Steven Spielberg

by Joseph McBride

  Many people assumed Spielberg could only have made The Color Purple in a calculated and cynical attempt to win an Academy Award. There was no doubt he was impatient with the widespread perception of his work as juvenile escapism, and that he was seeking greater respect by making an “adult” film from a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel dealing with the kinds of themes that often impress Academy voters. The director spoke frankly of wanting “to challenge myself with something that was not stereotypically a Spielberg movie. Not to try to prove anything, or to show off—but just to try to use a different set of muscles.” The lingering shadow of the Twilight Zone court case, which was in the headlines throughout this period, also may have played a role in Spielberg’s need for greater respect from the Hollywood community.

  But there was something profoundly cynical in his critics’ suggestion that winning an Oscar was all that motivated Spielberg to make The Color Purple. That argument assumed a white director could not really be interested in a story about black characters without having some kind of ulterior motive. To Peter Rainer of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, the movie was “ostensibly about the ordeal of being black and poor¶ and a woman in the South in the first half of this century. But the movie is really about winning awards.” Sneered Time’s Richard Corliss: “[F]rom the geriatric elite of Hollywood, Spielberg got no respect—no Oscars, that is. So here comes Steven the Nice, with his first ‘respectable’ motion picture.” Hollywood wags referred to the movie as Spielberg’s Close Encounters with the Third World.

  Because of Spielberg’s habitual reticence on the subject of his Jewish heritage and his experiences with anti-Semitism—a subject he did not discuss publicly with complete candor until he made Schindler’s List—few people seemed to realize how personally he empathized with the plight of Walker’s abused heroine. “Someone someday will write a Spielberg psycho-biography which will tackle the particular significance this project has for him,” J. Hoberman wrote in his largely negative Village Voice review. While recognizing that Spielberg’s decision to make The Color Purple stemmed from his long-standing concern with “the healing of wounded families” and the celebration of “a kind of ambiguous matriarchy,” Hoberman speculated that the film was “Spielberg’s apology for the rampant white male suprema-cism of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.”

  Celie’s determination to survive the twin burdens of racism and sexism made her kin to Spielberg because it touched a secret place in his heart that had never healed. “Spielberg shares the torment with us,” said Quincy Jones, the black composer who was one of the producers of The Color Purple. “He cares…. He cares about fighting prejudice.” As a high school senior living through his own “Hell on Earth” of ethnic prejudice, Spielberg had shown a passionate interest in the civil rights movement. His instinctive feelings of solidarity with members of another oppressed ethnic group, like those of many other Jews who supported the civil rights movement in that era, bore out the observation of Spielberg’s 1960s icon Lenny Bruce: “Negroes are all Jews.” Spielberg dates his acceptance of his Jewish heritage to the birth of his son, and that event’s occurrence during the filming of Celie’s childbirth scene intensified Spielberg’s emotional identification with her character.

  Some journalists writing about The Color Purple questioned Spielberg’s sincerity by claiming that his previous work had not shown much interest in African Americans. But The Color Purple was not the first time Spielberg had told a story with a black protagonist, even if the two earlier instances were minor efforts. His 1970 Night Gallery segment “Make Me Laugh” starred Godfrey Cambridge as an unhappy nightclub comedian, and his “Kick the Can” segment of Twilight Zone—The Movie featured Scatman Crothers as the elderly miracle worker. And after seeing E.T., Alice Walker observed, “From the very beginning of the film, I recognized E.T. as a Being of Color.”

  It was Kathleen Kennedy who brought The Color Purple to Spielberg’s attention, telling him, “Here’s something you might enjoy reading.” One of the few people in whom he had confided about his persecution as a youth in Saratoga, Kennedy recognized that Spielberg and The Color Purple might make a good emotional match, however unlikely it may have seemed on the surface. “You know, it’s a black story,” she told him. “But that shouldn’t bother you, because you’re Jewish and essentially you share similarities in your upbringing and your heritage.” Kennedy also understood his yearnings to expand his artistic horizons. “I always believed he would feel confident at some point to do other things,” she recalled in 1993. “That’s why I brought him The Color Purple. After he read it, he said, ‘I love this, because I’m scared to do it.’”

