Steven Spielberg (15 page)

S
TEVEN'S
movie fanaticism was nurtured at the Kiva Theater on Main Street in Scottsdale, which showed sexy “adult” movies in the evenings but had kiddie matinees every Saturday. Parents would drop off their kids and leave them all day with fifty cents' admission to a program including two features—grade-B Westerns and Tarzan movies, sci-fi and monster movies, and occasionally more prestigious films, such as John Huston's
Moby
Dick
and John Ford's
The
Searchers
—along with ten cartoons,
Our
Gang
shorts, and two installments of the kinds of serials Spielberg would pastiche so affectionately in his Indiana Jones movies. “It was a great Saturday,” Spielberg recalled. “I was in the movies all day long, every Saturday. I saw
Tailspin
Tommy
and
Masked
Marvel
and
Commando
Cody
and
Spy
Smasher
—serials like that.”

“I've seen absolute duplicates in Spielberg movies of scenes we used to see back in the 1950s at the Kiva, in serials filmed in the 1930s and 1940s,” reports Barry Sollenberger. “When Harrison Ford in
Raiders
of
the
Lost
Ark
rides his horse down the hill and jumps onto the truck carrying the ark, Spielberg got it from the 1937 serial
Zorro
Rides
Again,
with John Carroll, even the camera angle—Zorro is riding a horse chasing after a train, and he jumps into a semi truck going down a freeway.”

Arnold Spielberg took Steven and Jim Sollenberger to see Alfred Hitchcock's
Psycho
at the Round-Up Drive-In in I960, on a double bill with Roger Corman's
House
of
Usher.
“Psycho
absolutely scared the living shit out of me,” Jim remembers. “All three of us were in the front seat. Steve was in the middle, I was on the side, and I remember breaking his dad's little wind-wing window.” Steven later told neighbor Tom Simmons how impressed he had been with Hitchcock's employment of the power of suggestion: “Steve talked about the shower scene in
Psycho,
how Hitchcock never showed any real violence—he showed you the knife and this and that, but most of it was in the viewer's mind.”

Steven and his friends could get a bit rowdy when they attended movies at the Kiva Theater—once they were kicked out for making too much noise —and when they took the bus to see first-run movies at theaters in downtown Phoenix. The uproarious scene of the ghastly little title characters in Spielberg's 1984 production
Gremlins
tearing the theater apart while watching
Snow
White
and
the
Seven
Dwarfs
is a homage to fondly remembered boyhood mischief.

When Irwin Allen's dinosaur movie
The
Lost
World
played one of Phoenix's biggest theaters in I960, Steven recalled, “My friends and I took a lot of white bread and mixed it with milk, Parmesan cheese, creamed corn, and peas. We put this foul-smelling mixture into bags, went to the movie, and sat in the highest balcony. At the most exciting part, we made vomiting sounds and squeezed the solution over the balcony on the people below. We did it for laughs. Little did we realize that it would begin a chain reaction of
throwing up. The movie was stopped, the houselights came on, and ushers appeared with their flashlights—ready to kill. We were so frightened that we raced out the fire-escape exit. Even though we had brought two cars, the seven of us ran about a mile and took a bus home.”
‡

Spielberg and his pals especially liked the historical epics and other big-screen spectacles in vogue during that period. “
Ben-Hur
[1959] was in town for a year,” Jim Sollenberger recalls, “but Steve, being Jewish, was reluctant to go see that movie because they advertised it as ‘A Tale of the Christ.' I went to see it and thought it was fantastic. I finally persuaded him to go see it, and he said he was surprised a movie could be that good. Steve and I also saw
On
the
Double
[1961], a comedy with Danny Kaye, and we both thought it was hilarious. It's tough to imagine comedy coming out of Nazis, but Danny Kaye did it. He would disguise himself as Hitler, and I can remember Steve for years after that jumping up and giving Danny Kaye's Hitler salute.”

