Steven Spielberg

by Joseph McBride

  At the time “The Film School Generation” came to Hollywood, generations of nepotism had made the studios terminally inbred and unwelcoming to newcomers. The average age of the Hollywood labor force was fifty-five. There was no organized apprenticeship program to train their replacements in an industry that appeared moribund. The studio system, long under siege from television, falling box-office receipts, and skyrocketing costs, was in a state of impending collapse. The movies Hollywood made in the late sixties tended to be bloated, soulless, and increasingly out of step with the cultural and political views of youthful moviegoers. The future seemed daunting for the determined young movie fanatics who came of age in the sixties and for whom film historians Michael Pye and Lynda Myles coined the phrase “The Movie Brats.” Spielberg vividly remembers how he and such other “self-starters” as Lucas and Scorsese “had to chisel and dynamite their way into a profession that really never looked to young people, except as actors or possibly as writers…. There were no willing producers at the time I was trying to break into the business. My first thrusts were met with a great deal of animosity.”

  George Lucas, who attended USC, says that “the credo of film school that we had drilled into us every day” was that “nobody would ever get a job in the industry. You’ll graduate from film school and become a ticket-taker at Disneyland, or get a job with some industrial outfit in Kansas. But nobody had ever gotten a job in Hollywood making theatrical films.”

  The “USC Mafia”—who also included such other future Spielberg collaborators as John Milius, Robert Zemeckis, Robert Gale, Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins, Gloria Katz, and Willard Huyck—were unwilling to settle for such limited dreams. They ate, breathed, and slept movies with a passion earlier generations had brought to writing or painting. The funkier UCLA Film School—whose most prominent students from that period included Coppola, writer-directors Paul Schrader and Colin Higgins, and director Carroll Ballard—encouraged its students to take a more personal approach to filmmaking. USC’s Milius defined the difference between the films made at the two schools: “Ours were trying to be professional and imitative of Hollywood. Theirs always had beautiful naked girls running through graveyards. … They were, I guess you could say, more left-wing, a little more far-out. They used more powerful chemicals and they smoked stronger things.”

  Ironically, it took a UCLA student, Coppola, to start breaking down the doors of Hollywood for other film school graduates in the late sixties. He became, as Spielberg put it, “all of our godfathers.” Like many UCLA film students, Coppola was as strongly influenced by literature and theater as he was by movies. But he was pragmatic enough to start his professional filmmaking career by making nudie movies and working for schlockmeister Roger Corman, the only producer in Hollywood at the time who regularly gave jobs to young filmmakers. Coppola quit school when he was offered a screenwriting contract by Warner-Seven Arts. His Hollywood directing debut, You’re a Big Boy Now (1967), was not only a Warner–Seven Arts production, it was also his UCLA master of fine arts thesis, a dual achievement that inspired both envy and awe among his contemporaries.

  Largely due to Coppola’s groundbreaking example, others fresh out of film school began to be given opportunities to tap into the growing youth market, a market little understood by the “suits” in the studio executive suites other than as a welcome source of untapped profit. With the runaway success of Dennis Hopper’s 1969 counterculture movie, Easy Rider, “A bit of history opened up like a seam,” Lucas said, “and as many of us who could crammed in. Then it drifted back closed again.”

  One day in 1967, Spielberg went to UCLA’s Royce Hall to see a festival of student films made at UCLA and USC. The movies included Lucas’s futuristic short THX 1138:4EB (Electronic Labyrinth), which Lucas later expanded into a Warner Bros, feature, THX 1138.

  When he saw the short, Spielberg “was jealous to the very marrow of my bones. I was eighteen [actually twenty] years old and had directed fifteen short films by that time, and this little movie was better than all of my little movies combined. No longer were John Ford, Walt Disney, Frank Capra, Federico Fellini, David Lean, Alfred Hitchcock, or Michael Curtiz my role models. Rather, it was someone nearer my own age, someone I could actually get to know, compete with, draw inspiration from….

