The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Yale Press book describes Spielberg’s ‘revenge of the nerd’
Here’s a great American success story: how an anxious, insecure, bullied nerd overcame his fears and ridicule by picking up a movie camera as a teenager and used his anxieties to scare, entertain and captivate millions of people.
Yes, he has directed 34 movies, including “Jaws,” “E.T.” and “Jurassic Park” and is the most successful, popular moviemaker of all time.
And now, at age 70 (really? could it be?) Steven Spielberg is being analyzed and seeing his movies examined by esteemed film critic Molly Haskell in a mini-biography.
She admits she was an unlikely choice for this assignment.
“When Yale University Press came to me with the idea of writing a short biography of Spielberg for its Jewish lives series, I hesitated,” Haskell wrote in her preface to “Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films.”
It wasn’t so much that Haskell isn’t Jewish. “More to the point, I had never been an ardent fan.”
Haskell loves “art films,” many of them foreign. But as she wrote, Spielberg acknowledges he has no feeling for European films. Haskell wrote she embraces “brooding ambiguities, unresolved longings, things left unsaid and the erotic transactions of men and women.”
But Spielberg doesn’t “do” erotic in his movies. “He can’t imagine the full spectrum of adult heterosexual emotions — attraction, flirtation, desire, even good conversation between a man and a woman,” Haskell wrote.
And yet, when Haskell went back to take another look at Spielberg’s work, she discovered some movies she deeply admires, especially the relatively unnoticed “Empire of the Sun.” She is also impressed with his willingness in more recent times to take on weighty subjects such as the Holocaust (“Schindler’s List”) and slavery (“Amistad”).
The most interesting parts of this 205-page book come in the early chapters when Haskell is taking us through his troubled youth. She had to rely on sources such as Joseph McBride, author of a much more detailed Spielberg biography. Spielberg wouldn’t talk to her because he doesn’t grant interviews to biographers; McBride managed to “write around” this obstacle.
She also noted something Spielberg once said when he was willing to be quoted: “Everything about me is in my films.” And so she approached her book by telling his story through his movies.
But before she settled into that movie-by-movie appraisal, she gave us about 40 pages describing his angst as a kid and teenager.
Addressing why Spielberg, at 70, keeps making movies at such a rapid pace — “What keeps him going?” — she wrote: “The answer, or rather the mystery, begins with the outsize fears of a little boy who began biting his nails while still in knee-pants.”
But Haskell wrote Spielberg was unusual in that he hung onto his childhood fears instead of burying them: “He nourished their memory, translated them into bold cinematic images and projected them onto a terrified audience.”
His father, Arnold, was a workaholic computer engineer who wasn’t often available to his son. His mother, Leah, was artistically inclined and permissive.
The family moved around a lot, making it even harder for a socially awkward kid to fit in. They went from Cincinnati to New Jersey and then to Arizona. In the latter two states, he felt like an outsider.
Young Spielberg also had to deal with being Jewish in communities that were predominantly Christian. His “outsider” feeling came mostly from being Jewish and a “non-jock,” Haskell wrote.
Haskell dug out this quote from Spielberg: “Being a Jew meant that I was not normal.” McBride quoted him saying he wanted to be a gentile with the same intensity that he wanted to be a filmmaker.
His years in Arizona were the most painful, Haskell wrote. “He felt more like an outsider than ever, ‘a wimp in a world of jocks.’ His ears stuck out, his nose was too long. Bullies called him ‘Spielbug.’”
But his aloof dad came through, giving him an 8 m.m. movie camera. The boy quickly began making highly inventive science fiction shorts and Westerns.
The other kids started to notice. Suddenly, “Spielbug” was cool.
He also turned to TV shows such as “The Twilight Zone” for comfort because he was contending with another problem: his parents were often fighting and were headed toward divorce court.
In 1964, the family moved again, to California. Spielberg finished his senior year of high school there and the divorce came through after 10 years of emotional turmoil.
Spielberg got his first career break by arranging an interview with a film librarian at Universal Studios. The man was so impressed by Spielberg’s
film knowledge that he arranged for him to get a one-day pass to the studio lot. Spielberg managed to extend it indefinitely, allowing him to walk onto the lot whenever he wanted, observe filmmakers at work and even share an office.
Soon afterward Spielberg and a friend made “Amblin,’” the tale of two hitchhikers who meet on a desert highway. A Universal executive liked it so much that he offered Spielberg a seven-year contract with Universal Television. He was 21 years old.
One of his early assignments was directing an episode of “Night Gallery” with Joan Crawford as lead actor. Haskell’s book contains many evocative photos and one of the best shows neophyte Spielberg conferring with Crawford, then 64.
When Haskell gets into Spielberg’s early moviemaking, including “Sugarland Express,” she criticizes his portrayal of women. She wrote he managed to depict Goldie Hawn as abrasive and shrill: “The first, but not the last, of that Spielberg archetype, the Shrieking Woman.”
“Sugarland Express” was not a hit. But then in 1975 came “Jaws,” the first big summer blockbuster. Spielberg followed it with another huge success, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
There were some busts, including “1941,” but then along came “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” the first of the Indiana Jones series. Many New Haven area residents got to see Spielberg at work in 2007 when he came here to film “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”
In 1992, Spielberg married Kate Capshaw, a star in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.”
In 1993, Haskell wrote, when Spielberg was finally ready to take on “Schindler’s List,” the scenes he shot were so emotionally draining that he would come home at night to the Polish rental house he was sharing with Capshaw and their kids and break down into tears.
But Haskell said making that film enabled him to finally embrace his Jewishness. He also at last won an Academy Award for best director.
His next movie with a serious theme, “Amistad,” was of special interest to New Haveners because it told the 1839 story of the 53 kidnapped Africans who mutinied on board and after being recaptured were put on trial in the Elm City. Their court victories, here and in Washington, D.C., set them free.
But Spielberg caused controversy here in 1997 when he filmed the New Haven scenes in Mystic and Newport, R.I. The film also had its national premiere in Rhode Island, not here.
I had my “close encounter” with Spielberg in 2002, when he accepted an honorary degree from Yale. I went to the spot where those recipients wait beforehand and walked up to Spielberg as he stood with university officials. I introduced myself and, as I recall, started to ask him about his controversial New Haven “Amistad” decisions. He smiled at me but before he could say anything, the Yale high command hustled me away.
You don’t talk to royalty.