Steven Spielberg

by Joseph McBride

  When Winfrey played Sofia’s reawakening scene at Celie’s dinner table toward the end of location shooting in North Carolina, it became an emotional epiphany for both the character and the actress. That scene also is a major turning point for Celie, in which she finally gives liberating vent to all her pent-up rage against Mister. Spielberg’s usual method of shooting underwent a dramatic change when it was filmed.

  “That was a tough scene,” Allen Daviau recalls. “We were in a real house in North Carolina, not on a stage, and the heat! We were filling the room with smoke; we had a lot of people crowded in. They were seemingly simple setups, but when you’re dealing with that many people, every time you shifted a setup, a whole bunch of things had to shift. And he wanted every reaction there was. He went by the book in covering that scene. He had different [image] sizes, he had different looks, he just had it every way you could possibly look. I kidded him, ‘This is George Stevens’ kind of coverage.’ Very unusual for him. Most of the time you know he’s got exactly in his head what he’s going to do. He generally does not shoot a lot of takes. A lot of it had to do with Oprah’s character being very, very lost, showing all of her pain and then having a recovery, and how this was going to be achieved.”

  Winfrey recalled that Spielberg encouraged her to improvise much of her dialogue in that scene, “like when I started to rock in my chair, and I said to Whoopi, ‘I want to thank you, Miss Celie, for everything you’ve done for me.’ And then Sofia started to cry—I started to cry. When Steven yelled ‘Cut,’ I looked up, and there he was, giving me a great big hug…. Whoopi stood up and said, ‘My sister today became an actress!’”

  The Color Purple marked “only the second time I didn’t storyboard the whole picture,” Spielberg said. “The first time was E.T., because it was an emotional journey. I felt that The Color Purple was even more of an emotional journey, and I wanted to surprise myself through the process of discovery every day during the making of the movie.** I was afraid the storyboards would tie me down to preconceived ideas that would no longer be relevant once the cast got together and began performing their hearts out…. Allen and I were very gentle to everybody. On E.T., we were yelling and screaming all the time, but on this picture we were a lot more mellow. I was never more relaxed while making a picture.”

  Alice Walker carries a lasting impression of “the feeling of love that was palpable daily on the set…. ‘What makes this Jewish boy think he can direct a movie about black people?’ critics fumed. Well, what did, exactly? It was this that I wanted to know. I thought it might be love. I thought it might be courage. I thought it might be the most wonderful thing of all: Steven had outgrown being a stranger.”

  *

  HOW disheartening it was, then, for Spielberg when his labor of love was met with a hostile response from critics who were not content to attack his work but also tried to put him in his place with venomous personal insults. The majority of the film’s reviews actually were positive—thirty-three reviewers put it on their 1985 top-ten lists—and the public warmly embraced it. Opening on Spielberg’s thirty-ninth birthday, December 18, 1985, The Color Purple grossed a remarkable $142.7 million in worldwide box office, with a production cost of only $15 million. But its popular success only served to heighten the contempt of Spielberg’s detractors. The negative reviews left a lasting sting, as did the angry reaction in some segments of the black community.

  “This film’s total inauthenticity proves that [Spielberg] finds it harder to imagine black people than spacemen, and suggests that his gifts have been wholly corrupted: He can’t make an honest film if he tries,” wrote John Powers of L.A. Weekly. Spielberg’s “suburban background shows all over the place,” claimed Rita Kempley of The Washington Post, mocking the director’s vision of rural Georgia as “a pastoral paradise that makes Dorothy Gale’s Kansas farm look like a slum.” Other reviewers compared the movie to Amos ’n’ Andy, Disney’s Song of the South, MGM’s all-black musical Cabin in the Sky, and even D. W. Griffith’s infamous paean to the Ku Klux Klan, The Birth of a Nation.

  Favorable reviews, such as Gene Siskel’s in The Chicago Tribune, could barely be heard over all the commotion. Calling the film “triumphantly emotional and brave,” Siskel wrote, “Nothing in the book appears to have been soft-pedaled in the film, and yet The Color Purple couldn’t have a sweeter, more uplifting tone. The director who tugged at our hearts with the rubber alien E.T. works at an even deeper emotional level with flesh-and-blood characters this time…. [and] to its everlasting credit, The Color Purple is also a film that takes risks. Specifically, it takes an incredibly strong stand against the way black men treat black women.”

  That strong stand was what caused the angriest backlash against the film, although Spielberg was faulted as well by Walker and other feminists for downplaying the novel’s lesbian themes. The backlash started even before filming began, when the announcement that Spielberg was to direct the movie brought objections from some African Americans. “These people bitch and moan that you never see a black face in the movies,” Whoopi Goldberg responded during the shooting, “and as soon as there’s a movie with a black cast that is not singin’ and dancin’, they bitch and moan about it…. I say to people, cool the fuck out, and see what this man does with the movie.”

