Steven Spielberg

by Joseph McBride

  Spielberg’s indulgence in “sick” humor about Nazis in high school appears to have been a vent for his anguish and outrage over his feelings of victimization as a Jew. Flouting a taboo and treating the subject of the Holocaust as black comedy may have relieved some of the pain he was feeling. “A joke,” observed Nietzsche, “is an epitaph on an emotion.” In flip-flopping between the roles of Jew and Nazi, Spielberg may have been distancing himself psychologically from his predicament at a terrible time of confusion, bitterness, and self-hatred. The boy who admittedly was “so ashamed of being a Jew” and “wanted to be a gentile with the same intensity that I wanted to be a filmmaker” may have felt compelled to put himself into the mind of the enemy.

  *

  AFTER he left Phoenix, Spielberg recalled, “[M]y life changed and I went without film for about two years [sic] while I was trying to get out of high school, get some decent grades, and find a college. I got serious about studying.” Although the stress of his senior year in a new city and school made it impossible for him to undertake anything as ambitious as Firelight,‡ Spielberg was not entirely inactive as a filmmaker during that year in Saratoga. He kept in practice by filming high school football games and by making two other movies, inexpensively but imaginatively.

  The murder of President Kennedy, which occurred while Spielberg was a high school junior in Phoenix, was the watershed event for the baby boomer generation, marking the end of its political innocence and the beginning of its distrust of the U.S. government. Spielberg and Augustine, fervent admirers of the late President Kennedy, wanted to find some way of expressing their pain and anger over his death. “I had a wooden Kennedy rocking chair,” recalls Augustine. “It was made for the 1964 election and it was put out right after JFK was killed. You wound it up and it would play ‘Happy Days Are Here Again.’ I showed it to Steve and he thought it was ironic that the thing would have come out after JFK died. He thought people should see that irony.”§

  With Augustine’s help, Spielberg made a three-minute film of the musical rocking chair, turning what could have seemed like a sick joke into an elegy to President Kennedy. “He shot into the sun setting in the wheat outside his house,” reports Augustine. “I had a piece of cardboard box or masonite I was waving up and down, blowing on the wheat to create a ripple effect. The rocking chair wound down slowly with this incredible, horrible, tear-wrenching sound and stopped on an off-note.”

  Spielberg also made a jocular documentary about Senior Sneak Day, the annual outing by Saratoga High’s graduating class to the beachfront amusements at nearby Santa Cruz. An elaborately edited series of Mack Sennett-like gags showing the students frolicking in the sand on a chilly day in May, forming pyramids and having a pie-eating contest, it was rounded out with a few scenes shot around the school.

  Without explaining why, Spielberg also filmed shots at the beach of several classmates looking up at the sky while flinching and covering their eyes. When he edited the film, the director mischievously spoofed Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds by intercutting “dive-bombing” sea gulls with the reaction shots of his classmates cowering in the sand. Among the victims of the gag was one of the bullies who had been tormenting Spielberg. When the movie was shown several times at the all-night graduation party on June 18–19, 1965, at the Bold Knight restaurant in Sunnyvale, Spielberg expected the bully to react angrily to the gag. But after seeing the film, his tormentor “came over a changed person,” Spielberg recalled. “He said the movie had made him laugh and that he wished he’d gotten to know me better.”

  *

  WITH Vietnam suddenly and unexpectedly looming on the horizon after the U. S. Marines landed in Da Nang on March 8, 1965, the problem of the draft hung like a black cloud over the boys in Spielberg’s class. High school seniors graduating that year were forced to confront the question of what to do about the draft, along with the more traditional problem of deciding whether and where to attend college.

