Spielberg Page 3

  To instill a love of literature in his son, his father gave him a copy of The Scarlet Letter. Steven hated to read so he drew stick figures of a bowler knocking down pins on the edge of each page. When he flicked the pages, the pins went tumbling down. Today, he calls The Scarlet Letter his “first film adapted from another medium.”

  He also has praised his father for forcing him to study “just enough math” so he wouldn’t actually flunk a grade. He did flunk gym class three years in a row. “I couldn’t do a chin-up or a fraction. I can do a chin-up now, but I still can’t do a fraction.” In fact, the king of computer-guided special effects has confessed that he still counts on his fingers. “When my dad sees me counting on my fingers, he looks away.”

  His father used to wake him up early and tutor him in math every morning. These tutorials would have been comical if they hadn’t been so frustrating for his well-meaning father. “I hated math. I didn’t like when they’d stack the numbers on top of one another. My father used to say things like, ‘3 into 4 won’t go,’ and I’d say, ‘Of course it won’t! You can’t put that 3 into the little hole on top of the 4. It won’t fit.’ ”

  To this day, Spielberg remains a techno-peasant when it comes to anything more sophisticated than a touch-tone phone.

  Based on his lifelong dislike of reading, it seems possible that Spielberg’s academic difficulties may have been caused by a learning disorder, perhaps dyslexia. “I was not a reader, and I’m still not a reader. I just don’t like reading. I’m a very slow reader. And because I’m so slow, it makes me feel guilty that it might take me three hours to read a 110-page screenplay that I even wrote the story for. So I don’t read a lot. I have not read for pleasure in many years. And that’s sort of a shame. I think I am really part of the Eisenhower generation of TV.”

  For all his mother’s permissiveness, both she and her husband tried to thwart television’s pernicious influence on their children. The television set in the Spielberg household usually had a blanket over it.

  In school, Steven was nicknamed “the retard,” and once lost a race to a boy in the class who actually was retarded.

  As painful as the incident was, the details reveal a young man with a precociously big heart and a capacity for empathy unusual in a preadolescent.

  “The height of my wimpery came when we had to run a mile for a grade in elementary school,” he has said. “The whole class of fifty finished, except for two people left on the track—me and a mentally retarded boy. Of course he ran awkwardly, but I was just never able to run. I was maybe 40 yards ahead of him, and I was only 100 yards away from the finish line. The whole class turned and began rooting for the young retarded boy—cheering him, saying, ‘C’mon, c’mon, beat Spielberg! Run, run!’

  “It was like he came to life for the first time, and he began to pour it on but still not fast enough to beat me. And I remember thinking, ‘OK, now how am I gonna fall and make it look like I really fell?’ And I remember actually stepping on my toe and going face hard into the red clay of the track and actually scraping my nose. Everybody cheered when I fell, and then they began to really scream for this guy: ‘C’mon, John, c’mon, run, run!’ I got up just as John came up behind me, and I began running as if to beat him but not really to win, running to let him win. We were nose to nose, and suddenly I laid back a step, then a half-step. Suddenly he was ahead, then he was a chest ahead, then a length, and then he crossed the finish line ahead of me. Everybody grabbed this guy, and they threw him up on their shoulders and carried him into the locker room, and into the showers, and I stood there on the track field and cried my eyes out for five minutes.

  “I’d never felt better and I’d never felt worse in my life.”

  Spielberg’s athletic humiliations were not confined to track and field. He was always the last boy to be chosen for the basketball or baseball team. In high school, sickened by having to dissect a frog in biology class, he ran outside to vomit along with other weak-stomached students. “The others were all girls,” he wryly recalled.

  A photo published by People magazine taken circa 1954 shows Spielberg wasn’t exaggerating his ungainly appearance. He is shirtless and as emaciated as an extra in Schindler’s List. He hasn’t yet grown into his nose, which is Cyrano-sized. He’s wearing only underpants.

  “I was skinny and unpopular. I was the weird, skinny kid with acne. I hate to use the word wimp, but I wasn’t in the inner loop. I never felt comfortable with myself, because I was never part of the majority. I always felt awkward and shy and on the outside of the momentum of my friends’ lives. I was never on the inside of that. I was always on the outside. I felt like an alien [shades of E.T.!]. I always felt like I never belonged to anything. I never belonged to any group that I wanted to belong to.

  “Unlike Woody Allen, you know, I wanted to become a member of the country club,” he said.

  At least he wasn’t the only one outside the loop. “I had plenty of friends who were just like me in Scottsdale. Skinny wrists and glasses. We were all just trying to make it through the year without getting our faces pushed into the drinking fountain.”

  High school wasn’t a total wash, socially. He found friends in the theater arts programs, which he called “My leper colony. That’s when I realized there were options besides being a jock or a wimp.”

  Like most childhood memories, Spielberg’s were more dramatic than the reality. His sister Anne insists he wasn’t quite the pariah he claims to have been. In fact, in a nerdy way, he was attractive to girls.

  “A lot of the girls had crushes on him,” she recalls. “He really had an incredible personality,” says the sister who used to get brushes from her brother’s ribbing. “He could make people do things. He made everything he was going to do sound like you wished you were a part of it.”

