Susan Lacys documentary Spielberg debuts October 7th on HBO, trots out an all-star team of interviewees from film critics to famous friends, the Toms (Cruise and Hanks) to God herself, a.k.a. Oprah Winfrey. The voices film buffs will undoubtedly want to hear from the most, however, belong to his fellow movie brats: Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese, who all talk at length about their heady New Hollywood days alongside Spielberg in the early Seventies. All of them partied together, bounced ideas off of each other and, oh, by the way, permanently changed the tenor of American movies.
It was like a fraternity, De Palma fondly reminisces. But it was a frat where the brother whod go on to make Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind was often the odd one out. Spielbergs friends enjoyed his company and his boyish enthusiasm, but admit he was more clean-cut, conformist and commercial than they ever wanted to be. He was a lovable nerd, producer Michael Phillips says. But he was a nerd.
Steven Spielberg's Movies, Ranked Worst to BestLeonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese Praise Steven Spielberg in First Doc TrailerThurston Moore: 5 Songs That Influenced Me Early On10 Things You Didn't Know About the Beatles' Music
That little tidbit about Spielbergs reputation among his peers is one of many insights in Lacys film, which compiles multiple long conversations with the director and copious clips from his nearly 50 years worth of masterpieces into a near-definitive statement on the mans life and career. Here are 10 more takeaways from the doc.
1. Lawrence of Arabia nearly convinced him not to pursue his dream.
In the opening scenes of Spielberg, the director talks about the first time he saw David Leans Oscar-winning 1962 epic as a teenage cinephile and amateur filmmaker. He absolutely loved the film and was so intimidated by it that he almost abandoned his plans to break into movies. The bar is too high, he thought. Though demoralized, the 16-year-old Spielberg still went back to the theater the next week and the week after, taking mental notes on how Lean organized images and ideas. After three viewings, he knew that this was going to be the rest of my life.
2. A lot of his movies are really about his parents messy divorce.
Spielbergs father Arnold was a hard-working, genius-level engineer, while his mother Leah was more of an artsy bohemian, who eventually had an affair with and later married Arnolds best friend. Not wanting to embarrass his family, his dad shouldered the blame for the divorce. Steven channeled a lot of residual anger over his tumultuous upbringing into films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusadeand Catch Me If You Can, which all deal with wayward fathers and idyllic homes shattered by dysfunction.
The experience of loss was so profound that the filmmaker claims that E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial wasnt originally even going to have an alien in it the movie was just going to be about the everyday life of a lonely, heartbroken kid. My main religion was suburbia, Spielberg admits in Lacys doc. Of course it was all false.
Not until he made Saving Private Ryan dedicated to his WWII veteran pop did Spielberg really begin to get over with how his family had fractured. It helped that by then hed been through a divorce himself, after being so sure in his youth that hed never put a child through that.
3. He was famous before hed ever made a movie.
Spielbergs C-average high school grades cost him a shot at USCs film school, so according to legend, he snuck into Universal Studios and persuaded the bosses he belonged there in a gambit similar to the cons in Catch Me If You Can. That anecdote is mentioned in Lacys documentary, though the man himself doesnt confirm (or deny) the story.
What is true is that Universal Television executive Sidney Sheinberg was impressed enough by the precocious 21-year-olds 1968 short film Amblin to offer him a seven-year contract to direct TV. So by 1970, everyone in Hollywood had heard about this boy wonder; and both the towns old guard and its up-and-coming film school brats were skeptical.
Producers hesitated to work with him. Peers like Coppola and Lucas looked at his early work and found it too facile and slick. The industrys reaction to Spielberg shaded his early suspense films Duel and Jaws, which he says were really about his own personal insecurity, and his fear that something angry, enormous and unstoppable was going to catch up to him and destroy him.
4. Spielbergs film school was his TV job.
The ABC TV movie Duel is Spielbergs most famous directorial assignment from his Universal contract, and an early indicator of what was to come. But he also helmed two TV movies after his tense man v. truck opus (1972s Something Evil and 1973s Savage),as well as a smattering of episodes from series like Columbo, Night Gallery, The Psychiatrist, Owen Marshalland The Name of the Game. He used the format to experiment as much as he was able, and learned techniques that hed later apply to his big-screen work. Even back then, critics noticed the flashy style and rich emotion of his work. In Spielberg, writer/producer Steven Bochco marvels that even then the young artist had a gear in his brain that almost translated words into pictures. (Its a missed opportunity that Universal or Criterion or Shout! Factory hasnt compiled his TV work into one completist DVD/Blu-ray set.)
5. A lot of Jaws was written hours before each days shooting.
Determined to prove that he could be as much of a serious artist as his pals Scorsese and De Palma, Spielberg went into his first big movie assignment, Jaws, with the intention of turning a bestselling novel about a killer shark into something that combined Hitchcock and cinema-verit realism. He avoided the phony backlot water tanks where seafaring stories back then were usually shot, insisting they go out into the real ocean where shifting weather patterns and equipment failures meant that screenwriter Carl Gottlieb had to rewrite the script almost every night, in order to adjust to whatever was going wrong.