  The draft law required a young man to register for the draft when he turned eighteen. Spielberg was in the middle of his senior year at Saratoga High School when he turned eighteen in December 1964 and had to register for the draft. With his love of a good story, he has implausibly claimed that his first close encounter with the Selective Service System came several months before that when he was standing in line to see Dr. Strangelove the first weekend that film played in San Jose: “[M]y sister pulled up with my father and ran out with the Selective Service envelope, which converted me to 1-A for the first time, eligible for the draft. I was so consumed with [the] possibility of going to Vietnam that I had to see [Dr. Strangelove] a second time to really appreciate it, and that’s when I realized what a piece of classic, bizarre theater it was.”¶

  Although Spielberg appears to have been relatively uninterested in politics during his senior year in high school, other than in issues involving racial and ethnic discrimination, he clearly had no desire to join the Army. He did not accompany Augustine and other friends to an antiwar protest against Lyndon Johnson in San Francisco during the spring of 1965, but according to Augustine, Spielberg already had antiwar feelings by that time, putting him ahead of many others in his generation in questioning the American involvement in Vietnam. Discussing his decision to attend California State College at Long Beach rather than spending all his time hanging out at Universal, he once said, “I was actually just staying there so I wouldn’t have to serve in Vietnam. If the draft had not been after me, I probably wouldn’t have gone to college at all.”

  His first choices were the prestigious film schools at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, but, ironic as it may seem in retrospect, he was rejected at both film schools because of his mediocre academic record. (It didn’t help that he failed to take one of his college entrance exams, the ACT, because his friend Dan Huboi’s old DeSoto convertible broke down the morning they were to take the test at San Jose State University.) “When Steve’s grades didn’t muster up, he got bummed out because he didn’t go to one of those master classes [at USC or UCLA],” Shull recalls. Even the intervention of Chuck Silvers with both universities was unavailing.

  Silvers, who like others in the industry sometimes lectured at USC, recalls, “I called Herb Farmer over at USC. Herb was coordinator of the cinema department for many years, and he was a friend. I explained the situation. I had this kid who was so unbelievable, and I asked if there was some way he could pull a little rank somewhere and get him into the USC cinema department. It didn’t work. Everything was filled. It was filled for years to come.”

  By the spring of 1965, Spielberg “was already working on Plan B,” says Shull. That meant using college as a place to hang his hat while he concentrated on breaking into the film industry through his own independent means. “When everybody was running around saying what school they were going to,” Gene Smith recalls, “Spielberg said, ‘I’m going to Long Beach State.’ I was taken aback. I thought he was way too smart to go to a state college. He said his grades weren’t good enough for USC, and Long Beach State had a great film arts department.” In fact, Long Beach State did not even have a film department at the time, although it did have film courses in its Department of Radio and Television. But Long Beach had one crucial attraction for Spielberg: it was in southern California, less than an hour’s drive from Universal. Spielberg could maintain a half-hearted presence in school, to avoid the draft and placate his father, while making contacts at the studio and continuing to make his own movies.

  Apparently Spielberg wanted additional protection from being drafted, in case he dropped out of college or otherwise lost his student deferment. After interviewing Spielberg for a 1978 Rolling Stone profile, Chris Hodenfield wrote: “The psychiatrists kept him out of Vietnam.”

  “I saw a shrink—primarily to get out of the Army—when I was eighteen,” Spielberg told Hodenfield. “I really didn’t have a problem that I could articulate, I didn’t have a central dilemma that I was tryin
g to get the psychiatrist to help me with. So I would just talk. And I felt at times that the psychiatrist disapproved of the long lapses in conversation, because he would sit there smoking his pipe and I’d sit there with nothing to say. So I remember feeling, even though I was paying the fifty dollars an hour, that I should entertain him. So I would go in, once a week, and for those fifty-five minutes make up stories. And sometimes the stream of consciousness, on the chair in his office, gave me great movie ideas. I would test all these scenarios on him…. And I got a feeling that, in all my movies, there’s something that came out of those extemporaneous bullshit sessions.”

  Seeking a draft deferment may not have been his only reason for seeing a psychiatrist. He was under extraordinary psychological stress during the year in Saratoga when he turned eighteen, and one of the things he learned about himself from those sessions was “that I could never lose control. I felt I would never regain it.”

