Spielberg

  SPIELBERG

  SPIELBERG

  The Man, the Movies, the Mythology

  UPDATED EDITION

  Frank Sanello

  First Taylor Trade Publishing edition 2002

  This Taylor Trade Publishing paperback edition of Spielberg is an unabridged republication of the edition first published in Dallas, Texas in 1996, with the addition of four new chapters, an updated filmography, and three textual emendations. It is reprinted by arrangement with the author.

  Copyright © 1996 by Frank Sanello

  Updated edition copyright © 2002 by Frank Sanello

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  Published by Taylor Trade Publishing

  A Member of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

  4720 Boston Way

  Lanham, Maryland 20706

  Distributed by National Book Network

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2002105743

  ISBN 0-87833-148-4 (paper : alk. paper)

  ISBN: 978-0-87833-148-2

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: The Reluctant Jew

  ONE

  Baby Mogul

  TWO

  Amblin’ Along

  THREE

  The Big Time, at Last

  FOUR

  Bonanza Time

  FIVE

  Close Encounters

  SIX

  Pearl Harbor

  SEVEN

  Raiders of the Box Office

  EIGHT

  The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

  NINE

  Doomed, Temporarily

  TEN

  Turning Points

  ELEVEN

  The Color Versatile

  TWELVE

  Not So Amazing Stories

  THIRTEEN

  Empire Building

  FOURTEEN

  Raiders of the Box Office Again

  FIFTEEN

  Never

  SIXTEEN

  Hooked

  SEVENTEEN

  A Culmination

  EIGHTEEN

  Casa Spielberg

  NINETEEN

  Dinosaur Deux

  TWENTY

  A Feel-Good Film About Slavery

  TWENTY-ONE

  Stalking Steven Spielberg

  TWENTY-TWO

  Robo-Tot

  Filmography

  Index

  Index to Updated Material on Pages 255–95

  INTRODUCTION

  The Reluctant Jew

  For a Jew, it’s a shame Steven Spielberg is so white bread.

  —megafilm producer Don Simpson

  (Crimson Tide)

  The conventional has always appealed to Steven.

  —Leah Adler, his mother

  There are literally six million stories that could be told about the Holocaust. It speaks volumes about Steven Spielberg that he chose perhaps the only one with a happy ending.

  —an industry source

  IF EVER AN ARTIST’S BODY OF WORK WAS A product of his upbringing and background, director Steven Spielberg’s films are exactly that.

  His mother Leah was an accomplished classical pianist. His father an inventor and electrical engineer who designed computers for RCA, GE, and IBM.

  Spielberg and his work can be seen as a fusion of these two very different parents. His father’s influence contributed the techno-wizardry which is the hallmark of most Spielberg films, all those sci-fi epics and scare-’em-to-death roller-coaster rides. His mother’s artistic bent provided the aesthetic balance which enriched his low-tech, character-driven films like Schindler’s List and The Color Purple.

  Spielberg’s religious upbringing—or lack thereof—influenced not only his formative years but the flavor and content of his films.

  “I wasn’t a religious kid, although I was Bar Mitzvahed in a real Orthodox synagogue,” he once recalled. His earliest memory was of entering a Cincinnati synagogue for services with Hasidic elders. “The old men were handing me little crackers. My parents said later I must have been about six months old!”

  His early works were indeed as Don Simpson said, “white bread.” Spielberg’s fascination with Waspy suburbia under siege in everything from Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Poltergeist reflected his own childhood, growing up Jewish in primarily Anglo-Saxon neighborhoods. He was at once the alien and the insider. The local boy who was somehow different by reason of his Jewishness.

  In childhood, it’s fair to say Steven Spielberg was a reluctant Jew. The theme of longing to belong permeated much of his work until only recently. It was only after fully accepting his Jewishness that Spielberg flowered as a mature artist, capable of producing his Oscar-winning masterpiece, Schindler’s List.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Baby Mogul

  STEVEN SPIELBERG WAS BORN DECEMBER 18, 1946, in Cincinnati. (For years he asserted that his birthdate was 1947. But in 1995, in response to a long-running legal battle, Spielberg acknowledged that 1946 was the correct year.) His father’s work as an electrical engineer led to a change of jobs and home every few years. Young Steven remembered himself as always being the new kid on the block, the new boy at school, never fitting in. Whenever he finally did manage to insinuate himself into the local crowd, the family would up and move to a new city.

  After Cincinnati, there was a brief stop in Haddonfield, New Jersey. Then the family settled for its longest period in Scottsdale, Arizona. Steven lived in this Ur-Wasp suburb from the ages of nine to sixteen.

  His mother, Leah, an adventurous type, did not want to live in a Jewish neighborhood and always plopped the family down right into the middle of Gentile, U.S.A. Today, his mother regrets this rejection of her roots. “I was raised in an Orthodox home, but I chose to rear my children in non-Jewish neighborhoods. That was my one really big mistake. The kids next door used to stand outside yelling, ‘The Spielbergs are dirty Jews.’ So one night Steven snuck out of the house and peanut-buttered all their windows.”

