Steven Spielberg (12 page)

Stevie and his friends on Crystal Terrace would stage battle scenes with plastic and rubber soldiers (World War II or Civil War) and with cowboys and Indians. Stevie became known as the grand master of those war games. He found willing partners in Sandy MacDonald, who also enjoyed long, intricate games that stretched on for days, and his brother Scott, who remembers the unusual way Stevie used to start playing:

“Stevie had this big table and he would set up a village with Indians or the Civil War. He would show us how they would move around. We wouldn't really play—we would watch him set up the scenario of
his
play. He would say things like, ‘This guy gets caught here. Ooh, this guy gets an arrow. This
guy gets guillotined.' We had about five or ten minutes of him administering the play and then
we
could all play.”

“I'd go across to Stevie's basement and we'd set up those huge battle scenes,” adds Sandy. “He always played with a box of nails and a hammer. When the soldiers were hit by arrows, he'd put nails into them, and use ketchup for blood. At the end of the game he had fewer and fewer usable soldiers. I never used to bring my men over because he'd ruin them. I wouldn't do that to my men. For him, it was worth it to get an effect; it had to be real, to have an arrow stick out. It was just that little bit of extra that I wouldn't have thought of doing.”

“We [girls] were never allowed to play, but we would stand around and watch,” Sandy's sister Jane remembers. “Most kids would be content to say, ‘Oh, this guy's killed.' Steven would make it seem that the guy
was
getting killed. To me that's why he seemed different.”

L
OOKING
back on his childhood, Spielberg always has thought of Arizona as “my real home. For a kid, home is where you have your best friends and your first car, and your first kiss; it's where you do your worst stuff and get your best grades.”

Arizona was also the place where Steven's family ties grew increasingly strained, almost to the breaking point, turning him more and more inward for emotional sustenance. And, most important, Arizona was the place where he set his sights on becoming a filmmaker. One of his boyhood friends in Phoenix, Jim Sollenberger, recalls Spielberg saying “he could envision himself going to the Academy Awards and accepting an Oscar and thanking the Academy. He was twelve or thirteen at the time.”

“I've been really serious about [filmmaking] as a career since I was twelve years old,” Spielberg said in a 1989 interview. “I don't excuse those early years as a hobby, do you know what I'm saying? I really did start then.”

S
TEVEN'S
mother later admitted that the very idea of moving to Phoenix made her “hysterical” with culture shock: “I mean, in [1957] what nice Jewish girl moved to Arizona? I looked in an encyclopedia—it was
published in 1920, but I didn't notice at the time—and it said: ‘Arizona is a barren wasteland.' I went there kicking and screaming. I had to promise Steve a horse, because he didn't want to go either. I never made good on that promise, and he still reminds me of it today.”

When they arrived in February 1957, the Spielbergs spent four months in a cramped two-bedroom apartment on the west side of Phoenix before moving into their newly built ranch house at 3443 North Forty-ninth Street, in the city's Arcadia neighborhood.
*
As a newcomer living in a suburban development carved out of citrus groves near the winter resorts at the foot of Camelback Mountain, Steven felt more like an “alien” than ever before. In that conservative western community on the fringe of the Arizona desert, Gila monsters still roamed, men wore string ties, some streets were unpaved, new commercial buildings on some streets had to have hitching rails out front, and his neighbors included Senator Barry Goldwater and a golf-playing youngster named J. Danforth (Dan) Quayle. The ten-year-old Jewish kid from back east could not help sticking out, like the ears protruding from under his baseball cap.

“He was the first person I knew who came with an accent,” recalls Spielberg's grade school classmate Susan Smith LeSueur, a Mormon who is an Arizona native. “He talked a lot and gestured a lot. He was very funny-looking, and I guess very Jewish. I didn't know many Jews. I didn't know anybody who talked that way or looked that way. He was so different.”

“I guess we were a pretty intolerant bunch of people back in the fifties and sixties,” says Steven's Boy Scout counselor Richard (Dick) Hoffman Jr. “It was like being back in the thirties, practically. Phoenix didn't have a lot of Jews. With the kids I didn't see much anti-Semitic stuff, but I did see it among the parents. We have a lot of jackasses out here. People out here are small-minded. Being a liberal is almost like being a Communist.”