  The most vocal opposition came from a twenty-member Los Angeles group calling itself the Coalition Against Black Exploitation, whose persistent attacks on the film helped set the tone for media coverage (as well as a similar protest by the Hollywood branch of the NAACP). One member of the coalition, Kwazi Geiggar, accused the movie of portraying black men as “absolute savages” and depicting all blacks “in an extremely negative light. It degrades the black man, it degrades black children, it degrades the black family.”

  While his detractors’ rhetoric often distorted the film out of recognition, certainly Spielberg is most vulnerable to the charge of using one-dimensional depictions of the black male characters. Alice Walker often has been attacked as anti-male, but she was able to find more forgiveness in her heart than Spielberg does for Mister. Spielberg’s black male characters are defined by their mostly unnuanced roles as rapist (Celie’s “Pa”), tyrannical patriarch (the fathers of Mister and Shug), philandering abuser (Mister), or henpecked buffoon (Harpo). The fact that the characters’ given names are so seldom heard on screen underscores their archetypal status, which the film’s detractors have viewed as racial stereotyping.

  Walker defended herself and Spielberg by writing in 1986, “A book and movie that urged us to look at the oppression of women and children by men (and to a lesser degree, women) became the opportunity by which many black men drew attention to themselves—not in an effort to rid themselves of the desire or tendency to oppress women and children, but instead to claim that inasmuch as a ‘negative’ picture of them was presented to the world, they were, in fact, the ones being oppressed.” And yet Walker also tried to justify the depiction of black men in The Color Purple by explaining their behavior in light of their oppression: “In the novel and in the movie (even more in the movie because you can see what color people are) it is clear that Mister’s father is part white; this is how Mister comes by his run-down plantation house. It belonged to his grandfather, a white man and a slave owner. Mister learns how to treat women and children from his father, Old Mister. Who did Old Mister learn from? Well, from Old Master, his slave-owning father …”

  These subtleties may be read into the film by readers knowledgeable about the history and sociology of the post-Reconstruction South, but Spielberg and screenwriter Menno Meyjes make no attempt to deal with them dramatically or otherwise explain them to the audience. Spielberg may have blundered into the appearance of racial stereotyping because of a limited ability to relate to male authority figures and an inadequate understanding of the film’s sociohistorical background.

  If the director had more carefully situated the characters in terms of their time and place, uncomprehending white viewers also might
have understood more easily why the characters live in what some felt were incongruously comfortable, even luxurious, surroundings. Whether that kind of explanation should have been necessary is another matter. “I knew I had a responsibility to The Color Purple,” Spielberg said, “and yet I didn’t want to make the kind of movie from the novel that some people wanted me to…. I think some people had a kind of Uncle Tom’s Cabin view of what the picture should be, which is wrong. And, ironically, it pointed out their own inclination for racial stereotyping, which is what some of the same people said we were guilty of.”

  “Every time there is a play or movie with white people in it,” Winfrey pointed out, “they don’t expect them to represent the history or culture of the race. We aren’t trying to depict the history of black people. It’s one woman’s story, that’s all.” On the other hand, Margaret Avery, who played Shug, says, “I did understand the black reaction. It was the first [major] black film in years, since Sounder, and the black community I feel was just so needy of a film that when they had one, they wanted it to represent themselves. No one film can do that.”

  The controversial love scene between Celie and Shug is one of the film’s most affecting scenes. When Shug gently kisses her, the shy, self-effacing Celie, for the first time in the film, breaks into a broad, beaming grin, delighted at her own effrontery in feeling pleasure; it is like watching a flower opening in magical stop-motion photography. Spielberg’s delicacy in directing the scene keeps the emphasis not on voyeuristic physical details of lovemaking but on the transforming power of love itself. And yet the scene became a focus of some of the most heated criticism of the film, both from black males who felt threatened by it and from feminists who felt the male director was too timid to explore the full dimensions of Celie’s lesbianism. The film elides the development of the women’s intimate relationship after they move together to Memphis, and some critics contended that this diminishes the motivation for Celie’s rebellion against Mister, as if her virtual enslavement were not ample motivation.

  Walker, who proudly proclaims her bisexuality, regrets that in the film, “Shug and Celie don’t have the erotic, sensuous relationship they deserve…. It took a bit of gentle insistence, in talks with Menno, Steven, and Quincy, simply to include ‘the kiss,’ chaste and soon over as it is. However, I was aware, because Quincy Jones sent copies of some of the letters he received, that there were people in the black community who adamantly opposed any display of sexual affection between Celie and Shug.”

  Admitting that he “downplayed the lesbian scenes,” Spielberg explained, “I confined them to just a series of kisses; I wasn’t comfortable going beyond that. In the book, which handles the scenes beautifully, Shug actually holds up a mirror to Celie’s private parts. But a scene like that plays at least 150 times bigger on the screen, and I just couldn’t do it. Marty Scorsese could do it; not me.” He insisted it was “an artistic decision” simply to suggest the relationship with the kissing scene: “No one had ever loved Celie other than God and her sister. And here Celie is being introduced to the human race by a person full of love. I didn’t think a full-out love scene would say it any better.”

