“One of the interesting things about that milieu,” his friend Rick Cook comments of the Arcadia neighborhood in the early 1960s, “is that it was so new, everybody was from somewhere else, and a lot of the old ethnic associations didn’t exist. Looking back, there were a fair number of Jews at the school—who knew? Who cared? The intense social status revolved around athletics—in the 1963 school year we were state champions in football—and the drama people were very much second-class citizens, neck-and-neck with academics.
“By the time I knew ‘Spielbug,’ he knew what he was going to do. But he was not narcissistic about it. The thing with him was not ego, not the shallow sense of ‘I’m going to be a big movie director.’ What interested him was making the movie, the whole process. He is still childlike in the sense that he is still fascinated with magic and a sense of wonder, but he was one of the least childish fourteen-year-olds I had ever seen. He was very focused, and that’s not a fourteen-year-old’s characteristic. If anyone I knew was going to make it, I thought he was going to, because he was so driven and committed.”
Arcadia’s stage facilities were of professional caliber. The school was locally renowned for its annual spring musical, an elaborate production on which as many as three hundred students would work under stage director Dana Lynch, musical director Reginald Brooks, and vocal director Harold Millsop. Spielberg was a member of both the Drama Club (joined by his sister Anne in her freshman year, 1963) and the National Thespian Society, an honorary group for drama students. Art teacher Margaret Burrell, who designed sets and costumes for the school plays, says that in addition to helping her paint sets, Steve would “organize everything—he would organize the crews and work with the actors. He was a nice young man, very cooperative and interested.”
The headline on the page containing his class picture in the 1964 Arcadia High School yearbook reads, “Spelberg [sic] Seen As Talented Actor.” No one who knew him in high school remembers Spielberg as a particularly talented actor, but he did have several inconsequential bit parts in school plays that he performed adequately. “He schlepped one of the bodies out of the basement in Arsenic and Old Lace,” remembers fellow actor Michael Neer. Spielberg played a soda jerk in I Remember Mama and, while serving as a prompter for the school’s 1963 production of the musical Guys and Dolls, he was the offstage voice of garage owner Joey Biltmore in a telephone scene with Neer’s Nathan Detroit. As a member of the school band, Spielberg also played clarinet in the pit orchestra for Guys and Dolls, as he had for the previous year’s production of Brigadoon. But he was more prominent in the drama group for his work with director Dana Lynch as her sometime stage manager and general all-around assistant.
“Steve would try out for acting parts, but he usually wouldn’t get anything because he wasn’t too good in that area,” recalls fellow drama group member Haven Peters. “He didn’t have a lot of personality; he was kind of awkward. Even in class, where we were all friends, he had trouble. We had to give dramatic readings, and he wanted to do well, he worked hard at it, but he had trouble memorizing lines. He would kind of stumble through it. I bet he has a lot of sympathy for people in that position, because he was always very nervous and shy. And in terms of class work, he was worse than average—he would never read the textbook.
“He always volunteered for other things. He would stay after school for hours and hours. Mrs. Lynch was kind of disorganized, and he was always willing to help her out in any way possible, running errands, ringing telephones [offstage], doing makeup, helping with lights. Some kids would kid him about being Mrs. Lynch’s pet, for hanging around her for hours asking to help with every little thing. I recall some of the girls, and [Steve’s friend] Roger Sheer, kidding him with names like ‘Nanny Spielberg,’ because he was always fussing about production details. But other people wanted to be in the spotlight. He didn’t. He had a good attitude about the theater: pitching in and doing anything.”
But it was largely through his filmmaking, recalls Firelight cast member Warner Marshall, that Spielberg “created a circle of friends, a whole bunch of people who admired him and enjoyed him. It was a way of giving people a chance to know him and get to like him. He enjoyed the social interaction of doing the film; he wasn’t just trying to use people. I had the sense of it being a communal effort, and he was the gentle leader.”
*
“PHOENIX has a young Cecil B. DeMille—young Steve Spielberg,” a local TV newscaster announced in 1961.
