Steven Spielberg

by Joseph McBride

  DreamWorks limped along with a mostly mediocre performance in the early 2000s. Its box-office duds included a dull and charmless version of The Time Machine, directed by author H. G. Wells’s great-grandson Simon Wells; Woody Allen’s stylish but underappreciated farce Hollywood Ending; and Chris Rock’s ineptly directed, only intermittently amusing comedy Head of State, a proto-Obama piece of whimsy about the first black president. A solemn genre piece from director Sam Mendes, the 1930s gangster film Road to Perdition, was a moderate commercial success. DreamWorks’ penchant for postmodern genre pastiche and parody had become one of its hallmarks, and in-joke references to Spielberg’s own movies were a staple in many of the company’s films.

  By 2003 DreamWorks was having what Spielberg admitted was “our first shitty year.” Even the animation division, so soon after the runaway success of Shrek, was in the doldrums in 2002–03, dragged down by such underperformers as Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas. The division reported losing $189 million in 2003. By the following year, it would be spun off as a publicly traded company, with Katzenberg still in charge. That split, necessary to raise production capital and protect the division from the vagaries of the live-action operations, further weakened DreamWorks’ overall clout in the industry, especially since Spielberg kept his distance from DreamWorks Animation, reportedly because he otherwise would have had to disclose details of his compensation for directing films for DreamWorks SKG. But the indefatigable Katzenberg would soon lead the new animation company into a more fertile period, thanks in part to its gradual purchase of Pacific Data Images, a leader in the field of computer animation. That deal gave DreamWorks Animation a second studio in the northern California town of Redwood City. Although Shrek 2 (2004) became the most successful animated film ever made, the live-action component of DreamWorks continued its dispiriting run with such creatively challenged program fodder as Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, EuroTrip, The Stepford Wives, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, and the relentlessly crude and witless “comedic” train wreck Meet the Fockers, a grotesque parody of the original Meet the Parents and a career low point for Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, and Blythe Danner, as well as another dispiriting outing for Robert De Niro. A more ambitious offering, Vadim Perelman’s House of Sand and Fog, from the novel by Andre Dubus III about a lethal battle over the ownership of a California home, is sometimes compelling but suffers from a dully inexpressive lead performance by Jennifer Connelly, while Ben Kingsley’s magisterial characterization of a doomed former Iranian military man veers into the operatic.

  In 2004, ten years after its founding, DreamWorks faced the inevitable and opened negotiations for selling itself to a major studio. That step marked the partners’ recognition that going it independently was just too daunting in the face of modern Hollywood economic realities, such as the huge costs of production and marketing. DreamWorks’ concentration on live action at the expense of its original plans for diversification had made it increasingly vulnerable to the ebb and flow of the marketplace and terribly exposed if it had an off-year. In his book on DreamWorks, Daniel M. Kimmel somewhat melodramatically overstates the case that by 2004, “the DreamWorks story was over … a failed dream.” But DreamWorks did not cease to exist; it downsized and became a subsidiary of a major studio, with access to corporate financing that kept it more insulated from the vagaries of the commercial marketplace. That was an unhappy comedown but not a complete collapse of Spielberg’s dream of independence, which, after all, is always a relative concept in Hollywood unless you are Charlie Chaplin and are able and willing to fully finance your own studio. “Our eyes were bigger than our stomachs,” David Geffen admitted to the New York Times in 2004. “We did what we could do. We started a number of things that turned out not to be good ideas. The world has changed a great deal in ten years.”

