“I always had the feeling [Steven] was somewhat embittered about his father,” says fellow Scout Charles Carter. “He was really close to his mother and disowned his father.”
Hoffman remembers “Stevie” Spielberg as “a skinny, little, inconspicuous fellow. I worried about him, because I liked him very much. He seemed to go in fits and starts—he would dash from one thing to another. I thought it was a disability, not being able to concentrate the way the rest of us would. I knew he was wildly enthusiastic about things, but I didn’t think he had enough ability to analyze things. I tried to stabilize him, and that didn’t work out very well.
“What stands out in my mind was a time they were all going off to cook wieners and marshmallows. The kids were going to scrape around, picking up combustible pieces of wood to build a fire. Stevie would rush around and pick up about three or four little twigs and start his fire. I told him, ‘Stevie, that’s no good. You’ve got to go out and get a big pile to start a fire.’ He just couldn’t do it. He was too impatient to get the fire started. I thought, When he grows up and gets into the real world he’s going to have a tough time keeping up. I didn’t dream anything would come of him. Of course, that was a complete misjudgment of the kid’s personality.”
Steven admitted he “was always doing doofy things” as a Scout. When he demonstrated ax-sharpening at a gathering of five hundred area Scouts, “On the second stroke, I put the blade through my knuckle.” Another time, on an “absolutely freezing night,” he was supposed to build a fire for cooking, but “I dropped my mess kit into the mud. Couldn’t get the fire started. I was hungry and also very tired, and instead of putting the canned food into a pot, I forgot and put the cans unopened on the fire. They exploded, sending shrapnel in all directions. No one was hurt, but everyone within about twenty yards of my cookout needed new uniforms.”
Nevertheless, Steven earned the respect of his fellow Scouts, becoming assistant patrol leader, then patrol leader, and working gamely to overcome his limitations to become an Eagle Scout. Completing his one-mile swim requirement was a major challenge. He was afraid of the water and “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…. I got more respect for myself in being able to overcome those phobias momentarily.”
“I was one of the leaders who had to initial their cards when they completed their requirements,” fellow Scout Tim Dietz recalls. “Steve couldn’t do the obstacle course. That was the only thing he couldn’t do to get Eagle Scout. We worked on him and worked on him: ‘Come on, Steve, you’ve got to complete the course!’ We held onto Steve’s legs to make sure that he could do all the pullups required. He was a good sport about everything—a good guy. He wasn’t the kid we beat up or anything else.”
Dietz admits, however, that they sometimes pulled pranks on Spielberg. He and a few others once persuaded Steven to take part in a “snipe hunt,” a prank which involved sending a gullible boy out in the darkened desert hunting for birds with a pillowcase. Dietz laughingly remembers Spielberg “sitting on the side of a mountain about a hundred yards from us, yipping and yapping and callin’ in the snipes.”
But sometimes the hazing went too far for Steven. “A guy named Rechwald had his pants down taking a crap,” Charles Carter remembers. “Rechwald was an underling in the pecking order; I think he was a little obese. Spielberg intervened because we were torturing Rechwald with a flashlight—everybody was shining lights on Rechwald, exposing him and chuckling at him. Spielberg got mad because they were embarrassing him. I think we tortured Steve a little bit [for protesting]—not seriously, we were just kids. But they laid off on Rechwald. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but looking back, I was impressed. Most kids didn’t stand up against peer pressure. He did. He took a stand.”
• • •
STEVEN became “much beloved of the boys because of his imagination,” Dick Hoffman says. Steven “was always reading, always bringing books along” to camp, and when the boys pitched their pup tents and bunked down for the night, he would provide the entertainment with his own storytelling. Hoffman’s son Bill remembers that Spielberg’s stories “tended to be science-fiction—lots of monster-from-outer-space stories.”
“I was a great storyteller in Boy Scouts,” Spielberg recalled in 1982. “I used to sit around the campfire and scare forty Scouts to death with ghost stories.” The image is archetypal: Spielberg’s TV series Amazing Stories started each week with a montage showing the development of storytelling through the ages, beginning with a caveman spinning stories around a campfire. When Steven told stories to his fellow Scouts, “The whole semicircle would fall silent, all of them listening to what came out of the tent,” Dick Hoffman says. “He’s got the damnedest imagination of anyone I ever knew. The other kids were rapt in their attention to what he was saying. I don’t think he was terribly popular except when he was telling those stories.”
