Steven Spielberg (11 page)

W
HEN
it came to neighborhood sports, Stevie was hopelessly uncoordinated. “He would participate, but we would kind of tease him about not being able to throw a football or catch very well,” Scott MacDonald admits. “We wouldn't really tease him in a cruel way, because he never reacted in a way for us to get a kick out of it. He would play for a while and then say, ‘I'm going to go in.' Stevie wasn't ostracized or anything, but he had a different
style
of play. You might call him a slightly nerdy kid, but he really wasn't. We thought he was pretty cool in the areas he was interested in.”

“One time someone got boxing gloves,” Sandy MacDonald relates, “and we made a ring between our two houses. When it was Stevie's turn, he got hit and ran away. He got a bottle of ketchup from his house and every time he was hit he'd pour ketchup on himself. He had it all over his clothes and hair.”

“Another time,” recalls Scott, “Stevie put a tomato in a pot on his stove. Three or four of us were gathered around watching. He said, ‘Watch what happens when I get this to explode.' Before it happened, we heard his mom or dad pulling in the driveway and we all took off. He thought it was a new way to make blood; he liked anything that would look like blood, that would explode all red. He used to love mulberries. He would squeeze them on his head and arms and run into his house screaming to his mother that he was bleeding.”

Then there was the time Stevie managed to cause a commotion simply by locking himself into his bathroom on the second floor of his house. As Scott says, “Seeing the fire department coming through the window with ladders and everything, I thought that was really neat.”

T
HE
future director of
Jurassic
Park
had an early fascination with dinosaurs. That was not unusual for a boy growing up in the Haddonfield area, because the town, built on land once covered by a prehistoric ocean, was the discovery site of the
Hadrosaurus
foulkii,
the first virtually complete dinosaur skeleton found in modern history. When Spielberg was a boy, schoolchildren often were taken on field trips to the site where the hadrosaur
fossil was found. Some of the remains were on display at Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences, which sold brass models of dinosaurs.

“I've been interested in dinosaurs since I was a child,” Spielberg said while making
Jurassic
Park.
“As most of my films originate, the interest of the subject matter originates from kidhood. And I remember always collecting dinosaur models, and being interested in the fantastic
size
of these creatures.”

Like almost every American boy growing up in the 1950s, Spielberg also imbibed a sense of fantasy and adventure from comic books, which had a strong influence in shaping the bold, sometimes exaggerated clarity of his visual style as a filmmaker. Among his favorites were the superhero and fantasy genres—Superman, Batman, and the Bizarro characters—and the Disney comics featuring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Uncle Scrooge. Stevie and friends also devoured
Mad
magazine, which became a cult favorite among aspiring hipsters throughout the United States during the 1950s with its refreshing irreverence, “sick” humor, and clever movie parodies.

Mad
paved the way for Spielberg and his fellow Hollywood “movie brats” to indulge their boyhood fondness for old movie clichés, reinventing and parodying genres and images with twists for the postmodernist era. A famous example can be seen in Spielberg's
Raiders
of
the
Lost
Ark.
The script called for an elaborate sword-and-bullwhip duel between Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones and an Arab foe. But Harrison Ford felt ill and Spielberg was trying to speed up the schedule, so they decided to have Indiana Jones abruptly terminate the duel by pulling out his pistol and casually blowing away his opponent. Spielberg said the scene reminded him of the
Mad
feature “Scenes We'd Like to See.”

Perhaps it was largely through the influence of comic books that as a child in New Jersey, “Stevie had a surprising kind of morbid streak,” Scott MacDonald says. “We thought it was really cool. I remember his elaborate torture chamber. We used to go down in his basement, and he would show us how he would put his toy men in a guillotine he had made out of a black shoebox. He chopped off heads, he sawed a few heads off—it was a great effect. When my brother and I saw
E.
T.,
we said to each other, ‘Gee,
that
doesn't seem like Stevie.' He seemed kind of warped when he was little. When he moved to Arizona, I got a fascinating letter from him telling us about scorpions and about the Gila monster, how it had really cool poison spikes on its head. We couldn't imagine what kind of lifestyle he had out there.”

In Stevie's basement there was also a big cardboard box he used for puppet shows. “I began wanting to make people happy from the beginning of my life,” he remembered. “As a kid, I had puppet shows—I wanted people to like my puppet shows when I was eight years old.”

U
NDOUBTEDLY
the single most pervasive cultural influence on Spielberg in his early childhood years was television. “I was, and still am, a TV junkie,” he has said. “I've just grown up with TV, as all of us have, and there is a lot of television inside my brain that I wish I could get out of there. You can't help it—once it's in there, it's like a tattoo.”

The Spielbergs bought their first television set, a round-tubed DuMont, in 1949. At that time, national TV networks had been in full operation for barely two years and only one in twelve American families owned a set. Although television was still in its infancy in the early 1950s when Steven lived on Crystal Terrace, that era was so rich with creative invention that it now is regarded as the medium's “Golden Age.” Few kids were watching highbrow anthology programs like
Omnibus
or
Playhouse
90,
but Steven and his friends grew up huddled around their small-screen black-and-white TV sets (many of them made at his father's RCA plant in Camden), absorbing shows that are now considered classics. While the influence of TV on the baby boomer generation of filmmakers often has been lamentable—Spielberg's own big-screen productions of
The
Flintstones
and
The
Little
Rascals
are among the more witless examples of recycled TV nostalgia—much of what he and his friends watched as children was considerably more sophisticated than most of today's TV offerings in terms of the quality of writing and performing.

