Eventually, in August 2009, DreamWorks announced that it had finally locked in place the necessary funding to begin operations anew. JP Morgan Securities led a consortium that also included eight other lenders (Bank of America, City National Bank, Wells Fargo, Comerica, Union Bank of California, Sun Trust California Bank and Trust, and Israel Discount Bank) to put up $325 million in bank funding, and Reliance agreed to match that amount in equity in exchange for a 50 percent ownership share in DreamWorks. Disney agreed to increase its lending to DreamWorks from $100 million to $175 million. The reorganized production company expected to make at least six movies a year over the following three years. “We got the funding in an environment where credit has been almost impossible to secure,” said Stacey Snider, who expressed hope that as the credit market improved, more bank funding could be obtained and Reliance would make an additional investment. As Claudia Eller wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Although the $825-million total falls short of the $1.25 billion the director had originally sought, DreamWorks has achieved what many in Hollywood have been unable to do: secure new sources of film funding in financially treacherous times. But independence comes at a steep cost”—selling half the company to its Indian partners. Spielberg tried to put a positive spin on the long ordeal of raising the funding, saying of DreamWorks and Reliance, “We had a year to get to know each other, to test the relationship.”
DreamWorks’ problems and all they implied were summed up by Kim Masters, who wrote on the financial Web site The Big Money: “The spectacle of Steven Spielberg reduced from 800-pound gorilla to maybe 400-pound gorilla is enough to send shivers through even the iciest executives in the business.” His former studio’s misadventures in finding a new haven for its stubborn efforts at independence showed the limitations of Spielberg’s power and seemed to symbolize a more sobering era in Hollywood.
Even if the retooled company (known to Hollywood wags as DreamWorks 2.0) might well rise again, it would never be the same as in Spielberg’s grandiose initial dreams. In her 2010 history of DreamWorks, The Men Who Would Be King, former Variety reporter Nicole LaPorte offers a somber analysis of the company’s gradual downsizing: “In the end, more than anything else, DreamWorks was a failure of expectation, one that resulted from all of the relentless hype. Spectacular success was not so much a goal as an assumption. How could these guys fail? DreamWorks itself promulgated this notion through its close relationships with the press, and the company’s story is a lesson in the dangers of those staggering expectations. Anything less than delivering the stars and sun and moon (as promised) couldn’t help but look like a failure— even to sage Hollywood observers who knew the score in terms of the risky nature of the business. Spielberg had so long been considered infallible that he seemed to believe it himself.”
*
SPIELBERG coped with all the financial turmoil by doing what he does best, directing. In the fall of 2008, he embarked on a fresh experiment when he “ventured into the brave new world of motion-capture 3-D” by filming The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. Based on The Secret of the Unicorn and material from other comic books by the Belgian artist Hergé (Georges Remi), the digitally produced film is being made in collaboration with Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, whose New Zealand visual-effects company is supervising the animation. Jamie Bell, the young British actor who worked with Jackson on King Kong but is best known for his title role in the 2000 film Billy Elliot, won the role of Tintin after Thomas Sangster bowed out due to a schedule conflict. Daniel Craig, who played one of the hit men in Munich and subsequently became James Bond, plays the villainous pirate Red Rackham.
Spielberg first optioned the Tintin books in 1983, shortly after making E.T. Hergé, who had failed to interest Walt Disney in filming the Tintin comics and died in 1983, was an admirer of Spielberg’s work and said, “Yes, I think this guy can make this film. Of course, it will not be my Tintin, but it can be a great Tintin.” Spielberg and Jackson tried to set up the initial film as a joint venture between Paramount and Universal, but Universal passed on the $135-million feature because the two filmmakers’ combined share of the gross was so high (30 percent) and because the track record of previous motion-capture films did not inspire confidence that the studios would make much money from Tintin after the filmmakers took their share. (It’s worth recalling that Columbia passed on E.T., concluding it had limited commercial potential and was nothing more than “a wimpy Walt Disney movie.”) Spielberg and Jackson wound up making Tintin for both Paramount and Sony, which has distribution rights in some countries. Because of the long postproduction process for the conversion from live action to animation, the film is not expected to be released until 2011.
“We want Tintin’s adventures to have the reality of a live-action film,” Spielberg explained during preproduction, “and yet Peter and I felt that shooting them in a traditional live-action format would simply not honor the distinctive look of the characters and world that Hergé created. Hergé’s characters have been reborn as living beings, expressing emotion and a soul that goes far beyond anything we’ve been able to create with computer-animated characters.” When he finished principal photography, Spielberg wrote that he “found motion-capture to be liberating, daunting and breathtaking.” He added, “Every movie I made up until Tintin, I always kept one eye closed when I’ve been framing a shot [so he could see the scene in two dimensions, as viewers would]. On Tintin, I have both of my eyes open.”
