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Steven Spielberg Dvds @ amazon.com (direct link)
Steven Spielberg Books @ amazon.com (direct link)
b. Steven Allan Spielberg
How much is he worth?
Height:
The difference between a great director like Spielberg and, say, Hitchcock, another great director, is that when they both make real films of the unreal, Spielberg gives us Jurassic, without caring that the characters are one dimensional, unreal, and just a kind of nuisance getting in the way of the real stars, the dinosaurs; whilst Hitchcock makes The Birds, where in the unreality of birdworld the realness of the human characters makes us care for them. Hitchcock's spirit and concern for humanity is there in every second of the movie.
Don't agree? You think Jurassic was made for any other reason than to gross shit loads of cash? Then explain away what The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) is doing in Spielberg's filmography? What the hell is that movie's reason for being if it ain't for the colour of your money, cos it sure ain't there for it's decisive insight into the metaphysics of the characters!
Jurassic Park is a
superb producers coup according to the principle
"Show them something they've never seen." And
in its comprehensive revelation of a lifelike, or
movielike, fluency for unreal, unborn things it
may prove more influential than any film since
The Jazz Singer. "One day, all movies will be like this" you can almost hear the producers say. And ever since, mainstream Hollywood has been working flat out to replicate it.
Schindler's List is the most moving film I have
ever seen. No-one can deny its place among the top 100 greatest films ever made but I don't really
believe in Spielberg as an artist: I don't believe
that much soul or doubt is there, or that much
heartfelt trust in the organic meaning of style. But
Schindler's List is like an earthquake in a culture
of gardens. And it helps persuade this viewer that
mainstream cinema—or Hollywood cinema, to be precise—is not a place for
artists. It is a world for producers, for showmen,
and Schindlers. Sure, there are some fine artists in American film but they are cut far, far adrift from Hollywood in independant land. If art is to be found in cinema then look to Europe, to Bergman, Michael Powell, Cocteau, Lean etc., and you don't have to look beyond Europe's borders to find art for art's sake. The closest Schindler's List comes
to art may be in aiding Steven Spielberg to back
into the upheld coat of his own mysterious, brilliant, actorly nature. The film works so well
because he is Schindler, and 1993 has been his
1944.
From the mid-1970s, there was an accepted
wisdom that Spielberg was the junior mechanic as
movie director. It grew out of the interest in cars
and trucks in his first two films; a motorized shark
in the third; and some of the most elaborate special effects ever organized in Close Encounters. Even Spielberg himself acknowledged the prominence of smooth-working parts in his films, and
looked forward to smaller, more intimate, and by
implication, more humane pictures. He had nothing to be ashamed of, even if he uttered
regrettable industry homily of approaching
"movie ideas that you can hold in your hand" - as
opposed to those that dwell in your mind.
The rivalry of car and truck in Duel is a vivid allegory of the common man facing an enigmatic threat of terror and destruction. The motorcades of Sugarland Express never obscure the frantic emotions of a redneck mother blind to all but the
need to retain her child. The mechanical shark in
Spielberg's hands was a wittier version of the truck
in Duel, and the means to an authentic pop art Moby Dick. And Close Encounters had a
flawless
wonder, such that it might be the first film ever made. Its laboratory effects and its models are all harnessed to an unusual plot structure, a view of personal stories that is remarkably detached for American pictures but never cold, and a kind of
inquisitive awe for the unknown that transcends
the paranoia and melodrama so widespread in science fiction. Close Encounters is a tribute to the richness of the ordinary human imagination. The inevitable comparison of Star Wars and Close Encounters reveals Lucas as a toymaker, and Spielberg as an admiring explorer of the mind's
power.
The son of an electrical engineer and computer
expert, Spielberg began making 8mm films in high
school with his father's camera. At that time he
lived in Phoenix, Arizona, and he learned and commandeered his father's hobby. Firelight
was a twenty-one-hour epic, according to its maker, anticipating some of the themes and
images brought to fruition in Close Encounters. He took a degree in English at California State College, Long Beach, but was always working on movies. Amblin' was a short that won prizes and earned a release with Love Story—early evidence of Spielberg's ability at drawing together good
luck and commercial acumen.
He moved into TV and quickly won a reputation as an efficient director—the height of TV's needs. He worked on the pilot for Night Gallery
and contributed episodes to Columbo, Marcus Welby, The Name of the Canw, The Psychiatrist and Owen Marshall. On that basis, he did Duel as a movie-of-the-week for ABC. Its impact was such
that it got a theatrical release outside America.
Deservedly so, for it stands up as one of the
medium's most compelling spirals of suspense.
The ordinariness of the Dennis Weaver character
and the monstrous malignance of the truck confront one another with a narrative assurance that
never needs to remind us of the element ot fable.
The ending is unsatisfactory, partly because the
rest of the film is so momentous, but also because sheer skill needed more philosophy for a fitting resolution.
Sugarland Express is another epic of the road—
raucous, feverish, and based on an actual incident.
What makes its quest and journey so touching is
the treatment of the central characters. They are
not self-aware, enlightened, or stereotyped, and
the movie never patronizes them. Goldie Hawn's
wife is an untidy, vibrant woman, a robust departure from the social gentility that usually encloses Hollywood women. She is genuinely vulgar, but is
never mocked because of it.