  Spielberg loyally offered DreamWorks to his longtime home, Universal Pictures, which was already involved with DreamWorks in foreign and DVD distribution. But he was publicly humiliated when Universal’s new owner, General Electric, seemed less than eager over the prospect of buying his company. When DreamWorks suffered another slump, caused in part by the unexpectedly weak U.S. box-office returns of Michael Bay’s $130 million futuristic thriller The Island (ironically enough, one of his more watchable films, a relatively restrained and affecting dystopian chase thriller that still did respectable business overseas), GE demanded that the company lower its $1.4 billion asking price by $200 million, a move that offended Geffen, its point man in the negotiations. DreamWorks misguidedly turned to a new suitor, Paramount, a subsidiary of Viacom. They reached a deal in December 2005, completed the following February, for Paramount to pay $1.6 billion for DreamWorks (including assumption of debt). Each of the three founding partners in DreamWorks received a return of $175 million from the sale of the company, on their initial investments of $33.3 million. Paramount recouped some of that investment by selling the DreamWorks library of live-action films to a group led by investor George Soros in 2006 for $900 million, while keeping world distribution rights. The DreamWorks deal with Paramount contained clauses allowing Spielberg and his partners to depart after a three-year period.

  Spielberg issued a statement in December 2005 admitting, “I was saddened that after long negotiations and many compromises we were unable to come to terms with Universal’s parent company, GE.” When Los Angeles Times writer Rachel Abramowitz met with him to discuss his new film Munich just hours after he agreed to sell DreamWorks, she found him “slumped—almost curled up against a pillow—on a banquette by a window overlooking the Pacific. His hair is gray, his face pale, his manner muted. He seems tired—soultired— almost emptied out, as he talks; gone is the excited purposefulness that is the hallmark of his on-set persona.” The following February, Spielberg said that DreamWorks would continue to have strong ties to Universal because “Universal is my birthplace, and because of that, I’ll always have a weak spot for partnerships there.” These were not auspicious statements to make as he and DreamWorks entered their partnership with Paramount. Since Spielberg always wanted to preserve his flexibility in setting up directing projects anywhere he pleased, his deal with Paramount was nonexclusive. After the messy negotiations involved in finding a new owner for DreamWorks, Spielberg’s seller’s remorse and the frustrations that soon followed in his working relationship with Paramount seemed inevitable.

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  SPIELBERG often flirted with projects that he wound up passing to other directors. But he dallied for an unusually long time over whether to direct a film version of Arthur Golden’s novel Memoirs of a Geisha for DreamWorks, which he began considering in 1997, before giving the project to director Rob Marshall, who filmed it in 2004. If Spielberg had made the period film about a Japanese peasant girl being sold into a geisha house and surviving World War II, it probably would have had echoes of The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun, but he seemed to find the story too remote from his more compelling interest during that period in examining American social problems. His partners were unenthusiastic about the project, which he planned to film on a modest $10 million budget: “No one wanted to make that movie—even with me,” Spielberg lamented. The film that finally emerged is overly glamorized and dramatically torpid, as well as inauthentic; much of it was filmed in California, and the three lead actresses are Chinese and Malaysian, a fact that caused some controversy. The stilted English dialogue, which makes the movie sound dubbed, damages the quality of the performances, demonstrating the wisdom of Spielberg’s initial plan to film it in Japanese.

  While Marshall was preparing to film Geisha, Spielberg turned his attention to shooting The Terminal, a DreamWorks project he took over from another director, Lasse Hallström, and completed for release in the summer of 2004. Catch Me If You Can in 2002 and The Terminal enabled Spielberg to take what he called a relatively lighthearted creative “vacation” from the emotional agony of A.I. and the graphic violenc
e of Minority Report. And yet both of these comedies have their disturbing elements, and The Terminal deals directly with contemporary social anxieties, contradicting his comment that “when I see darkness I can’t make funny films about it.”

  Spielberg had flirted with the idea of directing Meet the Parents for DreamWorks in 2000, but Kate talked him out of it (“She said I was not funny enough to direct it”). He had avoided directing comedies since the debacle of 1941, worrying that his critics were right and that his comic tastes tended toward excess, even if the humorous elements of his more serious films showed he could calibrate those instincts effectively. Spielberg made an “impulsive decision” to commit to directing Catch Me If You Can in 2001 when a brief window of availability opened up on the project about a young con man and impostor. Frank W. Abagnale Jr., the son of a feckless New York businessman, chronicled his scams and impersonations in a best-selling 1980 memoir of equally dubious reliability (written with Stan Redding). Abagnale claimed to have impersonated, while still in his teens or just beyond, an airline pilot, a doctor, a prosecutor, and a college teacher, while supporting himself by forging checks.