  Spielberg found belonging to the only Jewish family on the block a lonely position, especially at Christmas, when theirs was the sole house in the neighborhood unlit by decorations. In vain, the dying-to-assimilate youth begged his father to at least put a red light in the window. “I was ashamed because I was living on a street where at Christmas we were the only house with nothing but a porch light on,” he has said.

  His parents refused, but not out of any great sense of Jewish identity or pride. In fact, he remembers that when the family moved from New Jersey to Scottsdale, they stopped keeping kosher for no particular reason.

  Spielberg has described his family as “storefront kosher.” That’s the equivalent of cafeteria Catholics, those who pick and choose what dicta of the Pope to believe or discard, sort of like selecting the broccoli but rejecting the jicama at the salad bar.

  The Spielbergs’ storefront kosherism had the flavor of an ethnic sitcom. Leah Spielberg (nee Posner) loved shellfish, a food strictly verboten by Judaic dietary laws. One day when she and her son, who shared his mother’s fondness for crustaceans, were about to pop two giant lobsters into a pot of boiling water, their rabbi pulled into the driveway for an unannounced visit.

  You can almost hear the television laughtrack in the background as Leah instructed her son to hide the offendi
ng creatures under his bed.

  “The rabbi came to my room to see how I was doing,” Spielberg wrote in a first person memoir in Time magazine. “You could hear the lobsters clicking and clacking at each other with their tails. The rabbi just sort of stared and sniffed the air; he must have wondered what that tref (unkosher) scent was, lingering in the kid’s bedroom. The minute the rabbi left, my mom and I gleefully threw the lobsters into a pot of boiling water and then ate them.”

  Years later, Leah, divorced and remarried to Bernie Adler, would atone for such sins by opening a popular kosher deli in west Los Angeles, called the Milky Way in honor of her son’s galactic epic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But back then, she now concedes, her faith was less than integral to her life. “It was a very nothing part of our lives. All we did was light candles on the Sabbath,” she recalls.

  While these close encounters with strict Judaism had a sitcom whimsy to them, other incidents relating to the Spielbergs’ faith ranged from scary to downright ugly.

  Growing up, Steven never recalled his parents or relatives referring to the Holocaust or Nazis by name. He did remember hearing, however, terms like “those murdering bastards. My parents referred to the Holocaust as ‘those murdering sons of bitches.’ ” In fact, distant cousins perished in Poland and the Ukraine, victims of the Final Solution.

  His grandmother taught English to Holocaust survivors who had emigrated to America. His earliest encounter with the event that would lead to his greatest film involved a survivor of the death camps who studied English in his grandmother’s home. The man taught the preschool Steven his numbers by displaying the concentration camp number tattooed on his forearm. Even then, the event involved a touch of magic, which the youngster would later depict on a big screen in 70 mm. The man delighted young Steven with a grisly magic trick. By bending his arm he could make the number six on his arm turn into a nine.

  Other Holocaust memories were appropriately more bleak and anticipated the terror component of his masterpiece. A relative told a story of an accomplished classical pianist in Berlin. (Shades of mom.) During the Nazi era, this woman had the temerity to play a work by a forbidden Jewish composer in public. In the middle of her performance, Nazi thugs ran up on stage and broke all her fingers so she would never be able to play again.

  “I grew up with stories of Nazis breaking the fingers of Jews,” Spielberg has said.

  Pop psychologists might say he later tried to domesticate those fears in two Indiana Jones films with cardboard Nazis who weren’t nearly as scary as the real thing from his childhood. But ultimately, he would confront these childhood bogeymen in an authentic way in Schindler’s List.

  Another story which could have come from Schindler’s List, but instead came from a Spielberg relative, dealt with a woman who was wearing a wedding ring which the Nazis demanded she surrender. The woman apparently had put on weight since her marriage, and the ring refused to budge. The Nazis were about to cut off her finger when nervousness caused the ring to miraculously slip off her hand.

  These stories no doubt instilled awe and wonder, but they didn’t instill a whole lot of pride. All children long to belong, and Steven, growing up in Wasp-ville, was no different. His desire to assimilate, however, was so shameful a memory that it wasn’t until years later, when Schindler’s List had forced him to confront his own ambivalence toward Judaism, that he finally told his mother an embarrassing incident from his youth.

  Every night before he went to bed, he would fasten duct tape to his nose, pushing it toward his forehead in the forlorn hope of developing an upturned, Wasp-like snout.

  Groaning, he recalled the incident in a magazine interview: “Oh, god, oh my god! It’s true! I used to take a big piece of duct tape and put one end on the tip of my nose and the other end as high up on my forehead line as I could. I had this big nose. My face grew into it, but when I was a child, I was very self-conscious about my schnozz. I thought if you kept your nose taped up that it would stay . . . like Silly Putty!”

