Silvers says that one rainy day when he was in his office at Universal, he received a telephone call from Arnold (Arnie) Shupack, manager of information services (i.e., computers) for Universal’s parent, MCA Inc. As Silvers recalls, “I had met [Shupack] and gone through a course in computer administration under his aegis. Arnie called me and said, ‘The son of an old friend of mine from GE is here. He’s in high school and he’s a real film bug. Would you mind showing him around postproduction?’ I said, ‘Fine.’ Steven was on some kind of long weekend from school. So he sent Steven.”§
Arnold Spielberg, however, recalls that the person who set up his son’s meeting with Silvers was Stu Tower, who lived in the San Fernando Valley and was a cousin of Bernie Adler, the friend of the Spielbergs whom Leah later married. A salesman for Honeywell, Tower had become acquainted with Silvers after selling Universal a computer that was used in the studio film library.
Whether it was Shupack or Tower who arranged the meeting, Silvers gave generously of his time when Steve arrived at his office: “Because it was raining, I didn’t try to show him a hell of a lot of stuff. I showed him postproduction, editorial, Moviolas; I do remember him saying he had seen Moviolas. We spent the rest of the day talking and walking. He said, ‘I make movies.’ He told me about the movies he had made. I asked basic questions of him, how he became involved in film. That first conversation was a mind-blower for me.”
Spielberg told Silvers how his early interest in film was nurtured in the Boy Scouts and how it had progressed through his increasingly elaborate 8mm movies about World War II to the making of Firelight. He explained how he wrote, photographed, and directed his own pictures, casting them with neighborhood and school friends, devising the special effects, and even making the costumes.
“Steven was such a delight,” Silvers felt. “That energy! Not only that impressed me, but with Steven, nothing was impossible. That attitude came through—it was so clear. He was so excited by everything. When we walked onto a dubbing stage, how impressed he was! At some point in time, it dawned on me that I was talking to somebody who had a burning ambition, and not only that, he was going to accomplish his mission.
“He was very young for his age in all other respects. In the sophisticated parts of life, he wasn’t involved. But when it came to motion pictures, God damn! I knew he was gonna do something. I didn’t know what the hell he was gonna do, but he was gonna do something. You can’t walk away from a kid like that. Just out of curiosity, you want to sit and watch.”
After Spielberg went back to Arizona, he occasionally corresponded with Silvers, asking advice about production matters on Firelight, such as how to go about requesting permission to use an existing piece of music in his score. Eventually he returned to show Silvers the final print of Firelight. He had been telling people who worked on the movie that he was planning to show it to Universal, and that he hoped to convince the studio to let him make a big-screen version of Firelight. Silvers does not recall Spielberg discussing that idea with him, but he vividly recalls the astonishment he felt while watching Firelight:
“I thought, How the hell did Steven ever manage that? Firelight was fascinating. What a project! Something that really impressed me was that he had done a stop-motion animation sequence that involved movement of armored vehicles, cannon and so forth, through terrain. I recall him saying he went to the National Guard and asked to borrow tanks and equipment and they wouldn’t allow it, so he did stop-frame animation. I asked him, ‘How the hell did you do that?’ He said, ‘I had a lot of trouble. The lights would keep burning out.’ The lighting was uneven, I’ll grant you, but it was a totally credible sequence. Steven Spielberg is as close to a natural-born cameraman as anybody I’ve ever known.
“The other thing that impressed me was that he had recorded dialogue, various effects, and music, and he had mixed this. There was no doubt that he was special. There was this tremendous confidence everything was going to work out the way he wanted it.”
At the beginning of Spielberg’s senior year at Saratoga High School in northern California in September 1964, the school paper reported, “Steve Spielberg worked with Hollywood directors this summer at Universal Pictures.” Silvers confirms that Spielberg “spent that whole vacation” working as an unpaid clerical assistant in the Universal editorial department. The job enabled Spielberg to roam the lot watching films and television shows being shot and to hang out with film editors and other postproduction people, kibitzing and learning the craft of professional filmmaking. He would continue hanging out on the lot all through his college years, until, with Silvers’s help, he was hired as a director.