  “I met George that day, and I realized that there was an entire generation coming out of NYU, USC, and UCLA, and I was kind of an orphan abandoned in Long Beach at a college that didn’t really have a film program. So I even redoubled my efforts [at] that moment to attend those two [California] universities. And every time I went in with my application for transfer, they kept saying, ‘No, your grades aren’t high enough.’ I remember one teacher at USC said, ‘You’re probably going to Vietnam anyway.’”*

  *

  GOING to Long Beach State served its two primary purposes for Spielberg, helping keep him out of Vietnam and keeping his parents relatively pacified. But he later boasted to the school paper, “In college I didn’t learn a bloody thing!”

  “I didn’t think any of us could teach him anything,” admits Hugh Morehead, chairman of the Department of Radio and Television when Spielberg was a student. “Steve knew more about cameras than anybody in the department. He could teach the department.”

  The word “Film” was not added to the department’s title until after Spielberg left. With film studies in their infancy at most American colleges, Long Beach State, even with its proximity to Hollywood, felt no urgent compulsion to invest the money and manpower to begin competing with USC or UCLA. While Spielberg was there, from September 1965 through January 1969, the department existed mainly to train students for journeyman careers at local TV or radio stations. It offered courses in film appreciation and film production, but there was hardly any budget for filmmaking equipment; the production course used 8mm cameras instructors rented or brought from home. To practice editing, students would buy silent 8mm prints of old Laurel and Hardy movies and recut them. Spielberg was far beyond needing basic training in loading a home-movie camera and putting together a story on film. Acutely frustrated over his rejection by the gilt-edged USC, Spielberg felt being at Long Beach State was a “deterrent” rather than a help in furthering his Hollywood aspirations.

  “He was always kind of disenchanted with things,” Morehead recalls. “We didn’t have the film courses the guy wanted and thought he should be taking. He would drop by my office to talk, and he would say he wished we would get those courses and the equipment he wanted. The kid was absolutely captivated by motion pictures. I never saw him without cameras hanging around his neck. He was always shooting film. College didn’t seem to hold much interest for him, and quite rightly as it turned out. I felt he was passing through on the way to Hollywood. He should have been at USC. He was marking time [in Long Beach], but he found some people who were helpful to him. He was a very nice boy, the kind of kid you liked and admired.”

  *

  AS A freshman, Steven commuted from his father’s apartment in the posh West Los Angeles community of Brentwood. Their relationship, one of mutual support in the first few months after the family breakup, deteriorated during Steven’s college years.

  Arnold Spielberg’s financial support made it possible for Steven to lead his dual life as a college student and unpaid studio apprentice, but Arnold, who was working for Max Palevsky’s computer firm Scientific Data Systems, remained frustrated by Steven’s indifference toward education. Steven agreed to attend Long Beach State “just to be close to Hollywood, even though Dad still wanted me to major in computer engineering.” Arnold wryly recalls that Steven did do some serious studying during his college years—when it came to the subject of filmmaking: “Once he went to college he started reading up on it. He’d take theater arts, creative writing, anything but science.”

  Shortly before Steven started college, Arnold made a phone call to Chuck Silvers, Steven’s mentor at Universal, who describes their conversation, the only substantial one he and Arnold ever
had, as “spirited.”

  “Steven’s going to come and stay in Los Angeles,” Arnold told him. “He’s going to go to Long Beach State. I’d appreciate it if you would do what you can to make sure he goes to school.”

  Silvers said he couldn’t do that.

  “Look, there’s something you’ve got to understand about this motion picture business,” he told Steven’s father. “For Steven to realize his ambitions he’s going to need a hell of a big break. Somebody’s going to have to put a lot of faith and a lot of money up so the rest of us can see if Steven is who he appears to be. I’m Steven’s friend. If it comes to a choice of Steven having the opportunity to direct something that he could use as a showcase, I will advise Steven to do it, school be damned. Lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place in the industry, so you’d better be ready for it. They don’t care whether he’s got a degree or not. What they are interested in is what he can put up on screen.”

