Spielberg remembers having made about fifteen or twenty 8mm movies as an amateur filmmaker, but that rough estimate covers only his completed story films, not all the varied footage he shot while growing up. His movies sometimes had no stories, but were simply experiments in filming techniques. “He would look at anything and see how it would look through the lens,” Mechling says. Steven even hooked up a camera cart behind his cocker spaniel, Thunder, and had the dog tow it around the neighborhood to make a movie called A Day in the Life of Thunder.
Steven “had an attitude about the use of film that I didn’t,” Arnold Spielberg says. “I’m a Depression baby. When I grew up, everything was expensive. When I used to put film in the camera, I tried to use every bit for taking pictures. He’d take several rolls and he’d experiment. He’d try out close-ups, he’d try out stop frames, he’d try out slow motion. I used to say, ‘Steve! Use the film efficiently!’ He said, ‘Dad, I gotta experiment.’” Cinematographer Allen Daviau has described Arnold as Steven’s “first producer.” “That’s right—‘Watch the money!’” Arnold laughs. “That’s what they say about George Lucas [who has produced Spielberg’s three Indiana Jones movies]: Lucas would try to control the number of retakes that he wanted to do. Now Steve’s good at it. He knows how to manage things.”
Steven soon became impatient with the limitations of his 8mm home movie camera. “I remember I was over at his house,” says next-door neighbor Bill Simmons Jr., “and I went in the bathroom and he was working on some kind of sound effects in the sink, making different sounds in the water.” Jim Sollenberger recalls an even more remarkable experiment Steven made with him when they were thirteen years old: “He filmed me as a hideous intruder in the night, coming down the hallway in his house directly into his bedroom. He filmed it in 8mm—in CinemaScope. He bought an anamorphic lens that he had found in a catalogue, that would squeeze the image down. He put one adapter on the camera and one on the projector. For most of the filming, he was lying on the floor looking up at me. He’d bought a spotlight, and it was hotter than hell. I was holding a big butcher knife, and he filmed me quite effectively—I turned the knife in such a way that we saw a glint of it coming across his camera a couple of times.”
When Steven was in eighth grade, teacher Pat Rodney had a “career exploration” project, encouraging students to show what they planned to do for a living. Steven went out in the desert with some classmates and made another 8mm Western, this time with a primitive soundtrack. His teacher recalls that Steven ran an accompanying tape of “dialogue, screaming, and galloping. They were rolling around in the desert shooting and stuff. One of the things I remember was the money he spent on props to make it look realistic. He spent his allowance on bags of blood. We had a great time—we ran the movie forward and backward, and we all hollered. We all knew he had some special talent.”
“I’m going to make movies,” Steven told the class. “I’m going to direct and produce movies.”
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“I WAS an exhibitor when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old,” Spielberg has recalled. “I exhibited 16mm movies for a charity in my dad’s family room in Phoenix, Arizona. And I never made those movies. I never made Davy Crockett or Toby Tyler or any of the [other] Disney films that were available to me to exhibit for this charity. But in watching the reaction of the kids getting off on the movies, I felt as if I had made those films…. I wanted to run my amateur theater like the big time. It gave me the feeling I was part of a large industry.”
In fact, as people who attended those screenings vividly recall, Steven did show his own movies, usually as curtain-raisers for the programs of Hollywood features, cartoons, and serials. Some of the profits were given to the building fund of a local school for the retarded, the Perry Institute. In July 1962, The Arizona Republic ran a feature on four benefit screenings of Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier Steven held on a single day. “Producer-director-scriptwriter-cameraman Steven Spielberg, age 15, has now turned entrepreneur,” wrote columnist Maggie Savoy. He told her he would have shown one of his own films to help the Perry Institute, but that most of the neighborhood kids had already seen all of his movies, and “anyway, they’re nothing great. They don’t have any stars in them—just all my friends.”
