Spielberg Page 2

  “I would experiment with terror on my sisters. I killed them all several times,” he has said. He loved casting his sisters in his epics “because I could trash them any way I felt like. I killed them over and over again, and it was all in the interest of telling a good story. After my third or fourth little 8 mm epic, I knew this was going to be a career, not just a hobby. I had learned that film was power.”

  “Steven was not a cuddly child,” his mother has recalled. “He was scary. When he woke up from a nap, I shook. He was quite weird as a child and prone to terrorizing his three sisters.” She mentions the time he decapitated his sister’s favorite doll and served it to her on a bed of lettuce. Another time he bought a plastic skull at a novelty store and hooked it up to a flashlight. Before locking his sister in the closet, he switched on the flashlight, then enjoyed the screams that came pouring out from behind the closed door.

  His sister Sue, a mother of two in suburban Washington, D.C., remembers adventures with her older brother baby-sitting that were pure torture. “When he was baby-sitting 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.”

  His sister also could be describing her brother’s uncanny knack for getting young filmgoers to see his films multiple times, thus ensuring their blockbuster grosses (about the only way a film can make a half billion dollars).

  His youngest sister Nancy, now a jewelry designer in New York City, remembers being one of the first actresses ever cast by the fledgling director. Even then, there were creative differences on the set.

  When Steven was sixteen, he made a science fiction thriller called Firelight, whose theme would eerily foreshadow Close Encounters of the Third Kind. “I played a kid in the backyard,” Nancy remembers, “who was supposed to reach up toward the ‘firelight’ [UFO] in the sky. Steven had me look directly at the sun. ‘Quit squinting,’ ” the pint-sized De Mille would shout. “ ‘Don’t blink!’ And though I might have gone blind, I did what he said because after all, it was Steven directing.”

  It wasn’t just family members he managed to wrap around his fingers in pursuit of filmmaking. Adults found themselves curiously corralled by his obsessive will. “People ask me if I knew Steven was a genius,” his mother says. “I didn’t know what Steven was. From twelve on, he was always writing little scripts and enlisting everyone to act in them. I supplied the cold cuts.

  “Once he got a hospital to close off a wing for one of his location shots,” Leah continues adding that the wing included the emergency rooms. “Another time he got the airport to close a runway. No one ever said no to him, and it’s a good thing. Steven doesn’t understand no.”

  A forerunner of bigger things to come, Firelight was his first film to turn a profit. He borrowed the $400 it cost to make the film from his father. Later, it premiered at a local movie theater and grossed $500. His first net was a whopping $100.

  When they weren’t collaborating on films, he still enjoyed tormenting his siblings. “We were sitting with our dolls,” Nancy says, “and Steven was singing as if he was on the radio. Then he interrupted himself to bring us an important message. He announced a tornado was coming, then flipped us over his head to ‘safety.’

  “If we looked at him he once said, we’d turn to stone.”

  Spielberg doesn’t deny his wild child days and has offered up his own anecdotes almost proudly: “I loved terrifying my sisters to the point of cardiac arrest. I remember a movie on TV with a Martian who kept a severed head in a fishbowl. It scared them so much they couldn’t watch it. So I locked them in a closet with a fish bowl. I can still hear the terror breaking in their voices.”

  His mother recounts other deeds committed by her demon seed: “He used to stand outside his sisters’ windows at night, howling, ‘I am the moon. I am the moon!’ I think those poor girls are still scared of the moon.”

  While he could instill terror, Spielberg wasn’t immune from the sensation himself. His childhood, as he tells it, was full of fears of things that go bump in the night. At six, the death of Bambi’s mother and just about everything in Fantasia scared the hell out of him. But he remembers enjoying the sensation. “There were scenes of utter violence and sheer terror in Bambi and Snow White. They terrorized me as a child and I’ll never forget them,” he has said.

  These childhood phobias later would be re-created in his films, especially Poltergeist, the ultimate child horror film, which he wrote and produced. A clown doll, which Spielberg called his “biggest fear,” figured prominently in one of Poltergeist’s scariest sequences. “Also the tree I could see outside my room.” (Another Poltergeist element.) “Also anything that might be under the bed or in the closet. Also ‘Dragnet’ on TV. Also a crack in the bedroom wall—I thought ghosts might come from it.” (They did, again in Poltergeist.)

  Many of his childhood fears remain with him to this day. Like so many artists, he seems to hold on to the awe and fascination—and fear—that make childhood such a magical and scary time. To this day, he refuses to go into an elevator alone because he fears it will get stuck between floors and his whitened bones will be found two weeks later. Whenever possible, he skips elevators altogether. Amblin, his production office on the backlot at Universal, was built specifically with only two stories so he’d never have to set foot in an elevator at work. In fact, he has been known to hold business meetings in the lobby of a building to avoid using the lift.

  He’s a hypochondriac, beset by fears both rational and irrational. He has nightmares that his house is being engulfed by waves and dreams about piling sandbags around the foundation, yet he lives on the beach. He refuses to go in the water because “there are sharks out there,” although the closest sharks have ever come to southern California is twenty miles off shore. “And they were baby sharks,” Captain Bob Buchanan of the Los Angeles County Fire Department/Lifeguard Division says, dramatically easing any fears the phobic director may have about taking a dip in the Pacific Ocean. Unless, of course, Spielberg is a champion marathoner who likes to swim to Catalina as a lark.