“It’s what made him special,” says fellow Scout Bob Proehl.
Steven’s storytelling ability also manifested itself in teacher Ferneta Sulek’s seventh-grade class, classmate Del Merrill remembers: “He would always write some short story or some kind of fantastic story that was fun to hear. We’d all read our stories aloud and you didn’t want to hear some people’s stories. But everybody always wanted to listen to his story. He brought mystery into it, too. He often would have a twist ending, and he could scare you. A lot of his stories were a blend of humor and science fiction. I remember him reading a lot of science-fiction books in seventh and eighth grade. He said it was his favorite kind of reading.”
Spielberg, who has been described by Ray Bradbury as “probably the son of H. G. Wells, certainly the grandson of Jules Verne,” acquired his passion for science fiction from the pulp magazines and paperbacks his father left around the house. Steven’s tastes included not only the visionary fantasies of such masters as Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert A. Heinlein, but virtually any kind of sci-fi yarn between covers.
Spielberg’s obsession with science fiction was “one of the fascinating things about him,” says Gene Ward Smith, a fellow sci-fi buff who later attended high school with him in California. “Here I’d gone through my life, and if I met a guy who’d read one science-fiction book, I’d read fifty—and he’d read all this stuff. He’d read stuff I hadn’t read. He’d also seen all these science-fiction movies I hadn’t seen, like The Day the Earth Stood Still. He took me through the whole plots of Forbidden Planet and the sleazeball monster movies. We spent a lot of time talking about science-fiction shows on TV—he wasn’t a big fan of Science Fiction Theater, but he thought The Twilight Zone was wonderful.”
Outer space was brought close to home for Steven by the work of his uncle Bud, the rocket scientist, and Scout leader Dick Hoffman, who was program manager for Motorola on space communications equipment linking ground stations to astronauts on Apollo moon flights and sending photo transmissions from interplanetary satellites. Many of the Flaming Arrow Patrol meetings were held in Hoffman’s backyard “hobby house,” a guest house full of elaborate ham radio equipment he had built himself, along with a planetarium and a globe of the world that lit up to indicate places he was calling. Many years later Spielberg told Dick Hoffman how much he envied his son for having a father who was “the Mr. Wizard of Phoenix, Arizona.” A huge antenna loomed above the hobby house, with a platform the boys could climb to peer into a four-foot-long telescope to study the stars over Camelback Mountain on cloudless nights. Steven, who later shot part of Firelight in the hobby house and the orange grove surrounding it, was fascinated by the telescope. He set up a smaller telescope to watch the skies from his own backyard. Once, when he found Saturn, he excitedly invited the neighborhood kids to come around and share the sight with him.
When Steven wasn’t reading science fiction or making movies, he usually was watching television. His memories o
f TV-watching in Phoenix are somewhat distorted. He once complained that “Phoenix, Arizona, is not exactly the culture center of the United States. We had nothing! Except, probably, the worst television you’ve ever seen. They showed one movie on three different channels, The Atomic Kid [a 1954 comedy starring Mickey Rooney as a radioactive survivor of an atomic bomb blast]. They kept repeating that for years!”
But even if Phoenix TV was a wasteland for movies, there was a lot more to watch than The Atomic Kid. In addition to The Twilight Zone, Steven enjoyed Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Steve Allen’s comedy-variety shows. When he attended high school in California, Spielberg (whose middle name is Allan) would introduce himself by saying, “I’m Steve Allan … Spielberg.” He also liked the comedy of Ernie Kovacs and You Bet Your Life with Groucho Marx. But the comedy show that influenced him most when he was growing up in Phoenix was the locally produced favorite Wallace & Ladmo.