Steven made his own posters and ran off advertising fliers on his father’s office mimeograph machine. His father would bring home a GE 16mm projector. Anne and Sue took tickets and peddled popcorn, candy bars, Kool-Aid, and Popsicles at a refreshment stand during intermissions. “Leah would leave—she would abandon it,” Steven’s friend Doug Tice remembers. “They had an agreement he had to clean up when he was done.” On summer nights, Steven devised his own equivalent of a drive-in movie theater by hanging a sheet on his mother’s clothesline in the backyard and showing movies to kids gathered on his patio.
Between screenings, Steven quizzed his audiences about their reactions, using the neighborhood kids as his own early version of what Hollywood today calls a “focus group.” It was invaluable feedback for a budding director who wanted to understand how to appeal to the mass audience. And by immersing himself in the nuts and bolts of exhibiting movies, he acquired knowledge that has enabled him to supervise the marketing and distribution of his Hollywood productions with a rare degree of expertise. Barry Sollen-berger was impressed by Steven’s precocious commercial savvy: “He would rent Francis (The Talking Mule). I thought it was a goofy movie, but the neighborhood kids loved it. He would rent what the kids would see, what would sell.”
The primary purpose of Steven’s screenings, Arnold Spielberg says, was “to make money for his movies.” When he began making movies, Steven recalled, “My dad financed them—about twenty bucks per film.” But after Steven’s filmmaking became a steady habit, he found he needed an additional source of revenue. The money raised by selling concessions at the screenings “was used to finance his ongoing purchase of film,” Arnold explains. “He’d give the girls a little, but the rest was his money to buy whatever film he wanted. I wouldn’t let him keep the money for admission. I said, ‘You can’t do that. We’re using somebody else’s film. It’s not licensed to us.’ So he would donate that money to the Perry Institute for retarded children, and he would get a lot of publicity out of that. I said, ‘You got more credit for donating that money to the Perry Institute than you would out of saving it and buying film.’”
From time to time Steven augmented his income from the screenings by whitewashing fruit trees to protect them from bugs and the blistering Arizona heat. Like other boys, he would pick up fifteen or twenty dollars spending a few hours whitewashing the trees in neighbors’ yards. Another time, he went to the Scottsdale shop of his family hairdresser, Paul Campanella, and said, “You need something done here. I know I can earn fifty dollars. Let me look around.” As Campanella remembered, “He looked around and went to the ladies’ room, checked it out, and said, ‘Your ladies’ room is terrible. Let me do it all.’ So I said, ‘OK, go ahead, paint it all.’ I went to look at it the next morning. I couldn’t believe what he painted. He painted the faucets, he painted the handle on the toilet, he painted the trap underneath the sink, he painted the little [aperture] around the drain, he painted the chrome around the mirror.”
For all of Spielberg’s business enterprises, “He didn’t really care about making money,” Doug Tice points out. “That was not one of his goals. Even when he was showing movies at his house, he wasn’t doing it to make money. He was doing it to support his addiction to making movies.”
“People who don’t know me think I’m just motivated by money or success,” Spielberg told The New York Times in 1992. “But I’ve never been motivated by that. I’ve never based a decision on money.”
*
STEVEN’S fascination with collecting soundtracks began when he bought the album for George Pal’s 1950 sci-fi movie Destination Moon, and it became an enduring passion. He has hundreds of movie soundtrack albums, including some of the rarest titles. His
intimate familiarity with classic movie scores and composers has helped him greatly in conceiving scenes with music as an integral component, and in talking the musical language of longtime collaborator John Williams. Spielberg would “make my 8mm home movies when I was a kid by taking the soundtrack from some score like [Elmer Bernstein’s] The Great Escape or [Miklos Rozsa’s] Spellbound and inventing a movie to the music.”