Spielberg’s first public notice came when a TV crew was sent to cover the making of his World War II movie Escape to Nowhere in the desert around Camelback Mountain. The forty-minute Escape to Nowhere, which began filming in 1959 and was finally completed in 1962, was a considerable advance in production values from Fighter Squad. With a cast of mostly adolescent actors shooting it out and emoting in a motley collection of makeshift uniforms, no one would mistake the movie for The Bridge on the River Kwai. Still, the 8mm color movie won first prize in a statewide amateur film contest, the 1962–63 Canyon Films Junior Film Festival (Canyon was a company that made industrial films). The prize was awarded in part because the director’s battlefield props and special-effects explosions appeared so startlingly realistic.
“When we showed up in the morning at his house to come out to film,” Barry Sollenberger remembered, “he had a pickup truck with a 50-caliber machine gun mounted in the back. I remember how awed we were: ‘Man, where does this guy come up with this 50-caliber machine gun?’ But I had enough foresight to say, ‘The machine gun—heck, where does a [fourteen]-year-old come up with a pickup truck?’”
Chris Pischke, who helped Spielberg stage the battle scenes, recalls what happened next: “We got to the location first, and waited and waited, and he hadn’t shown up. All of a sudden he finally pulled in—it turned out the police had pulled him over. They thought it was a real machine gun and he was going to spray the traffic or something. It was pretty funny.”
During a later part of the prolonged filming schedule, Spielberg had another brush with the law.
“The Highway Patrol came after us,” reports Haven Peters, who played one of the leading roles. “We were out in the desert, and some people drove by and reported to the state police that all these guys were trooping around in Nazi helmets and guns. Two or three cars of troopers came out to investigate. We thought, Are we all going to be arrested for trespassing? Somebody told them we were making a movie, and I remember Steve’s dad talking to them and cooling them off. After that they were really interested, and they hung around to watch.” Arnold Spielberg seemed to be the dominant personality in the making of Escape to Nowhere, says Peters: “I think he ran everything, that was my memory of it. Steve was running the camera, but his father was the adult—he was the one people really looked to for direction.”
Escape to Nowhere was shot around Camelback Mountain and at Cudia City, a local Western studio where Steve and his fellow amateur filmmakers occasionally made movies without permission. The ambitious silent featurette tells the story of a group of American soldiers surrounded by Germans as they try to capture a strategic hill in North Africa. In the process of trying to break out, all of the GIs are killed except for one soldier, played by Haven Peters: “I was all alone at the end, lost and done for. It ends as I’m just sitting there all by myself. It was sad. But in that movie there wasn’t any interpersonal stuff—except with bayonets. It was all action. I always felt that was what he was interested in. It was mass directing. What do you call it? Second unit. The whole movie was second unit. He reshot [some scenes] later because he wanted to have more close-ups. Even then, he would just kind of have the camera zoom in and show my face. It wasn’t like I had to act or anything. I had no input. That was always the way I felt with him and his father. I was just a body that got filmed.”
Although Peters was surprised to find that Spielberg had managed to round up as many as twenty or thirty boys for the battle scenes, they all had to double up as Americans and Germans
to make the cast seem larger. Spielberg attempted to dye white T-shirts black to make German uniforms, but they didn’t come out right, so his Germans wore blue with silver eagles. At other times, Spielberg resorted to old B-movie trickery to stretch his limited resources. He had a limited supply of German helmets, so he would have his soldiers run past the camera and pass their helmets to other kids, who then would dash around behind the camera and make their appearances. And as Esther Clark reported in her 1963 feature article on Spielberg in The Arizona Republic, to “give the impression in [one] scene of a long line of GIs sneaking past the enemy … Steve and a classmate simply went around and around a grinding automatic camera on the ground.”
“Since we had a jeep in Arizona, and I was the only one old enough to drive it in that gang,” Arnold Spielberg recalls, “I put on my Army fatigues, and I’d crunch down and drive the jeep, leading a column of American soldiers through the desert.” Steve’s mother also drove the jeep for some scenes in the movie, wearing a helmet over her short blond hair while playing a German soldier. Even Anne Spielberg found herself pressed into service. “We were shy a soldier the day we filmed the scene,” Steve told the reporter, “so we had her put on a uniform and helmet and got rid of her in a hurry, wearing a German uniform and crawling on her stomach.”
