Spielberg

by Frank Sanello

  Two of Schindler’s List’s producers, Gerald Molen and Branko Lustig, himself a survivor of the death camps, will serve as executive producers of the project along with Karen Kushell, who is head of special projects at Spielberg’s production company, Amblin.

  Senior producer of the foundation, James Moll, said, “Our primary goal is to interview people not yet interviewed.”

  “There has never been a multi-media system of this size,” Moll also said, adding that twenty-five to thirty employees were already compiling research and postproduction plans. The project uses digital technology to record the testimony. A newly invented database will allow users of the material to access instantly any piece of information on the video. Interviews will include experiences of the survivors before, during, and after World War II.

  “Steven is the visionary behind this. He’s the driving force,” June Beallor, another senior producer for the foundation, said. Moll added, “His heart is really in this project.”

  Spielberg will split his profits from Schindler’s List with the foundation and the Righteous Persons Foundation, also formed by the filmmaker to fund other Holocaust and Jewish charities. The Shoah Foundation asks Holocaust survivors to contact it at (800) 661-2092 or write Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Box 8940, Universal City, CA 91608.

  The Shoah Foundation will be the first major archival database to use multiple media. Spielberg said the software will be simple enough so that a seventh-grade student will be able to access information, including first person accounts of life in the death camps.

  Calling the project a “race against time,” Spielberg said, “My whole dream is to take as many testimonies as is humanly possible and make their stories available for no fee for those who want it.”

  Spielberg’s initial contribution totaled $16 million. Also contributing funds are the Lew Wasserman Foundation, MCA, Time-Warner, and NBC, all partners with Spielberg in various commercial projects. With understatement Spielberg said, “I don’t think we’ll have a problem raising money.”

  By June 1994, the project had recorded 100 interviews with survivors. The foundation is sending filmmakers, rabbis, psychotherapists, scholars, and adult children of Holocaust survivors around the world to interview survivors. The interviewing process is expected to cost from $50 million to $60 million over a period of several years.

  The director estimates that there are 300,000 Holocaust survivors. He hopes to record testimony from 150,000 of them by the year 2000.

  Spielberg admitted that some potential interview subjects did not greet his emissaries with open arms. “You should know,” he said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, “that some people would not talk to us. There are a lot of Jewish survivors that would like this to die with them because the memories are too horrible to confront.”

  Eventually, the foundation will record testimony from non-Jewish survivors, who include Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gays, and other minorities deemed by the Nazis as “sub-humans.” The director defended focusing on Jewish survivors first “because the Holocaust was really about what happened to European Jewry—the destruction of Jewish culture on that continent.”

  The recorded testimony includes more than just the despair of the Holocaust. Interviews, planned for two to three hours each, will not only describe the horrors of the camps but also, in typical Spielberg fashion, the stories of the survivors who rebuilt their lives after World War II.

  “The technology is just unbelievable. We’re creating a global network,” producer June Beallor explained.

  The computerized archives will be a godsend for researchers—and easy to use. By typing key words into the computer, scholars will be able to call up interviews by last name, hometown, topic, camp name, or other subject. The database also should help survivors locate fellow inmates with whom they have lost contact over the years.

  Beallor hopes easy access will attract people who normally shy away from literally dusty research. Beallor says, “One of the problems of oral histories is the volumes and volumes of written material that are so thick that few people will actually look for them. This gives you instant accessibility. If you’re interested in what happened to a particular town—who went to Auschwitz and who lived—you can call up certain key words and find out. If you want to find out about where people slept, what they ate, the kinds of latrines they used, you type in a certain word—like ‘latrine’—and it takes you to exact points in interviews where people talked about it.”

  Recording the testimony has taken its toll on the project’s principals. Beallor was particularly touched by the testimony of one survivor who was forced by the Nazis to hang his own father.

  The son of another survivor thanked Beallor for finally getting his father to talk about his camp experiences. After recording his account, the man gave a copy of the videotape to his son. Only then, half a century after the event, were father and son able to discuss the older man’s nightmare.

  The idea of an audiovisual memoir of the Holocaust came to Spielberg during the filming of Schindler’s List. Survivors showed up on the set in Poland and began telling him their stories. “I kept saying to them, ‘Thank you for telling me, but I wish you could say this to a camera because this is important testimony.’ I asked them if they’d be willing to do this, and they all said yes.

  “I felt that a much more important contribution to remembering the Shoah would be an aural-visual history.”

  His interest in the Holocaust dates back to his childhood, when his classical pianist mother would welcome fellow musicians who had survived the Holocaust into the Spielberg home. “There were people playing cellos and violas with Auschwitz-Birkenau tattoos on their arms,” Spielberg recalled.

  But what really prompted Spielberg to spend millions on the project was the debt he felt he owed posterity. He wanted to help young people “wake up to the fact that we are all part of every episode that has happened.”

  Many of the volunteers operating the foundation’s hotline are survivors themselves. Milie Stern, who works out of a trailer used on the production of Jurassic Park, is a volunteer interviewer who as a child hid from the Nazis in the Netherlands during World War II. Many of her callers, she says, “are reluctant at first. They haven’t talked before. It’s very painful. I make sure to identify myself. I tell them I’m a survivor. It helps them.”