Among their favorites were the brilliantly inventive comedy skits on
Your
Show
of
Shows,
starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca; uproariously funny variety programs such as
The
Milton
Berle
Show
and
The
Colgate
Comedy
Hour,
with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis; sitcoms such as
The
Honeymooners
and
The
Phil
Silvers
Show,
with Silvers as Sergeant Bilko; and Jack Webb's police drama
Dragnet
(which Stevie found frightening). They watched such kiddie programs as
Howdy
Doody;
Don Herbert's
Mr.
Wizard;
Andy's
Gang,
with Andy Devine showing jungle serials; and the adventure sagas
Captain
Video
and
His
Video
Rangers,
Superman,
Hopalong
Cassidy,
The
Roy
Rogers
Show,
The
Cisco
Kid,
and
The
Lone
Ranger.

Most popular of all with the kids in Stevie's neighborhood were Walt Disney's Sunday night
Disneyland
series, which began in 1954, and
The
Mickey
Mouse
Club,
the daily variety program starring the Mouseketeers which first aired in 1955. Stevie had crushes on three of the girl Mouseketeers in succession: perky Darlene Gillespie, winsome little Karen Pendleton, and the sultry-yet-wholesome Annette Funicello, whose spectacular emergence into puberty awakened many American boys' libidos. For Steven, that was the time when puppy love turned into “sexual awe—I hate to use the word
sexual;
it's a little heavy, but there it was.”

Playing Davy Crockett was a neighborhood obsession on Crystal Terrace for more than a year following the December 1954-February 1955 broadcasts of the
Disneyland
TV serial “Davy Crockett” (later released as a feature film titled
Davy
Crockett,
King
of
the
Wild
Frontier).
Unfortunately for Stevie, everyone else got a coonskin cap before he did, so he wound up being
chosen to play the “bad guy,” Mexican general Santa Anna. He and his playmates battled to the death with cap pistols and long toy rifles at their makeshift “Alamo,” a stockade fence in the backyard of a neighbor family.

Steven was not only fascinated by what appeared on television, but by the tube itself. “I believe there's something in there trying to get out,” he once said. “I used to stick my eye right up to the snow. I was
this
far away from the TV set and there would always be some out-of-the-way channel, some far-off channel that was getting its signal through the station that wasn't broadcasting, and there would be ghosts and images of some broadcasting station five hundred miles away.” In
Poltergeist,
which Spielberg has described as “my revenge on TV,” a little girl is sucked into the family TV set by ghosts she greets in the opening scene by staring into the snow on the tube and announcing, “They're
here.
”

Steven often has claimed that, aside from such bland fare as
The
Mickey
Mouse
Club
and some comedy programs, he was “forbidden to watch TV.” His parents, he said, not only rationed TV viewing on principle, but after he became distraught watching a documentary on snakes, they also tried to shield him from such potentially disturbing shows as
Dragnet
and
M
Squad.
Steven even remembered his parents trying tricks to discourage his surreptitious TV viewing: “Sometimes my father would attach hairs in exact positions so he could tell if I had lifted up the dust ruffle over the RCA nineteen-inch screen and snuck a peek…. I always found the hair, memorized exactly where it was and rearranged it before they came home.”

Arnold Spielberg responds, “He used to complain I never let him watch television, that his parents were real strict. Well, he saw
plenty
of TV. It just wasn't enough. The TV was on all the time. But, you know, we said, ‘Homework time.' And I guess I was kinda hard-nosed about that. I would not let them watch too much television, so he resented that.”

Steven's conflict with his father over that issue may help explain why he later declared that “my stepparent was the TV set.” He also pointed out that before the advent of television, “[P]arents would read to the kids from a rocking chair, and families were very, very close. They used to gather around the reader, or the
seer,
of the household, and in the twenties and thirties, usually it was the father. And then television replaced the father, and now it seems to be replacing both the father and the mother.” Since his father's nightly storytelling ritual once had been so important to Steven, and since he had to turn elsewhere for entertainment when Arnold became consumed with his job in the 1950s, it was literally true, in that sense at least, that in Steven's house, “television replaced the father.”

Spielberg's parents also tried to control his movie-watching habits in his preadolescent years. “I could only see films in their presence and usually pictures that appealed more to them.” The Spielbergs attended family-audience movies such as
The
Court
Jester
with Danny Kaye, the Fred Astaire–Audrey Hepburn musical
Funny
Face,
and of course, Disney movies. “And yet when I came screaming home from
Snow
White
when I was eight years
old, and tried to hide under the covers, my parents did not understand it,” Steven recalled, “because Walt Disney movies are not supposed to scare but to delight and enthrall. Between
Snow
White,
Fantasia,
and
Bambi,
I was a basket case of neurosis.”
¶

Because his parents “didn't know what backfired” at the movie theater, Steven recalled, they “tried very, very hard to screen violence from my life.” He and his friends occasionally went to Saturday matinees at the Westmont and Century theaters in neighboring Westmont and Audubon, paying a quarter to watch a program consisting of cartoons and a monster movie, a sci-fi movie, or a Western with Hopalong Cassidy or the Cisco Kid. But Steven's parents' concern over his moviegoing fare and the freer availability of TV discouraged him from becoming a movie addict until later in his boyhood, after he moved to Arizona. The most enduring feeling about movies he took away from that period in New Jersey was his frustration at being kept away from them. As he said later, “I feel that perhaps one of the reasons I'm making movies all the time is because I was told not to [watch movies].”

L
IKE
many other sons of veterans, Stevie was fascinated from an early age with World War II: “I love that period. My father filled my head with war stories—he was a radioman on a B-25 fighting the Japanese in Burma. I have identified with that period of innocence and tremendous jeopardy all my life. It was the end of an era, the end of innocence, and I have been clinging to it for most of my adult life.”
||
As a boy he especially enjoyed building model planes and was, he said, “attached to flying,” like his youthful protagonist in
Empire
of
the
Sun.