  The Boy Scouts finally allowed him to blossom socially, but even in that arena, he now admits, “I was pretty inept.”

  “Inept” is like saying the shark in Jaws has a terrific overbite. While demonstrating ax sharpening in front of 500 scouts one summer, “on the second stroke, I put the blade through my knuckle.” Thirty years later he showed the scar to an interviewer to prove it.

  His adventures in scouting, like his forays into nonkosher lobstering, sound like the stuff of sitcoms. Once, after building a camp fire, he was so tired he forgot to open a can before putting it into a pot of boiling water. The can exploded, sending shrapnel in all directions. “No one was hurt,” he says, “but everyone within 20 yards of the fire needed new uniforms.”

  To get the canoeing merit badge, he had to capsize a canoe, swim under it, then flip it over his head. Everything went well until it came time for the flip. “It came down on my head. I had to be pulled out of the water.”

  Somehow he managed to earn the swimming merit badge, even though it required him to swim a mile. “I really couldn’t swim a mile, but it was a case of mind over muscle once I determined I was going to do it. I remember pulling myself out of the water after that in a complete sort of wet haze.”

  He shone brilliantly, however, when it came time to earn the photography badge. The rules required still photographs, but Spielberg convinced the Scout master to allow him to shoot an 8 mm film instead. “If he hadn’t,” he says now, “I would have ended up becoming the finest still photographer in Scottsdale, Arizona.”

  The Scout film was a three-minute epic, archly titled, Gunsmore, after the popular Western television series of the day, Gunsmoke. The extravaganza cost $8.50, which he earned by painting trees with insecticide. The film included a stagecoach holdup, a macho sheriff, and a bad guy who went over a cliff. After the holdup, the bad guy is seen counting his money, a nifty metaphor for the director’s sharklike negotiating abilities as an adult. For the special effect of the bad guying going over the cliff, Spielberg stuffed some clothes and shoes with pillows and newspapers, then threw them down a hill.

  “The Boy Scouts put me in the center of the loop. It sort of brought out things I
did well and forgave me for things I didn’t,” he said.

  Besides scouting, Spielberg also succeeded in fitting in school by joining the school band and the orchestras in the fourth grade. He played the clarinet. “I’ve marched in more rodeo parades and stepped in more horse pies than anybody I know,” he recalled, laughing. “But I chose film instead.”

  Steven was showing himself to be not just a precocious filmmaker but a savvy exhibitor as well. From the age of twelve on, he rented 8 mm movies which he screened for all the kids in the neighborhood. His three sisters would distribute flyers he had painstakingly printed. On hot Saturday mornings all summer long, the Spielbergs’ living room resonated with the screams of more than thirty youngsters. Admission was thirty-five cents, and popcorn cost ten cents a bag.

  By now having given up on his son ever becoming an electrical engineer, dad would gamely set up the screen and the Bell and Howell projector for his son’s home movie premieres. The movie fare included Davy Crockett, which he rented from an 8 mm movie catalog. “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,” he said.

  “We all worked for Steve,” his mother says. “From the minute he was born I was his employee.”

  When he was sixteen, the family business collapsed when his parents divorced.

  For years before his parents split, he remembers the house being filled with tension between mom and dad, but the tension never erupted into full-scale fights. It was there, palpable, just underneath the surface, like the shark you sense coming in Jaws whenever John Williams’s thump-thump-thump score begins to resonate on the soundtrack.

  In a first person account in Time magazine, Spielberg remembered how traumatic his parents’ split was for him and his three sisters:

  “I was about 16 . . . when our parents separated. They hung in there to protect us until we were old enough. But I don’t think they were aware of how acutely we were aware of their unhappiness—not violence, just a pervading unhappiness you could cut with a fork or a spoon at dinner every night.

  “For years, I thought the word ‘divorce’ was the ugliest in the English language.” In the Time magazine account, Spielberg remembered the word “divorce” and many other painful sounds traveling from his parents’ bedroom to his own via the heating ducts. He and his sisters would be kept up all night by the sound of his parents’ heated quarrels. The director vividly recalls having a virtual panic attack whenever he heard his parents say the d word. While his sisters wept, he held on to them, the big brother comforting female siblings. It took his parents six years of bitter fighting before they finally called it quits. He later admitted that he wished they had split sooner, to save the kids years of anguished eavesdropping at the heating ducts.

  Still, he made it clear in his Time memoir that the divorce didn’t embitter him toward either parent. He concluded the painful recollection saying, “I have two wonderful parents; they raised me really well.”

  This theme of separation from parents or loved ones would echo again and again in his adult films, whether it was the tot who was sucked out of the doggie door by extraterrestrials in Close Encounters or the British schoolboy literally yanked from his parents’ arms amid a rampaging mob in Empire of the Sun.

  After graduating from Arcadia High in Scottsdale, the budding film director applied to UCLA, which has the best film school in the country. The state-supported school was a bargain, charging tuition that was only a fraction of private schools like USC, to which Spielberg didn’t even bother to apply because of the prohibitive cost.

  Unfortunately, UCLA only accepts students who have graduated from the top 10 percent of their high school classes, and Spielberg, a C-student, didn’t even come close.

