Classmate Nina Nauman Rivera says that although Steven was “really shy” around girls, he had a crush on one of the prettiest girls in his neighborhood, who was in the class behind him, and he “used to try out some film ideas on her.” His friend Del Merrill describes a certain “buck-toothed blond-haired little girl” as having been Steven’s “girlfriend” in seventh grade. But Steven remembers his first romantic experience as somewhat traumatic: “I’ll never forget the time I discovered girls. I was in the fifth grade. My father took me to a drive-in movie with a little girlfriend of mine. This girl had her head on my arm, and the next day my parents lectured me about being promiscuous at an early age.”
That may have accounted for some of the reserve he showed around girls in his high school years in Arizona, a time when no one can remember him having a single formal date, even though he had female friends and worked with girls on school plays and on his movies. His friend and fellow movie-maker Chris Pischke thinks Steven didn’t date because he was “a fanatic about doing film. Plus, it would have cost him money that he would have spent on his movies. What made Steven who he is is that he was single-minded—he didn’t care about anything except making movies.”
“I don’t think he realized the crushes that some girls had on him,” Anne Spielberg said. “Some of my friends had major crushes on him. If you looked at a picture of him then, you’d say, Yes, there’s a nerd. There’s the crewcut, the flattop, there are the ears. There’s the skinny body. But he really had an incredible personality. He could make people do things. He made everything he was going to do sound like you wished you were a part of it.”
• • •
WHEN he was in eighth grade at Ingleside, Spielberg’s creative energies burst forth into a wide variety of cinematic genres, including his Western for Patricia Scott Rodney’s “career exploration” project; a filmed record of a school play, the mystery Scary Hollow, made with his friend Roger Sheer, a member of the cast; and a slapstick comedy. The comedy featured trick photography of students’ heads popping out from both sides of trees, speeded-up chases, and other sight gags reminiscent of Mack Sennett silent two-reelers. Spielberg screened it at Halloween 1960 as part of the school’s annual outdoor fund-raising carnival, in a booth on the playground decorated with a sign reading “Steve Spielberg’s Home Movies.” The filmmaker would show his little movie to anyone for a quarter.
The Spielberg movie that people remember best from that remarkable school year—the one that pointed most clearly toward his future—was a World War II flying movie, Fighter Squad. He had begun filming it in seventh grade, and it was his most ambitious project to date. The subject itself was not unusual for a kid in Steven’s neighborhood. “We all made films about World War II,” Spielberg noted. “It was because our fathers had fought in the war and their closets were full of props: souvenirs, uniforms, flags, revolvers that had been fixed so they wouldn’t shoot.” But the way Steven (and his father) managed to bring World War II alive on screen despite an infinitesimal budget still has people who saw Fighter Squad shaking their heads in admiration.
The black-and-white movie, which ran about fifteen minutes, integrated 8mm Castle Films documentary footage of World War II dogfights with scenes Steven shot at the local airport using vintage fighter planes. “If we were making a flying movie,” admits Barry Sollenberger, “it never would have dawned on us to say, ‘Let’s go to the [airport] and really shoot the scene in an actual airplane.’ But Steve got permission to go in the cockpit to film. He would stand on the wings filming as if the plane was actually flying.”
It was Arnold Spielberg who arranged for the use of the plane. “These planes were used for firefighting, aerial drops and things like that,” he says. “We got permission to crawl over ’em and even sit in ’em, but no keys to turn anything on. Steve would climb up on a ladder and climb up on the nose and photograph into the cockpit, with one of the kids sitting there with a helmet on. When he wanted to show him turning, he took the camera and [tilted it], and, so help me, it looked like you’re making a bank! He did his own planning. I would try to open doors to help him get things.” Arnold helped Steven augment the scenes shot at the airfield with close-ups filmed in a backyard mockup of a cockpit, using a painted backdrop and a household fan for a wind machine.