“The first time he came back there [in 1964] I got him a pass to come on the lot,” Silvers adds. “I couldn’t get him a permanent pass on the lot. Steven found his own way of getting on the lot. Steven was able to walk onto the lot just about any time he damn well pleased.”
At the time of his signing to a directing contract by Universal in December 1968, Spielberg first told the press the story of how he broke into Hollywood. To Ray Loynd of The Hollywood Reporter, he stated simply, “Through private auspices, I got a gate pass and studied filmmaking.”
* Steve’s unsuitability for a medical career was apparent when he took biology and was required to dissect a frog. He became nauseated and had to run outside to vomit along with other students, “and the others were all girls,” he noted. Before leaving he set several frogs loose; he endearingly recreated that scene in E.T., when Henry Thomas’s Elliott liberates all the frogs in his school’s biology lab, thereby earning a kiss from a pretty little blonde (Erika Eleniak).
† While working on Firelight, he helped another amateur filmmaker, Ernest G. Sauer, make a feature film called Journey to the Unknown, which also had a premiere at a local theater. Sauer, who owned some fairly sophisticated sound equipment, filmed most of his sci-fi fantasy in a soundproofed studio at his parents’ house. Spielberg was credited with the special effects on the film and also had third billing as spaceship mechanic Ray Gammar. Haven Peters, who played the lead, says Spielberg’s “main interest was in learning about sound technology.”
‡ A 1996 interview with Spielberg in Reader’s Digest dates that meeting in “the summer before his senior year” (1964).
§ Shupack, who is now president of studio operations and administration for Sony Pictures Studios, declined to be interviewed for this book.
SIX
“HELL ON EARTH”
HE MADE AN ENORMOUS IMPRESSION ON ME…. I THOUGHT HE WAS SO DEVELOPED – SO MUCH OF HIS PERSONALITY WAS IN PLACE BY THE TIME HE WAS SEVENTEEN.
– GENE WARD SMITH SPIELBERG’S CLASSMATE AT SARATOGA HIGH SCHOOL
SPIELBERG began his unofficial Hollywood apprenticeship at Universal in the summer of 1964, following his junior year in high school in northern California. His mentor, Chuck Silvers, recalls that the ambitious teenager gradually “worked out his own curriculum” on the lot, visiting sets and kibitzing with editors and sound mixers. Silvers offered Steven a place to hang out in the television editorial building, provided he could justify his presence by helping in the office for a few hours every day: “I said to him, ‘There’s a certain amount of scut work you can do that’s not involved with the union.’ There we had to be very careful. He couldn’t even be a junior apprentice—he was a kind of guest, a self-appointed observer who made all his own arrangements with the people who responded to him.”
Silvers shared an office with a middle-aged woman named Julie Raymond, the Universal Television editorial department’s purchasing agent, in charge of filling orders with laboratories and other subcontractors. “Spielberg was sixteen when I first met him,” she remembers. “He was working on the lot when he was still in high school. Chuck told him he could use our office to take phone calls. Chuck brought him into the office and told me the kid was floating around the lot. Spielberg used to come in to take calls and work on scripts. I was working my butt off and going up to see my husband [who
had cancer] in the Veterans Hospital in Sylmar. I had so much work to do, I gave Spielberg things to do.”
Spielberg helped her during the summers of 1964 and 1965 by “tearing down” purchase orders—separating colored sheets and carbons—and routing copies to various departments. He also ran errands to the Technicolor laboratory adjacent to the studio lot, and to other suppliers housed in that building.
In his accounts of his early days at Universal, Spielberg has never mentioned his office work with Julie Raymond. Instead he has gone to considerable lengths to turn mundane reality into romantic myth, saying that after bluffing his way past the guard and finding an empty office, he commandeered it, listing his name in plastic letters next to Room 23C in the building’s directory.