And he later recalled, “It was fun to get them dressing up. Difficult to keep them interested, though. I could only shoot on weekends. Monday through Friday, I was in school. Saturday and Sunday, when they really wanted to go out, have a good time, I needed them to come over to the house and be in a movie. For the first few weeks they loved it. They were great! After that, other interests developed. They got into cars. They got into girls. They wouldn’t turn up and I’d replace actors, rewrite characters out of the movie. That was the major problem.”
Jim Sollenberger, who had played the lead role in Fighter Squad, fought a hand-to-hand battle to the death as a German soldier in Escape to Nowhere. “This was the first time I can remember thinking that Steve had some talent,” he says. “Fighter Squad was just kids goofing around. It got pretty serious after that.”
“One time on Escape to Nowhere he had six cameras on a big battle scene—it was awesome,” Pischke remembers. “That scene was spectacular and sweeping—the way he set it up against Camelback Mountain in Echo Canyon, all the guys he mustered together, the explosives—can you imagine a kid filming a huge battle with explosions and firebombs? And it was on 8mm!”
“My special effects were great,” Spielberg boasted in a 1980 interview. “For shell explosions, I dug two holes in the ground and put a balancing board loaded with flour between them, then covered it with a bush. When a ‘soldier’ ran over it, the flour made a perfect geyser in the air. Matter of fact, it works better than the gunpowder used in movies today.”
Even more ingenious than the special effects was the way that Spielberg used Escape to Nowhere to deal with a vexing problem in his personal life, the bully who “made anti-Semitic slurs” against him at Arcadia High School: “He was my nemesis; I dreamed about him.” Struck by the boy’s resemblance to John Wayne, Spielberg had the brainstorm of asking him to play the squadron leader in Escape to Nowhere. Initially scoffing at the request, the bully soon found himself co-opted into acting under the command of the “wimp” he loved to torment.
“Even when he was in one of my movies, I was afraid of him,” Spielberg said. “But I was able to bring him over to a place where I felt safer: in front of my camera. I didn’t use words. I used a camera, and I discovered what a tool and a weapon, what an instrument of self-inspection and self-expression it is….
“I had learned that film was power.”
*
“THREE people in the neighborhood, within ten houses, were filming movies all through late grade school,” Barry Sollenberger recalls. “And when we got to high school, Chris Pischke and the Sollenbergers lost interest. Spielberg kept the interest and kept doing it, and the rest is history. Relatives of ours discouraged us—‘What are you going to do, film movies all your life?’—and Spielberg was encouraged by relatives of his. That made the difference.”
Friends who knew Spielberg in Phoenix have observed that, painful as he found his parents’ impending breakup, it also may have had some beneficial side-effects. “They didn’t hover, they let him have the space to go about and do it,” says Warner Marshall. “It seemed they had a lot of wisdom—they were either distracted or they realized he knew what he wanted to do.” The Spielbergs’ departure from Phoenix for California in 1964, putting Steve one step closer to the movie business, was in part a response to the marital tensions between Arnold and Leah, a last-ditch attempt to start anew in fresh surroundings. When the attempt failed, Leah and the girls returned to Arizona, but Steve went to Hollywood.
“The best thing that ever happened to Steven Spielberg was his parents getting divorced,” Barry Sollenberger believes. “If Steve had never left Arizona, he wouldn’t have had the opportunities to succeed that he had in California.”
• • •
IN 1962, the same year he completed Escape to Nowhere, Spielberg first set foot on a Hollywood soundstage.
While visiting relatives in the Los Angeles area, he managed to insinuate himself onto Stage 16 at Warner Bros. in Burbank, where a battle sequence for PT 109 was being filmed (Spielberg himself would film part of Jurassic Park on that same stage thirty years later). A rah-rah adventure movie about the World War II exploits of U.S. Navy Lieutenant (j.g.) John F. Kennedy, PT 109 starred Cliff Robertson as the future president and was directed by Leslie H. Martinson (whose Mickey Rooney comedy The Atomic Kid had driven Spielberg to distraction with its frequent appearances on Phoenix late-night TV).
