Steven Spielberg

by Joseph McBride

  It’s fair to criticize Spielberg for failing to make the people in Jurassic Park as three-dimensional as the dinosaurs. While Australian actor Sam Neill fills the role of the brooding Grant in competent but uninspired fashion, Laura Dern is an annoyance as Dr. Sattler, her open-mouthed gaping and general ditziness undercutting her credibility as a paleobotanist. Spielberg’s anxiety about finishing ahead of schedule may have undermined his customary care with performances, allowing the cast (including Jeff Goldblum’s hipster mathematician, Ian Malcolm) to get away with too many affectless, mumbling line readings. Spielberg preferred to spend his budget on special effects rather than on his cast.|| But the director’s more intense creative rapport with Attenborough and the two children also suggests that the characters played by Neill and Dern simply failed to engage his full emotional involvement.

  “Jurassic Park packs the thrills of a great entertainment, but it doesn’t resonate like a great movie,” wrote Julie Salamon of The Wall Street Journal, who complained that “while the dinosaurs feel real, the humans seem fake.” With few exceptions, such as Henry Sheehan, reviewers tended to be indifferent or actively hostile to the director’s preoccupation with the fatherhood theme. David Ansen of Newsweek dismissed it by writing that Grant’s “aversion to children [is] predictably reversed when he must save Hammond’s two movie-brattish grandchildren from becoming the dinosaurs’ hors d’oeuvre.” Georgia Brown of The Village Voice wrote that Jurassic Park is “too terrifying for tender psyches. Amazingly, it really roughs up its two picture book–perfect child protagonists. After Hook’s nauseating tribe of Lost Boys, many will appreciate this new coldness.”

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  “WHAT is a cynic?” asked Oscar Wilde. “A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” That observation could be applied to the box-office phenomenon of Jurassic Park. The financial numbers were so staggering, they threatened to relegate the actual movie to a footnote.

  Following its opening on June 10, 1993, Jurassic Park took less than four months to break the previous record of $701 million set by E.T., and it finished its theatrical run with a worldwide box-office gross of $913 million (E.T. remains champion in the domestic market, with $399.8 million to Jurassic’s $357.1 million). Jurassic Park so monopolized foreign theater screens that it sparked bitter protests among French filmmakers demanding government protection for their own films over such rampaging Hollywood blockbusters. Spielberg’s own share of Jurassic revenues also made news, with Forbes reporting that he “got his ‘gross points,’ in this case a weighted average of perhaps 20% of film revenues, until the film broke even. Once the film was in the black, Spielberg split profits 50–50…. Spielberg will make over $250 million from Jurassic Park…. by far the most an individual has ever made from a movie, or any other unit of entertainment.”

  Sarcastically skewering such journalistic hosannas to the film’s financial success, Stuart Klawans wrote in The Nation, “Do I care? Is any of that money headed toward my bank account? But perhaps I’ve missed the point. From the tone of the news report, I can tell that Jurassic Park’s success must surely be my success, too. As if in a potlatch, I can participate in the communal good fortune by offering my $7.50 to the next week’s gross. To quote the ad campaign: ‘Be a Part of Motion Picture History!’ What joy all of America must feel, as the numbers rise higher and higher!”

  With people reviewing his bank account rather than his movie, Spielberg once again found himself stigmatized by his own success. That bore out the truth of his reflection: “Part of me is afraid I will be remembered for the money my films have made, rather than the films themselves. Do people remember the gold medal, or do they remember what the gold medal was won for?”

  Then came Schindler’s List.

  *

  “IT’LL make a helluva story,” Spielberg said. “Is it true?”

  Sid Sheinberg had sent him a New York Times review of Thomas Keneally’s “nonfiction novel” about Oskar Schindler, the Nazi industrialist who spent his fortune to save his Jewish workers from the Shoah. “I was drawn to it because of the paradoxical nature of the character,” Spielberg recalled. “It wasn’t about a Jew saving Jews, or a neutral person from Sweden or Switzerland saving Jews. It was about a Nazi saving Jews…. What would drive a man like this to suddenly take everything he had earned and put it all in the service of saving these lives?”

