Steven Spielberg (14 page)

One of their inspirations was the daily local TV kiddie show
Wallace
&
Ladmo,
a zany potpourri of studio skits, cartoons, and silent slapstick comedy footage (including frequent Western spoofs) shot off-the-cuff in the parks and desert around Phoenix.
Wallace
&
Ladmo
had a weekly showcase for young filmmakers, “Home Movie Winners.” Spielberg appeared on the KPHO program in the early 1960s to show a brief piece of film he had shot that “looked like space guys glowing in the dark,” according to series costar and writer Bill Thompson (“Wallace”). “He was very inventive, a bright guy. He was very highly thought of, even as a kid.” When Steven was interviewed about his filmmaking on another local TV show, his father was “amazed—he just was so cool and collected. He was sixteen or seventeen, but he handled it just like he'd been doing it for years.”

Steven was not the only kid in his neighborhood making movies. His budding interest in film was stimulated by his friendship and collaboration with three other amateur filmmakers—Barry Sollenberger, Barry's younger brother Jim, and Chris Pischke. “Most of us were considered kooks or goofs,” Pischke admits. “When other kids were doing whatever—sports, chasing girls, playing with cars—we were playing with guns and making films. All of us were pretty much self-taught.” “We got our ideas from watching movies and TV—Westerns, sci-fi, war movies, those were the popular types of movies in those days,” Barry Sollenberger recalls. “We all appeared in each other's movies, and when we were all in a scene and had no one to film it, we'd say, ‘Steve, come and film this scene,' and vice versa. The person who made the most movies was Steve.”

“It was helpful to Steve, indirectly, that there were other people in the neighborhood equally interested in what normally would be considered an offbeat or off-the-wall type of thing—making movies,” observes Jim Sollen-berger. “If Steve had been a Lone Ranger, the only kid on the block making movies, he might not have been able to pursue it. But since there were two or three other kids, that gives you some support, instead of people looking at you as a complete geek. It was a pretty good place to incubate.”

S
TEVEN'S
budding interest in filmmaking remained unfocused, however, until he became a Boy Scout, a member of the Flaming Arrow Patrol of Ingleside's Troop 294. He made his first real attempt at a story film in order to earn his photography merit badge in 1958. “Scouting gave me my start,” Steven has said. “… Boy Scouts put me in the center of the loop. It sort of brought out things I did well and forgave me for things I didn't.” He found that the Boy Scouts helped him fill a growing emotional void. With his father becoming “as much a workaholic as I am today,” he later explained, “as a child I didn't understand, and Scouting became like a surrogate dad.”

Troop 294 went out into the desert in convoys of station wagons to pitch tents for weekend campouts and also made week-long visits to Camp Geronimo, the Phoenix area's organized Scouting camp. Arnold Spielberg was treasurer of Steven's troop. He went along on a few outings, and Steven wistfully remembered that on those weekends, “We became our closest.” Dick Hoffman, who supervised the boys on many outings, says that Steven's father “wasn't a big participator in our activities. He was a hardworking engineer. Few parents will go out in the wilds for the weekend—they don't like that. Those of us who do get interested are zealots. I think we all felt we were filling a need for these kids.”

“I always had the feeling [Steven] was somewhat embittered about his father,” says fellow Scout Charles Carter. “He was really close to his mother and disowned his father.”

Hoffman remembers “Stevie” Spielberg as “a skinny, little, inconspicuous fellow. I worried about him, because I liked him very much. He seemed to go in fits and starts—he would dash from one thing to another. I thought it was a disability, not being able to concentrate the way the rest of us would. I knew he was wildly enthusiastic about things, but I didn't think he had enough ability to analyze things. I tried to stabilize him, and that didn't work out very well.

“What stands out in my mind was a time they were all going off to cook wieners and marshmallows. The kids were going to scrape around, picking up combustible pieces of wood to build a fire. Stevie would rush around and pick up about three or four little twigs and start his fire. I told him, ‘Stevie, that's no good. You've got to go out and get a big pile to start a fire.' He just couldn't do it. He was too impatient to get the fire started. I thought, When he grows up and gets into the real world he's going to have a tough time
keeping up. I didn't dream anything would come of him. Of course, that was a complete misjudgment of the kid's personality.”