  Even after he agreed to become involved with the Warner Bros, project under his Amblin Entertainment banner, Spielberg kept it gingerly at arm’s length for a while. “I didn’t really think I was going to direct the movie until much later, into the development of the second-draft screenplay. To me it was a wonderful diversion from all the Saturday matinee kidflicks I was executive producing [including the 1985 releases The Goonies, Back to the Future, and Young Sherlock Holmes]…. With open arms and great hosannas I would sit with Menno Meyjes, the writer [of the Color Purple screenplay], and we’d spend a lot of time dealing with adult truths. Then we’d finish something and I’d go back and put on my waders and go into five feet of water on the Goonies set and shoot an insert for [director] Dick Donner.” While on location for The Color Purple, Spielberg said the principal reason he took so long to commit to directing it was that he was accustomed to making “big movies. Movies about out there. I didn’t know if the time was right to do a movie about in here [tapping his chest].”

  Another reason he hesitated was that he anticipated the kneejerk reaction many critics would have to his involvement in the project. “I don’t know that I’m the filmmaker for this,” he told Quincy Jones. “Don’t you want to find a black director or a woman?” Jones replied, “You didn’t have to come from Mars to do E.T., did you?”

  • • •

  BEFORE the cameras could roll, Spielberg had to pass an interview with Alice Walker. It was the first time in eleven years that he found himself in the position of being interviewed for a job.

  The author had misgivings about letting Hollywood film her epistolary novel, written largely in a southern black-English idiom of the period. Hollywood’s record of dealing with African Americans generally had been dismal, and the book presented minefields for any moviemaker with its stylistic audacity, its fiercely feminist themes, and its explicit treatment of incest, domestic violence, and lesbianism. Her respect for Jones helped overcome her qualms, but when Spielberg was proposed as director, she at first did not recognize his name. Later, however, she would recall having seen part of The Sugarland Express, whose “passionate intensity and sense of caring” made her realize he had an affinity for The Color Purple.

  Following his visit to her home in San Francisco with Jones on February 20,1984, Walker wrote in her journal, “Quincy had talked so positively about him I was almost dreading his appearance—but then, after a moment of near I don’t know what, uneasiness, he came in and sat down and started right in showing how closely he had read the book. And making really intelligent comments.” Spielberg’s “absolute grasp of the essentials of the book, the feeling, the spirit,” was what convinced her to trust him with the project.

  Walker sensed that Spielberg, for all his worldly success, remained a minority person. She recognized that his sensitivity enabled him to share the feelings of characters of another race and another gender. For a filmmaker whose own feelings about the pain of childhood were still raw, it was no emotional stretch to empathize with Celie’s suffering at the hands of her father and her tyrannical husband. “I saw Alice Walker’s book as a Dickens piece,” said Spielberg, whose idea it was to have Celie reading Oliver Twist. As a child of a broken family, Spielberg empathized instinctively with Celie’s pain at being forcibly separated from her sister and her two children. Nor was it difficult for
Spielberg, who knew what it was like to be physically mistreated by bigots, to enter into the agony of Sofia (Oprah Winfrey), the strong, defiant black woman who loses her children by refusing to submit to white racist authority. Perhaps with his difficult relationship with his own father in mind, Spielberg also heightened the story’s emphasis on the estrangement of blues singer Shug Avery (played by actress Margaret Avery) from her father, a puritanical Baptist preacher. As Susan Dworkin reported in her Ms. magazine article about the film, Walker “saw that these women and their breaking hearts and soaring spirits did not feel strange to Spielberg.”

  On the other hand, it proved even harder for Spielberg than it had for Walker to get inside the skin of Mister (Danny Glover), that embodiment of patriarchal insensitivity whose two-dimensionality on screen evoked a firestorm of protest. Spielberg’s visceral revulsion toward bullies left him little room for understanding how someone becomes a bully, particularly someone from such a vastly different social background. When Mister finally redeems himself, Spielberg musters up far less sympathy and forgiveness than the novelist feels for the character, whom she based on her own grandfather. Spielberg cannot help keeping the repentant Mister at a wary distance, treating him as a solitary and pathetic figure bereft of the mature companionship he shared with Celie in the latter parts of the book.