  Spielberg was attracted to this brash, far-fetched yarn partly because he saw a connection with his own youthful adventures roaming the Universal lot as a cheeky seventeen-year-old and, within a few short years, directing Joan Crawford in a television program while commanding hostile crew members three times his age. Remembering when he “went into a disguise—I became a sixteen-and-a-half-year-old [sic] executive with a tie and a suit … got me to say I can get into this kid’s skin. I kind of understand what he went through.”

  While there’s no doubting the emotional resonance Spielberg found in the subject, especially since he responded to Abagnale’s messy family situation by having Jeff Nathanson strengthen that element in the screenplay, it’s curious that the director’s identification with Abagnale’s con games is itself something of a con on the media and the public. Spielberg’s often-repeated claim that he “broke into” Universal by conning his way past the gate guard and setting himself up in an empty office, pretending to be a filmmaker, was debunked in the 1997 edition of this book. The reality—that Spielberg was given a job by Universal librarian Chuck Silvers as an unpaid clerical assistant in the editorial department and shared an office with Silvers and purchasing agent Julie Raymond—was studiously ignored by the director in his promotional interviews for Catch Me If You Can, along with the fact that his original meeting with Silvers had been arranged through family connections. Since directorial “creation myths,” however dubious, are more appealing to segments of the public than the truth, many people continue to believe the false account of how Spielberg got his start. Perhaps they share the view expressed by Lord Gainsford in Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon when he says of Robert Conway’s adventures in Shangri-La, “I believe it, because I want to believe it.”

  When Spielberg was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors in 2006, Tom Hanks amused the VIP audience by telling the story: “A few decades ago a young man showed up at the gates of fabled Universal Studios, dressed in a cheap suit and carrying an empty prop of a suitcase, hoping to sneak into one of Hollywood’s great temples of magic-making.” Hanks went on to talk about Spielberg bluffing his way onto the lot and setting up an empty office to use while crashing sound stages for two and half months. The show contradicted itself by also giving the other version about Spielberg jumping off a tram on the Universal tour and staying for only two weeks. When Washington Post writers Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts questioned these accounts, the CBS-TV show’s producer, George Stevens Jr., asked their researcher, “Really, are you new to show business? Does he have creative license to retell his story? Yes, I would imagine…. Maybe we should just say it’s part of the ever-expanding legend of Steven Spielberg.” The Post cited this book’s revisionist account and quoted film historian Douglas Gomery as commenting of the mythic version, “It makes a better story than the guy who works his way through the system. As the story grows older, the mythology grows stronger. And I’m sure even [Spielberg] now believes it.”

  Whether that is the case, or whether Spielberg was still consciously conning the media by retelling the story, it’s clear that part of him relates nostalgically, but with residual anxiety, to Abagnale’s audacity in bursting into professions where he hardly belonged. Despite its jaunty style, jazzy music, and bright pastel color scheme, the film version of Catch Me If You Can has dark undertones, depicting young Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) as desperately trying to construct an alternate identity to escape his depressing background and to impress his troubled father (Christopher Walken) and emotionally distant mother (Nathalie Baye). Spielberg finds a powerful visual metaphor for Frank’s trauma in a jump cut to him running away down a street, into his new life, after a lawyer asks him to choose between his parents. Frank’s elaborate scams, like his false checks, are works of art, the objects of admiration for those he deceives, as well as a form of revenge against a financial system he sees as victimizing his father.

