E.T.—The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
Once again, Spielberg remained unique among filmmakers by depicting space aliens as nice, not nasty. The eponymous hero was nothing more than a pile of polyurethane and radio-controlled moving parts, but Spielberg coaxed such a performance out of his star that serious film critics lobbied for an Oscar for the reptilian figure. Despite its sci-fi theme, E.T. is a deeply autobiographical film. Nerdy, friendless Elliot, anguished by his parents’ divorce, is the young Steven Spielberg, a fish out of water (or in Spielberg’s case, a Jew in Wasp hell). If only Elliot had a friend of his own who understood him. His wish is granted when a very special friend literally drops from the skies. E.T.’s suffering, death, and resurrection has led some film scholars to decode him as a Christ figure, but Spielberg didn’t have such theological pretensions: he was creating a happy ending for his unhappy childhood. Trivia note: At $10 million, with 10 percent of the budget spent on the puppet alone, E.T. was the box-office record holder until some ravenous velociraptors gobbled up its record.
The Color Purple (1985)
After a brief pit stop back in Jonesville (1984’s execrable Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), Spielberg was ready to tackle the Big Picture and the Big Themes: racism, incest, spousal abuse, black lesbians. As one industry pundit said, “After Raiders and E.T., Steven Spielberg could have made a film about black lesbians, and the studios would have let him.” He did and they did. Spielberg fell in love with the book by Alice Walker, but he felt that a woman or a black should direct this story of an abused southern woman who liberates herself from male oppression and finds freedom in the arms of another black woman. African-American music mogul Quincy Jones, who owned the rights to the book, finally convinced the nice Jewish boy from Scottsdale that he could make a film about the African-American experience by saying, “You didn’t have to come from Mars to do E.T., did you?” That of course begs the question, since there were no underemployed directors from the Red Planet waiting in the wings to make E.T. Spielberg, long accused of treating his actors like, well, spaceships, managed to wring Oscar-nominated performances from two newcomers, stand-up comic Whoopi Goldberg and a short, obese woman who had just started hosting a national talk show named Oprah Winfrey. Critics cavilled that the black experience had been “lucasbergered.” Black men complained that the director had perpetuated stereotypes with Goldberg’s incestuous father and physically abusive husband. Even the Oscars seemed to take Spielberg to task when the Academy gave the film nominations in just about every category (eleven in all) except best director. (The film didn’t win a single Academy Award.) Everybody seemed to hate The Color Purple except the public, which turned it into a $143 million hit.
Empire of the Sun (1987)
Despite the shellacking The Color Purple took from the critics, Spielberg, to his credit, didn’t retreat to his tried and true escapist style for his next film. Instead, he chose a project whose subject matter was almost as difficult and painful as The Color Purple’s.
Empire of the Sun was based on a real-life account of a British boy who was imprisoned by the Japanese during World War II. The film contains many of Spielberg’s earlier thematic preoccupations, including separation from parents and the dissolution of the family unit, but Empire of the Sun was a major stylistic departure from his previous roller-coaster rides. Scenes in the film include the spoiled upper-class eleven-year-old growing up quickly and painfully. In the prison camp, the starving child is reduced to eating insects and stealing shoes from corpses. Routine beatings by the sadistic camp guards make this film in many ways scarier than Jaws or Poltergeist, since the terror is based on fact, not fantasy or supernatural intervention. The screenplay had an impeccable pedigree. Based on the autobiographical novel by science fiction writer J. G. Ballard, the script was penned by one of Britain’s greatest living dramatists, Tom Stoppard. He and the director had such a mutually enjoyable collaboration that Spielberg put the playwright under long-term contract to read and critique scripts for possible production by Amblin.
Empire of the Sun is one of Spielberg’s most accomplished and involving films, but again both the public and the critics failed to applaud his attempts to stretch beyond the mass-entertainment mode. The film was one of his biggest flops, and the critics were equally unkind. As Spielberg said of the reaction in the press, “I got a bollocking from the critics who didn’t like the idea that I was suddenly trying to stretch my character.”
Always (1989)
Spielberg returned to the seemingly safer world of fantasy for this remake of the 1943 cult classic, A Guy Named Joe, about a fighter pilot who comes back from the dead to counsel his best friend, who has fallen in love with the pilot’s girlfriend. Richard Dreyfuss was fatally miscast in the leading man role of the dead pilot. Brad Johnson was physically more appropriate as the studly best friend, but his male-model good looks couldn’t hide a hopelessly inept performance by a neophyte actor. And the typically brilliant Holly Hunter failed to compensate for an underwritten script and role. (Strangely, Spielberg threw out the first draft by the great Tom Stoppard and shot a version by former television hack Jerry Belson [The End].)