The Tintin books have long been popular in Europe and have spawned other film and television adaptations, but they are little-known in the United States. The protagonist is a young newspaper reporter, an intrepid Everyman character, who gets involved (with his white dog, Snowy) in adventures with criminals and other characters from the demimonde. In that regard Tintin resembles a young Indiana Jones; Hergé’s books also are boys’ adventure yarns with affinities with the movie serials of the 1930s and ’40s, and they may have influenced the Indy series, even though Spielberg claimed to have discovered the comics only after reviewers mentioned similarities with Raiders of the Lost Ark. Hergé started his series with an anti-Bolshevik story in 1929–30 (Tintin in the Land of the Soviets) and published his Tintin adventures in a Nazi-controlled Belgian newspaper during World War II; some of his Tintin adventures contain caricatures of blacks and Jews. The series often involved political satire, but because of Hergé’s desire to avoid controversy in his comics during the war, the 1943 story Spielberg is principally adapting (with screenwriters Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright, and Joe Cornish) concentrates on escapism, telling a tongue-in-cheek, if rather hackneyed, story of pirates and treasure hunting.
How Spielberg’s personality will blend with Hergé’s, and whether the filmmaker’s Tintin will seem merely a technical jeu d’esprit, a reversion to the leaden boy’s-adventure whimsy of Hook, or another artistic departure, remains to be seen. Collaborating with another director is not unprecedented for Spielberg, who has done so to varying degrees with George Lucas and Stanley Kubrick. But Jackson’s level of creative involvement in Tintin complicates the film’s authorship, and he plans to direct the first of the possible sequels. Jackson was on the set for part of Spielberg’s rehearsals and shooting, and the two filmmakers monitored each other’s work through video-conference hookups, as well as talking extensively by that means during preproduction.
If nothing else, Tintin is a further demonstration of Spielberg’s unpredictability and tireless penchant for cinematic experimentation. He has said that he needs to do work that “will frighten me.” Despite the body of work he has amassed in a career that has spanned more than fifty years and brought him every conceivable honor, his creative anxiety causes him to feel ill every morning when he directs a film, and “every time I begin a new scene, I get that stage fright, that little bit of those opening-night jitters, which I think is a very healthy thing because it kind of pushes me.” Tintin, though one of Spielberg’s “entertainments,” represents a jump into the techn
ological future, and is another of the creative risks he enjoys taking.
In May 2010, Spielberg announced that he would next direct War Horse, a film of the 1982 children’s book by British author Michael Morpurgo and its acclaimed 2007 stage adaptation by Nick Stafford. The story of an English farm boy wandering through the battlefields of World War I in search of his pet horse, who has been taken into service to the British cavalry and captured by the Germans, has echoes of Empire of the Sun. But in further pursuing his career-long preoccupation with war, Spielberg has given himself a new set of historical horrors to confront in reimagining what was then known as the Great War, and whether the narrative will be told partly through the beleaguered horse’s perspective (as the novel does in its entirety), as well as through that of the plucky lad (played by Jeremy Irvine) who follows him into battle, remains to be seen. Because of the unusually prolonged production schedule of Tintin, War Horse is scheduled to reach the screen earlier than Tintin in 2011, via Disney and DreamWorks.
Spielberg’s development as an artist has always been hard to predict; he seldom rests on his laurels for long, and though he continually returns to some seemingly unshakable obsessions, mostly involving childhood trauma, he often surprises even those who follow his career closely with his choice of material. When asked in 1998 if he ever worried that he might run out of ideas, Spielberg replied, “I don’t have enough time in a lifetime to tell all the stories I want to tell.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I FIRST BECAME AWARE of Steven Spielberg’s prodigious filmmaking gifts in 1972, when I saw his TV movie Something Evil. In the twenty years that followed, I watched with bemusement as his enormous popularity left him largely without honor from his Hollywood colleagues and the critical community. As early as 1982, when E.T. appeared, I began thinking, Here is a good story for a biographer. The disdain of the self-styled intellectual elite for this great popular artist reminded me of the condescension with which such Golden Age directors as Hitchcock, Hawks, and Capra were treated in the prime of their careers. I reluctantly put aside the notion of a Spielberg biography at the time, realizing that it was a bit premature (he was, after all, only thirty-five), but I waited in vain during the intervening years to read a serious, in-depth biography, or even a critical study with any insight or originality. It seemed that first-rate writers on film and academic scholars were shunning Spielberg as if he were unworthy of sustained attention.
Ironically, another factor in this undervaluation of Spielberg has been his desire to control the telling of his own life story. Even writers who have approached him with the proposal of an authorized biography or an authorized book about his films have been discouraged; he was said to be planning to write his autobiography at some time in the future. Evidently the idea of writing an unauthorized biography of Hollywood’s most powerful figure was out of the question for many writers. I am constantly surprised by how many people, including some in the literary world, react with automatic suspicion when they hear the phrase “unauthorized biography,” as if there were something inherently dubious about a book not having the subject’s seal of approval. On the contrary, what should arouse the reader’s suspicions are the inevitable constraints placed on an author’s integrity by the decision to allow his subject to authorize and thereby to control the writing of the book. By talking endlessly about his life in press and television interviews to promote his movies, Spielberg already has given us an autobiography of sorts, albeit a scattered, fragmentary, and sometimes misleading one; what largely has been missing from the picture is an independent examination of his character, seen not simply through his eyes alone but also through the perspectives of the people who have known and worked with him throughout his lifetime.