  Another survivor-volunteer, Daisy Miller, says, “I generally ask people to give me a picture of what life was like before the war, their family life. Then they start talking about their wartime experience. Once the floodgates open, memories return.”

  Zofia Evenoz survived the war in a Polish ghetto, where she was raped by a Nazi soldier in 1941. In her taped testimony for Spielberg’s foundation, she confesses that she was never able to speak of the incident before. “I had a nervous breakdown years later. If I had been able to retell my experiences sooner it might have been better.”

  Renee Firestone, a survivor-interviewer, recalled her experience at Auschwitz in 1944: “My sister and I were pointed to the right, while my mother was taken the other way. We then tried to find out where my mother had been taken. The commandant simply pointed to a chimney. ‘Do you see this? There go your parents. When you go to this chimney, you will be reunited with them.’ ”

  Mel Mermelstein was the only member of his family to survive the camps. “I just remember seeing my father shortly before he died. He was so ill, so weak, such a small man then. I had always seen him, like any son, as big. His last words were that if I ever did get out I was to tell the world.”

  With the help of Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, Mermelstein has fulfilled his father’s dying wish.

  If the director ever decides to dramatize the Holocaust on film again, he will have an invaluable source for his imagination.

  USA Weekend magazine asked Spielberg during an interview about the Shoah Foundation if, after making a film about one of the darkest chapters in human history, he would ever be
able to return to making sunny, optimistic movies. Laughing, Spielberg replied, “Sure I can, because I have a sunny, optimistic nature. But I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive.”

  Until Schindler’s List swept the Oscars in 1994, the Academy Awards had always been more of a curse than a blessing in Spielberg’s career. Every time one of his films made half a billion dollars or whatever, there was usually the sour note of the Academy voters saying in effect, “So you can make money. Why don’t you make art now?”

  The first time Spielberg had the legitimate right to feel snubbed by Academy voters was in 1973. His very first feature film, The Sugarland Express, was good enough to win the best screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival, which usually honors more sophisticated films than the Oscars, especially at that time. Spielberg, with his “story by” credit for the script after Barwood and Robbins were hired to rewrite it, wouldn’t have received an Oscar nomination even if the screenplay had been so honored. But it would have been a gratifying vote of support for him. The director may have comforted himself with the realization that the original screenplay competition in 1973 was stiff indeed and included three other films that eventually would be considered all-time classics: American Graffiti, the bittersweet piece of nostalgia that put Spielberg’s best bud, George Lucas, on the map; Ingmar Bergman’s difficult but ultimately rewarding Cries and Whispers; and The Sting, the intricately plotted caper film, produced by his mentors Zanuck and Brown, which won the best screenplay Oscar that year.

  Spielberg’s next film, Jaws, which quickly became the number-one box-office hit of all time, was honored with a best picture nod. Jaws’ nomination reflected a short-lived phenomenon in Oscar history when hugely commercial but artistically lowbrow films often received a best picture nomination, almost as a way of the Academy thanking the studio for keeping the industry afloat. How else do you explain such inexplicable best picture nominees as Airport, The Towering Inferno, and Love Story? (Even Cleopatra made the best picture list, although it’s hard to figure what kind of message the Academy was trying to send the industry: make films that will almost bankrupt your studio?) Spielberg could at least derive some comfort from the fact that Jaws was beaten by another soon-to-be-classic, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

  Close Encounters of the Third Kind was a more critically respected film than Jaws, earning Spielberg his first best director nomination. The film itself was shut out of the best picture category, however, as the Academy apparently felt that one sci-fi nominee per year was sufficient. (Star Wars, not Close Encounters, was nominated that year, as was its director, George Lucas.) But a film light years away in style and content took the best director and film prize, Woody Allen and his Annie Hall.

  Spielberg’s next hit (not his next film, 1941) earned him another best director nomination, and this time there was no similar entry to knock Raiders of the Lost Ark out of the best picture category. Competition was fierce that year, and Spielberg would have been genuinely sincere had he spouted that old bromide, “It’s an honor just to be nominated.” His competitors were the great Louis Malle for the cult classic Atlantic City; the sentimental favorite, Henry Fonda’s last film, On Golden Pond, directed by Mark Rydell; Warren Beatty for Reds; and the year’s big winner, Chariots of Fire, by a little known British director, Hugh Hudson.

  The director reached the pinnacle, albeit a temporary one, of his career with his next film, E.T., which not only made you weep over the fate of a rubber hand puppet, but also soon earned more money than any other film up to that time. The Academy recognized the achievement with best film, director, and script nominations, but the only Oscars it won were sound effects editing and visual effects. Partisans of Spielberg were starting to get paranoid over these repeated snubs of their boy. But in defense of the Academy, the competition that year (1982) was fierce and filled with socially important message films that also made a raft of money (although not E.T.-level amounts). Gandhi (the eventual winner), Missing, The Verdict, and even Tootsie dealt with deep dish themes like passive resistance, alcoholism, gender identity, and political torture. E.T.’s theme of childhood alienation wasn’t socially as significant as the Mahatma freeing an entire subcontinent from British tyranny.

