Steven Spielberg

Shorn of friends and relations by the move to Arizona, and hungry for acceptance, Spielberg took refuge increasingly in showmanship. ‘I began wanting to make people happy from the beginning of my life. As a kid, I had puppet shows – I wanted people to like my puppet shows when I was eight years old.’ For the rest of his life, displays of virtuoso invention would alternate with attempts to create the suburban contentment for which he envied others.

Physical awkwardness remained his greatest humiliation. In a school footrace, he once found himself second last, only just ahead of an even slower handicapped boy. It was this boy the crowd cheered on, yelling, ‘C’mon, John, you can beat Spielberg!’ With the compulsion to win but also to satisfy the expectations of an audience that became characteristic of him as an adult, Spielberg contrived to trip so that the other boy could pass him. Then, once the other was well ahead, he threw himself into almost catching up, coming in a close last. John was carried off in triumph, while Spielberg, winner and loser at the same time, stood on the field and cried for five minutes. ‘I’d never felt better and I’d never felt worse in my whole life.’

In adulthood, Spielberg’s ideal social and intellectual level remained that of his life as a suburban schoolboy in the late 1950s. George Lucas was to have Luke Skywalker say of provincial Tatooine in Star Wars, ‘If there is a bright centre to the universe, this is the place it is furthest from.’ But for Spielberg, suburbia would always radiate a prelapsarian glow. He came to revere middle-class virtues. Richard Dreyfuss says Spielberg has ‘a love affair with the suburban middle class. I don’t share his fascination, but Steven could do whole movies about block parties if he wanted to.’ If he’d been making All the President’s Men, Spielberg said, he would have concentrated on the White House typists rather than the reporters. His favourite painter was, and remained, Norman Rockwell, whose covers for the Saturday Evening Post showing scenes of gentle whimsy, often set in churches, soda fountains and domestic interiors, exemplified a sunny vision of America as God’s Country.

A later writer was to sum up Rockwell’s style in terms that make clear Spielberg’s affinity for the artist: ‘At his peak, Rockwell reflected an American dream which did not at the time seem ridiculous or unobtainable — the dream of international power, domestic pleasure and civil tranquillity. Rockwell’s arcadia was peopled by clever kids, indulgent grandparents, bourgeois shopkeepers, shy courting couples and pious schoolteachers – all painted in a style which was a strange blend of fairy-tale, cinematic still and comic strip.’ Another critic wrote: ‘To be feeling good at home is the secret and desire of the world Rockwell narrates. “Home” is also his narrative horizon and his project. Having a comfortable, solid, lived-in home, being confident in oneself and one’s values, are everyday and prosaic values which are obvious, lived and shared. It is art for, and about, Joe Sixpack. It plays very well in Peoria.’ Spielberg’s lifelong fascination with Rockwell culminated in him becoming a collector of his works, and a trustee and major financial contributor to the Rockwell Museum.

Unlike the Haddonfield house, which was surrounded by trees, and in particular a large one just outside his window on which Spielberg focused his scarier fantasies, the house in Scottsdale was part of a modern development sprawling over flat semi-desert. Spielberg loved its sense of community, the way one could look into the kitchen windows of the families on either side. ‘You always knew what your neighbours were cooking because you could see them preparing dinner and you could smell it. There were no fences, no problems.’ In the nineties, ensconced in a mansion in Los Angeles’ luxurious suburb of Pacific Palisades, he still felt the same affection. ‘I live in a different kind of suburbia, but it still is. There are houses next door and across the street, and you can walk, and there are street lamps on the street and sidewalks, and it’s very nice.’

The Spielberg household placed a premium on work and hobbies. Leah would invite her musician friends for musical evenings. Steven was encouraged to have pets. He filled his room with eight free-flying parakeets which perched on the curtain rod and left their droppings underneath. He would continue to keep them as an adult, naming them serially, as he had as a child. In the seventies he still had a pair, called Schmuck I and Schmuck II. On holidays, his parents drove as far as the White Mountains and the Grand Canyon, pitching their tent and, particularly in Leah’s case, throwing themselves into serious hiking and nature study. One of Spielberg’s most vivid memories is of his mother on a mountaintop, whirling in ecstasy, and while shooting Raiders in Tunisia he reminisced of scorpion hunts with his father in the Arizona desert.