“I can remember spending summer afternoons, when it was miserable outside, in Steven’s room listening to soundtrack albums,” says Bill Hoffman, who played the piano for high school musicals while Steven played the clarinet. Tom Simmons ‘‘never will forget” the day Steven came to his house, discovered his xylophone, and “hit notes playing songs from every single Western known to man on television—Gunsmoke, Maverick, Cheyenne, whatever was on TV in those days.”
Influenced by his mother’s love of music, Steven joined the Ingleside Thunderbird Band, spending several years playing the clarinet at school ceremonies, recitals, and football games, and marching in a black-and-white uniform with a gold-plumed high hat in local parades, including the annual Parado del Sol before 100,000 people in Scottsdale. The band’s repertoire included the standard John Philip Sousa marches and the “Colonel Bogey March” from The Bridge on the River Kwai.
“He was a very energetic young lad, well liked by all of those around him,” says band director Rodney Gehre. “He was obedient, he was a good listener, and he had discipline. I always gave him the top grade. But it’s a good thing he did what he did [i.e., made movies], because he probably wouldn’t have made it as a musician. Well, maybe he would have. He was very creative—he would take a little lick on his instrument and make a little jazz figure on it. It seemed that playing the clarinet was a good release for him.”
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WHEN Steven was in his second semester of fifth grade, teacher Helen Patton went to Ingleside principal Richard T. Ford and complained about his obsession with moviemaking. “He was driving her nuts,” Ford recalls. “He did some filming at the school, and he was always talking about it. I remember having a talk with him in my office. He came in—I think he took his camera into the office—and talked about what he was doing. I said to her, ‘Oh, for cryin’ out loud, get off the kid’s back and leave him alone.’ I wasn’t encouraging him because he was making movies, even though I’d like to say that—it was because he was active, because he was a busy little guy, and he never bothered anybody; and because I always liked to have kids be in a position where they could dream. If a kid wanted to sit by himself beside a wall and watch the clouds go by, that was fine with me. There has to be a time for dreams.”
When called upon to read aloud in class, Steven, much to his embarrassment, was “a very slow reader.” Even today he considers it “sort of a shame” that he does not have the same passion for reading that he has for motion pictures. It is an intriguing question how much his prodigious visual sense may be compensation for his difficulties with reading, and, conversely, how much his difficulties with reading stem from his intense inclination toward the visual. His mind would often wander while he was reading in school, and he would amuse himself by drawing stick figures on the edges and flipping the pages, making his own animated movie.
Although he never made the honor roll, during his last two years in grade school Spielberg impressed social studies teacher Pat Rodney as “a good student,” demonstrating an especially keen interest in history. It was in her class that the future director of Schindler’s List first saw film footage of the Nazi concentration camps. She ran a documentary about Nazism called The Twisted Cross, which “showed the real thing—dead bodies, people hanging from barbed wire—it was shocking. In order to show the movie I had to get permission from the parents. I did it for several years, and I always involved somebody who was a true Holocaust person, who’d been in the camps.”
While on location in Poland making Schindler’s List, Spielberg told a journalist that although he had relatives who died in the Holocaust, and although he knew Holocaust survivors as a child in Cincinnati, those stories did not become real to him until he saw The Twisted Cross.
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THERE was a dark side to Steven in his childhood, a pent-up aggression stemming from the harassment he received from bigger boys and from the tensions between his parents. “He could be a little brat at times,” remembers Sylvia Gaines, who lived across the street. “He was always out there pelting younger kids with oranges. At his bar mitzvah [open house at his home on January 10, I960], they had to call the kids off—he was up on the roof throwing oranges. I’m sure he was venting some of his latent talent.”
In the same 1978 interview in which he confessed to the vomiting prank in a movie theater, Spielberg described his most serious instance of youthful misconduct: “By today’s standards, we were pretty straight. But I did have a six-month fling as a juvenile delinquent. One day I went with four of my friends to a modern shopping mall that was being built and threw rocks at plate-glass windows for three hours. We later discovered we had caused about thirty thousand dollars’ worth of damage.”¶
He usually took out his frustrations by bullying his “three screaming younger sisters” and some of their little girlfriends.
