“You’ve tackled one of the darkest chapters in history,” an interviewer said to him. “Can you go back to making sunny, optimistic movies?”
“Sure I can,” he replied with a laugh, “because I have a sunny, optimistic nature. But I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive.”
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SPIELBERG’S planned year-long hiatus from directing—an event so earthshaking in Hollywood it was announced on the front page of Daily Variety—eventually stretched to three years. Those were among the busiest years of his life, although much of his activity took place behind the scenes on two ambitious projects that illustrate how richly divergent his interests have become. In 1994, he launched both his new studio, DreamWorks SKG, and his Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a worldwide program to videotape the testimonies of Holocaust survivors and rescuers. He called the Shoah project “the most important job I’ve ever done…. People say, ‘What are you doing after Schindler’s List?’ Well, this is my next project…. I’ve dedicated the rest of my life to being involved in taking testimony as long as there are survivors who want to volunteer it.”
Seeded with $6 million of his earnings from Schindler’s List, the nonprofit project was budgeted at $60 million for its first three years, receiving additional funding from such donors as the Lew Wasserman Foundation, MCA/Universal, Time Warner, and NBC. Spielberg’s contribution was part of the estimated $40 million his Righteous Persons Foundation announced it would donate to various organizations in its first seven to ten years. Other donations it has made have included a long-term grant yielding $3 million to the U.S. Holocaust Museum; $1 million to New York City’s Museum of Jewish Heritage; $500,000 to the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University; and $300,000 to Synagogue 2000, a group developing an innovative model for synagogues in the twenty-first century. Spielberg also provided funding to Bill Moyers for a public television series on the Book of Genesis, Jon Blair for his Oscar-winning documentary Anne Frank Remembered, and Elizabeth Swados for a film on racism and anti-Semitism, The Hating Pot.
The Shoah project came about, Spielberg related, “because survivors who came to me both during the production of Schindler’s List and after the film was released said to me, ‘I have a story to tell. Will you hear my story?’ At first I thought, Are you saying [that] you want me to make a movie out of your story? But what they were really saying was, ‘Will you take my testimony? Can I, before I die, tell somebody—tell you, with a camera—what happened to me, so my children will know, so my friends will finally know, and so I can leave something of myself behind so the world will know.’ Enough people came to me that finally my slow brain suddenly went ‘Click’ and I thought that this really was the reason I made Schindler’s List, … to do this project.”
The goal of this massive oral and visual history project has been to record as many as 50,000 survivor testimonies in the first three years. Volunteer interviewers (many of them survivors themselves) and camera crews in more than a dozen countries have gone about eliciting testimony from among the estimated 300,000 Holocaust survivors alive at the beginning of the project. Because most survivors are in their seventies and eighties, the Shoah Foundation represents what Spielberg calls “a race against the clock … a rescue mission. We’re rescuing history.” After being indexed and combined with family photographs and historical film footage, the videotaped testimonies are digitally preserved. Copies are to be deposited with five major repositories—Yad Vashem in Israel, the Fortunoff Video Archive, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Living Memorial to the Holocaust–Museum of Jewish Heritage, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles—and ultimately are to be made more widely available through online computer services, CD-ROM educational programs, books, and documentaries.***
Even such a benevolent Spielberg enterprise is not immune from controversy. In January 1996, The Village Voice, which had devoted eight pages to a highly critical roundtable on Schindler’s List, ran an article by Adam Shatz and Alissa Quart accusing Spielberg of propagating “pop monumentalism” with his Shoah project: “In a strangely compensatory sequel to Schindler’s List, a film so enamored of a benevolent German entrepreneur that it barely portrayed the Jews he saved as characters in their own right, Steven Spielberg is promising each of the survivors of the Holocaust a permanent place in cyberspace.”
Spotlighting the competitive anxiety other archives have felt over Spielberg’s better-funded and-publicized project, Shatz and Quart also raised aesthetic and moral issues reminiscent of those prompted by Schindler’s List. Questioning the propriety of a ‘‘Virtual walk-through concentration camp” Spielberg has envisioned as a CD-ROM teaching tool, they wrote, “Critics wonder whether the price of making history lessons more like arcade visits could result in a student encountering the Holocaust as a morbidly thrilling game.” Spielberg’s practice of encouraging Holocaust survivors to bring their families before the camera at the end of their testimonies—his way of celebrating the fact that “because of their survival, whole generations have been replanted on this planet”—was criticized by Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer as “a kind of manipulated scenario.” Pointing out that many Holocaust survivors have had great difficulties returning to a normal postwar existence, Langer contended, “Having the family in the video creates the impression that the Holocaust is an event people recover from and get over. It’s a Hollywood spin.”
While these concerns are valid, it is impossible for Spielberg or any other chronicler of the Holocaust to avoid putting his own emotional imprint onto the story. Spielberg’s continuing identification with Oskar Schindler has led him to see himself as the “rescuer” of the last uncollected history of the Holocaust. If that goal is “[l]audable and self-aggrandizing in equal measure,” as the authors of the Voice article contended, Spielberg nevertheless has the resources, and the moral imperative, to attempt it. Karen Kushell, one of the project’s executive producers, reported that Spielberg “almost went through the same epiphany I think Schindler does at the end of the movie, where he said, ‘No, no, I want them all. I don’t want to just do the Schindler survivors, I want to get everybody’s stories.’”