His first encounter with a movie camera sprang from these camping trips. Leah gave Arnold an 8mm Kodak for Father’s Day. He hosepiped like any amateur until Steven, sensitised by prolonged viewing of movies on TV, became impatient. After being criticised repeatedly by his son for shaky camera movements and bad exposure, Arnold handed over the camera. After that, holidays were never the same. His mother recalled:

My earliest recollection of Steven with a camera was when my husband and I were leaving on vacation and we told him to take a shot of the camper leaving the driveway. He got down on his belly and was aiming at the hubcap. We were exasperated, yelling at him, ‘Come on! We have to leave. Hurry up.’ But he just kept on doing his thing, and when we saw the finished results, he was able to pull back so that this hubcap spinning around became the whole camper – my first glimpse of the Spielbergian touch, and a hint of things to come.

A hundred yards before they arrived, Steven jumped out and filmed them driving through the campsite gate. After that, every part of the trip was recorded. ‘Father Chopping Wood. Mother Digging Latrine. Young Sister Removing Fishhook From Right Eye – my first horror film. And a scary little picture called Bear in the Bushes.’

1959 was a year of significance for Spielberg. References to it riddle his films. It was the year he was bar mitzvahed, only managing to mumble through his ill-memorised extract from the torah with the help of the old men in the front row, who muttered along with him. This was also the year he began actively to resent his father’s obsession with work, and his insistence on precision and order. His father brought home a transistor, and told him, ‘Son, this is the future.’ Spielberg grabbed it and swallowed it.

Detroit’s disastrous attempt at manipulating the American public by designing cars according to theories of subliminal sexual symbolism reached fruition in 1959 with the Ford Edsel. Spielberg used one of these doomed gas-guzzlers with its calculatedly vaginal front grille in his first film, Amblin’. One of the year’s big hits, Jerome Kern’s ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, revived by the black singing group The Platters, provided the theme of Always.

More important, CBS premiered a new half-hour TV series in October. An anthology of quirky science fiction or fantasy stories, each with an ironic trick ending, it was introduced each week, and often written by, its creator, TV writer Rod Serling, already well-known for original dramas like Requiem for a Heavyweight. In his dark suit and with his crooked smile and off-handedly intellectual comments, Serling, like Arnold Spielberg, was an ex-GI with a revisionist view of the America Fit For Heroes To Live In. Through the window of The Twilight Zone, he invited his audience to spy on a puzzling future with more than a hint of threat.

The Twilight Zone influenced not only Spielberg but a whole generation of film directors-in-waiting. Like them, he came running at the sound of Marius Constant’s theme, which he compared to a bugle call drawing one to the TV set. The tune inspired the five-note alien signature of Close Encounters. Spielberg would also attempt, unsuccessfully, to replicate the series, first in a film version, then on TV in the ill-fated Amazing Stories.

The family camera admitted Spielberg to his first real life of the mind. Here his skill was not in doubt. It gave him absolute control of a world. While other kids were involved in a Little League baseball team or in music, he was watching TV and, his phrase, ‘drowning in little home movies’. Once he exhausted the technical possibilities of the little Kodak’s single lens, flip-up viewfinder and thirty-five-second clockwork motor, he persuaded his father to buy a better model with a three-lens turret. Being able to cut from long shot through medium shot to close-up widened his horizons.

Over the years, his versions of his debut in narrative film have varied. Initially, he went off alone during a camping trip and experimented with shooting something other than the family. ‘The first film I ever made was… about an experience in unseen horror, a walk through the forest. The whole thing was a seven-hundred-foot dolly shot and lasted fourteen minutes.’ Story films quickly followed. ‘My first… I made when I was twelve,’ he says, ‘for the Boy Scouts.’ For the Photo Proficiency badge, he had to tell a story in a series of still photographs. Spielberg went one better with a movie, variously remembered as Gun Smoke or The Last Gun. A 3 1/2-minute western about a showdown between homesteaders and a land baron, it cost $8.50, which he raised by whitewashing the trunks of neighbours’ citrus trees at 75c a tree. Fellow Scouts with plastic revolvers played all the characters, and Spielberg persuaded a man with a cigarette to puff into the barrel of a gun so that the film could end on the sheriff’s smoking pistol shoved back into his holster. The Scouts loved his movie, and Spielberg got his badge. ‘In that moment,’ he said, ‘I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.’