Spielberg obviously had a lot of fun shooting forest fires and airplane stunts, but the core of the movie was a romantic comedy, and the light touch required for this genre was apparently beyond the director’s heavy-handed grasp.
Always enjoys the dubious distinction of being his most boring film, if not his worst. (That honor, of course, goes to 1941.) Trivia note: Spielberg had asked Sean Connery to do a cameo as God, but prior film commitments prevented his participation. The late Audrey Hepburn was tapped for the role instead.
Hook (1991)
For years it had been a cliche: Steven Spielberg was a real life Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up. After he tackled such adult subject matter as lesbianism and child abuse, the Peter Pan analogy was growing rather thin. Not surprisingly, the director was intrigued when he found a script that dramatized what happened to Peter Pan after he grew up.
Robin Williams plays the adult Peter Pan, who has become an only slightly less scary version of Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, a Wall Street arbitrageur who gobbles up and spits out companies for breakfast. Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman), still smarting from the loss of his right hand after a run-in with the young Peter, shows up and kidnaps Williams’s kids. Peter must rediscover his inner child to rescue his children, which occasions a return to Neverland, which cost $70 million to build on the same soundstages used for The Wizard of Oz. Julia Roberts does an embarrassing turn as a miniature Tinkerbelle. Heavy-handed and witless, Hook, however, boasted brilliant production design and state-of-the-art special effects, which turned it into one of the director’s most commercially successful films.
Jurassic Park (1993)
Scientists find zillion-year-old dinosaur blood in the belly of a mosquito preserved over the eons in amber. The blood supplies DNA from which dinosaurs are cloned and exhibited in a Central American amusement park, a reptilian Disneyland. Industrial spies screw up the security system that keeps the park’s wildlife safely penned in, and dinosaurs run amok. As terrifying as the similarthemed Jaws, Jurassic Park benefits from nearly two decades worth of computer advances since the release of the 1975 shark epic. Spielberg lightened the dark tone of the bestseller by Michael Crichton, which reflected his own temperament and also left open the possibility of a sequel. (In the novel, the dinosaur “problem” is solved by atom-bombing the island which houses the amusement park.) Computer-generated and animated dinosaurs make Jurassic Park’s preposterous premise believable and eminently watchable. The public couldn’t take its eyes off the film and quickly turned it into the No. 1 hit of all time, knocking another film about a reptilian creature out of first place.
Schindler’s List (1993)
With his masterpiece about the Holocaust, Spielberg once and for all refuted charges that he was merely a glorious hack. The commercial success of Schindler’s List also p
roved that the third time was the charm after two quixotic attempts to tackle World War II (Empire of the Sun and 1941). Schindler’s List also represented the director’s third cinematic depiction of Nazis, although this time the cartoon villains of the Indiana Jones films were replaced by a real life psychopath, Ralph Fiennes’s searing camp commandant Amon Goeth. Liam Neeson’s Oskar Schindler is hypnotic as an amiable Nazi who inexplicably rose above his moral mediocrity to become a heroic rescuer of more than a thousand Jews destined for the gas chambers. Spielberg tackled this difficult project for many reasons: to exorcise the demons of his youth, which included alienation as a Jew in Wasp suburbia and physical attacks by other kids because of his religion; to film a riveting if unlikely real life story; and not the least of which, to preserve and honor the memory of the dead as survivors and eyewitnesses died off.
The need to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive was urgent, as evidenced by the number of quack savants who claimed it never took place. One horrifying result of the film itself: reports that neo-Nazis in Germany were flocking to the movie because they enjoyed “scenes of the Jews being killed.” Both phenomena underlined the wisdom of philosopher George Santayana who said those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Schindler’s List is both a classic of the cinema and a vigilant warning. And it unequivocally places Spielberg in the pantheon of his idols, John Ford, Howard Hawks, and David Lean.
The Lost World: Jurassic Park II (1997)
After the emotionally draining Schindler’s List, industry observers wondered if the director would return to filmmaking on a popcorn diet or continue with more nutritious fare. After a three year “retirement” playing Mr. Mom, Spielberg picked popcorn with this sequel to Jurassic Park. During those three years, computer generated imaging (CGI) and other special effects technology advanced considerably, allowing the filmmaker to create even more realistic looking and terrifying dinosaurs. As in the case of most sequels, all the villains (i.e., dinosaurs and their capitalist creators) hadn’t been destroyed in the first film. On an island near the original dinosaur haunt off the coast of Costa Rica, the out-sized reptiles continued to be bred to create another super-theme park, but a hurricane destroys the lab where the creatures are cloned, and these “lab rats” escape and now roam free on the island. Two competing expeditions, one humane, the other crass, set out to rein in these free-range reptiles. The sequel’s ad line, “Something has survived,” was almost as compelling as “Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water . . .” was for the Jaws sequels. And like the Jaws retreads, this sequel was unfavorably compared to the original by critics, but the public turned it into a $200 million-plus hit.