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WHEN he and his partners in DreamWorks held a press conference to announce the creation of their film, TV, music, interactive video, and consumer products company, Spielberg, in a Freudian slip, called it “our new country.” Turning his hubris into a joke, he added, “Maybe it will be a country. Is Belize still for sale?”
The first new Hollywood studio to be planned on such a scale since Twentieth Century–Fox was founded in 1935, DreamWorks, if all goes as Spielberg envisioned, could well become “a company that will outlive us all.” With their grandiose plans for reimagining the very concept of a movie studio, Spielberg and his partners could take the lumbering, financially overextended, and creatively bankrupt movie industry on a quantum jump into the next century. DreamWorks combines Spielberg’s creative vision and passion for breaking the bounds of technology with Jeffrey Katzenberg’s executive savvy and David Geffen’s entrepreneurial flair. In their case, the old Hollywood warning about not letting the lunatics run the asylum may be meaningless, for Katzenberg brought Disney animation to record box-office heights, Geffen’s record company made him a billionaire, and Spielberg has amassed a comparable fortune.
When the partnership was announced on October 12, 1994, the location of the studio facility had not yet been decided. The company did not even have a name, although the press, prompted by Katzenberg, fawningly labeled it “The Dream Team.” There were, in fact, no concrete plans to discuss at the press conference, a fact that caused some skeptical head-shaking in Hollywood.
The rough sketch for the partnership had come together with remarkable alacrity. After being forced from his post as chairman of Walt Disney Studios on August 24, Katzenberg, already a partner with Spielberg in the Dive! restaurant chain, asked Spielberg, “What do you think about starting a studio from scratch?
” Spielberg was immediately receptive, although he worried about leaving his longtime home at MCA. The decisive discussions among the three partners occurred during the early morning hours of September 29 in Washington, D.C., following their attendance at a White House state dinner for Russian President Boris Yeltsin. “We’re in tuxedos talking about a brand-new studio,” Spielberg recalled, “and just across from us there’s Yeltsin and Bill Clinton talking about disarming the world of nuclear weapons.” The preliminary legal paperwork for the partnership was drawn up hurriedly during the weekend before the announcement.
“We could have built this up over a fifteen-year period,” Spielberg mused. “Instead, we’re trying to do it in a couple of years. After our first planning sessions, I thought about how much easier it would be to start with a single film, make it, see how it does, and if it does well, do a second picture. That’s the conservative, play-it-safe side that haunts me before I fall asleep at night.”
Seeming bemused at his own audacity, Spielberg told the press that he had broken two long-standing personal rules with the creation of DreamWorks. “Over the years I’ve had almost a religious fervor in not investing my own money in show business,” he said. “… Now I can’t think of a better place than this to invest in our own future.” And recalling his fruitful business and personal relationships with Sid Sheinberg and Steve Ross, he noted, “Ten years ago this would have been inconceivable because I love having bosses in my life…. I needed them. But I grew up and began to foster children and have a large family. I have five children. I felt I was ready to be the father of my own business. Or at least the co-father.”
There was speculation that what the three were really after was a takeover of MCA in support of Lew Wasserman and Sheinberg, who were then embattled with the firm’s Japanese owners, Matsushita. That notion was fueled by reports that the DreamWorks partners sought and received the “blessing” of Wasserman and Sheinberg before announcing their new studio. Any takeover plans the trio might have had were rendered moot by the acquisition of MCA in April 1995 by Seagram, which subsequently concluded a ten-year deal with DreamWorks to distribute its films outside North America. The eighty-two-year-old Wasserman was kicked upstairs to become chairman emeritus of MCA, and Sheinberg left to form his own production company, The Bubble Factory.
Planning its own domestic distribution operation rather than relying on the traditional Hollywood system, DreamWorks, as George Lucas observed, “has the opportunity to create a whole new distribution system that may be a vast improvement over the old one.” MCA’s foreign distribution of DreamWorks films excludes only South Korea, where rights are reserved for that country’s One World Media Corp., which invested $300 million in the new studio. That largesse was surpassed only by the $500 million investment by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Spielberg, Katzenberg, and Geffen each put up $33.3 million for a combined 67 percent stake in their privately held company, with the outside investors divvying up the remaining 33 percent. DreamWorks also lined up $1 billion in loan commitments from Chemical Bank. By using their personal leverage to retain control of the company despite being minority investors, Spielberg, Katzenberg, and Geffen are attempting (in Spielberg’s words) to “be the owners of our own dreams.”
But there is nothing harder to create in Hollywood than a new studio that lasts, and the checkered history of creative partnerships in the film industry gives ample cause for skepticism. DreamWorks initially seemed to have little trouble commanding the enormous financial resources needed to capitalize all the start-up costs involved in such a grandiose enterprise, including the construction of physical facilities, deals with creative talent, and the underwriting of a sustained production schedule. But after spending more than two years in the planning stages, DreamWorks was still without a permanent home.