The instant gratification of story film influenced Spielberg against abstraction. ‘I think if I had made a different kind of movie, if that film had been maybe a study of raindrops coming out of a gutter and forming a puddle in your back yard, I think if I had shown that film to the Boy Scouts and they had sat there and said, “Wow, that’s really beautiful, really interesting. Look at the patterns in the water. Look at the interesting camera angle” – I mean, if I had done that, I might have been a different kind of film-maker.’

Until then, his record in the Scouts had been as undistinguished as that in high school. He couldn’t cook, was so hamfisted he never learned to tie knots well, and enlivened a demonstration of sharpening an axe by cutting his finger open in front of five hundred Scouts at a summer jamboree. He avoided weekend camps, which robbed him of his only chance to see a UFO; other Scouts returned from a camp in the desert with stories of a strange glow in the sky. But movies made him, if not popular, then at least accepted. He freely acknowledged that his first films were exercises in ingratiation. They gave him, he said, ‘a reason for living after school hours’. The school bully could also be placated by putting him in a film. He rented Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier and War of the Worlds on 8mm, and showed them at 25c a head in the family den. As well, he sold popcorn and soda – an integral part of the film experience for him. The proceeds went to charity. The point, then as later in his career, wasn’t profit but popularity.

Over the next four years he made about fifteen story films. Old enough now to be allowed to see almost anything at his local cinema, the Kiva, he plundered Hollywood for ideas. Some of the lessons of The Great Locomotive Chase, Disney’s version of the Civil War raid on which Buster Keaton had based his classic 1926 comedy The General, were put into effect in Duel, and parts of Henry Levin’s version of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth would be restaged for Raiders of the Lost Ark. One of the first films he saw which was not straight escapism was The Searchers. John Ford’s story of racist loner John Wayne searching for the niece kidnapped by Indians opened his eyes to the poetic possibilities of landscape. ‘I wasn’t raised in a big city,’ Spielberg says. ‘I lived under the sky all through those formative years, from third grade right through high school. That’s my knowledge of a sort of lifestyle.’ Ford, brought up on the imagery of Catholic paintings and ‘holy pictures’, instinctively employed aspects of the natural world as metaphors for mental and moral states. Dust represented dissolution; rivers a sense of peace and cleansing; silhouettes presaged death. Certain landscapes, like Monument Valley, were for him intellectual universes in miniature. Those weathered towers of limestone rising from the desert against a vast sky became the unalterable precepts by which honourable men must live. Spielberg would make his own pilgrimage to them in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, one of many films to exhibit a Fordian vision of the American west.

Frank Capra also returned to the screen in 1959 after eight years in the wilderness to direct A Hole in the Head, though neither it, nor the film that followed, A Pocketful of Miracles, a remake of his 1933 Lady for a Day, in which sentimental gangsters transform an impoverished street-corner apple seller into a socialite so that her daughter can make an advantageous marriage, rivalled Mr Deeds Goes to Town or Mr Smith Goes to Washington.

While his future colleagues in the New Hollywood like Brian De Palma were surrendering to the moral intricacies and multiple deceptions of Alfred Hitchcock or, in the case of Martin Scorsese, relishing the social disquiet behind Sam Fuller’s tabloid cinema and the pastel melodramas of Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray, Spielberg made Ford and Capra his models. Lacking a strong moral structure of his own, he absorbed theirs, populist, sentimental, reverent and patriotic. Never comfortable talking to actors, he adopted their technique too, employing landscape and weather as symbols of character, and developing a fluid camera style and skill in directing masses of people that swept his audiences past fragile narratives and sketchy characters. ‘Film for me is totally pictorial,’ he says. ‘I’m more attracted to doing things with pictures and atmospheres – the idea of the visual telling the story.’