“I’ve never been in that office, let’s say,” Chuck Silvers comments diplomatically. Julie Raymond’s response is more blunt: “He made up a lot of stories about finding an empty editing office and moving into it. That’s a bunch of horseshit.”
Spielberg’s unpaid clerical job was the humblest, most mundane of beginnings, but it enabled the teenager to roam the lot with a purpose while seeing the inside workings of the studio system. The old-line Hollywood system was then in its last days before splintering in the creative, financial, and political upheavals of the late 1960s. But the Universal lot was the major exception to the rule in that era of studio decline. Still booming when Spielberg went to work there, it would remain so throughout his beginnings in television and features in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Those were the days when Alfred Hitchcock was making his last features on the lot, Universal TV was pioneering the made-for-TV movie format, and as many as two dozen TV series were shooting simultaneously. Spielberg’s professional training was much the same as he would have had working his way up the ladder from B pictures to A pictures at MGM or Warner Bros, during the “Golden Age” of Hollywood in the 1930s. While most other filmmakers of his generation know the classic studio system only from history books and old movie footage, Spielberg’s precocious start gave him an invaluable firsthand knowledge of how that system functioned.
“I visited every set I could, got to know people, observed techniques, and just generally absorbed the atmosphere,” he said in a 1969 interview. “At least I knew where to go when it came time to talk about contracts.” There were more tangible benefits as well. Running errands to the Technicolor lab “put him in touch with a lot of people who could get things developed and printed,” Silvers recalls. “When Steven moved to L.A., he graduated from 8mm to l6mm, and his dailies [raw film footage for his amateur films] got developed [at Technicolor]. And the paperwork put him in touch with sound people who loaned him equipment.”
Extraordinary as it was for a youngster to be allowed such access to a studio lot in those days when Hollywood was resistant to newcomers and had little in the way of formal apprenticeships, Spielberg became “more frustrated watching other directors at work and still not being able to get anybody to look at my movies or even stand still for five minutes to talk to me. I was sitting in an office with a telephone. Nobody to call. Nothing to do. I gave up watching other directors—it’s not healthy. They’ll take you into their confidence and tell you why they’re going to do something. But moviemaking to the casual observer is a long, boring, sometimes cacophonous process. It drove me out of the stages into the cutting rooms. I would hang out with the editors.”
He spent more time on sets than those comments would indicate. Julie Raymond says that during those two summers when Spielberg was working with her, she often picked up the office telephone and handed over to him “calls from somebody on set—‘We’re shooting, come on down.’ Almost everybody on the lot would be calling. He was a nice kid then. People would help him. He was ingratiating, and he was talented. He really knew the camera, and he seemed to know how to edit film already. He used to write scripts for his school friends. He couldn’t spell worth a damn. I used to read the scripts when he was still in high school and correct the spelling. He was very inventive. He didn’t have any money for effects, so he’d make a fade by blowing cigarette smoke into the lens. He didn’t have a zoom—I read the script and I asked him, ‘How’d you do that?’ He told me, ‘I put the camera on a skateboard.’ He was brilliant.”
*
IF Spielberg felt frustrated at being out of the inner loop at Universal, imagine his frustration when he had to return to high school in northern California following that first tantalizing summer in the Hollywood dream factory. “He was depressed with hanging out in Saratoga, a long way from Universal,” says classmate Mike Augustine. “For a seventeen-year-old kid, five hundred miles is a long way. He knew what he wanted to do; he was so confident and sure of himself. At the same time, he was having to live the life of the moment in high school.”
“We took typing class together,” recalls Spielberg’s best friend and neighbor in Saratoga, Don Shull. “He would rattle off the whole time practicing [typing] about Universal Studios and going to the movies, whom he was going to meet. He was so into his movie trip. I always thought this was a kind of dead period for him, but it really wasn’t—his mind was already into the next year or two. He had it all prepared.”