“These guys [Bill Thompson and Ladimir Kwiatkowski] were inventive and original, and they turned me on,” Spielberg recalled. “They were my idols. I watched them every day. I grew up and I was supposed to be too old to watch them, and I still watched them, because they were very hip. They always kept abreast of the times. They were the Saturday Night Live before Saturday Night Live. Essentially they were contemporary humorists. They never talked down to kids, that’s what I remember most about them. They never treated kids as children; they always treated them as peers. I will never forget the day they took Stan Freberg’s album United States of America [i.e., Stan Freberg Presents The United States of America, a satirical revue of early American history], and they did the whole thing on their show, they lip-synched to the record. It was just great. I remember buying the album after that and memorizing it.”
• • •
STEVEN’S movie fanaticism was nurtured at the Kiva Theater on Main Street in Scottsdale, which showed sexy “adult” movies in the evenings but had kiddie matinees every Saturday. Parents would drop off their kids and leave them all day with fifty cents’ admission to a program including two features—grade-B Westerns and Tarzan movies, sci-fi and monster movies, and occasionally more prestigious films, such as John Huston’s Moby Dick and John Ford’s The Searchers—along with ten cartoons, Our Gang shorts, and two installments of the kinds of serials Spielberg would pastiche so affectionately in his Indiana Jones movies. “It was a great Saturday,” Spielberg recalled. “I was in the movies all day long, every Saturday. I saw Tailspin Tommy and Masked Marvel and Commando Cody and Spy Smasher—serials like that.”
“I’ve seen absolute duplicates in Spielberg movies of scenes we used to see back in the 1950s at the Kiva, in serials filmed in the 1930s and 1940s,” reports Barry Sollenberger. “When Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark rides his horse down the hill and jumps onto the truck carrying the ark, Spielberg got it from the 1937 serial Zorro Rides Again, with John Carroll, even the camera angle—Zorro is riding a horse chasing after a train, and he jumps into a semi truck going down a freeway.”
Arnold Spielberg took Steven and Jim Sollenberger to see Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho at the Round-Up Drive-In in I960, on a double bill with Roger Corman’s House of Usher. “Psycho absolutely scared the living shit out of me,” Jim remembers. “All three of us were in the front seat. Steve was in the middle, I was on the side, and I remember breaking his dad’s little wind-wing window.” Steven later told neighbor Tom Simmons how impressed he had been with Hitchcock’s employment of the power of suggestion: “Steve talked about the shower scene in Psycho, how Hitchcock never showed any real violence—he showed you the knife and this and that, but most of it was in the viewer’s mind.”
Steven and his friends could get a bit rowdy when they attended movies at the Kiva Theater—once they were kicked out for making too much noise —and when they took the bus to see first-run movies at theaters in downtown Phoenix. The uproarious scene of the ghastly little title characters in Spielberg’s 1984 production Gremlins tearing the theater apart while watching Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a homage to fondly remembered boyhood mischief.
When Irwin Allen’s dinosaur movie The Lost World played one of Phoenix’s biggest theaters in I960, Steven recalled, “My friends and I took a lot of white bread and mixed it with milk, Parmesan cheese, creamed corn, and peas. We put this foul-smelling mixture into bags, went to the movie, and sat in the highest balcony. At the most exciting part, we made vomiting sounds and squeezed the solution over the balcony on the people below. We did it for laughs. Little did we realize that it would begin a chain reaction of throwing up. The movie was stopped, the houselights came on, and ushers appeared with their flashlights—ready to kill. We were so frightened that we raced out the fire-escape exit. Even though we had brought two cars, the seven of us ran about a mile and took a bus home.”‡
Spielberg and his pals especially liked the historical epics and other big-screen spectacles in vogue during that period. “Ben-Hur [1959] was in town for a year,” Jim Sollenberger recalls, “but Steve, being Jewish, was reluctant to go see that movie because they advertised it as ‘A Tale of the Christ.’ I went to see it and thought it was fantastic. I finally persuaded him to go see it, and he said he was surprised a movie could be that good. Steve and I also saw On the Double [1961], a comedy with Danny Kaye, and we both thought it was hilarious. It’s tough to imagine comedy coming out of Nazis, but Danny Kaye did it. He would disguise himself as Hitler, and I can remember Steve for years after that jumping up and giving Danny Kaye’s Hitler salute.”
