Steven Spielberg: Force Behind the Box Office, From ‘Jaws’ to ‘E.T.’
At 34, Steven Spielberg is, in any conventional sense, the most successful movie director in Hollywood, America, the Occident, the planet Earth, the solar system and the galaxy. Three of his movies – Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Raiders of the Lost Ark – are action-fantasy classics that rank among the biggest moneymakers of all time. Before the summer is out, they may well be joined by E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a lyrical piece of sci-fi about the human, and alien, condition (conceived, coproduced and directed by Spielberg), and a crowd-pleasing shocker, Poltergeist (coproduced and cowritten by Spielberg but directed by Tobe Hooper). Spielberg is the scion of a suburban upbringing and a public-school education. His mother was a concert pianist and his father a computer scientist who moved his family of four children “from Ohio to New Jersey, Arizona, Saratoga and Los Angeles.” From age twelve on, Spielberg knew he did one thing best: make movies. When college time came, he enrolled in film school at Cal State Long Beach. In 1969, on the basis of a 24-minute short called Amblin’,’ Spielberg was able to sign with Universal, where he directed episodes of Night Gallery, Marcus Welby and Columbo; the terrifying TV-movie Duel; his first feature, The Sugarland Express; and his breakthrough, “primal scream” thriller, Jaws.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is another breakthrough for Spielberg. His previous movies have all been spectacles of some species, even the out-of-control slapstick epic 1941. Their escapism grew out of Spielberg’s childhood fantasy life: “When I didn’t want to face the real world,” He says, “I just stuck a camera up to my face. And it worked.” Making E.T., however, compelled Spielberg to face the reality of his childhood pain and left him feeling “cleansed.” Now, he says, “I’m trying to make movies by shooting more from the hip and using my eyes to see the real world.”
The day after a triumphant out-of-competition screening of E.T. at Cannes in May, I spoke to Spielberg in his New York City hotel suite. He exuded casualness, from his NASA cap to his stockinged feet, as well as confidence that his most intimate movie might also prove to be his best loved. Talking about E.T., Poltergeist, his favorite contemporary, directors and the troubled state of the motion-picture business, Spielberg seemed itching to take on the world.
Everything seems to have come together for you with E.T. Certainly few filmmakers have had such a good shot at being both profoundly personal and phenomenally popular.
You know the saying, the book wrote itself. This movie didn’t make itself, but things began to happen from its inception in 1980 that told me this was a movie I was ready to make. I’m not into psychoanalysis, but E.T. is a film that was inside me for many years and could only come out after a lot of suburban psychodrama.
What do you mean by suburban psychodrama?
Growing up in a house with three screaming younger sisters and a mother who played concert piano with seven other women – I was raised in a world of women.
In a lot of your movies, the women or the girls are the more elastic characters, emotionally.
That’s right, they are. I like women, I like working with women. E.T. had a plethora of them. A woman coproducer, a woman writer, a women film editor, a woman assistant director, woman costumer, woman script person, women in construction, women in set design, a woman set dresser. I am less guarded about my feelings around women. I call it the shoulder-pad syndrome; you can’t cry on a shoulder that’s wearing a shoulder pad. This is something from my school days of being a wimp in a world of jocks.
How much of a wimp were you?
The height of my wimpery came when we had to run a mile for a grade in elementary school. 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 forty 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 on, 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, “Okay, 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, 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 entire life.
You once said you managed to win over some of the jocks by starring them in a film called Battle Squad. By making films like Jaws, were you still trying to ingratiate yourself with hard guys?
Yeah, hard liners. Hard, cynical liners. But not just three or four jocks in my elementary or junior high school. I’m talking about millions of people.