Steven admitted he “was always doing doofy things” as a Scout. When he demonstrated ax-sharpening at a gathering of five hundred area Scouts, “On the second stroke, I put the blade through my knuckle.” Another time, on an “absolutely freezing night,” he was supposed to build a fire for cooking, but “I dropped my mess kit into the mud. Couldn't get the fire started. I was hungry and also very tired, and instead of putting the canned food into a pot, I forgot and put the cans unopened on the fire. They exploded, sending shrapnel in all directions. No one was hurt, but everyone within about twenty yards of my cookout needed new uniforms.”

Nevertheless, Steven earned the respect of his fellow Scouts, becoming assistant patrol leader, then patrol leader, and working gamely to overcome his limitations to become an Eagle Scout. Completing his one-mile swim requirement was a major challenge. He was afraid of the water and “really couldn't swim a mile, but it was a case of mind over muscle, once I determined I was going to do it. I remember pulling myself out of the water after that in a complete sort of wet haze…. I got more respect for myself in being able to overcome those phobias momentarily.”

“I was one of the leaders who had to initial their cards when they completed their requirements,” fellow Scout Tim Dietz recalls. “Steve couldn't do the obstacle course. That was the only thing he couldn't do to get Eagle Scout. We worked on him and worked on him: ‘Come on, Steve, you've got to complete the course!' We held onto Steve's legs to make sure that he could do all the pullups required. He was a good sport about everything—a
good
guy.
He wasn't the kid we beat up or anything else.”

Dietz admits, however, that they sometimes pulled pranks on Spielberg. He and a few others once persuaded Steven to take part in a “snipe hunt,” a prank which involved sending a gullible boy out in the darkened desert hunting for birds with a pillowcase. Dietz laughingly remembers Spielberg “sitting on the side of a mountain about a hundred yards from us, yipping and yapping and callin' in the snipes.”

But sometimes the hazing went too far for Steven. “A guy named Rechwald had his pants down taking a crap,” Charles Carter remembers. “Rechwald was an underling in the pecking order; I think he was a little obese. Spielberg intervened because we were torturing Rechwald with a flashlight—everybody was shining lights on Rechwald, exposing him and chuckling at him. Spielberg got mad because they were embarrassing him. I think we tortured Steve a little bit [for protesting]—not seriously, we were just kids. But they laid off on Rechwald. I didn't think much about it at the time, but looking back, I was impressed. Most kids didn't stand up against peer pressure. He did. He took a stand.”

S
TEVEN
became “much beloved of the boys because of his imagination,” Dick Hoffman says. Steven “was always reading, always bringing books along” to camp, and when the boys pitched their pup tents and bunked down for the night, he would provide the entertainment with his own storytelling. Hoffman's son Bill remembers that Spielberg's stories “tended to be science-fiction—lots of monster-from-outer-space stories.”

“I was a great storyteller in Boy Scouts,” Spielberg recalled in 1982. “I used to sit around the campfire and scare forty Scouts to death with ghost stories.” The image is archetypal: Spielberg's TV series
Amazing
Stories
started each week with a montage showing the development of storytelling through the ages, beginning with a caveman spinning stories around a campfire. When Steven told stories to his fellow Scouts, “The whole semicircle would fall silent, all of them listening to what came out of the tent,” Dick Hoffman says. “He's got the damnedest imagination of anyone I ever knew. The other kids were rapt in their attention to what he was saying. I don't think he was terribly popular except when he was telling those stories.”

“It's what made him special,” says fellow Scout Bob Proehl.

Steven's storytelling ability also manifested itself in teacher Ferneta Sulek's seventh-grade class, classmate Del Merrill remembers: “He would always write some short story or some kind of fantastic story that was fun to hear. We'd all read our stories aloud and you didn't
want
to hear some people's stories. But
everybody
always wanted to listen to his story. He brought mystery into it, too. He often would have a twist ending, and he could scare you. A lot of his stories were a blend of humor and science fiction. I remember him reading a lot of science-fiction books in seventh and eighth grade. He said it was his favorite kind of reading.”