Entering Ingleside Elementary School during the second semester of fourth grade, Steven reacted to his culture shock by withdrawing into himself. “He was very quiet,” says his sixth-grade teacher, Eleanor Wolf. “I felt sorry for him because he didn't have any friends. You see, he was different from everybody else. Nerdy. He looked kind of prim and proper, he wore a little button-down collar; he looked kind of sissy. He was living in a dream world. He was rather nondescript, just a good little kid. He was so reserved—a lot of kids wanted to direct everything, but he didn't. I don't know what his problem was—maybe it was self-consciousness, low self-esteem. Oh, heavens, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine Steven Spielberg would have grown up to be anything like he is.”

S
OON
after he came to Arizona, however, there was a harbinger of things to come.

“One night my dad woke me up in the middle of the night and rushed me into our car in my night clothes,” Spielberg remembered. “I didn't know what was happening. It was frightening. My mom wasn't with me. So I thought, What's happening here? He had a thermos of coffee and had brought blankets, and we drove for about half an hour. We finally pulled over to the side of the road, and there were a couple hundred people, lying on their backs in the middle of the night, looking up at the sky. My dad found a place, spread the blanket out, and we both lay down.

“He pointed to the sky, and there was a magnificent meteor shower. All these incredible points of light were crisscrossing the sky. It was a phenomenal display, apparently announced in advance by the weather bureau. My dad had really surprised me—actually, he'd frightened the hell out of me! At the same time, though, I was tremendously attracted to the
source,
to what was causing this.”

Although Steven remembered being in a crowd of hundreds of people, “We were by ourselves,” reports Arnold Spielberg. “There was a comet that was supposed to be visible in the sky. Some journal said there should be a comet, maybe tenth magnitude or something like that. I wanted to see the comet, and I wanted Steve to see the comet. So we drove up over the mountains and into the desert, away from the city lights. We just got out of the car and lay down in the sand and we started looking for that comet.

“For some reason, a bunch of meteors showed up. In those days, there wasn't that much smog in the air or dust in the air in Phoenix, and the stars were just tremendous. They were so intense it was
frightening.
When you got out of the car, there was this bright canopy of dust, bright lights over your head. And it was momentarily frightening—you know, you got disoriented a little bit. Then we settled down. And I could not find that damn comet.”

His father, Steven recalled, “gave me a technical explanation of what was happening…. But I didn't want to hear that. I wanted to think of them as falling stars.” That memory would inspire his first feature-length film, the Arizona-made
Firelight,
and its later “remake,”
Close
Encounters
of
the
Third
Kind,
in which Richard Dreyfuss bundles up his family in their station wagon, drives out into the country, and watches by the side of the road as strange and wonderful lights appear in the night sky.

W
HILE
growing up in Phoenix, Steven “had more friends than he remembers having,” his sister Anne has pointed out. But there were many people who looked down on the gawky kid with glasses and acne and considered him “weird” or “wacky,” a “nerd” and a “wimp.” Steven remembered being “a wimp in a world of jocks…. I was skinny and unpopular. I hate to use the word wimp, but I wasn't in the inner loop…. I had friends who were all like me. Skinny wrists and glasses. We were all just trying to
make it through the year without getting our faces pushed into the drinking fountain.”

Some kids bullied Spielberg and ostracized him from social events. Some called the gangly boy with the big ears and nose and the bulging Adam's apple “Spielbug.” And a few taunted him for being Jewish. His frequent recollection that he was the only Jewish kid in his neighborhood, and in his Phoenix elementary and high schools, is factually incorrect, but he often must have
felt
that way. His awareness of being “different” in his new surroundings was so acutely painful that he secretly tried to alter his physical appearance in the privacy of his bedroom: “I used to take a big piece of duct tape and put one end on the top of my nose and the other end as high up on my forehead line as I could. I had this big nose. My face grew into it, but when I was a child, I was very self-conscious about my
scbnozz.
I thought if you kept your nose taped up that way it would stay … like Silly Putty!”

Apart from a lackluster stint with Ingleside Elementary School's Little League baseball team, the C&L; Service Mounties, Steven did not participate in sports, the main preoccupation of most boys in his neighborhood. But his mother's friend Marie Tice recognized other qualities in Steven: “I wouldn't have called him a wimp, because he had strength. Steven was always very involved in movies. I don't remember him ever being interested in anything else. I don't think Steven ever had any doubt about what he was going to do. He was very determined without being obnoxious about it.”

Many who knew him could not help scoffing when he declared that he was heading to Hollywood. His friend Barry Sollenberger, who also made amateur movies, “didn't hesitate to give him some advice. I remember once when I went into high school and changed my interests to more important things like football games and chasing cheerleaders, I said, ‘Come on, Steve, grow up—what are you going to do, film movies all your life?' He was really a perfect example of somebody that got the last laugh on the neighborhood.”