The movies that impressed Steven the most in his Arizona boyhood were two epics directed by British master David Lean—
The
Bridge
on
the
River
Kwai
(1957) and
Lawrence
of
Arabia
(1962). Spielberg later called Lean “the greatest influence I ever had.” He has emulated Lean's magisterial sense of visual storytelling throughout his career, especially in the underrated 1987 World War II drama
Empire
of
the
Sun,
a project he inherited from Lean himself.

Haven Peters, a classmate who acted in two of Spielberg's amateur movies, remembers that in theater-arts class at Arcadia High School, “Steve was promoting
The
Bridge
on
the
River
Kwai
as the greatest movie because of its stupendous action scenes, especially ‘the greatest scene ever' (or words to that effect), ‘the way Alec Guinness falls, dying, onto the dynamite plunger.' And, animated by the thought, he acted out Sir Alec's famous fall.”

Speaking at Lean's Life Achievement Award tribute from the American Film Institute in 1990, Spielberg declared that
River
Kwai
and
Lawrence
“made me want to be a filmmaker. The scope and audacity of those films filled my dreams with unlimited possibilities.”

I
N
the summer of 1958, shortly after finishing fifth grade, Steven “was working on Eagle Scout and doing merit badges, and he kinda ran out of ideas of what to do for a merit badge,” his father recalls. “I said, ‘Well, they have a photography merit badge. Why don't you take this little movie camera and go out in the desert and make a Western? See if the scoutmaster will accept it.' So I gave him three rolls of film and he went out in the desert and made this little Western.”

The movie had no title cards. Steven subsequently referred to his first
attempt at cinematic storytelling as
The
Last
Gunfight,
The
Last
Gun,
and
The
Last
Shootout.
§
The primitive little Western, which was edited in the camera, had a cast made up of fellow Scouts and other pals, including Jim and Barry Sollenberger.

“A bunch of neighborhood kids went out in a station wagon with Steven's dad to a restaurant named Pinnacle Peak Patio [a Western steakhouse in Scottsdale], which had a red stagecoach parked in front of it,” recalls Jim Sollenberger, who played the lead. “Steven's dad did most of the filming, or all of the filming. We were not old enough to handle a camera. The movie was Steven's idea. He had more of the director role; it was his toy.

“I played a bandit with a bandanna and a cap pistol. I robbed a stage with two people on top. The camera was positioned so that you couldn't see that there weren't any horses. The people threw the money down from the stage. Then we got in the car and drove out in the desert. I remember my cowboy hat blew off during one scene and, like in the old Westerns, we naturally left it in and in the next scene I was wearing my hat. It ended with me being shot and rolling down the rocks. [When Jim was tossed over a cliff, he was doubled by a dummy made up of pillows, clothes, and shoes.] Steve and his dad had broken a ketchup bottle for blood and poured it on the rocks. I was grinning ear-to-ear trying to be serious. I remember getting no end of crap from them over the years because I was lying there dead and grinning.”

Making that early Western gave Steven “a sense of power bossing around a few kids who otherwise would be slapping me around. But that wasn't so important. I was making something happen that I could relive over and over again, something that would only be a memory without a camera in my hand.”

When the film was shown at the next Monday night's troop meeting, Steven recalled, “the Boy Scouts cheered and applauded and laughed at what I did, and I really wanted to do that, to please again.”

Steven began taking his camera along on every Scout trip, filming everything that happened, from the boys getting on and off cars and buses to their physical exertions and shenanigans at camp. When he showed the movies at troop and patrol meetings, some of which were held in his house, he enjoyed seeing “everyone come out of their seats, partly because they were in the picture.”

Starting his moviemaking career shooting film without sound was excellent discipline in the art of visual storytelling, comparable to the training received by the great directors who started in silent movies and perfected their craft in the sound era, such as Hitchcock and John Ford. Steven's friend Terry Mechling also had a family 8mm movie camera, and over two Saturdays during seventh grade he and Steven put together a silent homage to Ford in
Mechling's backyard, a two-reel Western starring classmate Steve Swift. “It was pretty much action-packed, just a straight robbery-chase kind of thing, with the general store robbed and the sheriff chasing the robbers, more scenes than a thought-through movie,” Mechling recalls. “We both liked the same movie—John Ford's
The
Searchers
—and that was one of the movies we felt we could emulate.”