  Ironically, the white male director’s reworking of Walker’s novel sees the relationship between Celie and Mister from a viewpoint that is even more onesidedly feminist. But as the novelist pointedly observed, people who most vehemently objected to the characterization of Mister often displayed a selective sense of outrage: “[W]hen The Color Purple was published, and later filmed, it was a rare critic who showed any compassion for, or even noted, the suffering of the women and children explored in the book, while I was called a liar [as was Spielberg] for showing that black men sometimes perpetuate domestic violence.”

  Walker exercised an unusual degree of influence over the filming of her book. She consulted on the casting and had a clause inserted in her contract providing that half the crew members would be “women or blacks or Third World people.” Using photographs of her grandparents’ home to indicate how Mister’s home should look, she convinced production designer J. Michael Riva that not all southern blacks lived in abject poverty during the early 1900s. Riva admitted that “to do justice to this film, I had to confront my own prejudices.” Walker also wrote her own screenplay, which was rejected in favor of one written by Menno Meyjes, a Dutch immigrant who had impressed Spielberg with his script about the Children’s Crusade, Lionheart.|| The author was present for much of the production, working closely with Meyjes and the cast to ensure that the dialogue sounded true to the period and did not violate the spirit of the book.

  There were moments of anxiety for Walker when she questioned the depth of Spielberg’s understanding of racial issues. One such occasion was the day “Steven referred to Gone With the Wind as ‘the greatest movie ever made’ and said his favorite character was Prissy [the childlike slave played by Butterfly McQueen]…. I slept little for several nights after his comment, as I thought of all I would have to relay to him, busy as he was directing our film, to make him understand what a nightmare Gone With the Wind was to me.” Spielberg’s naïveté about some aspects of the black American experience also showed through in a poignant moment of mutual misunderstanding. At a preproduction meeting, Spielberg and his colleagues were discussing how they could make cameo appearances in the movie (the director eventually dubbed in the forlorn whistling of Willard Pugh’s Harpo when his wife, Sofia, leaves him). In what he undoubtedly intended as a heartfelt gesture of solidarity, Spielberg asked the novelist if she would appear in a scene holding his infant son, Max.

  “I was upset by your question, because of course I could not,” Walker wrote Spielberg in 1989. “There is just too much history for that to have been possible. It’s a very long Southern/South African tradition, after all—black women holding white babies. And yet, I felt so sad for us all, that this should be so. And especially moved by you, who had this history as no part of your consciousness.”

  *

  FOR the first day of shooting, Spielberg scheduled the scene of Shug Avery serenading Celie in Harpo’s rowdy “jook joint.” In a happy confluence of milestones, this also was Whoopi Goldberg’s first day before a movie camera, and her shy, elated look of surprise represents the beginning of her character’s sensual awakening.

  As the scene was described by cinematographer Allen Daviau, “We have this tiny, scared woman, who has barely been off her farm in over a decade, yet there she is in a nightclub, a ‘jook joint,’ seeing a life she didn’t know existed, as a churchgoing woman of that time. Here she was, almost hiding, in this marvelous old hat that Aggie Rodgers, the costume designer, gave her, as all the action of the ‘jook joint’ happens around her.” With Celie’s face softly caressed by a tiny light hidden on the table, but seemingly by the glow from a kerosene lantern, “This shot is when we first realized the magic of Whoopi Goldberg’s eyes,” Daviau recalled. “It was one of those wonderful moments when you’re working on a movie and you realize something special is really happening. You feel that you’ve just seen a character live on screen and you really know where the movie is going.

  “Even though it might’ve been done for logistical reasons, it was a stroke of real genius by Steven to choose to start in the ‘jook joint.’ I think he knew in his heart that a lot of things would come together in this scene. It was one of those magic decisions that sets the tone for the film in all aspects.”

  The performance Spielberg evoked from Goldberg has few, if any, equals in the director’s body of work. Perhaps only Ben Kingsley’s Itzhak Stern in Schindler’s List has a similar degree of richness and complexity, expressed with such eloquent economy of gesture and intonation. But while Kingsley’s Stern is ever a man of infinite subtlety and shrewdness, Celie’s character is formed before our eyes, year by year, look by look, word by word. She begins as a helpless girl of seemingly artless simplicity, only gradually acquiring the fiercely self-protective survival skills that, in the end, give her a transcendent strength and wisdom.