Doug Tice, who is four years younger than Steven, remembers being shown part of Fighter Squad in the filmmaker’s bedroom, which was jammed with movie photos and posters, camera equipment, props and masks, and model airplanes. “When you see a guy about your age in a fighter plane and it looks like a real fighter plane, you say, ‘Wait a minute, how did you do this?’ To this day I wouldn’t know how he did it. I asked him, and he said, ‘I can’t tell you.’ Steve was nice, but he would never tell you the secrets of how he did things.”
“I’d buy seven or eight of those [Castle] films and pull out all the exciting shots and write a movie around them,” Steven explained in a 1978 interview with American Cinematographer magazine. “… If I needed a shot of a young flier pulling back on the stick of a P-51, we’d go out to the Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix, climb into a P-51 (after our parents got us permission), and I’d shoot a close-up of the stick being pulled back. Then I’d cut to a piece of stock footage of the airplane going into a climb. Then I’d cut back to a close-up of this fourteen-year-old friend of mine grinning sadistically. Then another close-up of his thumb hitting the button. Then another stock shot of the gun mounts firing. I’d put the whole thing together that way.”
Jim Sollenberger, who played the squadron leader, remembers Spielberg also appearing as a flier in the movie: “Spielberg played a German—there were always Germans in Spielberg pictures, never Japanese. Spielberg’s interest was in the Nazis, and I frankly was a little surprised it took him as long as it did to make a movie [Schindler’s List] with them as real villains, not like Raiders of the Lost Ark. In Fighter Squad, Spielberg got shot, in a scene of a plane falling for a long time, spliced in with him in the cockpit trying to get out. He slumped forward and had black or blue food coloring coming out of his mouth. I filmed it; I was on the wing filming sideways into the cockpit to get the effect of the plane going down. I gradually tilted the camera to make it look like the front end was going down. I can remember him being all pissed off after he got back the film because I had shaken the camera too much. He wanted me to shake it a little, but I shook the camera more than he wanted. It was the only time in the years I was around him when he was angry.”
“You know how kids are in eighth grade—all they wanted to do was screw around,” recalls cast member Mike McNamara. “He would say, ‘Everybody calm down—we’re shooting a movie. We do this, we do that, and if you don’t want to do it, leave.’ Everybody else was doing it more or less as a game, and he was very serious about what the end result was supposed to be. It was his life. I was amazed how focused he was. It was unbelievable. It was scary.”
*
WHEN graduation ceremonies were held on May 26, 1961, for Steven’s class at Ingleside Elementary School, Pat Rodney wrote a Class Prophecy, imagining a reunion fifty years in the future:
“Some of us have aged a bit and may be difficult to recognize. We would like to take a little time out right now to introduce you to your classmates once more…. You there, with the tam and glasses, STEVE SPIELBERG, would you please stand so that we may see the producer of those great Smell-o-Rama Productions.”
Pat Rodney insists she was only making a joke about the then-current exhibition gimmicks of Smell-O-Vision and AromaRama (processes that wafted odors around the movie theater) and that she was not poking fun at the bathing habits of “Smelly Spielberg.” But otherwise the prophecy was remarkably on target.
Asked how she felt when Steven became successful in Hollywood, his favorite grade-school teacher replied, “I wasn’t a bit surprised by his film-making. He was a filmmaker. Always, from the early days.”
* Their house was in Phoenix, not in neighboring Scottsdale, as has o
ften been reported by Spielberg and others.
† One of Steven’s playmates in New Jersey, Cholly Devlin, claims that Steven started experimenting there with stop-motion filmmaking: “He had hundreds of toy soldiers, and he had a small movie camera. Steven would line up all his toy World War II soldiers on the living room floor, underneath his mother’s grand piano. He would move them and film them, and move them and film them, and move them and film them.” However, Arnold Spielberg does not recall Steven making movies in New Jersey. The family did not own a movie camera while living there, but Arnold says it is possible that Steven borrowed a movie camera.