  *

  EVEN though the topic of Spielberg’s family problems was “kind of a hush-hush deal,” Shull could tell throughout their senior year that it was “traumatizing the guy. The divorce was looming on the horizon. You could see that coming way off. It was very strained for Arnold and Leah.”

  The tension continued to manifest itself in Steven’s treatment of his sisters. Kathy Shull, who palled around with Anne Spielberg, says Steven gave his sisters “a horrendous time. He was after them incessantly, always terrorizing them. He would want to be in on the girl talk, but he wasn’t invited. Anne would tell him where to get off.”

  Another sign of Steven’s inner turmoil was his attitude toward his mother’s jeep. “Steve had a serious aversion toward that jeep,” Don Shull says. “It got so she’d offer us a ride [on the way to school] and we’d shine her on because of that jeep. It was a symbol of what was to come. I think Steve laid this divorce thing and the breakup of the family on Mom.”

  Arnold Spielberg moved out of the house on Sarahills Drive and relocated to Los Angeles around the time of Steven’s graduation from high school without honors on June 18, 1965. “As soon as the kids were out of school, the whole thing went to hell in a bucket,” Shull remembers. “Steve couldn’t wait to go down to Universal Studios and get in his groove.” Although more firmly set in his career aspirations than the average boy of eighteen, Steven felt an acute sense of anxiety over his future, heightened by the finality of his parents’ divorce: “[M]y mom and dad split, and there was no longer a routine to follow. My life changed radically. I left home and went to L.A.”

  Steven grew closer to his father during the period of the divorce and its aftermath, Shull thought. Arnold, in his view, was “a solid good guy, always there for Steve.” That summer, Steven chose to move into his father’s apartment in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles. He lived there throughout his first year of college, commuting to Long Beach and Universal City in a gunmetal blue 1962 Pontiac convertible his father had given him for graduation. “It was a beaut,” Shull recalls, “but it was a rattletrap, shaking and shimmying at traffic lights, with one of the funkiest engines.” While visiting Steven and his father, Shull saw that “things were going pretty well between them, especially that first year in L.A. They were a kind of support group for each other. The family was going separate ways. Steve was clinging to his dad, and his dad was clinging to Steve.”

  Leah filed for divorce on April 11, 1966, while still living in Saratoga. In a settlement agreement signed ten days earlier, she and Arnold stipulated that he would have custody of Steven, while sixteen-year-old Anne, twelve-year-old Sue, and nine-year-old Nancy would be in Leah’s custody. Arnold agreed to support Steven until he reached his twenty-first birthday in December 1967 and to provide $650 per month for the support of Leah and their daughters. The property settlement called for an equal division of proceeds from the sale of the house on Sarahills Drive and of the family’s other financial assets, which included three shares of stock in IBM, twenty in GE, and a piece of unimproved land in Cave Creek, Arizona. While most of the household furniture went to Leah, Arnold was allowed to keep such sentimental items as his mother’s samovar, his father’s silver wine cup, and his World War II mementos, as well as his set of Shakespeare’s plays, classical records and balalaika, prayer books and technical books, electronic equipment, and the family “movie equipment, except Ann[e]’s Brownie Movie Camera.” All of his son’s possessions went with Arnold to Los Angeles, including “Steven’s camera ‘dolly.’”

  The divorce was granted in Santa Clara County Superior Court on April 20, 1966, on the grounds of extreme cruelty. Leah and the girls returned to Phoenix, and after her divorce became final in 1967, Leah married their longtime family friend Bernie Adler.

  • • •

  LOOKING back on his year of “Hell on Earth” in Saratoga, Steven Spielberg reflected in 1994 that the experience “enlarged me as a person, made me more tolerant toward my fellow man, and perhaps ironically prepared me at the end of that year to leave my family for the first time to go into an uncertain world alone….”