One of those who did not mock Steven's dreams was his seventh-and eighth-grade social-studies and homeroom teacher, Patricia Scott Rodney, whom Steven knew as “Miss Scott.” “I've heard him talk on television about not being a popular kid,” she says. “He talks about people not liking him, how he was an outsider. That always makes me very sad. I've spent my life with kids, and
I
didn't see him as an outsider. I go, ‘Wow, was I
that
stupid? Or was it much bigger to him being an adult?' I thought he was a force in this group. We always knew what he was thinking; he spoke up. He was very bright and he was a neat, funny little kid. He didn't care much about how he looked, he didn't have any real interest in haircuts or whatever the other kids were wearing. He would just come in as he was, and he presented himself as a really big personality.”

“He had friends around him,” says classmate Clynn Christensen, “but if he didn't, he wasn't upset about it. He could take it or leave it. Maybe he was just so far ahead of the rest of us that he knew where he was going in life and wanted to get an early start.”

S
HORTLY
after he moved to Arizona, Steven started fooling around with his father's new movie camera. Arnold recalls, “Around that time, Leah, for a birthday or Father's Day present, got me this little twenty-dollar Brownie 8mm movie camera, a real cheap, no-frills camera. It worked fine. Steve glommed onto it pretty quick.”

“I became interested in moviemaking,” Steven explained, “simply because my father had an 8mm movie camera, which he used to log the family history…. I had an outdoorsy family and we would spend three-day week-ends on outings in sleeping bags in the middle of the wilderness in the White Mountains of Arizona. My dad would take the camera along and film the trips and we'd sit down and watch the footage a week later. It would put me right to sleep…. I would sit and watch the home movies and criticize the shaky camera movements and bad exposures until my father finally got fed up and told me to take over.”

“If you know so much, why don't you try?” Arnold Spielberg said as he gave his son the camera.

“I became the family photographer and logged all our trips,” Steven continued. “… I was fascinated. I had the power of choice. This is what I choose to show. This is my view of the trip. When the film was processed and screened, Dad was very critical and fussy about my choices: ‘Why did you show this and not that?' But it was my view, my choice….

“Then I began to think that staging real life was much more exciting than just recording it. So I'd do things like forcing my parents to let me out of the car a hundred yards before we reached the campgrounds when we went on trips. I'd run ahead and film them arriving and unpacking and pitching camp…. I began to actually stage the camping trips and later cut the bad footage out. Sometimes I would just have fun and shoot two frames of this and three frames of that and ten frames of something else, and it got to the point where the documentaries were more surrealistic than factual.”

Steven's friends remember Arnold helping shoot some of Steven's early movies, but Arnold says modestly that there was little he could teach his son about using a movie camera: “All you could do with the camera was push the button and load it. That's all there was. You couldn't even focus it—it was a fixed-focus camera. He took over so fast that all I did was give him a little bit of coaching. When we'd go on vacation together, he'd take the camera and do the shooting, and it was always better.”

“My earliest recollection of Steven with a camera,” his mother said, “was when my husband and I were leaving on a vacation and we told him to take a shot of the camper leaving the driveway. He got down on his belly and was aiming at the hubcap. We were exasperated, yelling at him, ‘Come on! We have to leave! Hurry up!' But he just kept on doing his thing, and when we saw the finished results, he was able to pull back so that this hubcap
spinning around became the whole camper—my first glimpse at the Spielbergian touch and a hint of things to come.”
†

Steven soon made what he considered his first actual movie. The storyline was an impulse of sheer juvenile delight—“my electric trains crashing into each other.” It came about because he had become so fond of staging train wrecks that his father threatened to take the trains away if he didn't stop. So Steven came up with the creative solution of putting together one final, spectacular crash for his own viewing enjoyment, composed of various angles of trains roaring down the tracks on collision courses, with cutaways to shots of plastic men reacting in mute horror. His cinematic inspiration was the scene “when that train came off the screen and into my lap” in the first movie he ever saw, Cecil B. DeMille's
The
Greatest
Show
on
Earth.
When he set up his own version, “Intuitively, I guess, I put the film together the right way. I figured if you shot one going right to left and one going left to right, it would be clear they were going to crash.” He called his movie
The
Last
Train
Wreck.
When it came back from being developed, he was “amazed at how my little trains looked like multiton locomotives.”