  As Silvers recalls, Arnold reiterated that he “wanted him to go to school and get a degree. My reaction was, With talent like Steven Spielberg you don’t set that kind of goal. What the hell good is a degree? That wasn’t Steven. You can tell if somebody is academically inclined or not, and he wasn’t. Steven didn’t have a whole hell of a lot of support from his father. His father tried to do the right thing. I don’t fault Mr. Spielberg. There’s no question in my mind, he was a good father. He was doing what a good father would do. I don’t agree with him.

  “I think Steven thought I was some kind of guru, which I wasn’t. I was determined not to be his father, either. Mr. Spielberg made it clear that I should, in effect, be Steven’s father. I didn’t want to play the part of a father. He had a father. My idea of encouragement [during his college years] was to be there. Basically that’s the only function I really served. Somehow I always became a listening board every time he got a story idea, every time he shot some film and had dailies.”

  Asked why he went so far out of his way to help Steven, Silvers replied simply, “I liked him. I admired this lump of raw material. When Steven wasn’t involved or talking about his involvement in pictures, he really didn’t have a whole big personality besides that. There were two Stevens, if you will. There was the one that made the movies and the other one was immature. One of them I knew would grow up and the other one was damn near fully formed.”

  As it became increasingly clear to Arnold Spielberg that Steven was not concentrating on college but wholeheartedly pursuing a film career, the tension between them grew. “His dad always had the attitude, ‘Get a job and get out of the apartment,’” felt Steven’s friend Ralph Burris. “Steve was having problems with his dad, who just didn’t want him around, basically. I don’t think he was all that supportive of Steve. I’m sure he felt Steve wasn’t living up to his potential. He [eventually] kicked him out and we ended up living together.”

  Don Shull, who visited Steven and his father occasionally during Steven’s first two years of college, had more sympathy for Arnold’s viewpoint: “Steve started out doing the starving-artist routine. He was cutting every corner he could cut to make a go. He wasn’t making money and he had to rely on his dad. It was apparent that Steve was just using Dad as a place to hang his hat. The last few times I visited I found myself spending my time with Arnold. I ended up going out to dinner with Arnold and Steve wasn’t there. Dad’s footing the bill and Steve’s too busy to go to dinner with him. He bought him a car, gave him a safe place to live—the mom sure wasn’t around.”

  Leah, who was living in Arizona, shared Arnold’s concern about their son’s lackluster performance in college. Long Beach State Radio-TV teacher Dan Baker remembers that “Steven’s mother would call all the time and she’d get very upset he wasn’t paying more attention to his classes. She would call [department chairman] Hugh Morehead and ask, ‘How’s he doing?’ Hugh would tell her, ‘Not very well, frankly.’ She was very upset he was not going to get a degree. He wasn’t interested.”

  Spielberg did forge a friendship with one of the Radio-TV teachers, a Texan named Billy Joe Langston. The late Joe Langston was “a concerned person” who became “very close” to Spielberg, recalls teacher Howard Martin. Spielberg later paid Langston an affectionate tribute in his 1974 feature, The Sugarland Express, which takes place in Texas and revolves around the abduction of an infant known as Baby Langston. But Hugh Morehead felt Spielberg showed more interest in his English classes than in his handful of beginner-level Radio-TV courses. His embryonic writing talents were stimulated by an English teacher, the late Ronald Foote. Morehead recalls that he and Foote “used to talk about this unusual and wonderful kid. Steven was an excellent student in English.” “His interest was in writing,” Dan Baker agrees. “He had all these stories running through his head, and he was always jotting down little story ideas. His TV series Amazing Stories is part of the storehouse [of those ideas]. He was saying that writing was something he wanted to do as much as anything.”

  Around the Radio-TV department, Baker says, Spielberg acquired the reputation of “a great talker and a great manipulator, talking his way out of certain things that were due for school projects. He would come in and out and he wanted it to go his own way. To me he didn’t exemplify responsibility and sticking to it. I thought he was a young fly-by-night kid who needed to grow up.”