In this state of mind, Spielberg also dabbled in theatre:

I was probably the only student director at Arcadia High School in Arizona who was allowed to control and put together a show. I did Guys and Dolls and brought the action, especially the brawl in the Hot Box, into the audience. I guess that’s kind of commonplace in today’s theatre, but then it was very strange to have people running up and down the aisles singing and acting. I got killed for it! Every critic in Arizona who could write said, ‘How dare he open up the proscenium and do this drivel in the audience. Guys and Dolls is meant to be on stage.’ I did the standards – Arsenic and Old Lace, I Remember Mama – everything you were allowed to do then.

Like many directors destined to work in sf and fantasy, Spielberg discovered the quirky magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. Edited by Forrest J Ackerman, self-styled ‘Mr Sci Fi’, whose Los Angeles home contained the world’s largest collection of sf movie memorabilia, it celebrated horror film and its techniques with jocular reverence.

The wave of cheap science fiction films that was Hollywood’s response to the sf publishing boom washed through American cinemas throughout 1959 and 1960. Spielberg was banned from seeing the 1958 I Married a Monster from Outer Space, a relatively modest and reticent film despite its gaudy title, but went anyway, and was racked by nightmares. In particular he came to admire the work of Jack Arnold, who directed The Incredible Shrinking Man, It Came from Outer Space, The Space Children and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The catchpenny titles disguised thoughtful exercises in imagination and suspense which made evocative use of natural surroundings and domestic interiors. The shrinking man in Richard Matheson’s story, exposed to fallout from an atomic test, dwindles away in an ordinary suburban home; the film’s menaces are a cat and a spider. In It Came from Outer Space, written by Ray Bradbury, aliens arrive outside a small desert township. The man who first makes contact with them, John Putnam, is an archetypal Spielberg character, an unassuming Jeffersonian natural philosopher and amateur astronomer who muses about the nature of the universe and the desert, to both of which he has a gently mystical attitude.

Spielberg shared the general enthusiasm for The Thing (from Another World), a rare example of a major director, Howard Hawks, dealing with an sf subject. The script also had an important pedigree. It was based on a story called ‘Who Goes There?’ written by John W. Campbell before he became editor of Analog. Like most of Campbell’s work, it is refreshingly iconoclastic. A crashed alien ravages an Arctic research station, smashing down the scientist who tries to befriend it. It’s left to a few tough professional airmen to kill it off and save the world. At the end, a reporter broadcasts the story, warning his listeners, ‘Watch the skies. Keep watching the skies.’

For all the film’s flair, however, Hawks’s right-wing paranoia always jarred. It’s to Arnold’s films (and Bradbury’s script for Outer Space) that much of Spielberg’s later work is traceable. After Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released, Spielberg asked Bradbury, ‘Well, how did you like your film?’ and explained he’d been inspired by It Came from Outer Space. Bradbury and Arnold’s idea, that alien visitors may be benign, and concerned mainly to return home as quickly and quietly as possible, would surface in both Close Encounters and E.T. The fathers of the ‘space children’ who discover an alien in a beachside Californian cave work on a nearby scientific project and share the dislocated life Spielberg knew well, and which he evoked in The Goonies. And while the Black Lagoon may only have been in a corner of the Universal backlot lake, the underwater footage shot in the crystal springs of a Florida park played so effectively on the sense of ‘something’ lurking below us where we swim that the aquaphobic Spielberg paid it homage in the opening scenes of Jaws.

From the start, it wasn’t the atmosphere of fantasy films Spielberg enjoyed so much as their depiction of alternative realities through model work, special effects and elaborate make-up. His sisters, resented because of the attention they drew from his mother, and thus away from him, became victims of his exercises in imagination. He would scare them by building his face into a horror mask with papier mâché made from wet green toilet paper, or would lurk outside the window of Anne, the youngest, and groan ‘I am the moooooon’ until she became hysterical. He convinced them that the bedroom closet hid the decomposing body of a World War II airman, then left it to their curiosity to peek in at the plastic skull he’d hidden there, with goggles over the eyes and a flashlight inside. After they had been terrified by William Cameron Menzies’ Invaders from Mars, which featured the disembodied head of the Martian super-mind, played by an actress with green-painted face, fringed with tentacles, in a glass bubble, he locked them in the closet, this time with an empty fishbowl within which, he said, the head would materialise. All these domestic horrors and more would be recycled in Poltergeist.