  Spielberg did not commit in 1982 to directing Schindler’s List, but he showed enough interest that Universal bought the film rights for him that fall. The following spring, he had his first meeting with a Holocaust survivor named Leopold (Paul) Page. A Pole, born Leopold Pfefferberg, he was one of the eleven hundred Jews saved by Schindler, known to themselves as the Schindlerjuden. “Poldek” Pfefferberg played the black market for Schindler in Kraków before becoming a barracks leader in the Plaszów forced-labor camp, whose commandant was SS Untersturmführer Amon Goeth. Schindler bribed Goeth to let Pfefferberg, his wife, Mila, and the other Schindlerjuden work in the safety of his Deutsche Emailwaren Fabrik (German Enamelware Factory) on the outskirts of Kraków. When the factory was ordered disbanded in 1944, Schindler bought the workers from Goeth and established another haven, a bogus munitions plant in his hometown of Brünnlitz, Czechoslovakia.

  Since coming to America in the war’s aftermath, Pfefferberg had made it his life’s mission to bear witness to Schindler’s unlikely heroism. Pfefferberg was the first person Spielberg thanked while accepting his Oscar for directing the film: “This never could have happened—this never could have gotten started—without a survivor named Poldek Pfefferberg…. He has carried the story of Oskar Schindler to all of us, a man of complete obscurity who makes us wish and hope for Oskar Schindlers in all of our lives.” Armed with a rich collection of documents and photographs, Pfefferberg searched indefatigably for someone to tell the story. While doing so, he also arranged with his fellow Schindlerjuden to support their rescuer, whose business ventures after the war all came to ruin. A deal Pfefferberg helped arrange with MGM in 1963 for a film about Schindler also fell through, but not before earning $37,500 for Schindler himself.

  One day in October 1980, on his way home to Australia from a film festival in Italy, Thomas Keneally stopped briefly in Beverly Hills to sign copies of his latest novel, Confederates. Visiting a luggage store to buy a briefcase, he began chatting with the owner—Poldek Pfefferberg. “In the course of the conversation he found out I was a novelist,” Keneally recalled. “… He told me that he had the best story of the century.”

  “I was saved by a big, good-looking Nazi named Oskar Schindler,” Pfefferberg explained. “Not only was I saved from Gröss-Rosen [a concentration camp in Poland], but my wife, Mila, was saved from Auschwitz itself. So as far as I’m concerned, Oskar is Jesus Christ. But though he was Jesus Christ, he wasn’t a saint. He was all-drinking, all-black-marketeering, all-screwing.”

  Keneally was fascinated by “Herr Schindler’s strange virtue” and by Pfefferberg’s documents on the bureaucratic and industrial aspects of the Holocaust. But, recalled Pfefferberg, “Keneally said he was the wrong person to write it—he was only three when World War II broke out, as a Catholic he knew little about the Holocaust, and he didn’t know much about Jewish suffering. I got angry and said those were three reasons he should write the book.” A shrewd insight, for Keneally’s eclectic body of work has what the author calls a “preoccupation with race and the interface between different races and cultures.” He traces that preoccupation to the fact that he comes from “disreputable Irish convict stock” and to his early awareness of the injustices suffered by Australian Aborigines. And, like Schindler, Keneally is a former Catholic. “I was always fascinated by the way former Catholics tended to be morally engaged,” the author noted. “The first thing you do when you become a lapsed Catholic is to pork as many men or women as you can. Then you take up causes. Schindler seemed to me a typical lapsed Catholic.”

  With Pfefferberg acting as liaison and persua
der, Keneally traveled to several countries to interview almost fifty Schindlerjuden, taking care to make Schindler’s List factually accurate. “It may be a novel,” he said, “but it’s not fiction.” The reason he cast the book in fictional form was that he thought of Schindler as “very much partaking of the paradoxes that are favored by the novel. Paradox is what turns novelists on. Linear valor is not as important to them as light and shade.” As for the film, “The big fear the author of the original work would have with a film is whether or not it retains the ambiguities, and it’s there in spades. I’d say it’s triumphantly ambiguous.”

  *

  “PLEASE, when are you starting?” Poldek Pfefferberg asked Spielberg at their first meeting in 1983.

  “Ten years from now,” Spielberg replied.