  Spielberg has expressed some lingering regrets about not paying more attention to his college education. “I wanted to direct my first movie the day I graduated from the university,” he said in 1984. “That was the goal: first I’ll do four years of college, make my father very happy. Actually, looking back now, I wish I hadn’t had that attitude, because college could have helped me. If I’d paid more attention to college and less to motion picture making, I might have delayed my career by a couple of years, but I think I would have had a much more well-rounded education.”

  *

  SPIELBERG arranged his class schedule so that he could spend three days a week at Universal, watching filmmakers at work and trying to make useful contacts. He frequently slept overnight in an office at the studio where he kept two suits so he could emerge onto the bustling lot each morning looking as if he hadn’t slept in an office.

  “He just became part of the wallpaper,” Shull relates. “Nobody would stop him. Nobody would ask anything. He would always look presentable. The gate guards always knew him. He said, It was just like I owned the place.’ There was definitely a method to that madness.”

  *

  ALTHOUGH Spielberg never lived at the frat houses Theta Chi maintained in Seal Beach and later in Long Beach, his limited social life at the college centered around the frat.† Shull thinks Steven “was always looking for connections somewhere” and joined the clean-cut brothers of Theta Chi as another way of advancing himself professionally. Being part of a frat at a large, WASPish commuter college on the border of ultra-conservative Orange County no doubt was a form of protective coloration for the socially insecure Jewish kid from Arizona.

  But even though joining Theta Chi was characteristic of Spielberg’s youthful desire for assimilation into the American mainstream, it put him somewhat out of step with the changing culture of student life. Fraternities had fallen in disfavor with many students by the time Spielberg entered college. The social values of Greek life seemed hopelessly old-fashioned and reactionary to iconoclastic students galvanized by opposition to the Vietnam War and the incipient hippie movement. The antiquated racial and ethnic exclusionary practices of many fraternities and sororities also inspired a growing antipathy. Some fraternities at Long Beach State were known for excluding Jews, and there was one Jewish fraternity on the campus, Zeta Beta Thi. Theta Chi’s Zeta Epsilon chapter, formed only a couple of years before Spielberg’s arrival by what Burris calls “all the goofy guys in the dorm,” had some members who were “prejudiced against anyone who wasn’t white”; there were no blacks among its thirty-four members. But whether a prospective member was Jewish or not was “never really an i
ssue,” Burris says.

  After Spielberg was brought to rush by Radio-TV student Charles (Butch) Hays in the fall of 1965, Burris quickly forged an enduring friendship with Spielberg, becoming sensitized in the process to Steven’s complicated feelings about his ethnic identity.

  “If anything, he kind of downplayed being Jewish,” Burris recalls. “He never talked about it that much. But his kid sister [Anne] once gave him a small laminated bagel. He wore it around his neck until it turned green. I knew his Hebrew name was Shmuel. I used to call him that. He would go, ‘Don’t call me that.’ One [other] thing bothered him; I didn’t understand it then, although I do now. I used to have a striped dark-blue and light-blue bathrobe. He used to cringe when I wore it. He told me his grandfather had been in a concentration camp, and they wore outfits with stripes like that. [Neither of Spielberg’s grandfathers was in a concentration camp, but Spielberg might have been referring to one of his other relatives who died in the Holocaust.] It never dawned on me it was such an issue, because I’m not Jewish. At one point he asked me not to wear it. I thought, ‘What do I care?’”

  When Spielberg met Burris at the rush party, Burris was a senior majoring in English. He had always been interested in show business, and while growing up in San Bernardino, he had his own magic act. He took the film appreciation and TV production courses at Long Beach, but was planning to attend law school. The first words Spielberg spoke to him were enough to make Burris start questioning the course of his life.

  “You look like a producer,” Spielberg declared.

  When Burris asked what he meant, Spielberg said the seersucker jacket he was wearing reminded him of the jackets worn by the production coordinators he knew at Universal.