Spielberg recalled that he “stayed on the set up until the moment when the Japanese destroyer sliced the PT boat in half.” Then, to his disappointment, “They made us visitors leave.”
*
THE stimulus for Spielberg’s first feature film, Firelight, was an unidentified flying object he did not see when he was growing up in Phoenix.
Fascinated by heavenly lights ever since that night in 1957 when he and his father saw a meteor shower, Steve, like virtually every American boy growing up in the 1950s, was intrigued by reports of flying saucers and other UFOs. He longed for the real thing—the chance to see a UFO with his own eyes. So he was devastated when he missed a Boy Scout outing, “the only overnight I missed the entire year. Wouldn’t you know,” and his fellow Scouts came back and told him how, at midnight in the desert, they all saw “something they couldn’t explain … a blood-red orb rising up behind some sagebrush, shooting off into space. I felt so left out not being there.” Patrol leader Bill Hoffman says, “One overnight Spielberg was absent out in the desert. I don’t recall who did it, but the story was told to Spielberg that someone had seen a flying saucer. Spielberg was very interested. It wasn’t true at all. As far as I can tell, it was a complete fabrication.”
The making of Firelight was made possible by the prizes Steve had won for Escape to Nowhere in the state amateur film contest. “He won a whole bunch of stuff,” his father recalls. “He won a 16mm Kodak movie camera. I said, ‘Steve, I can’t afford to spend money for film for 16mm. Let’s swap it for an 8mm, and we’ll get a good one.’ So we bought a real good Bolex-H8 Deluxe, the big camera that was built on a 16mm frame, but cut for 8mm, and so you could get 400-foot reels on it. It had telephoto lenses, single-frame motion, and slow-motion, so he could make all kinds of stuff with that. And he won a whole library of books relative to filmmaking. He loved those books, but he said, ‘I’m going to donate them to the school library. I don’t need them. I have the feel for it.’ As a gift for being that generous, I said, ‘OK, we’re going to up the ante.’ We bought a Bolex projector, and we also bought a sound system. It was the first sound system out for consumer use, a Bolex Sonerizer.”
The Bolex Sonerizer enabled Steve for the first time to record sound directly on film. After editing his footag
e, he would have a laboratory put a magnetic strip on the side of the film. He then would lay the sound onto the strip, post-synching the dialogue, music, and sound effects in his living room. With the Bolex camera, he could do multiple exposures, making it possible for him to produce professional-looking visual effects. “A lot of the technique was dictated by what the camera could do,” he recalled. The equipment he used for Firelight is “antique now, just as Lionel trains are now antiques, but I was able to use the state-of-the-art such as it existed in [1963] and still make films that were pretty sophisticated.”
Steve’s sixty-seven-page, fully dialogued screenplay for Firelight was completed in early 1963, near the end of his sophomore year in high school. He spent about six months filming it, from June through December of that year, with a cast recruited from Guys and Dolls and other school plays. Asked how the film was financed, Arnold said, “We paid for it.” The cost was “somewhere between $400 and $600, and I think Steve took in about $700 or $800. He made a little money.”
The characters in Spielberg’s script are cardboard figures reminiscent of dozens of grade-B 1950s sci-fi movies, especially Quatermass II (1957), British writer Nigel Kneale’s tale of alien invaders controlling the minds of humans (Spielberg admitted that Kneale’s Hammer Films featuring Brian Donlevy’s Professor Quatermass were a major influence). Much of the dialogue in Firelight is unintentionally comical, with overblown rhetoric and frequent malaprops (the script also contains many ludicrous spelling and grammatical errors). Everyone who saw Firelight agrees that Spielberg, who was making his first film with trained actors and a carefully detailed screenplay, had not yet developed into much of an actor’s director. But Spielberg’s innate narrative sense, his precocious flair for visual storytelling, and his already evident ability to orchestrate complex movement and character interaction (as outlined in the script) make Firelight a gripping, well-constructed (if overlong) yarn about a small group of scientists investigating mysterious red, white, and blue balls of moving light coming from the sky to abduct people, animals, and objects.
Steven Spielberg Page 14