  He’s also afraid of furniture with feet. “I wait for them to walk out of the room,” he has said, only half joking. Other phobias includes snakes and insects, both prominently featured in several of his films. “I think we survive on our fears,” he has said.

  His mother remembers, “Steven always had a highly developed imagination. He was afraid of everything. When he was little, he would insist that I lift the top of the baby grand piano so he could see the strings while I played. Then he would fall on the floor, screaming in fear.”

  But as she also remembers, it was more common for her son to be the terrorist rather than the terrorized. She tells anecdotes that sound like fodder for an episode of the Addams Family, not a nice assimilated Jewish family in Scottsdale, Arizona. “He terrified everybody,” she says. “Baby-sitters would come into the house. They’d say, ‘We’ll take care of the girls if you take him with you.’ ”

  His sister Anne remembers, “Every Saturday morning my parents would escape from the four of us kids. The minute they were out of the house I would run to my room and blockade the door. Steven would push it all away and then punch me out. My arms would be all black and blue. Sue and Nancy would get it next, if they had done some misdeed. Then when he was through doling out punishment, we would all get down to making his movies.”

  His sister Anne, who later would earn an Oscar nomination for her screenplay for Big, remembers her brother’s earliest days as the director from hell: “He’d always have us in crazy costumes doing outrageous things. At the preview of Jaws, I remember thinking, ‘For years he just scared us. Now he gets to scare the masses.’ ”

  Spielberg has never disagreed with his mother’s assessment of his formative years. Like her, he seems to feel a certain warped pride. “I often think depravity is the inspirati
on for my entire career,” he said recently. “My parents were rigid about not letting me see horror films, so I staged my own, faking the chopping off of arms and legs and using buckets of fake blood.”

  Leah Adler had grown up in a poor family in Cincinnati. But despite the lack of material wealth, her childhood was like a fairy tale. Her father adored her. Her mother adored her. “She’d look at me and just grin,” Adler said of her mother. Adler in turn raised her four children that way, adoring and encouraging every one of them.

  Mom Spielberg had to be the ultimate permissive parent, but she was also a good child psychologist. She would break up fights among the children by having each side tell his or her story. Then she’d say, “Go back to arguing.” The kids were so shocked by her reaction they’d stop fighting.

  She was also a stage mother, film division. Basically, the word “no” was the only thing forbidden in the Spielberg household, at least as far as his mother was concerned.

  “His room was such a mess, you could grow mushrooms,” she says with a mixture of pride and horror. “Once his lizard got out of its cage, and we found it—living—three years later! He had a parakeet he refused to keep in a cage at all. There would be birds flying around and birdseed all over the floor. It was disgusting. Once a week, I would stick my head in his room, grab his dirty laundry and slam the door. If I had known better, I would have taken him to a psychiatrist, and there never would have been an E.T. His badness was so original that there weren’t even books to tell you what to do.

  “My mother used to say, ‘The world is gonna hear of this boy.’ I think she said that so I wouldn’t kill him.”

  Actually, Mrs. Spielberg encouraged her son in his film endeavors.

  “I was a very delinquent parent,” she says without any discernible guilt. “I became a member of my kids’ gang. If they wanted to stay home from school, they did. I’d say, ‘Let’s go out in the desert, guys,’ and then I’d write lying notes to their teachers about gastrointestinal diseases.”

  Once, when he needed to shoot a scene that called for gore, he persuaded Mom to boil thirty cans of cherries in a pressure cooker until they exploded and covered the kitchen cabinets with ersatz blood. She remembers that for years after, “Every morning, I’d come downstairs, and while I made coffee I’d clean the cherries off the cabinets.”

  On another occasion, when he was shooting a mini war epic on 8 mm, he persuaded his mother to participate. “She’d drop everything, climb into the Jeep, race out behind Camelback Mountain and helter-skelter barrel through the shot, hitting the potholes, her blond hair sticking out from under the pith helmet,” he told Time magazine. Even back then, Spielberg was learning how to stretch a movie budget, making less look like more. With his mother impersonating a male GI, he recalled, “I would have my ‘production value.’ My $7 film suddenly looked like a $24 film.”

  Although he may have gotten all his artistic inheritance from his piano-playing mother, Spielberg got his first break as a moviemaker from his father. When the youngster was twelve, his mother gave his father an 8 mm Kodak camera to memorialize their camping trips.

  Spielberg describes his father’s home movies and how the young would-be director soon was hogging his dad’s Father’s Day gift. “The events of the trips were pretty El Snoro, so I tended to sort of tweak reality and try to get a little more drama into, say, catching trout.

  “He’d take the camera out on family camping trips, and then we’d have to endure his photography. So one day I said, ‘Dad, can I be the family photographer?’ And he gave me the camera. My dad had to wait for me to say ‘Action!’ before he could put the knife into the fish to clean it.