Spielberg, who has been described by Ray Bradbury as “probably the son of H. G. Wells, certainly the grandson of Jules Verne,” acquired his passion for science fiction from the pulp magazines and paperbacks his father left around the house. Steven's tastes included not only the visionary fantasies of such masters as Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert A. Heinlein, but virtually any kind of sci-fi yarn between covers.

Spielberg's obsession with science fiction was “one of the fascinating things about him,” says Gene Ward Smith, a fellow sci-fi buff who later attended high school with him in California. “Here I'd gone through my life, and if I met a guy who'd read one science-fiction book, I'd read fifty—and he'd read
all
this stuff. He'd read stuff
I
hadn't read. He'd also seen all these science-fiction movies I hadn't seen, like
The
Day
the
Earth
Stood
Still.
He took me through the whole plots of
Forbidden
Planet
and the sleazeball monster movies. We spent a lot of time talking about science-fiction shows on TV—he wasn't a big fan of
Science
Fiction
Theater,
but he thought
The
Twilight
Zone
was wonderful.”

Outer space was brought close to home for Steven by the work of his uncle Bud, the rocket scientist, and Scout leader Dick Hoffman, who was
program manager for Motorola on space communications equipment linking ground stations to astronauts on Apollo moon flights and sending photo transmissions from interplanetary satellites. Many of the Flaming Arrow Patrol meetings were held in Hoffman's backyard “hobby house,” a guest house full of elaborate ham radio equipment he had built himself, along with a planetarium and a globe of the world that lit up to indicate places he was calling. Many years later Spielberg told Dick Hoffman how much he envied his son for having a father who was “the Mr. Wizard of Phoenix, Arizona.” A huge antenna loomed above the hobby house, with a platform the boys could climb to peer into a four-foot-long telescope to study the stars over Camelback Mountain on cloudless nights. Steven, who later shot part of
Firelight
in the hobby house and the orange grove surrounding it, was fascinated by the telescope. He set up a smaller telescope to watch the skies from his own backyard. Once, when he found Saturn, he excitedly invited the neighborhood kids to come around and share the sight with him.

When Steven wasn't reading science fiction or making movies, he usually was watching television. His memories of TV-watching in Phoenix are somewhat distorted. He once complained that “Phoenix, Arizona, is not exactly the culture center of the United States. We had
nothing!
Except, probably, the worst television you've ever seen. They showed one movie on three different channels,
The
Atomic
Kid
[a 1954 comedy starring Mickey Rooney as a radioactive survivor of an atomic bomb blast]. They kept repeating that for years!”

But even if Phoenix TV was a wasteland for movies, there was a lot more to watch than
The
Atomic
Kid.
In addition to
The
Twilight
Zone,
Steven enjoyed
Alfred
Hitchcock
Presents
and Steve Allen's comedy-variety shows. When he attended high school in California, Spielberg (whose middle name is Allan) would introduce himself by saying, “I'm Steve Allan … Spielberg.” He also liked the comedy of Ernie Kovacs and
You
Bet
Your
Life
with Groucho Marx. But the comedy show that influenced him most when he was growing up in Phoenix was the locally produced favorite
Wallace
&
Ladmo.

“These guys [Bill Thompson and Ladimir Kwiatkowski] were inventive and original, and they turned me on,” Spielberg recalled. “They were my idols. I watched them every day. I grew up and I was supposed to be too old to watch them, and I still watched them, because they were very hip. They always kept abreast of the times. They were the
Saturday
Night
Live
before
Saturday
Night
Live.
Essentially they were contemporary humorists. They never talked down to kids, that's what I remember most about them. They never treated kids as children; they always treated them as peers. I will never forget the day they took Stan Freberg's album
United
States
of
America
[i.e.,
Stan
Freberg
Presents
The
United
States
of
America,
a satirical revue of early American history], and they did the whole thing on their show, they lip-synched to the record. It was just great. I remember buying the album after that and memorizing it.”