Amistad (1997)
The director returned to more substantial fare with this re-creation of a true-life slave revolt aboard a Cuban ship, in which captured Africans rise up and kill their captors, then stand trial for their “crime” in the United States, with the case going all the way to the Supreme Court. The abductees win the case and sail back to Africa and into a typical Spielberg sunset. Critics complained that the director had made a feel good film about slavery, the public seemed uninterested in this obscure historical footnote, and Spielberg suffered one of his rare box-office bombs. He did receive praise for his harrowing re-creation of the notorious “Middle Passage,” in which African abductees were packed in the holds of slaveships like sardines. Spielberg brought all his talent as a popcorn action director to re-create this stunning sequence, although his inevitable detractors said that just as he had done with the Holocaust in Schindler’s List, he turned the Middle Passage into a terrifying thrill ride.
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Spielberg continued in a serious vein here, but this time the critics and the public embraced the director’s high-minded attempt to dramatize the D-Day invasion of Normandy and its aftermath. Again based on a true story, the film follows a small Army Ranger unit pulled away from its original mission, marching through France and invading Germany, to rescue the title’s private, missing behind enemy lines after the D-Day landing. Private Ryan’s brothers have been killed on duty, and he is the sole-surviving son. As a public relations morale booster, the Army Chief of Staff orders the rangers to take some time off from liberating France and find the missing soldier. The project was considered a financial risk because of its difficult subject matter and its summer release date, when escapist fare dominates theaters, but Saving Private Ryan not only became one of Spielberg’s biggest commercial hits, the film earned ecstatic reviews and earned Spielberg a best director Oscar.
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001)
The director claimed he made this alleged “children’s film” because his own children wanted him to make a movie they could enjoy, since genocide, slavery, and D-Day’s 5,000 dead and maimed were not the kinds of subject matter that appeal to kids. A dutiful father, Spielberg tried to make another popcorn movie, but this confection ended up sprinkled with prussic acid. In the “Pinocchio-goes-to-hell” adventure, a robotic child in the distant future is programmed to love his parents, but they abandon him. The robot then goes on a journey to find love and perhaps a human soul. The journey is land-mined with nightmarish scenes where robots are torn limb from limb, and the creepy nature of this so-called kid flick owed its origin to the fact that noirish filmmaker Stanley Kubrick wrote the treatment, which Spielberg, after the director’s death, incorporated into a screenplay he wrote himself. The critics loved and hated the grim fantasy in equal parts, but its neither fish-nor-fowl flavor failed to find an audience.
Minority Report (2002)
Imagine a future (2080 to be exact) where psychics finger future murderers, then the police execute these putative felons before they can commit their crimes. Tom Cruise plays a detective at the government agency that tracks down these criminals-to-be, then finds himself accused of a future crime, which he has to prove he will not commit before colleagues at his agency track him down and liquidate him. Perhaps tired of being called a filmmaker lite, Spielberg snapped at a reporter from the New York Times, “Yes, Minority Report is a popcorn movie, but it’s a gourmet popcorn movie.” (Minority Report had not yet been released when this biography went to press.)
INDEX
The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below
A
ABC
Academy Awards
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Color Purple, The
commercial nominations, tradition of
Empire of the Sun
E.T.
Irving Thalberg Memorial Award
Jaws
Jurrassic Park
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Rainman
Schindler’s List
studio predictions
Ace Eli and Roger of the Skies
Adler, Bernie (stepfather)
Adler, Leah (mother)
childhood of
influence on son
and Judaism
as parent
at Schindler’s List
on Spielberg as genius
on Spielberg’s childhood
Allen, Karen
Allen, Paul
Always
casting
commercial success
critics’ response
reason for remake
script
Spielberg’s satisfaction with
as unwise project
Amazing Stories
Amblin’ (film)
Amblin (production company)
architectural design
employees
future films
Stoppard contract
American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award
American Film Institute
American Graffiti
Anastasia
Animaniacs
Animated Tail, An
anthology shows
anti-semitism
during Schindler’s List
Spielberg experience of
“Anything Goes”
Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, The
Arts and Crafts style
Atherton, William
Atlanta Film Festival
Attenborough, Richard
Auschwitz
awards See also Academy Awards
Amblin’
American Film Institute
Directors Guild
Duel
Fellowship of the Academy Award (Britain)
Sugarland Express
teenage years
B
Back to the Future
Bain, Barbara
Bale, Christian
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