  He kept that promise precisely. Spielberg displayed a remarkable degree of self-knowledge in anticipating how hard it would be to summon up the courage to make Schindler’s List. Throughout his decade of indecision, the project “was on my guilty conscience,” he said, because Pfefferberg kept “heaping on the fact that he was going to die.”** Spielberg kept stalling a commitment, ostensibly because he had trouble getting a usable screenplay (first from Keneally and then from Kurt Luedtke), but mostly because he was not yet emotionally ready to “face the responsibility I have as a filmmaker…. In my burning desire to entertain, I kept pushing it back.” Responding to the external and internal pressures he felt to “grow up” artistically, Spielberg angrily told The Wall Street Journal in 1987, “I think some people would like me to make a movie that explores the dark side and provides no easy answer to make the audience feel better when they return to their cars. If those critics want more pain in my films, they can give me $2 million—that’s all it would take to make a film about pain—and I’ll make that movie. I won’t ask Warner or Universal to subsidize my pain.”

  He tried to pass off Schindler’s List to other directors. One was Roman Polanski. As a child, Polanski had been confined to the Kraków ghetto, escaping through the barbed wire on March 13, 1943, the day of the ghetto’s final liquidation by the Nazis. He spent the rest of the war in hiding; his father also survived, but his mother was gassed at Auschwitz. Polanski was approached repeatedly by Spielberg to direct Schindler’s List but decided he did not want to relive the experience. In 1988, Spielberg offered to produce the film for Martin Scorsese, who commissioned a new screenplay from Steven Zaillian. After surrendering artistic control, Spielberg had a change of heart. He was planning to direct a remake of the 1962 thriller Cape Fear, but swapped that more obviously commercial property to Scorsese for the return of Schindler’s List; Scorsese directed Cape Fear for Amblin in 1992.

  Another filmmaker who wanted to film Keneally’s book was the legendary Billy Wilder. An Austrian-born Jew who fled Berlin when Hitler came to power in 1933, Wilder wanted to close his career with Schindler’s List “as a memorial to most of my family, who went to Auschwitz.” “He made me look very deeply inside myself when he was so passionate to do this,” Spielberg acknowledged. “In a way, he tested my resolve.” After he saw the film, Wilder magnanimously wrote Spielberg a long letter of appreciation. “They couldn’t have gotten a better man,” Wilder said. “The movie is absolutely perfection.”

  World events also played a role in galvanizing Spielberg to action: “There was CNN reporting every day on the equivalent to the Nazi death camps in Bosnia, the atrocities against the Muslims—and then this horrible word ‘ethnic cleansing,’ cousin to the ‘final solution.’ I thought: My God, this is happening again…. And on top of all that comes the media giving serious air time and print space to the Holocaust deniers, the people who claim that the Holocaust never happened, that six million weren’t killed, that it’s all some kind of hoax.” While working on Hook, Spielberg “picked up Steve Zaillian’s script—I hadn’t read it for a year—and was leafing through it. And I suddenly turned to Kate, who was half asleep, and I said, ‘I’m doing Schindler’s List as my next film.’”

  *

  IN the process of persuading himself to tell the story of Oskar Schindler, Spielberg developed a powerful identification with the altruistic tycoon, who was addressed by his workers as “Herr Direktor.” Like Schindler, Spielberg struggled for years with the conflicting urges of commercial success and social responsibility, self-interest and the service of humanity. The man who had once told Sid Sheinberg that he was in “the Steven Spielberg business” described his protagonist as a man who was in “the Oskar Schindler business.” And like Schindler, Spielberg was a man driven to conform, to seek success in the approbation of others, until the price of popularity became too high.

  Spielberg received some criticism for making a film about the Holocaust with a gentile protagonist, one who was a Nazi to boot. To quote Keneally, Schindler represented “a figure of the imagination somehow as popular as the golden-hearted whore: the good German.” Schindler’s first scene in the film shows him affixing a swastika to his lapel before going out to ingratiate himself with Nazi officers at a Kraków nightclub. The evidence suggests that Schindler joined the Party more through cynical opportunism than ideology, although it might have added another layer of complexity if the film had acknowledged that he served as an agent of German intelligence (Abwehr) and, later in the war, as a double agent helping the Jewish underground.