What finally convinced me in 1993 to write this book was the news that Spielberg finally had decided to make Schindler’s List. Once he mustered the courage to confront the Holocaust and his own Jewish heritage, the conflicting impulses of his life and work began to resolve themselves in a way that provided dramatic shape and resolution for a biography, even if the subject still was only a middle-aged man with (one hopes) another twenty or thirty years of productivity ahead of him. There are major advantages in writing a biography when the subject is in the prime of his life. The subject and his surroundings have a vital immediacy, and if the benefit of distant perspective is somewhat lacking, it is not entirely absent. Spielberg has been making films, as boy and man, for forty years now, and if he were to stop tomorrow, his career would stand as one of the most important in the history of film. But the foremost advantage for a biographer of the fifty-year-old Steven Spielberg is being able to interview the people who knew him during his formative years—his family, friends, and neighbors, his playmates, classmates, and teachers, the people who shaped him into the man he would become—and the opportunity to hear their accounts when their memories still are relatively fresh.
Even more than for most human beings, it is true of Spielberg what Wordsworth wrote, that “The Child is father of the Man.” Following the trail of Spielberg’s unconventional childhood from Cincinnati to Haddon Township to Phoenix to Saratoga was a fascinating and revelatory experience; very few of the scores of people I interviewed from those years had ever before talked about him to a writer. In all, I interviewed 327 people for this book, including many of Spielberg’s Hollywood coworkers, friends, and colleagues (see the list in the following section).
Spielberg himself declined to be interviewed. During my years as a reporter on Daily Variety, I had met him twice, first at a small, informal press conference for Jaws in the Universal commissary in 1975, and then for a brief conversation with him and his wife, Kate Capshaw, before he received an award from the American Cinema Editors in 1990. When I wrote Spielberg on March 1, 1994, four months after starting work on this book, I explained that while I was writing an “unauthorized, strictly independent biography,” I would welcome the opportunity to interview him, as well as any other cooperation he might care to give, such as letting me see his early amateur films. His always gentlemanly spokesman, Marvin Levy, replied in a telephone call on March 18 that while Spielberg knew my work and realized that I was writing a serious book, he had a policy of not talking with anyone writing a book about him because of his plans to write his autobiography. “He’d be happy if there are no books” about him, Levy pointed out, but added, “He’s not going to stop you from writing a book.” Levy suggested that if I submitted factual questions in writing, Spielberg might answer them; it also might be possible, he said, to let me watch his amateur films, even though “some of [them] he’s always wanted to keep locked away.” When I followed up on March 24 by asking Levy for a list of titles and dates of Spielberg’s amateur films and reminding him of my request to see those films, my letter went unanswered.
From some of the people I approached for interviews in the months that followed, I learned that Spielberg’s office generally was not discouraging his friends and coworkers from talking with me, and that Levy himself had declared I was “kosher.” That helped open some doors, although I eventually learned that Spielberg did ask a few people not to talk to me (not everyone complied with his wishes); others declined to be interviewed because the book was not authorized. One person who later gave me an interview initially was told by Spielberg’s assistant, “Steven is in the throes of planning an authorized biography. Please save your recollections for that one.” The confidentiality agreements Amblin Entertainment reportedly has extracted from at least some of its employees may have been a hindrance as well; such are the hurdles an independent biographer faces in dealing with a living subject who is virtually omnipotent in Hollywood terms and unabashedly describes himself as a “control freak.” Among those who turned down my interview requests were Lew R. Wasserman, Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall, John Williams, Ben Kingsley, John Milius, Sean Connery, Sam Neill, Liam Neeson, and Steven Bochco; others in the film industry, most notably Sidney J. Sheinberg and Richard Dreyfuss, did not respond to m
y letters. But I was pleasantly surprised by the degree of cooperation and candor I did receive from dozens of others who had known and worked with Spielberg throughout his career in Hollywood and were eager to help me set the record straight.
Spielberg’s charming and effervescent mother, Leah Adler, chatted with me over the phone on three occasions from her Milky Way kosher restaurant but in the end declined to give me a formal interview. Although she has often talked about her son in print and on television, Mrs. Adler told me in January 1996, “The studio would rather I not do anything.” “You mean Steven?” I asked. “The gods!” she replied, laughing. “The gods said nix…. I don’t ask questions. I’m in obedience training school. Good luck with it.” On the other hand, Spielberg’s father, Arnold, enthusiastically granted me a candid and wide-ranging interview in January 1996. He subsequently changed his mind about loaning me family photographs for use in the book, explaining apologetically, “I have to go by my son’s wishes.” I remain extremely grateful to Mr. Spielberg for his many illuminating comments on Steven and the rest of his family, especially on those who were born in Russia. One especially poignant moment during our interview came when Arnold said of his son, with whom he has not always been close, “You probably know more about him than I do.” After Steven dissuaded his mother from talking, I made no attempt to interview his wife, Kate; his three sisters (one of whom, Anne, I dated for several months in 198–82); or his first wife, Amy Irving (although I have never met Irving, while she was living with Spielberg in the late 1970s she allowed me to use her name to help market a screenplay I wrote but that was not produced).
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