Spielberg remembers having made about fifteen or twenty 8mm movies as an amateur filmmaker, but that rough estimate covers only his completed story films, not all the varied footage he shot while growing up. His movies sometimes had no stories, but were simply experiments in filming techniques. “He would look at
anything
and see how it would look through the lens,” Mechling says. Steven even hooked up a camera cart behind his cocker spaniel, Thunder, and had the dog tow it around the neighborhood to make a movie called
A
Day
in
the
Life
of
Thunder.

Steven “had an attitude about the use of film that I didn't,” Arnold Spielberg says. “I'm a Depression baby. When I grew up, everything was expensive. When I used to put film in the camera, I tried to use every bit for taking pictures. He'd take several rolls and he'd experiment. He'd try out close-ups, he'd try out stop frames, he'd try out slow motion. I used to say, ‘Steve! Use the film efficiently!' He said, ‘Dad, I gotta experiment.'” Cinematographer Allen Daviau has described Arnold as Steven's “first producer.” “That's right—‘Watch the money!'” Arnold laughs. “That's what they say about George Lucas [who has produced Spielberg's three Indiana Jones movies]: Lucas would try to control the number of retakes that he wanted to do. Now Steve's good at it. He knows how to manage things.”

Steven soon became impatient with the limitations of his 8mm home movie camera. “I remember I was over at his house,” says next-door neighbor Bill Simmons Jr., “and I went in the bathroom and he was working on some kind of sound effects in the sink, making different sounds in the water.” Jim Sollenberger recalls an even more remarkable experiment Steven made with him when they were thirteen years old: “He filmed me as a hideous intruder in the night, coming down the hallway in his house directly into his bedroom. He filmed it in 8mm—in CinemaScope. He bought an anamorphic lens that he had found in a catalogue, that would squeeze the image down. He put one adapter on the camera and one on the projector. For most of the filming, he was lying on the floor looking up at me. He'd bought a spotlight, and it was hotter than hell. I was holding a big butcher knife, and he filmed me quite effectively—I turned the knife in such a way that we saw a glint of it coming across his camera a couple of times.”

When Steven was in eighth grade, teacher Pat Rodney had a “career exploration” project, encouraging students to show what they planned to do for a living. Steven went out in the desert with some classmates and made another 8mm Western, this time with a primitive soundtrack. His teacher recalls that Steven ran an accompanying tape of “dialogue, screaming, and galloping. They were rolling around in the desert shooting and stuff. One of
the things I remember was the money he spent on props to make it look realistic. He spent his allowance on bags of blood. We had a great time—we ran the movie forward and backward, and we all hollered. We all knew he had some special talent.”

“I'm going to make movies,” Steven told the class. “I'm going to direct and produce movies.”

“I
WAS
an exhibitor when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old,” Spielberg has recalled. “I exhibited 16mm movies for a charity in my dad's family room in Phoenix, Arizona. And I never made those movies. I never made
Davy
Crockett
or
Toby
Tyler
or any of the [other] Disney films that were available to me to exhibit for this charity. But in watching the reaction of the kids getting off on the movies, I felt as if I had made those films…. I wanted to run my amateur theater like the big time. It gave me the feeling I was part of a large industry.”

In fact, as people who attended those screenings vividly recall, Steven
did
show his own movies, usually as curtain-raisers for the programs of Hollywood features, cartoons, and serials. Some of the profits were given to the building fund of a local school for the retarded, the Perry Institute. In July 1962,
The
Arizona
Republic
ran a feature on four benefit screenings of
Davy
Crockett,
King
of
the
Wild
Frontier
Steven held on a single day. “Producer-director-scriptwriter-cameraman Steven Spielberg, age 15, has now turned entrepreneur,” wrote columnist Maggie Savoy. He told her he would have shown one of his own films to help the Perry Institute, but that most of the neighborhood kids had already seen all of his movies, and “anyway, they're nothing great. They don't have any stars in them—just all my friends.”