Jaws is Spielberg's most old-fashioned film, and
the occasion on which he was under most commercial pressure. But, like Coppola on The Godfather, Spielberg asserted his own role and deftly
organized the elements of a roller coaster entertainment without sacrificing inner meanings. The suspense of the picture came from meticulous
technique and good humour about its own surgical
cutting. You have only to submit to the travesty of
Jaws 2 to realize how much more engagingly
Spielberg saw the ocean, the perils, and the sinister beauty of the shark, and the vitality of its human opponents. The terror of his films is healthy and cathartic because his faith in the unknown is so generous and sensible and his trust
in the plain mans ingenuity and pluck so precise.
Close Encounters is as close to a mystical experience as a major film has come, but it is the mysticism of common sense. I don't think Spielberg believes in UFOs or specific answers in the universe. But he believes in man's vision and the
determination that trusts its own experience more
than official versions of the truth. The Dreyfuss
character is no fanatic; he is another ordinary man
whose life is disrupted by what he believes in. The
way his domestic life is violated by increasing
obsessiveness gives the film the flavor of surrealism. But the characters are smaller than the happenings that inspire them. Smallness never
diminishes them. There is no violence to oppress
them, only an invitation to the highest flights of
fancy. The movie could have been naive and sentimental—it was inspired by Disney—but Spielberg never relinquishes his practicality and his eye
for everyday detail. It is extraordinary that so big
and popular a film should have such a slender dramatic thread, and that the central marriage should be permitted to break up without apology, adultery, or the promise of reunion. It is the essence of Spielberg's attitude that when Dreyfuss and
Melinda Dillon embrace, it is not as lovers
brought together by plot, but as fellow believers.
At first sight, the Spielberg of the eighties may
seem more an impresario—or a studio, even—
than a director. Yet he directed seven films in the
decade, including the Indiana Jones trilogy, the phenomenon of E.T., and Empire of the Sun (a fine work, rather "explained" by Schindlers List), an adaptation of J. C. Ballard's book about childhood in Shanghai after the Japanese invasion.
Empire of the Sun was among Spielbergs box-office failures, and there are signs that he writes
failure out of history. Yet it combines the life of a
child with the momentous world of adults in a way
scarcely attempted in his other films. So busy, so
enterprising, Spielberg had time for three flat-out
bad films—The Color Purple, Always, and Hook
(warning enough to any critic who seems ready to
categorize Spielberg as a master of control and
market forces).
At the same time, he became a producer, a tireless master of many ceremonies, and many of them
simultaneous. Even E.T. feels calculated—to these eyes, it is not as inspired or involuntary as the wondrous< Poltergeist (82, Tobe Hooper), on which
Spielberg was producer, author of the story, and
reshooter. Some argue that Hook was personal; I
found it maudlin, fussy, and misjudged. Could it be
that Spielberg's judgment smothers the vestiges of
personal expression he can muster? Or is it that he
is truly most himself when satisfying the enormous
audience? He is a tycoon such as few can comprehend. He has done astonishing things; he has
become vital to the business. And like Schindler,
he has made us all think deeply about the nature of
business. As a director, he took a rest after 1993—
and then came back with a new, improved Jurassic
Park, Amistad, and Saving Private Ryan, all in the
space of a couple of years. Ryan changed war films: combat, shock, wounds, and fear had never been
so graphically presented; and yet there was also a
true sense of what duties and ideas had felt like in
1944. I disliked the framing device. I would have
admired a director who trusted us to get it without
that. Never mind—Ryan is a magnificent film.
Which is very much more than I could say for A.I., which seemed to me far too self-conscious in its thinking (and can no director coax a performance from the made entirely from wood, Jude Law that shows even the faintest flicker of emotion?). Indeed, I suspect that, for all his power
with futuristic technology, Spielberg's mind was
made in the forties and fifties. There were worse
times to be raised.
At any event, the filmography would be incomplete without the list of works that he has produced: I Wanna Hold Your Hand (78, Robert Zemeckis); Used Cars (80, Zemeckis); Continental Divide (81, Michael Apted); Poltergeist; Gremlins (84, Joe Dante); Back to the Future (85, Zemeckis); The Goonies (85, Richard Donner);
Young Sherlock Holmes (85, Barry Levinson); The
Money Pit (86, Richard Benjamin); the animated
film, An American Tail (86, Don Bluth); . . . batteries not included (87, Matthew Robbins); Innerspace (87, Dante); Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (88, Zemeckis); Back to the Future II (89,
Zemeckis); Dad (89, Gary David Goldberg); Joe Versus the Volcano (90, John Patrick Shanley);
Arachnophobia (90, Frank Marshall); Gremlins 2: The New Batch (90, Dante); Back to the Future
III (90, Zemeckis); and An American Tail: Fievel
Goes West (91, Phil Nibbelink and Simon Wells).
On The Flintstones (94, Brian Levant) he was
credited as Steven Spielrock (yeah, it's still not funny); Twister (96, Jan De Bont); Men in Black (97, Barry Sonnenfeld); Deep Impact (98, Mimi Leder); The Mask of Zorro (98, Martin Campbell); Shrek (01, Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson); Jurassic Park III (01); and the
HBO miniseries Band of Brothers (01), which he
and Tom Hanks had spun off from Saving Private
Ryan.
In fact, his producing hat had grown larger still
with the formation of DreamWorks in 1995. With
that enterprise (formed with Jeffrey Katzenberg
and David Geffen), Spielberg was part of a new
studio, involved in decisions on whether to build
studio space as well as every individual project
they took on. So it is one more measure of the
inhuman—or of a level of performance beyond
common humanity—that Steven Spielberg is also
still a writer and a director. Moreover, he has
maintained his own level of excellence for close to
twenty-five years. He has never had significant or
prolonged failure.
Steven Spielberg Dvds @ amazon.com (direct link)
Steven Spielberg Books @ amazon.com (direct link)
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