  To some observers, honoring the memory of a “good German”—even one who so spectacularly redeemed himself—is inappropriate in the context of the Holocaust. Rabbi Eli Hecht found it “incredible, almost blasphemous” that Schindler was given the status of a “Righteous Gentile” by the Yad Vashem Heroes and Martyrs Memorial Authority in Jerusalem. “For the life of me,” the rabbi wrote, “I can’t understand what possessed Steven Spielberg to make Schindler’s List, to glorify a latter-day Robin Hood who profited at the expense of Polish Jewry.” Even one of the Schindlerjuden who lays stones on Schindler’s grave in the epilogue, Dr. Danka Dresner Schindel, expressed discomfort at seeing him portrayed as a hero: “We owe our lives to him. But I wouldn’t glorify a German because of what he did to us. There is no proportion.” Cartoonist Art Spiegelman, author of the powerful Holocaust tale Maus, went so far as to claim that because Schindler’s List takes a gentile businessman as its hero, “the film is not about Jews or, arguably, even the Holocaust. Jews make people uncomfortable. It’s about Clinton. It’s about the benign aspects of capitalism—Capitalism with a Human Face.”††

  Rather than making a movie centering around a victim of Nazism such as Anne Frank or a heroic opponent of Nazism such as Raoul Wallenberg, Spielberg chose to explore the mind of the enemy. A lifetime of dealing with the issues of assimilation and prejudice had made him a keen observer of goyim, and as survivors and victims of prejudice are often prone to do, he developed a preoccupation with the dark side of the “other.” “We’re perversely fascinated and frightened by [Nazism],” Spielberg commented after making Schindler’s List, “and that fear, I think, attracts us to knowing more about it.” While focusing on one atypical Nazi’s gradual evolution from victimizer to rescuer, Spielberg gave almost equal dramatic attention to the unrestrained evil of Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), described by Keneally as “Oskar’s dark brother … the berserk and fanatic executioner Oskar might, by some unhappy reversal of his appetites, have become.”

  Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Schindler’s List is how acutely Spielberg penetrates the twisted psyche of Goeth, even to the point of unearthing some deeply buried humanity. Rather than being content to portray Goeth as a one-dimensional monster, Spielberg even more disturbingly brings out the Nazi’s perverse mixture of attraction and sadism toward his Jewish maid, Helen Hirsch (Embeth Davidtz). Goeth cannot help feeling drawn to this beautiful woman, telling her he “would like so much to reach out and touch you in your loneliness. What would that be like, I wonder? I mean, what would be wrong with that? I realize that you’re not a person in the strictest sense of the word.” His inability to cope with for
bidden feelings of tenderness is what leads him to beat her as a “Jewish bitch.” Little in Spielberg’s previous work anticipated such an insight into the nature of fascism, although his intimate lifelong acquaintance with the nature of terror no doubt helped him understand the personality of a psychopathic sadist such as Goeth.

  In Schindler’s risky double-dealing with Nazis on behalf of Jews, Spielberg could see a provocative parallel with his own need to assimilate into WASP society. He too learned to disguise his true feelings in order to manipulate and outwit those who otherwise would be hostile to him and his people. Spielberg played that game with a keen sense of showmanship, or, as Schindler calls it, “The Presentation.” A case in point was Spielberg’s relationship with the anti-Semitic bully he cast in one of his boyhood movies. As Spielberg told the Jerusalem Post, the bully “never became my real friend. I was able to stop some of the hatred by, in a way, doing what Schindler did. Which was to charm him and make him a conspirator…. Schindler consorted with the enemy and he got what he wanted. And I found that there was a real relationship.”

  Spielberg’s decision to put his reputation as a filmmaker on the line to bear witness to the Holocaust took courage. He knew he was risking ridicule and, worse, personal attack for venturing so far from his public image, and he worried that his image might prejudice people’s reactions to the movie. His own courage must have seemed to him a distant echo of the courage Schindler displayed in putting his life and fortune at risk for the sake of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Still, there was enough similarity in those moral decisions to give Spielberg a shared sense of mission with his protagonist. Even though he felt “more akin to the Ben Kingsley character”—Schindler’s Jewish accountant and conscience, Itzhak Stern—Spielberg said, “I aspire to be Oskar Schindler.”