  * At a Cannes Film Festival press conference for the premiere of E.T. in 1982, Spielberg revealed that he had lost his virginity at age seventeen (the girl was not identified). Variety reported that Spielberg’s sexual initiation took place “at a Holiday Inn motel with a creature that was anything but extraterrestrial.”

  † While in seventh grade at Ingleside Elementary School in Phoenix, Spielberg had filmed the school’s flag football games, touch-football contests in which the players would grab a flag from a rival’s uniform instead of tackling him. Steven was “just filming the action,” recalls classmate Terry Mechling, but “the coach gave us the films to see how we were doing.”

  ‡ “When I make movies,” Spielberg told Saratoga neighbor Susie Didinger, “my movies are going to be worth three dollars.” He was referring to the admission price in those days for such road-show spectaculars as Lawrence of Arabia and My Fair Lady.

  § Today Augustine likes to think of himself as another Indiana Jones, traveling the world buying and selling antiques and other rare objects.

  ¶ The trouble with the story is that the first weekend Dr. Strangelove played in San Jose was March 20–22, 1964. Not only was Spielberg still seventeen at the time, but that was also the last weekend he spent in Phoenix; Firelight premiered the following Tuesday, the day before he and his family left for California.

  SEVEN

  “A HELL OF A BIG BREAK”

  MY FIRST LOVE, MY MAIN OBJECTIVE IN LIFE, IS MAKING MOVIES. THAT’S MY WHOLE LIFE. EVERYTHING ELSE IS SECONDARY. RIGHT NOW I NEED BOTH FILM EXPERIENCE AND EDUCATION. AND I’M GETTING BOTH.

  – STEVEN SPIELBERG, 1967

  ALTHOUGH he often has been described as part of “The Film School Generation,” Spielberg never attended film school. Unlike such contemporaries as George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Brian De Palma, who learned their craft at prestigious film schools in the 1960s, Spielberg remained essentially an autodidact. He took the few rudimentary film and television courses then available at California State College at Long Beach, but as he had done from his boyhood beginnings as a maker of 8mm films, Spielberg followed his own eccentric path to a professional directing career.

  Universal Studios, in effect, was Spielberg’s film school. But it was a training ground much different from the film schools of USC, UCLA, and New York University, giving him an education that, paradoxically, was both more personal and more conventional than he would have received in an academic environment. Spielberg devised what amounted to his own private tutorial program at Universal, immersing himself in the aspects of filmmaking he found most crucial to his development, both as an observer and, later, as a TV director. Universal had as many as twenty-two series in production during that period, a phenomenal amount of activity, enough to give even a youngster a chance to direct—if that youngster was as promising as Steven Spielberg.

  Unusual though Spielberg’s apprenticeship was in the Hollywood of
the 1960s, it resembled the kind of training he might have received if he had worked his way up through the studio system in the 1930s. Universal was the one studio in the late sixties that still functioned like a studio factory from the “Golden Age” of Hollywood. Both in its production methods and in its choice of material, Universal tended to be a conservative place, institutionally resistant to the cultural and political upheavals that were tearing the country apart. Spielberg’s solid grounding in the classical studio system set him apart from most of his contemporaries. While other young filmmakers were trying to change the system, Spielberg was learning to work within it. Spielberg’s early years at Universal did much to shape his distinctive personality as a filmmaker, not only by honing his organizational skills and technical expertise, but also by strengthening his instinctive affinity for popular filmmaking.

  *

  A 1968 Time magazine article on “The Student Movie Makers” observed that students all over the country were “turning to films as a form of artistic expression…. The reason for this celluloid explosion is the widespread conviction among young people that film is the most vital modern art form. Jean Cocteau believed that movies could never become a true art until the materials to make them were as inexpensive as pencil and paper. The era he predicted is rapidly arriving.” Spielberg began making films earlier than any of the other famous directors who would emerge from his generation. But he was so far out of the trendy film school loop that he was not mentioned in the otherwise remarkably prescient article, which highlighted the student work of Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas, and John Milius.