War films could be just as interesting as science fiction, providing there were elaborate uniforms, and plenty of buildings were blown up. Firms like Castle Films sold World War II documentaries on 8mm, and Spielberg used some of these as stock footage for a flying story called Fighter Squadron. Arnold persuaded Skyharbor airport in Phoenix to let Steven shoot a friend in the cockpit of a P-51. In 1960, inspired by his father’s purchase of a war-surplus Jeep, Spielberg made the forty-minute Escape to Nowhere, about a World War II American platoon evading a Nazi army in the Libyan desert. He found a few fake German helmets, put them on friends and had them walk slowly past the camera, passing the helmets back down the line so that it looked like an army. Leah drove the Jeep and created uniforms in Wehrmacht grey in which Steven costumed his sisters and friends, who were then machine-gunned and forced repeatedly to roll down a hill in the desert which stood in for North Africa.

‘There was always a camera in his hands,’ Leah says. ‘Once he took a big cardboard carton from the supermarket and cut windows and doors and took it in the back alley and set it on fire to film it. When we saw it, it looked like a real building burning. These are things that in retrospect you try to figure out, but at the time it just seemed normal. He was my first child, and having no prior experience I thought all kids played like that.’

Escape to Nowhere won a prize at the Canyon Film Festival – a 16mm camera. Knowing he couldn’t afford 16mm film processing, Spielberg traded it for a more sophisticated H8 8mm Bolex. At the same time, with a little help from his father, he got a Bolex Sonorizer, with which he could put a soundtrack on his magnetically striped film.

He began to have friends, nerds like himself with over-active imaginations. During the run of the dinosaur film The Lost World in 1960, he and friends mixed white bread, Parmesan cheese, milk, creamed corn and peas in a paper bag and smuggled it into the Kiva. Then they made vomiting sounds and dripped the mixture from the balcony. It started a chain reaction of vomiting. The film was stopped and the lights went up as the malefactors escaped down the fire stairs.

Other attempts at sophistication didn’t work. ‘I’ll never forget the time I discovered girls,’ he says. ‘I was in the fifth grade. My father took me to a drive-in movie with a little girlfriend of mine. This girl had her head on my arm, and the next day my parents lectured me about being promiscuous at an early age. My growing up was like a sitcom ABC buys for a season before they drop it.’ Never passion’s plaything, except where movies were concerned, Spielberg would have a chequered emotional life that headed inexorably towards a marriage Ozzie and Harriet Nelson would have envied.

By the early sixties, Arnold and Leah’s marriage was failing. Spielberg recalled Arnold storming out of the house, shouting, ‘I’m not the head of the family, yet I am the man of the family’ – a line he would recycle in Duel. Steven fled from the cold silences of the house to the cinema’s warmth. In 1962, he saw the film that was to inspire him above all others. David Lean had spent years in the desert making Lawrence of Arabia, a truly epic picture of a larger-than-life historical character whose acts were mirrored and amplified by the landscapes in which they took place. Robert Bolt’s dialogue was minimal – indeed minimalist; aphorisms, orders, insults, seldom more than a sentence long. This was Ford crossed with Capra, but mediated by Lean. For the rest of his life, Spielberg would rate Lawrence as the one true classic of his early film-going. ‘I really kicked into high gear,’ he said of seeing it, ‘and thought, “This I gotta do. I gotta make movies.”’

Single-minded as ever, Spielberg set out to make his first feature, a science fiction adventure called Firelight. He wrote the first draft of the script in a night; the story of scientists who, investigating lights in space, provoke an alien invasion during which the visitors steal an entire city from earth and reassemble it on another planet.

Every weekend for a year, Spielberg worked on the film with anyone he could cajole or bully into helping. No girl, no football games, no summer jobs diverted him. His enthusiasm and persistence were infectious. When he needed someone exploded in the living room, Leah opened cans of cherries and stood by as her son balanced them on one end of a board and had someone jump on the other. She never got the stains off the furniture. Once again the airport closed a runway for him. A local hospital where he had worked as a volunteer in his holidays lent its corridors for a shot, though Spielberg found the experience disconcerting. ‘I saw things that were so horrifying that I had to fantasise that there were lights, props, make-up men, just to avoid vomiting.’