The partners wanted to build their studio in the Playa Vista section of western Los Angeles, on the 1,087-acre former site of Howard Hughes’s aircraft plant where Hughes built his gigantic wooden airplane, the legendary Spruce Goose. It was a fitting choice in light of Spielberg’s continuing interest in directing Warren Beatty in a Citizen Kane–like biographical picture about Hughes, a fellow aviation fanatic and movie producer.††† With Walt Disneyish futuristic visions dancing in their heads, Spielberg and his partners planned a hundred-acre, high-tech yet pastoral environment complete with a man-made lake. The facility was to be part of a massive real-estate development that was also to include a residential community, a hotel, and retail and office space. But by the fall of 1996, the Playa Vista project had stalled due to the developer’s financial problems and opposition from some environmentalists who were concerned about the project’s impact on the Ballona Wetlands (some of which was to be preserved under the development plan). At presstime, it was not certain whether the project would go ahead on the site or whether DreamWorks would find another location for its studio facilities.‡‡‡ DreamWorks had already begun to make films and TV programs elsewhere—its first feature, The Peacemaker, was scheduled for 1997 release—but as a studio it was still something of an unfulfilled dream.
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WHETHER the three partners will have the desire to stick with the studio over the long haul, weathering the inevitable setbacks and heavy demands on their time and energy, is another key question. Spielberg has been viewed in the press as an especially doubtful prospect for such a long-term business venture. His parallel involvement in his directing career, as well as with such creative and philanthropic activities as the Shoah project, cannot help but make people wonder whether at some point Spielberg will begin to find the role of mogul too distracting. The fact that he has kept the right to direct movies for other companies (such as the Jurassic Park sequel for Universal) has raised concerns about his ultimate commitment to DreamWorks. “I go where the material is,” he insisted. For admirers of his work as a director, however, the most troubling question of all is: Why would the greatest director in contemporary Hollywood want to take time away from directing movies to run a studio?
Perhaps, having made Schindler’s List, Spielberg recognized he had reached the time of life when he needed a radically different kind of creative challenge. Making plans for his own movie studio could be seen as a welcome diversion, enabling him to take his time deciding what kind of filmmaker he wants to become in the second half of his career. When CNN interviewer Larry King suggested in 1995 that he may never top the achievement of Schindler’s List, Spielberg replied with equanimity, “I’ll be very happy if I never top this.” Perhaps with that once-in-a-lifetime personal and artistic triumph behind him, it is now true of Spielberg what Lesley Blanch once wrote about the director George Cukor, that “he has not, or has passed, ambition, in the destructive sense. This makes him utterly free. And being perfectly sure of who he is, what he is, he does not envy—is not eaten up by competition.”
One of the few constraints Spielberg accepted in starting DreamWorks was imposed by his wife. Kate showed signs of becoming a bit restless in the early 1990s, advancing her own acting aspirations in such varied projects as the flop TV sitcom Smoldering Lust, Tony Bill’s cable TV movie Next Door, and Amblin’s feature How to Make an American Quilt. Spielberg was not altogether happy with her renewed interest in her career. “We were watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom the other night on television,” Kate related in early 1994. “And I turned to Steven and I said, ‘What happened to my career after that movie?’ He said, ‘You weren’t supposed to have a career. You were supposed to be with me.’”
When it came to starting DreamWorks, however, he knew he needed her blessing as much as Lew Wasserman’s. Concerned about Jeffrey Katzenberg’s legendary work habits, Kate laid down the law to her husband: “I love Jeffrey. But I never want you to become Jeffrey. I don’t want you to become involved in that lather of workaholism.” Perhaps chastened by the failure of his previous marriage, Spielberg promised he wouldn’t make that mistake again. When asked how he can manage starting a new studio while sim
ultaneously running the Shoah project and directing movies, he said with characteristic optimism, “All important things get done in my life…. Somehow this is all fitting nicely into my life and I’m still home by six and I’m still home on weekends. That’s the miracle.”
As he goes about creating his own private moviemaking domain, Spielberg is realizing another of his lifelong dreams. His actress friend Joan Darling remembers, “What Steven wanted more than anything else when he was young was somehow to set up his life so he could just go on a soundstage and make movies.” The alienated, anxiety-ridden boy who turned to filmmaking to find “a place where I felt safer: in front of my camera” has turned his refuge into a kingdom. If the promise of Schindler’s List is fulfilled, he should rule it with wisdom and responsibility. Rabbi Albert Lewis observes that moviemaking gave Steven “the strength or the courage to be what he was … the opportunity to stay sort of in the shadows, i.e., behind the camera, and to be part of the outside world.” And when Steven learned to use a movie camera, it “made a mensch out of him.”
* Including his son by Amy Irving, Max; his two children by Capshaw, Sasha and Sawyer (a son born in 1992); and their adopted son, Theo. Kate’s teenaged daughter, Jessica, also worked on the film as a production assistant. In 1996, Steven and Kate added to their family a daughter, Destry Allyn, and an adopted daughter, Mikaela.
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