‡ In Spielberg’s 1985 production The Goonies, one of the kids, Chunk (Jeff Cohen), tells that story about himself, calling it “the worst thing I ever done.” Spielberg later directed his own dinosaur movie called The Lost World, his 1997 sequel to Jurassic Park.
§ He also has called it Gunsmog, although his memory may have been playing a trick on him, for that was the parodistic title of an apparently unfilmed Western comedy project he described to The Arizona Republic in 1962.
¶ Spielberg did not mention in that interview what happened to him, if anything, as a result of his juvenile vandalism.
FIVE
“BIG SPIEL”
ONCE I COULD MAKE FILMS, I FOUND I COULD “CREATE” A GREAT DAY OR A GREAT WEEK JUST BY CREATING A STORY; I COULD SYNTHESIZE MY LIFE. IT’S JUST THE SAME REASON WRITERS GET STARTED, SO THAT THEY CAN IMPROVE THE WORLD OR FIX IT. I FOUND I COULD DO ANYTHING OR LIVE ANYWHERE VIA MY IMAGINATION, THROUGH FILM.
– STEVEN SPIELBERG
BECAUSE of its space-age design, students in Spielberg’s day called Arcadia High School “Disneyland.” Campus life centered around “The Flying Saucer,” a circular library building raised up on stilts—today the building is often referred to as “E.T.’s spaceship.” Affluent and bustling, the two-year-old Phoenix high school already had a strong reputation in both academics and athletics when Steve entered as a freshman in September 1961. He was one of 1,539 students, and by the time he moved to California in his junior year, the enrollment had increased to 2,200. In those days, Arcadia was “a typical suburban middle-to-upper-class white school [aside from its two families of Asian descent], where the kids had too much money, too many cars,” says fellow student Craig Tenney. “But it was large enough that you could find a circle in which you were comfortable.”
Steve’s boyhood friend and classmate Del Merrill remembers him being “a lot more popular in grade school than he was in high school. In grade school he was outgoing, smart, always working, ready to tell his story—‘I got an idea.’ Everybody was listening to him. He was relatively popular. I think he had a lot of confidence until he got to high school. Then he got quiet. When he hit Arcadia High School, something happened. The first couple years of high school I think was a gloomy, quiet time for him. He did a withdrawal from us. We had a lot of bullies at that age, among the jock crowd. Steve was one of the skinnier little runts. He got pushed around a bit in freshman and sophomore years, [when] everybody [else] had a growth spurt. I never turned on him, even though I was part of the jock crowd, but I’ve seen it—he was taking some knocks, being bumped into and laughed at or put down.”
One of Steve’s closest friends at Arcadia, Clark (Lucky) Lohr, suggests that he developed “a skill blending in and not being high-profile, maybe because he was afraid of attracting unwanted attention.” “Big Spiel,” as he came to call himself, formed his own tight little social circle in response to his exclusion from the jockocracy of Arcadia High School. “He had a social life going,” recalls Karen Hayden, who played in the school band with him. “He had friends and was going places and doing things. He was weird but good weird, independent-minded.”
A notoriously indifferent student throughout his years at Arcadia, Steve was “very much preoccupied with filming—he carried around a camera all the time and he was always taking pictures,” says his driver’s education teacher, Howard Amerson. “I was impressed with his determination to do what he wanted to do. So many kids don’t know what they’re interested in.”
Not everyone was so impressed with Steve’s monomania. “The neighborhood was all upper-middle-class and up, and the kids came in with the assumption that they were going to college,” says English teacher George Cowie. “That was fine, unless you happened to be a Steve Spielberg and were not interested in going to college.” Because of his frequent absences from school when he was faking illness to stay home and edit his movies, Steve “spent a lot of time being disciplined,” says his Drama Club adviser Phil Deppe. “He definitely did his own thing and went his own way, and that was fine for those of us who were going our own way as well. But the administration, oh, they didn’t like that.”