  “That was my first PG-13 moment.”

  Soon, the avid filmmaker had graduated to more spectacular subjects than fish gutting. “My first real movie was of my Lionel trains crashing into each other. I used to love to stage little wrecks. I’d put my eye right to the tracks and watch the trains crashing,” he recalled.

  Spielberg became obsessed with his new hobby. He would spend hours alone in his room writing scripts and storyboarding shots on paper, a practice he continues to this day during preproduction on a film.

  “Movies took the place of crayons and charcoal, and I was able to represent my life at twenty-four frames a second,” he later said, describing the beginning of a lifelong love affair with celluloid.

  Although his father launched him on his film career, the two were never close. At least that’s how the younger Spielberg remembers the relationship. Once, an interviewer asked him point-blank if he ever felt affection from his father. Spielberg said, “No, and I think that was a mistake on his part. I don’t want to repeat that error. I know that I always felt my father put his work before me. I always thought he loved me less than his work, and I suffered as a result.

  “I remember being bored to tears when my father had businessmen over to the house and they would always talk computers. My own technical proficiency is knowing how to use the Yellow Pages when something breaks.” Years later, he would finally come to appreciate his father’s high-tech world when he was forced to comprehend the arcana of computerization that made the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park come to life. The Yellow Pages apparently didn’t have a listing for computer-operated tyrannosaurs.

  His father’s recollections, perhaps in self-excusatory hindsight, suggest he was more hands-on than his son has asserted. “It was creative and chaotic at our house,” Arnold Spielberg said in 1985. “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 Ludehead. I see pieces of me in Steven. I see the storyteller.”

  And it is indisputable that his father gave him his first movie prop, a Lionel train set which his son happily crashed on film over and over again. “I would stage these very complex accidents on the rails,” Spielberg said, “and somehow, intuitively, I would film these perfect crashes. When I got the film back, I would be amazed at how my little trains looked like multi-ton locomotives.”

  He was also a natural cinematographer who managed to make the toys look like gigantic locomotives by unconsciously realizing that by shooting the trains from a low angle, they would appear life-sized on screen.

  Arnold Spielberg had mixed feelings about his son’s burgeoning interest in filmmaking, even though he was the originator and willing participant in his son’s budding career. Arnold came from a poor family, and he pushed a practical, scientific career on his son in reaction to his own childhood poverty. During an amazingly successful career, Arnold worked for IBM, RCA, and GE. He holds a whopping twelve patents in his name. Today, retired, he makes industrial sales films, which he shows to his son for input.

  Dad was pure left-brained, analytical, scientific. Young Steven was his mother’s son, creative, free-spirited and undisciplined about everything but making movies.

  Still, Steven undeniably got half his chromosomes from his father. “Steven’s love and mastery of technology definitely comes for our father,” his sister Sue says.

  There’s a telling incident from Spielberg’s youth which sounds like myth but actually happened, or so the director insists. The scene also encapsulates the subtle tension between father and son.

  One day, the elder Spielberg came home and showed his son a small object in his hand. “This is a transistor. This is the future.” Steven immediately put the tiny gizmo in his mouth and swallowed it. “My parents called the police to get it out,” he said.

  Years later, Spielberg would claim with some guilt that he was dismissing or denying his father’s world by so quickly disposing of the man’s prize. Film historians and psychologists might posit another theory: Spielberg at an early age had intuitively grasped that technology later would dominate his filmmaking and swallowed it whole, embracing it as he later would embrace optical effects or interactive video. If Steven had been born ten years later, he might have swallowed a sili
con chip instead.

  There was no real enmity between father and son, however—just a totally different mindset. Without bitterness, the director later would describe his father’s yin and his own ill-fitting yang: “My dad was of that World War II ethic. He brought home the bacon, and my mom cooked it, and we ate it. I went to my dad with things, but he was always analytical. I was more passionate in my approach to any question, and so we always clashed. I was yearning for drama.”

  There was happily no tension between his artistic mother and her talented son. Sister Sue recalls, “Mom was 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.”

  In fact, her permissiveness practically bordered on negligence when she allowed him to stay home from school at least once a week so he could edit the footage he had shot over the weekend. Spielberg recalled, “I would fake being sick. I’d put the thermometer up to the light bulb,” just as young Elliot does in E.T. so he can stay home and play with his extraterrestrial pal. But unlike the mother in E.T., Mrs. Spielberg knew her son was faking it and let him stay home anyway. “I’d call her in and moan and groan. She’d play along and say, ‘My god, you’re burning up. You’re staying home today.’ ”

  Today, his mother defends her outlandish permissiveness. “I was never a typical parent,” she says with understatement. “I think if a kid wants something, he ought to have it.” Once Steven wanted a job to finance a “big budget” opus, so she suggested he paint the bathroom. “He did the toilet and the mirror, then he quit,” she recalls.

  It wasn’t only a love of filmmaking that turned him into a frequent truant. Steven hated school. “From age twelve or thirteen I knew I wanted to be a movie director, and I didn’t think that science or math or foreign languages were going to help me turn out the little 8 mm sagas I was making to avoid homework.”