  He ended up at the less prestigious Cal State University at Long Beach, where he majored in English literature. This from a man who still hates to read!

  Steve Hubbert, a teaching assistant at Cal State Long Beach, explains why the future filmmaker majored in English. “Back in those days, we didn’t have a film program per se. We did have one basic film production course. I think it was a basic video production course. Steven was not too happy with Long Beach. He made films on his own.” Hubbert adds that the university didn’t institute its film program until the early eighties, by which time the director had already established himself as the most successful filmmaker in history.

  In film school, his taste was an avant-garde style of filmmaking he would never return to professionally. His 8 mm opuses sound more like something from the youth-gains-wisdom genre of a Godard or Antonioni, not the auteur of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. These film school efforts seem to combine existentialism and surrealism—conjured up by a teenager!

  “I once made a film about a man being chased by someone trying to kill him. But running becomes such a spiritual pleasure for him that he forgets who is after him. I did another picture about dreams—how disjointed they are. I made one about what happens to rain when it hits dirt. They were personal little films that represented who I was.

  “And then I made a slick, very professional looking film [Amblin’], although it had as much soul and content as a piece of driftwood,” he said.

  This slick film begins with a career-making connection. A fellow student and lab technician named Dennis Hoffman wanted to become a producer and put up the money so in 1969 Spielberg could make a student film called Amblin’.

  “I crashed into somebody who wanted to be a producer. I wanted to be a director. Dennis Hoffman gave me $15,000 to make the picture and we made it in ten days. That’s what I consider my big break. It was all based on five pages that Dennis believed in,” he recalled later.

  The twenty-two-minute film had no dialogue. It told the story of a boy and his girlfriend hitchhiking to the Pacific Ocean from the Mojave desert. The film won awards at the Venice and Atlanta film festivals. These prestigious accolades didn’t impress Spielberg. In fact, years later, he would dismiss his first professional project as a “Pepsi commercial” he made in “an attack of crass commercialism.” Proving he may be his harshest critic, he added, “When I look back at the film, I can easily say, ‘No wonder I didn’t go to [protest at] Kent State,’ or ‘No wonder I didn’t go to Vietnam or I wasn’t protesting when all my friends were carrying signs and getting clubbed in Century City.’ I was off making movies, and Amblin’ is the slick byproduct of a kid immersed up to his nose in film.”

  There’s more than a hint of regret when he discusses his precocious success. A feeling of opportunities lost because other opportunities—commercial ones—presented themselves so early.

  “I never counted on getting started as early as I did. It just happened that I started getting jobs before I was ready to say yes,” he said.

  Then he mentions a colleague, one of a group of artistic directors, whom he still feels a touch of envy toward. “I might have made underground movies first: I might have been like Brian De Palma and made nine films before breaking into the establishment.”

  In fact, he would later say the only reason he made Amblin’ was to get the attention of studio executives.

  It did. In spades.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Amblin’ Along

  IN 1966, THE SAME YEAR HIS PARENTS divorced, Spielberg took the hokey Universal Studios Tour, which purported to be an inside look at the movie business. But the tour had as much to do with the nuts and bolts of moviemaking as a cigar store Indian had with Wounded Knee.

  The teenager sneaked off the tram, which was a feat in itself, since the tour-goers on the backlot at Universal are as closely guarded as the presidential motorcade.

  “I remember taking a bus tour through Universal Studios. I remember getting off the bus. We were all let off to go to the bathroom.

  “Instead I hid between two soundstages until the bus left, and then I wandered around for three hours! I went back there every day for three months
. I walked past the guard every day, waved at him, and he waved back. I always wore a suit and carried a briefcase, and he assumed I was some kid related to some mogul. It was my father’s briefcase, and there was nothing in it but a sandwich and two candy bars. So every day that summer I went in 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 the camera store and bought some plastic name titles and put my name in the building directory: ‘Steven Spielberg, Room 23C.’

  “I found an empty bungalow and set up an office. I then went to the main switchboard and introduced myself and gave them my extension so I could get calls.

  “It took Universal two years to discover I was on the lot. Those two years I was there I never made any deals, but I used the phone a lot and learned how to play the game. I got fed up with the joint, though, and left and went to Long Beach College and made a short called Amblin’.”

  Universal was his off-campus campus. He crammed fifteen course units into two days of classes each week, then spent the other three days sneaking onto the backlot.

  The first time he managed to break into the studio, the intruder felt as though he had found his long-lost home. “I was on the outside of a wonderful hallucination that everyone was sharing. And I wanted to do more than be part of the hallucination. I wanted to control it. I wanted to be a director,” he said.

  Lower echelon executives remembered being embarrassed when Spielberg asked them to remove the pictures from their walls so he could project his little 8 mm epics.

  One executive advised him, “If you make your films in 16 mm—or even better—in 35 mm, then they’ll get seen.”

  Spielberg took the man’s advice. “I immediately went to work in the college cafeteria to earn money to buy 16 mm stock and rent a camera. I had to get those films seen.”

  One of the studio personnel willing to see his films was Chuck Silver, Universal’s film librarian.