus, not confrontation. Most of his films would be years in gestation, and would often begin with another director. Jaws had been Dick Richards’s film. Close Encounters of the Third Kind originated with Paul Schrader. Phil Kaufman would start as the director of Raiders, John Milius developed 1941, Tobe Hooper Poltergeist, and Hooper, with John Sayles, did the preliminary work on E.T. Empire of the Sun was intended for David Lean. Even Schindler’s List was at one point a Martin Scorsese project.

Just as Spielberg is anything but the common man, he’s also anything but the common artist. His vision is closer to that of a politician or a corporate CEO than to a film-maker. Newsday critic Jack Matthews articulated the truth that had been dawning for some time on the filmmakers with whom Spielberg had grown up in the industry, but whom he is now leaving further and further behind: ‘His contemporaries in the Hollywood firmament are not Scorsese and Coppola, they’re studio execs Jeffrey Katzenberg, Mark Canton, Peter Guber, Joe Roth and the other fortysomething crowd controlling the power.’ The critic Peter Biskind has pointed out how closely Spielberg’s and Lucas’s business philosophies conformed to those of Ronald Reagan, who served as president from 1981 to 1989, throughout the period of their greatest success. Reagan, says Biskind, ‘was the strong father Lucas and Spielberg didn’t know they were looking for, the ideal president for the age of Star Wars’. In temperament, Spielberg has more in common with the Democrats like John F. Kennedy who saw it as their role to make a world fit for baby boomers to live in. Arthur Schlesinger Jr speaks of Kennedy as ‘a realist and an ironist, a man of sardonic wit and impenetrable reserve who sought to apply reason to the problems of state’. One senses some of the same cool estimate of cause and effect in Spielberg. ‘His direct and unfettered mind,’ Schlesinger continued of Kennedy, ‘freed him to contemplate a diversity of possible courses. At the same time, he was a careful judge of those possibilities and was disinclined to make heavy investments in losing causes… He once described himself to Jacqueline as “an idealist without illusions”.’ Spielberg shares many of these characteristics, albeit in diluted form. He’s even closer, however, to the philanthropic industrialists of a century ago like Carnegie and Frick.

In person, he appears diffident, nervous, unsure, eager to be liked and to have his work approved by the audience, but a frosty stare at moments of threat reveals him as a man who understands power and expects to be obeyed. On the set, he’s fast, focused, saying little to his crew, even less to his cast. He’s animated, however, when talking business. If he is truly an artist, his art is the deal. No Edison or Ford, perhaps – but Federico Fellini was right to say, as he did to Francis Coppola, ‘Spielberg is a tycoon, like Rockefeller.’ When historians assess the 1970s and eighties, during which entertainment and audio-visual media began to dominate large segments of the world economy, Spielberg, along with innovators like Microsoft’s Bill Gates, may well emerge as a major architect of the change.

Millions would be astonished to hear Spielberg called, as he sometimes is, ‘the most hated man in Hollywood’. Admittedly, ‘hate’ is a term so contaminated by self-interest as to be meaningless in show business. The gibe ‘You’ll never work in this town again – unless we need you’ embodies so much conventional wisdom that nobody sees it as a joke. After Spielberg allied with ex-Disney studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg and record producer David Geffen in 1994 as DreamWorks SKG, David Letterman, master of ceremonies of the 1995 Oscar broadcast, joked that the alliance was a time saver; instead of waiting for them to fail separately, Hollywood could now wait for them to fail as a group.

However, even if one replaces ‘hated’ with ‘resented’ or ‘envied’, a residue of genuine dislike remains. Friends and colleagues agree; Steven Spielberg is hard to like. Geffen called him, according to Julia Phillips, ‘selfish, self-centred, egomaniacal, and worst of all – greedy’. Geffen denied the quote, but there are plenty in Hollywood prepared to endorse it, if not for the record. Spielberg can be remote, grasping, sulky, narrow. In his office, he seldom acknowledges anyone except to raise some technical point. He ‘lacked social graces’, one colleague said of his rapport, or lack of it, with his employees. ‘He never asked anybody about their personal lives. His only subject of conversation is the movies.’

But Spielberg shares these characteristics with many – perhaps most – great directors. Fellini, Buñuel and Welles all drew the same criticism. Likewise many of his own contemporaries in New Hollywood. Filmmaking is an art learned in decades alone in the dark with other people’s dreams, and pursued in an environment of inflated egos and expectations, sudden-death deadlines and Brobdingnagian profits and losses. As the matador respects the bull more than the crowd which gathers to see one of them die, directors come to love films more than they love the audience.

During the seventies and eighties, while he was finding his feet, Spielberg was famously approachable. While other directors retired to their trailers between takes and had lunch sent in, he schmoozed with the actors, ate in the commissary and hosted evening screenings of his favourite old movies to which the entire cast and crew were invited. He always entertained his cast at dinner just before shooting, and greeted each of them, ‘Welcome to the family.’ Lucas simply sent a basket of fruit to their rooms.

All this, however, may simply have been more a technique of manipulation than a sign of interest in other people. ‘Directing is 80 per cent communication and 20 per cent know-how,’ Spielberg says. ‘Because if you can communicate to the people who know how to edit, know how to light, and know how to act – if you can communicate what you want… and what you feel, that’s my definition of a good director.’ One of the warmer stories about him describes him winning over ageing star Joan Crawford on his first job by presenting her each day with a rose in a Pepsi-Cola bottle: Crawford was the widow of Pepsi’s chairman. At an American Film Institute seminar, however, Spielberg recollected cynically: ‘I put the day of the week on the Pepsi bottle, and each day I’d give her one. She didn’t know it was a countdown. I couldn’t wait to get off the picture. Oh yeah, I did a lot of that bullshit.’