The movies that impressed Steven the most in his Arizona boyhood were two epics directed by British master David Lean—The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Spielberg later called Lean “the greatest influence I ever had.” He has emulated Lean’s magisterial sense of visual storytelling throughout his career, especially in the underrated 1987 World War II drama Empire of the Sun, a project he inherited from Lean himself.
Haven Peters, a classmate who acted in two of Spielberg’s amateur movies, remembers that in theater-arts class at Arcadia High School, “Steve was promoting The Bridge on the River Kwai as the greatest movie because of its stupendous action scenes, especially ‘the greatest scene ever’ (or words to that effect), ‘the way Alec Guinness falls, dying, onto the dynamite plunger.’ And, animated by the thought, he acted out Sir Alec’s famous fall.”
Speaking at Lean’s Life Achievement Award tribute from the American Film Institute in 1990, Spielberg declared that River Kwai and Lawrence “made me want to be a filmmaker. The scope and audacity of those films filled my dreams with unlimited possibilities.”
*
IN the summer of 1958, shortly after finishing fifth grade, Steven “was working on Eagle Scout and doing merit badges, and he kinda ran out of ideas of what to do for a merit badge,” his father recalls. “I said, ‘Well, they have a photography merit badge. Why don’t you take this little movie camera and go out in the desert and make a Western? See if the scoutmaster will accept it.’ So I gave him three rolls of film and he went out in the desert and made this little Western.”
The movie had no title cards. Steven subsequently referred to his first attempt at cinematic storytelling as The Last Gunfight, The Last Gun, and The Last Shootout.§ The primitive little Western, which was edited in the camera, had a cast made up of fellow Scouts and other pals, including Jim and Barry Sollenberger.
“A bunch of neighborhood kids went out in a station wagon with Steven’s dad to a restaurant named Pinnacle Peak Patio [a Western steakhouse in Scottsdale], which had a red stagecoach parked in front of it,” recalls Jim Sollenberger, who played the lead. “Steven’s dad did most of the filming, or all of the filming. We were not old enough to handle a camera. The movie was Steven’s idea. He had more of the director role; it was his toy.
“I played a bandit with a bandanna and a cap pistol. I robbed a stage with two people on top. The camera was positioned so that you couldn’t see that there weren’t any horses
. The people threw the money down from the stage. Then we got in the car and drove out in the desert. I remember my cowboy hat blew off during one scene and, like in the old Westerns, we naturally left it in and in the next scene I was wearing my hat. It ended with me being shot and rolling down the rocks. [When Jim was tossed over a cliff, he was doubled by a dummy made up of pillows, clothes, and shoes.] Steve and his dad had broken a ketchup bottle for blood and poured it on the rocks. I was grinning ear-to-ear trying to be serious. I remember getting no end of crap from them over the years because I was lying there dead and grinning.”
Making that early Western gave Steven “a sense of power bossing around a few kids who otherwise would be slapping me around. But that wasn’t so important. I was making something happen that I could relive over and over again, something that would only be a memory without a camera in my hand.”
When the film was shown at the next Monday night’s troop meeting, Steven recalled, “the Boy Scouts cheered and applauded and laughed at what I did, and I really wanted to do that, to please again.”
Steven began taking his camera along on every Scout trip, filming everything that happened, from the boys getting on and off cars and buses to their physical exertions and shenanigans at camp. When he showed the movies at troop and patrol meetings, some of which were held in his house, he enjoyed seeing “everyone come out of their seats, partly because they were in the picture.”
Starting his moviemaking career shooting film without sound was excellent discipline in the art of visual storytelling, comparable to the training received by the great directors who started in silent movies and perfected their craft in the sound era, such as Hitchcock and John Ford. Steven’s friend Terry Mechling also had a family 8mm movie camera, and over two Saturdays during seventh grade he and Steven put together a silent homage to Ford in Mechling’s backyard, a two-reel Western starring classmate Steve Swift. “It was pretty much action-packed, just a straight robbery-chase kind of thing, with the general store robbed and the sheriff chasing the robbers, more scenes than a thought-through movie,” Mechling recalls. “We both liked the same movie—John Ford’s The Searchers—and that was one of the movies we felt we could emulate.”
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