  What Spielberg’s harshest critics may find most offensive about his style of filmmaking, in the last analysis, is simply that he expresses deep emotion and does so without embarrassment. His full-throated romantic mode of visual storytelling is not fashionable by the postmodernist standards of contemporary film criticism. That may explain the gap between the mass audience’s often tearful enjoyment of a film such as The Color Purple and the distaste of critics who view any evocation of strong emotion as a form of directorial “manipulation,” to use a word often applied disparagingly to Spielberg.

  But as the African American critic Armond White observed in 1994, “Spielberg attempted a first—applying Hollywood’s entire fictional apparatus to create a romance about African Americans, all the while adhering to the pop-feminist politics that marked Alice Walker’s novel as a modern work. The Color Purple is the most successful example of the eighties’ interest in cultural signs and signifiers of African American and Hollywood history that there is in mainstream American cinema, and is the quintessential example of Spielberg’s sophistication.”

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  THE loudest slap in the face Spielberg received over The Color Purple came from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. When Oscar nominations were announced on February 5, 1986, the film was named in eleven categories, including Best Picture, Best Actress, and two nominations for Best Supporting Actress (Avery and Winfrey). Although Spielberg was nominated as one of the film’s producers, he conspicuously was not nominated for his work as director.

  Warner Bros. took the unusual step of issuing a statement congratulating its nominees but adding, “At the same time, the company is shocked and dismayed that the movie’s primary creative force—Steven Spielberg—was not recognized.” Only once before, when journeyman director Sam Wood was ignored in the eleven nominations for his 1942 film Pride of the Yankees, had such an egregious snub been made by the Academy. Veteran Daily Variety columnist Army Archerd reported the day after the nominations were announced that “all the nominees we spoke to were shocked, surprised, disappointed, [and] amazed” by the Academy’s latest insult to Spielberg. George Perry of the London Sunday Times speculated that as a result of Spielberg’s unprecedented success, envious Hollywood colleagues believed “he must have some knowledge denied lesser mortals. They cannot understand how he does it, but shamelessly imitate his work, and feign indifference to his achievements by signally not awarding him Oscars.” Others suggested Spielberg’s chances for a directing nomination were hurt by the controversy surrounding the film and by what some perceived as his pandering for an Oscar. The ongoing Twilight Zone case perhaps added to the anti-Spielberg backlash.

  Defenders of the Academy were quick to point out that under Oscar nominating rules, it was not the entire voting membership that overlooked Spielberg for the directing nomination, but only the membership of its directors’ branch, an elitist group totaling only 231 at the time. One of those members, the self-financed boutique filmmaker Henry Jaglom, said, “None of the directors I know think[s] the movie is good. The picture is a sentimental cartoon. It’s as if Walt Disney decided to direct The Grapes of Wrath. Spielberg means well. But there’s a lesson here. People should direct what they know about.” But veteran director Richard Brooks, who voted for Spielberg, said, “I feel badly that he didn’t get a nomination. He’s the most successful director in the world. I guess when you get up that high, you’re bound to find people who will throw stones at you.”

  The Directors Guild of America, a much more broadly based organization of eight thousand voting members, including assistants and production managers, subsequently gave Spielberg its award for Best Director. Only twice in the previous forty years had the DGA winner not gone on to win the directing Oscar. “I am floored by this,” Spielberg said as he accepted the award on March 8. “If some of you are making a statement, thank God, and I love you for it.” Asked by the press backstage to comment on the Oscar brouhaha, Spielberg, who had not been talking publicly about the subject until then, said, “I’m a moviemaker and not a bellyacher…. Certainly, anybody would feel hurt to be left out of a category of richly deserved nominations, but I’m not bitter or angry about it. I’ve gotten so many letters and [so much] support from the public, I feel like Jimmy Stewart at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life.” (It was not until 1996, appearing on Oprah Winfrey’s TV talk show, that Spielberg admitted he was “real pissed off’ not to have been nominated.)

  Stung by what Academy president Robert Wise called the questioning of “the integrity of the Academy” with “this overkill in the media,” the organization compounded the insult by not giving a single Oscar to The Color Purple. Winfrey said she “could not go through the night [of the March 24 ceremony] pretending that it was okay that Color Purple did not win an Oscar. I was pissed and I was stunned.” B
ut in retrospect she thought it was “a greater Statement that [the film] won no awards than if it had won one or two. It put the whole Oscar in perspective for me, which is not to say I wouldn’t want to win one now. It would be great, but it would never mean the same thing, because for The Color Purple to be totally excluded says to me the Oscar isn’t what I thought it was.”

  Shortly after the Oscar ceremony, Spielberg left for Israel to join Amy Irving on location for Rumpelstiltskin, a film in which she was being directed by her brother, David. Speaking to a reporter from an Israeli newspaper, Spielberg attributed his snubbing by the Academy to the box-office success of his movies. Then he added:

  “When I’m sixty, Hollywood will forgive me—I don’t know for what, but they’ll forgive.”

  * In The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten defines a shiksa as “A non-Jewish woman, especially a young one…. Pronounced SHIK-seh,, to rhyme with ‘pick the.’”