As history proved, everything worked out pretty okay. Jaws was such a big hit that Spielberg would sometimes drive Scorsese around to different theaters in Los Angeles so they could look at the lines around the block. And the deftness with which the director handled a notoriously difficult shoot meant that he had a free pass into my future.
Plus, he discovered that hes at his most creative when he feels overwhelmed, verging on panic. In the documentary, he recalls that Hollywood legend Henry Hathaway once told him that everybody making movies feels that way but warned him that in order to maintain control of his sets, Youve got to guard that secret with your life.
6. You can thank the failure of 1941 for the Indiana Jones series.
Riding high from Jaws and Close Encountersin 1979, a cocky Spielberg gave wacky comedy a try with the all-star WWII farce1941and bombed so spectacularly that he spent much of the next year feeling nauseated. He confessed to Lucas that he was thinking about attaching himself to something reliably popular, like a James Bond movie to which his friend replied, I have something much better. Together, they brainstormed the character of Indiana Jones.
Spielberg made 1981s Raiders of the Lost Ark with a chip on his shoulder, determined to prove that he could work relatively cheaply and efficiently yet still churn out a blockbuster. Sure enough, by the time Raiders finished its run, hed become the first director whose movies had earned over a billion dollars at the box office.
7. Hes been a special effects wizard since boyhood
Spielberg includes clips from movies the young Steven shot with his friends, which show him experimenting with crude but impressive effects like using wooden planks and dirt clods to create the illusion of bombs exploding in his backyard, or employing colored lights and reflective glass to simulate alien spacecraft. (He later carried that technique over to Close Encounters.) The director has always been a proponent of whatever works including in Jaws, where he compensated for a malfunctioning mechanical shark by coming up with ways to make the audience think they were seeing a big scary fish.
In one of the documentarys most illuminating segments, he explains that the CGI breakthrough of Jurassic Park traced back to his insistence that the movies dinosaurs be able to run in the same shots as the humans. Screenwriter David Koepp describes the thrill they all felt when they saw their first digital dinos, and realized they were witnessing the future of cinema. It was like the moment when sound came to movies, he says.
8. And yet his greatest gift is a director is his skill with actors.
Ever wondered how Spielberg gets such natural, heartbreaking performances from small children in movies like E.T. and Close Encounters? The documentary explains it, via on-set footage of the director talking his kids through scenes, crouching just behind the camera. He seems genuinely happy in those clips, creating something on the spot as though he and his actors were just playing with toys in a sandbox, with no one else around.
This method doesnt just work with youngsters, either. The doc features interviews with the casts of Schindlers List and Saving Private Ryan, who were amazed by how spontaneous and improvisatory Spielberg can be. During the Schindler shoot, hed sometimes grab a camera and run alongside his actors, shouting out suggestions for what they should say next and where they should go. (Liam Neeson says he initially bristled at the coaching, until Ben Kingsley encouraged him to trust that it was heading somewhere.) On Ryan, it took 27 days to complete the Omaha Beach opening because Spielberg kept extemporizing and experimenting, moving the action along one yard at a time.
9. September 11th inspired bothMunichand War of the Worlds.
Next to Schindlers List, Lacy spends the most time in her doc on Munich, an often misunderstood project that saw Spielberg working through the moral complications of fighting terrorism and not finding any reassuring answers. The film was a reaction to 9/11 and the Iraq War, two events that had tested the directors left-leaning ideals and Jewish identity.
But Munich wasnt the only one of his 2005 projects to grapple with what was going on in the real world. The emotions of the times affected the way Spielberg told stories even in War of the Worlds, which put an unusual twist on the science-fiction thriller genre. His summer movie shows a catastrophic alien invasion, but from the perspective of an ordinary guy whos just trying to keep his family safe and, like so many Americans at the time, is unsure if any of his choices are the right ones.
10. Hes struggled with becoming a mature filmmaker as have his critics.
Early in Spielberg, critic David Edelstein quotes from Pauline Kaels generally positive review of the directors debut feature film The Sugarland Express, where she hails the young filmmaker as phenomenally gifted, but warns that he may not be deep. The director himself cites that same review later, admitting that Kael was right at least about his early work.
A lot of this documentary is about Spielbergs fitful attempts over the years to make movies aimed at adults, and how early efforts like The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun fell short because he lacked gravity and sophistication. Not until Schindlers List did he really find a way to modify his style to suit heavier material. Yet still, despite all the Oscars and the box office billions, some critics still doubt that hes the right person to tackle certain subjects (like, for example, terrorism in Munich).
This has been Spielbergs story since he broke into the business. In the doc, Scorsese sympathizes with his friends plight but only to a point. He says that anyone who can make back-to-back smashes like Jaws and Close Encounters has set the bar so high that hes going to be compared to that for the rest of his career. But what choice does he have? As Scorsese says, You get yourself into shape, and you jump over the bar again.