  Three years later, the debate over Spielberg’s love-hate affair with the Academy was by now getting downright nasty. Granted, E.T. was about a polyurethane geek from outer space, but The Color Purple was a different animal. Based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, the movie dealt with socially relevant issues like spousal abuse, the emancipation of women, and heroic black women. And it contained fine performances by untried actors, Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey, both of whom the Academy did deign to honor with nominations. The person who directed these Oscar-caliber performances, however, was once again ignored. And adding insult to injury, the Academy nominated directors who had made good but not truly great films (Sydney Pollack, Out of Africa; John Huston, Prizzi’s Honor; Akira Kurosawa, Ran; Hector Babenco, Kiss of the Spider Woman; and Peter Weir, Witness).

  Moreover the old theory that the Academy resented Spielberg’s box-office success didn’t even apply. Both Witness and Out of Africa, the best picture winner, made more money than The Color Purple.

  Unlike The Color Purple’s reception by the Academy, Spielberg could at least console himself with the fact that his next film, Empire of the Sun, was treated equally by the Academy and the public. Both ignored it—although the public ignored the box-office dud even more than Oscar voters, who nominated it in the lesser categories, cinematography, art direction, costume design, sound, editing, and original score.

  The conventional wisdom in 1987 was that another film, a critical and box-office smash, Hope and Glory, stole Empire of the Sun’s thunder because both films viewed World War II through the eyes of a young boy. Ironically, Hope and Glory’s vision was definitely rose-tinted, whereas Spielberg, often criticized for sanitizing his films, presented a truly horrific vision of wartime atrocities.

  By the time Jurassic Park was released, the Academy had dumped its quaint custom of nominating huge commercial hits simply because they were huge commercial hits. (Call it the Towering Inferno syndrome.) No one, not even his biggest fan, his mother, cried foul when Jurassic Park was nominated in only technical categories. E.T. and T-rex were both reptilian, but only E.T. made you cry, while the screams elicited by rampaging Mr. T’s were not the kind of response that usually attracted serious Oscar consideration.

  Spielberg didn’t have much time to obsess over the Academy’s indifference to Jurassic Park. That same year, Oscar voters made amends for years of snubs and damnation with faint praise by heaping just about every statuette they could find on Schindler’s List.

  Although for years Spielberg had denied Oscar-envy, when the awards finally came his way, he was elated. “Anyone who has ever been nominated for an Oscar, who denies it ever being a goal at the time, is loopy,” he said in a fit of honesty after years of much public denial.

  In his acceptance speech, he thanked “the six million who can’t be watching this among the one billion watching this telecast tonight. In so many American schools, the Holocaust really is a footnote in the history books.”

  With the commercial and critical success of Schindler’s List, not to mention its Oscar haul, the Holocaust would never again be an afterthought or a dry paragraph in an obscure history book.

  The day after the Oscars, Spielberg said, “If this is a dream, don’t wake me up.”

  After the emotionally draining work of filming a re-creation of the Holocaust, Steven Spielberg pronounced himself exhausted. He claimed he would take an eighteen-month vacation away from the camera.

  In the summer of 1993, he told Daily Variety columnist Army Archerd, “I have absolutely no plans to start a new movie. I spent many sleepless nights in toxic shock, going between the two movies,” Schindler’s List and Jurassic Park.

  And when he did go back to work, it wouldn’t be the usual roller-coaster ride. Or so he said:<
br />
  “Whatever I do after Schindler’s List has to be something that moves me deeply.”

  His resolution to play hooky didn’t last long. Within months he was back at work. The project he chose to devote his energies to, however, didn’t jive with his plans to do a deeply moving work.

  But it was work. And the workaholic director had to keep busy, even if it meant going from the holocaust to a kids tale about a friendly poltergeist.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Casa Spielberg

  WHEN YOU’RE NOT DREAMING UP YOUR next billion-dollar business venture or Oscar-winning film, how do you relax?

  Steven Spielberg, his wife, and their five children move from homes in the Hamptons to Malibu to Trump Tower in New York.

  But their primary residence is a sun-drenched, Mediterranean-style compound in Pacific Palisades, a suburb of Los Angeles near the Pacific Ocean that attracts other box-office royalty like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and until he decamped to Miami, Sylvester Stallone.

  The main house of the sprawling compound is huge, white, and airy. The garden is a forest of expensive palm trees. There are several large outbuildings housing a screening room, office, and guest houses. The spread is something of a landmark for nostalgia buffs. David O. Selznick lived there while producing Gone With the Wind. Other owners include Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Cary Grant with his then wife, heiress Barbara Hutton. Spielberg renovated much of the aging structure. In the living room, there’s a small Modigliani on the wall opposite a huge, luminous Monet. Much of the furniture is Arts and Crafts style by Gustav Stickley. On a table under the Monet are three scripts under glass: originals of Citizen Kane, Casablanca, and Orson Welles’ radio broadcast for The War of the Worlds. Spielberg’s favorite painter, Norman Rockwell, is represented everywhere.