*
ARNOLD Spielberg’s new job with IBM as technical advisor to the manager of control systems at the company’s plant in San Jose was another step upward in his career, placing him in northern California’s Silicon Valley, the cutting edge of the burgeoning computer industry. His tasks included designing IBM’s new process control computer. “I built that machine, and that was the last machine I ever designed personally,” he says. “From there on out, I was up too high to do design work.”
The Spielbergs lived briefly in an upscale suburb of San Jose, Los Gatos, where Steven attended the local high school from March 31 through June 12. They then moved to a rambling hillside ranch house in nearby Saratoga, an even more affluent suburb of about 25,000 residents in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, ten miles from San Jose and fifty miles from San Francisco. There Steven enrolled in the five-year-old Saratoga High School, a sprawling, maze-like complex of cinderblock buildings, an oddly grim and graceless design for such an attractive setting.
Spielberg often has asserted, erroneously, that he spent only the second semester of his senior year at Saratoga High, but the school records show that he started there on September 14, 1964, and after completing the entire school year, he was graduated from Saratoga on June 18, 1965. Spielberg’s faulty memory may be the result of a long-standing attempt to repress some of his painful memories of Saratoga High, which he did not discuss publicly in depth until 1993.
Saratoga is an affluent smalltown resort, the second home for many wealthy San Franciscans and a bedroom community for San Jose and other parts of Silicon Valley. The growth of the computer industry and the spread of suburbanization in the fifties and sixties led to the rapid subdivision of most of the town’s remaining orchards and vineyards for tract housing, but Saratoga managed to preserve its old-fashioned, rustic qualities. “When you’re talking about the 1960s, Saratoga still was almost in a time warp,” recalls Hubert E. (Hugh) Roberts, who taught social studies at Saratoga High School when Spielberg was a student. “It looks like a small town, and it looked like a small town then; it’s all facade-country. It has a homogeneous, vacuum-packed element to it. Politically, you’re in an area that is somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun.”
The Spielbergs’ ranch house at 21143 Sarahills Drive had a striking view of the Santa Clara Valley. Their next-door neighbors, Don Shull and his family, could hear Leah’s piano music drifting down the hill from her sparsely furnished living room. Steven and Don usually walked together to school, about two miles from their homes, although Leah sometimes drove them in her jeep. The gently curving streets and hillsides, hermetically comfortable homes, and blandly conformistic suburban ambience familiar to movie audiences from such Spielberg films as E.T. and Poltergeist bear more of a resemblance to Saratoga than to a
ny of the other places where the filmmaker lived in his youth. As his classmate Jim Fletcher observes, “Saratoga was gentile. It was as gentile as gentile could be.”
Some of the kids at Saratoga High tormented Spielberg for being Jewish. Because of those harrowing experiences, he remembers his senior year in Saratoga as being “Hell on Earth for me.”
• • •
THE issue of Spielberg’s treatment at the school did not fully erupt into public consciousness until Schindler’s List was released. When Spielberg bared his soul to interviewers about his experiences growing up Jewish, speaking with particular passion of his problems at Saratoga, it ignited a firestorm of controversy and soul-searching in the town. “It was such a shock to all of us—our wonder boy, the boy we were all so proud of, actually hated us,” says Judith Kreisberg Hamilton, one of several other Jews in Spielberg’s graduating class of 290 students.
Recalling his time of “personal horror,” Spielberg told interviewers that “to this day, I haven’t gotten over it nor have I forgiven any of them.” The mistreatment, he said, “consisted of humiliation … being hit, being struck, having pennies thrown at me during study hall and name-calling. People coughing ‘Jew’ into their hand[s] as they walked by me between classes…. I felt as alien as I had ever felt in my life. It caused me great fear and an equal amount of shame.”
Spielberg remembered daily harassment and physical abuse. He said he was “smacked and kicked to the ground during P.E., in the locker room, in the showers…. Like most kids, I had been hit from time to time. But I had never been hit in the face. There’s something really humiliating about being punched in the face. My world collapsed. Although I had wanted to be a gentile out of a desire for conformity, the idea that a person would hit me because I was Jewish was startling to me.
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