  While entertainingly demonstrating how a charming con artist can go far in the world (before his whole house of cards collapses and he winds up in a hellish French jail cell, looking like Jean Valjean in Les Misérables), Catch Me If You Can is also an extended examination of what psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes described in 1978 as “the impostor phenomenon.” As I wrote in my biography Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, about another director who may have suffered from that affliction, it is “the fear common to many high achievers that their success is actually based on a fraud. Another psychologist who studied the phenomenon, Joan Harvey, has said that the sufferer also has the ‘obsessive fear that sooner or later some humiliating failure would reveal his secret and unmask him as a fraud. Some very famous people have suffered from the feeling all their lives, despite their obvious abilities.’ In such people, ‘because each success is experienced as either a fluke, or as the result of Herculean efforts, a pattern of self-doubt, rather than self-confidence, develops,’ and each success actually intensifies those feelings of fraudulence.”

  Catch Me If You Can provocatively suggests that Spielberg’s many and deep-seated anxieties, which he has often discussed as the sources for his creativity, may stem in part from his feeling of being an impostor and his still-unresolved feelings about his broken family and their social background. As Harvey noted, “When people perceive themselves as having risen above their roots, it can evoke deep anxieties in them about separation. Unconsciously, they equate success with betraying their loyalties to their family.” Some psychologists trace the impostor phenomenon to unresolved Oepidal tensions, and Catch Me If You Can foregrounds such tensions in the scene of father and son both dancing suggestively with the sexy French mother to a Judy Garland song. “Consciously,” Harvey explained, those who suffer from the impostor phenomenon “fear failure, a fear they keep secret. Unconsciously, they fear success.” Unlike Capra, whose career collapsed under the strain of his success, Spielberg has coped remarkably well with his (when Capra met Spielberg in the 1970s, the first thing he asked the younger director was, “What’s with you, except success?”), and yet Spielberg’s anxieties remain largely unabated, as shown by their persistence in his work even after he entered his sixties.

  Perhaps his surprising decision to complete his unfinished college degree on May 31, 2002, by doing some independent-study projects at California State University, Long Beach, was a way of rectifying his “betrayal” of his loyalty to his parents when he dropped out of school in 1969 to pursue his film career. “I wanted to accomplish this for many years,” he said, “as a ‘thank you’ to my parents for giving me the opportunity for an education and a career, and as a personal note for my own family—and young people everywhere— about the importance of achieving their college education goals. But I hope they get there quicker than I did.” Getting his bachelor’s degree in Film and Electronic Arts, even at the age of fifty-five (he called it “m
y longest postproduction schedule”), was his way of redeeming some of the “imposture” and confusion of his youth, demonstrating that he could have followed the socially approved path if he had wanted to do so at the time, as well as providing a fatherly example for his own children. That concern is humorously reflected in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull when Indy takes his son, Mutt, to task over his dropping out of college. Spielberg submitted Schindler’s List in lieu of the required twelve-minute film project required for graduation, turned in Amistad for a black history course, and wrote a term paper about the California coast for his Natural Science course. “It was longer than most, well-written, and no grammatical errors,” said his professor, Donald J. Riesh.

  By offering an artistic metaphor for his unorthodox youth in Catch Me If You Can, Spielberg let us in on some of his secret fears, ones he can only express fully through his art while “explaining” them deceptively in his interviews. Movie directors, with their professional penchant for making up and embellishing stories, are often prone to creating fables about their own lives to impress the public and burnish their legends. Their “creation myths” often contain elements of imposture. Spielberg’s somewhat surprising choice of a vehicle for his most autobiographical film to date shows that he identifies these fraudulent traits in himself and connects them directly to the element in his life story that he has mined most obsessively throughout his career as a director, his trauma over his parents’ divorce, a subject he has addressed more candidly in his public statements.

  While discussing Catch Me If You Can with Martin Scorsese at a Directors Guild of America event, Spielberg said, “It was the first time, I think, on any film that I directed that I pretty much confronted head-on the events and repercussions of divorce.” Frank’s story was a “more literal” reflection of his own family trauma than E.T., Spielberg noted, “and so that was the first thing that attracted me to the subject—that and the fact that I did what [Frank] did once…. The older I get, the more I go back to the early memories to get me to commit to a movie. It takes sometimes something very Freudian to get me to say, ‘Well, this is interesting; I better read beyond page fifty.’”