“Every Saturday morning my parents would escape from the four of us kids,” Anne Spielberg has recalled. “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.”
Nancy never has forgotten the time when she and her sisters “were sitting with our dolls, and Steven was singing as if he was on the radio. Then he interrupted himself ‘to bring us an important message.’ He announced that a tornado was coming, then flipped us over his head to safety. If we looked at him, he said, we’d turn to stone.”
“When I would put Annie to bed,” their mother recalled, “Steven would hide outside her window and say in this eerie voice, ‘I am the Mooooon!’ Annie would scream in terror…. Once I bought Nancy a doll for Hanukkah, and one night while I was out, he cut off the doll’s head and served it to her on a big platter with a bed of lettuce and garnished with parsley and tomatoes. At this point Nancy didn’t even freak out. Baby-sitters would not come into the house. They’d say, ‘We’ll take care of the girls if you take him with you.’”
“I remember being totally scared of him,” says Janice Zusman, who lived in the house behind the Spielbergs. “One time Susie and I were playing Barbie dolls by the canal near our house, on Indian School Road. I would have been grounded for life if my parents knew I’d even gone near the canal. We were pretending it was the Grand Canyon. Steve was bugging us and teasing us: ‘If you don’t do whatever’—unfortunately, I don’t remember what it was he wanted us to do—‘then I’m going to throw your Barbie into the canal.’ He grabbed my Barbie doll and yanked the head off and threw it into the canal. The most important thing in my life was this Barbie doll! It was so traumatic I’ve been talking about it ever since. The worst thing was that I couldn’t tell my folks, so I had to go down and fish the head out of the canal.”
“Steven loves to do that stuff—he was always doing something to scare somebody,” says neighbor Bill Gaines. “He’d get younger kids in some kind of situation he wanted—when Sue and Anne were over at our house climbing trees or whatever—and he’d get it on film real quick. He always had a camera ready so whatever the moment was he’d catch it for future use later on. He was almost fanatical about having his camera with him.”
Reminiscing about his behavior toward his sisters, Steven admitted, “I loved terrifying them to the point of cardiac arrest. I remember a movie on television 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 fishbowl. I can still hear the terror breaking in their voice
s.” He also used the closet as the setting for another exercise in creative sadism. The props included a plastic skull, a light bulb, a pair of goggles, and his father’s Army Air Forces aviator cap. Out of them Steven fashioned the desiccated head of a dead World War II pilot. Luring the girls into the darkened closet, Steven switched on the light inside the skull and relished the sound of his sisters screaming at the grisly apparition.
His later penchant for scaring the wits out of movie audiences is a creative outgrowth of those childhood pranks. He has described Poltergeist as “all about the terrible things I did to my younger sisters.” From Spielberg’s boyhood fondness for mutilating dolls and smearing ketchup on the walls to make his sisters believe they were seeing blood, it was a short step to showing a little girl abducted by ghosts inside her suburban home and homicidal skeletons bursting out of the backyard swimming pool. And in the Indiana Jones movies, those extended homages to his boyhood moviegoing experiences at the Kiva Theater, Spielberg’s relish in putting his heroines through the most grueling ordeals with such creatures as snakes, bugs, and rats has the unmistakable aura of an incorrigible overgrown adolescent’s tormenting of the opposite sex.
*
NOT every girl in Steven’s neighborhood was afraid of him.
“Of all those older boys, Steven was the nicest, because he just wanted to take pictures of us,” says actress Lynda Carter, who is four years younger than Steven. “He at least interacted with us instead of torturing us and tying us to trees. He had an 8mm camera and he was always filming. My sister Pamela and I always put on shows in our backyard—singing and dancing— and he filmed some of them. I recall our begging him to film us. He would go, ‘Oh, OK.’ He did ask us to do crazy things, like hanging in trees, but he didn’t ever really traumatize us.”
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