Arnold Spielberg had frequent clashes with his son while trying to steer him into becoming an electrical engineer or a doctor. Steve remembered his father being “very strict with me regarding all the high school courses that would lead me in those directions, such as math or chemistry, which I was intuitively horrible at. Of course I took the opposite trail and followed in my mother’s footsteps.”*
Steve’s friends were mostly creative oddballs like him, and the things they were doing were not mainstream interests at Arcadia. When he became part of the drama group, it was the first time he “realized there were options besides being a jock or a wimp.” But he still could not help regarding that group as “my leper colony.”
“Arcadia was the most status-conscious, rigid school in terms of class lines, a very stressful peer situation,” explains Steve’s classmate Nina Nauman Rivera. “If you didn’t fit into those parameters of having new clothes, having a boyfriend who was on the football team, you were worthless. Kids who were academically oriented, who were intellectual, or had big dreams just didn’t fit in. Steven was really shy, and he was introverted in terms of girls. Nerds didn’t get talked to. It tended to make people introverted.”
One night in 1963, Arcadia student Sue Roper was baby-sitting for the three Spielberg girls. Steve was lying on a couch watching television, and Roper asked him to hold still so she could sketch him. He agreed, and she drew him staring placidly but intently toward the TV through dark, heavy-lidded eyes, his face soulful and handsome but entirely oblivious to her presence. While she was sketching, she could not resist leaning over to plant a kiss on his lips. “After being around him a while, I was attracted to him,” Roper says. “It must have been hormones. I remember kissing him on the couch, and it didn’t make a dent in him. I kissed him and he didn’t kiss me. It was probably my fantasy. He never went to proms—I know because I was there—I don’t think he had time. He wasn’t depressed or moody, he was just too involved in being creative. It certainly wasn’t school he was involved in, and there wasn’t much interaction with real close relationships.”
“A lot of us would have liked to spend more time with him, but he was very goal-oriented and very busy,” admits Jean Weber Brill, who worked with him on plays and movies. Lucky Lohr remembers, however, Steve “had girlfriends, at least one or two, who would talk to him about their boyfriends or whatever. I heard one woman telling Steve how it was ‘really rough waiting for that phone to ring.’ I thought, ‘My gosh, Steve is this person’s confidant. They trust that guy.’ Certainly he wasn’t known as a big man on campus, but he seemed to inspire confidence in females. It impressed me he was mature enough to be able to talk to them. Whatever misery he might have been going through in high school, there was something very coherent and balanced about him.”
*
SPIELBERG has given accounts of his high school years that have tended to conflate some of his experiences in Phoenix with experiences during his senior year at Saratoga High School in California. Some anti-Semitic incidents that actually happened to him in Saratoga, according to friends and other eyewitnesses, have been incorrectly described by Spielberg as happening in Phoenix. This may be a result of his tendency to confuse the locales and dates of events that
happened in one of the five cities where he lived when he was growing up; a natural consequence, perhaps, of such a peripatetic upbringing. While Spielberg was bullied frequently in Phoenix, and at least some of that abuse did stem from anti-Semitism (overt or otherwise), the instances of anti-Semitism against him appear to have been more frequent and considerably more virulent later, in Saratoga.
However, Spielberg has recalled that he was tormented in high school by a bully who “made anti-Semitic slurs” and enjoyed pushing him around. The bully would shove his face into the drinking fountain between classes and bloody his nose during football games in physical education. The most frightening incident came when the boy tossed a cherry bomb at Steven while he was sitting on the toilet in the school lavatory; Steven barely escaped injury. These incidents can be placed with certainty in Phoenix because the boy appeared in a film Spielberg made while he was a student at Arcadia.
Steve gravitated toward Arcadia’s drama group not only because his interests lay in show business, but also because it offered a refuge with congenial, like-minded students who accepted him for what he was. The proportion of Jewish students involved in drama was much higher than in the school at large, so that was a factor in easing his acceptance. Teasingly known to some of his classmates as “Spielbug,” he was “a nerdy little Jewish kid, a nice guy, talented and dweeby,” recalls Sherry Missner Williams, who was involved with him in the drama group and is also Jewish.
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