Closure encounters

No one, especially filmmakers, can be unaffected by a nationally, far reaching, glowing review. Writing about Spielberg’s first feature, The Sugarland Express, the eminent New York critic Pauline Kael described the film thus – and I am adding the whole sentence of the oft quoted line just to tamp down its power a smidgeon: “In terms of the pleasure that technical assurance gives an audience, this is one of the most phenomenal début films in the history of movies.” She went on to say that Spielberg, rare in movie directors, “…was a born entertainer, perhaps a new generation’s Howard Hawks.” How could anyone’s head and ego not be blown up by such pronouncements from the foremost critic of her era? Maybe at the impressionable age of 26, that review planted a ego-seed that was continually watered and speedily sprouting throughout his early professional life. At this time, Spielberg was still in his mid-twenties and who among us is three dimensional and fully formed by that ludicrously youthful age? And this was before Jaws thrust him into the commercial stratosphere. As one time girlfriend Katherine Carey said of him, “He needed a friend, not someone always telling him how wonderful he was.” He seemed to be, one assumes blissfully, cocooned by hordes of the latter. According to fellow director John Milius, quoted in Peter Biskind’s book Easy Riders Raging Bulls, extreme wealth and power severely affected both Spielberg and George Lucas (how could they not?) so the 70’s bohemian spirit of friends working on friends’ movies sharing profit percentage points petered out as both men became idols to many and untouchable celluloid gods to those in the industry. But there were many who might have liked to have questioned and castigated some of their actions, decisions and behaviour. Many sources of salacious stories about Spielberg’s conduct in Father of the Man desired anonymity for obvious reasons. You don’t poke a bear while wearing a name tag without a career death wish.

There is no life on this planet (including David Attenborough’s) that cannot be held up to such intense scrutiny without some dirt showing up on the radar. I have met Steven Spielberg and talked with him on a break shooting the trailer for 1941 in 1979 but I do not know him nor cannot easily believe certain disagreeable stories about him, many of which may have been embellished and born from envy and a bizarre desire in some people to bring the high and mighty down. I loved his films. Was it necessary to love the man who made them? Both tomes Easy Riders Raging Bulls and Steven Spielberg Father of the Man take an almost perverse delight in any detail that would assault and burst the bubble of Spielberg’s friendly interview demeanour. As an erstwhile fan of the man and the work (and it hurts my 17 year old self to use the word ‘erstwhile’), it’s almost painful to read about his behaviour as a young buck with increasing power and the burgeoning bank balance to back it up. If half the information about him in Father of the Man is true, cherry picked one assumes from friends and decidedly non-friends, then the man’s behaviour towards others points to an ego the size of Manhattan and a blatant and regrettable disregard for common courtesy. The dripping irony that Disclosure Day promotes empathy as a super power is not lost on me but perhaps with age the director has filed down the sharp claws that took him to the very top of the Hollywood pile.

While I remain doubtful that all the reported stories in print about his behaviour are true, I have had enough first hand evidence from friends in the industry relayed to me personally to believe that the man who shaped my teens with massively impressive and personally affecting movies, shall we say, has or had a less benevolent side. As someone once remarked, “You don’t get to be Steven Spielberg without being something of a ruthless bastard…” There’s nothing wrong with that. We all have aspects of our character that we may not be proud of but think of as necessary to our continued professional or personal advancement. The difference is that Spielberg is constantly under the celebrity microscope so his actions are often over-reported, over-emphasised and given weight that not many of us could bear without profound psychological damage.

And it must be tough to grow up in a professional environment in which no one ever says “No” to you. Yes, I meant tough, not blessed or easy. The estate of Cole Porter refused him the use of the song Always for his remake of A Guy Named Joe, retitled Always based on the song. It must have been the shock of his life, something Steven Spielberg couldn’t get. I could barely write that sentence and believe it. “No” wasn’t a word he heard too often. If your every whim, utterance and act at that young age was regarded as Gospel, how do you actually grow up psychologically healthy? Spielberg is eighty this year. As I questioned earlier, has age softened his sharper edges? Has fatherhood and his seven children dimmed his ego to a semi-opaque shadow of its former self? He’s always keen to share how many children he has in any interview he gives these days. Age and family have certainly not robbed him of his technical smarts.