  Goldberg came to Spielberg’s attention with her acclaimed one-woman show, in which she played several offbeat characters. The comedienne (whose real name is Caryn Johnson) read The Color Purple and, like many other female readers of the book, felt a personal emotional connection with it. She wrote Alice Walker asking to play Sofia in the movie, adding that just to be part of it, she would be willing to “play a Venetian blind, if necessary.” Walker caught Goldberg’s show in San Francisco and recommended her to Spielberg for the part of Celie.

  Spielberg asked Goldberg if she would perform her act for him and “a couple of friends.” She was stunned to find Spielberg’s screening room filled with people, including Walker, Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson, and Lionel Richie. She cheekily included in that performance “a piece I’d been asked not to do by other people”: a parody of E.T. in which the alien winds up on dope in an Oakland jail. Although Spielberg later expressed outrage when the Los Angeles Times pictured E.T. wearing a coke spoon, he “loved” her privately performed parody, Goldberg reported. He asked her to play Celie, but she wanted to play Sofia, a character she felt “had more spirit, more heart…. And then I realized that Steven Spielberg’s sitting there trying to convince me to be in his movie. And it was like, ‘Wake up, stupid. Say yes.’”

  During rehearsals, Spielberg felt Goldberg “didn’t interact with the other cast members very well—she was intimidated by the professionalism of Danny Glover and the spontaneity of Oprah Winfrey. I got very worried about her because she wasn’t part of that cast. Then once she got on the set she essentially gave herself over to me, and just said, ‘Listen, you’re going to have to help me because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing!’ That performance came out of her soul.”

  Spielberg patiently taught her the basic lesson of movie acting, which is to work from
within, letting the camera observe the character’s thought processes rather than projecting the character as one would do on the stage. “In that camera are a million people,” Spielberg told her. “They can see everything you do.”

  “The cat just gave me all kinds of faith,” Goldberg recalled. “Plus, we had a lingo because he’s a movie fanatic like me. He would say something like, ‘Okay, Whoopi, do Boo Radley right after the door opens in To Kill a Mockingbird.’ Or he’d say, ‘You know the scene where Indiana Jones finally finds the girl at the end? That kind of relief he has? That’s what I want.’… When I had a terribly wrenching scene with Danny Glover, he’d say, ‘OK, it’s Gaslight time,’ and I’d crack up.”

  Oprah Winfrey, who at the time was the host of a local TV talk-show, AM Chicago, also made a spectacular film debut in The Color Purple. The role of Sofia introduced her to the nationwide audience that soon would make her a TV superstar. Winfrey was cast in the film after Quincy Jones, on a visit to Chicago, saw her on his hotel TV. Immediately recognizing her similarity to the stout, outspoken, defiantly self-respecting Sofia, he suggested her to Spielberg.

  “Terrified” to be acting in her first film, Winfrey also felt intimidated by the director. When she had difficulty crying on her first day of shooting, she thought, “I’m gonna go down in history as the actress who couldn’t cry in a Spielberg movie.” Spielberg “didn’t seem upset but said we’d get it another day. I left the set and cried all afternoon because I couldn’t cry for him.” With some pointers from veteran actor Adolph Caesar (who played Danny Glover’s father), she finally managed to cry on cue, but continued working in a constant state of insecurity. In the journal she kept during the filming, she wrote of Spielberg, “I know he hates me. I know he must be sorry he ever cast me, a non-actor, in this movie. If I don’t get better soon he’s probably going to ask me to leave. Or maybe we’ve shot too much already. O God, why didn’t I take an acting class?” After she criticized a fight scene between Sofia and her husband, Harpo, as being “too slapsticky,” the director told her, “You’re being too analytical, and you can’t watch the dailies anymore.” But she felt vindicated when he eventually dropped the scene from the movie. Spielberg admitted being “a little frustrated” at first with her inexperience, but his respect for her acting ability grew and he enlarged her role as filming progressed.