  Years later, Don Simpson and film critics would complain that the director’s fascination with Waspy suburbia in films like E.T. and Poltergeist were the cinematic equivalent of taping his nose to his forehead. In fact, one critic derisively described the director’s infatuation with white-bread suburbia on film as a “triumph of assimilation.”

  Growing up presented big and small problems of assimilation and acceptance. Spielberg once recalled: “We were always leaving schools and relocating. My father assimilated into the gentile world of computers, and that’s a very Wasp world. We didn’t live in a big Jewish community. We’d move into gentile neighborhoods where there’d be no Jewish community center. There’d be a temple somewhere where we’d go on Friday nights and High Holy Days, but I was pretty much the only Jew I knew for many years outside my family.”

  He also recalled with classic Jewish guilt his formative years as a reluctant Jew. “It isn’t something I enjoy admitting, but when I was seven, eight, nine years old, God forgive me, I was embarrassed because we were Orthodox Jews. I was embarrassed by the outward perception of my parents’ Jewish practices. I was embarrassed because I wanted to be like everybody else. I didn’t feel comfortable with who I was. I was never really ashamed to be Jewish, but I was uneasy at times. My grandfather always wore a long black coat, black hat and long white beard. I was embarrassed to invite my friends over to the house because he might be in a corner davening [praying], and I wouldn’t know how to explain this to my Wasp friends.”

  This internalized anti-Semitism didn’t become external, he said, until the family moved to Saratoga, California, near San Francisco, when he was sixteen. His father had gotten a job at a nearby Palo Alto computer company, and Steven was once again the new kid in school.

  And the only Jewish one.

  Here his aesthetic desire to look gentile from the tape duct days turned into a matter of survival, not just cosmetics. During his senior year at Arcadia High, students would cough the word “Jew” as he passed them in the hall. In study hall, other kids would throw pennies at him, hoping he would pick them up and “prove” how miserly Jews were.

  “It was six months of personal horror. And to this day I haven’t gotten over it, nor have I forgiven any of them,” he told an interviewer years later. And he still doesn’t suffer anti-Semites gladly. Recently, he purchased a car for a friend from a Santa Monica, California, dealer. The salesman boasted after the sale, “I just got a Jew to pay full price for a car!” Somehow this comment got back to Spielberg, and he cancelled the order. The horrified owner of the dealership apologized profusely, but Spielberg refused to reinstate the order.

  The salesman’s anti-Semitism obviously opened old wounds that have never and probably will never completely heal. But that slur was mild compared to some of the anti-Semitism he experienced in high school. “I was embarrassed, I was self-conscious, I was always aware that I stood out because of my Jewishness. In high school, I got smacked and kicked to the ground in P.E., in the locker room, in the showers. Two bloody noses. It was horrible. We couldn’t stop it. So my mom picked me up in her car every day after school and took me home.”

  One nemesis left a legacy that still embitters him to this day, although at the time his knack for filmmaking helped him cope and even conquer.

  A bully, the biggest boy in class, used to bloody his nose, stick his head in the water fountain, and grind his face into the dirt. Once, the young thug threw a cherry bomb between Steven’s legs while he was sitting on the toilet at school. “I got up before it exploded,” Spielberg recalled.

  Adding insult to injury, his tormentor would shout anti-Semitic slurs at Spielberg. “He had a very limited vocabulary,” Spielberg recalled dryly.

  “Then I figured, if you can’t beat him, try to get him to join you.” Spielberg told the delinquent he was making a film about World War II and wanted to cast the bully (against type) as a John Wayne-type hero. “He did look a little like John Wayne. He sure was as bi
g as Wayne,” Spielberg recalled with perhaps the exaggerated memory of childhood. At first the bully continued to torment him, but eventually succumbed to the lure of movie stardom.

  “I converted him to being my friend, even though I don’t think I was ever his friend, because I never quite forgot the taunting and how intimidated I was around him. Even when he was in one of my movies, I was afraid of him. But I was able to bring him over to a place where I felt safer: in front of my camera. I discovered what a tool and a weapon a camera was, what an instrument of self-inspection and self-expression it is.” And in the case of the bully-turned-buddy, one of self-preservation.

  The film, entitled Escape to Nowhere, also introduced him to the world of special effects. It was the beginning of a love affair that continues to this day. He took his adolescent cast to the desert to shoot an “epic” battle between Nazis and British. To create a low-tech shell explosion, he dug two holes in the ground and put a wooden plank with flour between them. He covered the construction with a bush. When the soldiers ran over the board, the flour seesawed and made a perfect geyser in the air.

  “Matter of fact,” he said later, “it works better than gunpowder used in movies today.”

  The fifteen-minute film cost fifty dollars and won first prize at a teen film festival.

  Steven’s three younger sisters also were cast in his films, but he didn’t treat them with the fearful respect he extended to the class bully. Instead he specialized in terrorizing his siblings, a feat he would accomplish on a much larger scale with a much larger audience—the whole world—years later.