Steven Spielberg (24 page)

His first choices were the prestigious film schools at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, but, ironic as it may seem in retrospect, he was rejected at both film schools because of his mediocre academic record. (It didn't help that he failed to take one of his college entrance exams, the ACT, because his friend Dan Huboi's old DeSoto convertible broke down the morning they were to take the test at San Jose State University.) “When Steve's grades didn't muster up, he got bummed out because he didn't go to one of those master classes [at USC or UCLA],” Shull recalls. Even the intervention of Chuck Silvers with both universities was unavailing.

Silvers, who like others in the industry sometimes lectured at USC, recalls, “I called Herb Farmer over at USC. Herb was coordinator of the cinema department for many years, and he was a friend. I explained the situation. I had this kid who was so unbelievable, and I asked if there was some way he could pull a little rank somewhere and get him into the USC cinema department. It didn't work. Everything was filled. It was filled for years to come.”

By the spring of 1965, Spielberg “was already working on Plan B,” says Shull. That meant using college as a place to hang his hat while he concentrated on breaking into the film industry through his own independent means. “When everybody was running around saying what school they were
going to,” Gene Smith recalls, “Spielberg said, ‘I'm going to Long Beach State.' I was taken aback. I thought he was way too smart to go to a state college. He said his grades weren't good enough for USC, and Long Beach State had a great film arts department.” In fact, Long Beach State did not even have a film department at the time, although it did have film courses in its Department of Radio and Television. But Long Beach had one crucial attraction for Spielberg: it was in southern California, less than an hour's drive from Universal. Spielberg could maintain a half-hearted presence in school, to avoid the draft and placate his father, while making contacts at the studio and continuing to make his own movies.

Apparently Spielberg wanted additional protection from being drafted, in case he dropped out of college or otherwise lost his student deferment. After interviewing Spielberg for a 1978
Rolling
Stone
profile, Chris Hodenfield wrote: “The psychiatrists kept him out of Vietnam.”

“I saw a shrink—primarily to get out of the Army—when I was eighteen,” Spielberg told Hodenfield. “I really didn't have a problem that I could articulate, I didn't have a central dilemma that I was trying to get the psychiatrist to help me with. So I would just talk. And I felt at times that the psychiatrist disapproved of the long lapses in conversation, because he would sit there smoking his pipe and I'd sit there with nothing to say. So I remember feeling, even though I was paying the fifty dollars an hour, that I should entertain him. So I would go in, once a week, and for those fifty-five minutes make up stories. And sometimes the stream of consciousness, on the chair in his office, gave me great movie ideas. I would test all these scenarios on him…. And I got a feeling that, in all my movies, there's something that came out of those extemporaneous bullshit sessions.”

Seeking a draft deferment may not have been his only reason for seeing a psychiatrist. He was under extraordinary psychological stress during the year in Saratoga when he turned eighteen, and one of the things he learned about himself from those sessions was “that I could never lose control. I felt I would never regain it.”

E
VEN
though the topic of Spielberg's family problems was “kind of a hush-hush deal,” Shull could tell throughout their senior year that it was “traumatizing the guy. The divorce was looming on the horizon. You could see that coming way off. It was very strained for Arnold and Leah.”

The tension continued to manifest itself in Steven's treatment of his sisters. Kathy Shull, who palled around with Anne Spielberg, says Steven gave his sisters “a horrendous time. He was after them incessantly, always terrorizing them. He would want to be in on the girl talk, but he wasn't invited. Anne would tell him where to get off.”

Another sign of Steven's inner turmoil was his attitude toward his mother's jeep. “Steve had a serious aversion toward that jeep,” Don Shull says. “It got so she'd offer us a ride [on the way to school] and we'd shine her on because
of that jeep. It was a symbol of what was to come. I think Steve laid this divorce thing and the breakup of the family on Mom.”

Arnold Spielberg moved out of the house on Sarahills Drive and relocated to Los Angeles around the time of Steven's graduation from high school without honors on June 18, 1965. “As soon as the kids were out of school, the whole thing went to hell in a bucket,” Shull remembers. “Steve couldn't wait to go down to Universal Studios and get in his groove.” Although more firmly set in his career aspirations than the average boy of eighteen, Steven felt an acute sense of anxiety over his future, heightened by the finality of his parents' divorce: “[M]y mom and dad split, and there was no longer a routine to follow. My life changed radically. I left home and went to L.A.”

Steven grew closer to his father during the period of the divorce and its aftermath, Shull thought. Arnold, in his view, was “a solid good guy, always there for Steve.” That summer, Steven chose to move into his father's apartment in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles. He lived there throughout his first year of college, commuting to Long Beach and Universal City in a gunmetal blue 1962 Pontiac convertible his father had given him for graduation. “It was a beaut,” Shull recalls, “but it was a rattletrap, shaking and shimmying at traffic lights, with one of the funkiest engines.” While visiting Steven and his father, Shull saw that “things were going pretty well between them, especially that first year in L.A. They were a kind of support group for each other. The family was going separate ways. Steve was clinging to his dad, and his dad was clinging to Steve.”

Leah filed for divorce on April 11, 1966, while still living in Saratoga. In a settlement agreement signed ten days earlier, she and Arnold stipulated that he would have custody of Steven, while sixteen-year-old Anne, twelve-year-old Sue, and nine-year-old Nancy would be in Leah's custody. Arnold agreed to support Steven until he reached his twenty-first birthday in December 1967 and to provide $650 per month for the support of Leah and their daughters. The property settlement called for an equal division of proceeds from the sale of the house on Sarahills Drive and of the family's other financial assets, which included three shares of stock in IBM, twenty in GE, and a piece of unimproved land in Cave Creek, Arizona. While most of the household furniture went to Leah, Arnold was allowed to keep such sentimental items as his mother's samovar, his father's silver wine cup, and his World War II mementos, as well as his set of Shakespeare's plays, classical records and balalaika, prayer books and technical books, electronic equipment, and the family “movie equipment, except Ann[e]'s Brownie Movie Camera.” All of his son's possessions went with Arnold to Los Angeles, including “Steven's camera ‘dolly.'”

The divorce was granted in Santa Clara County Superior Court on April 20, 1966, on the grounds of extreme cruelty. Leah and the girls returned to Phoenix, and after her divorce became final in 1967, Leah married their longtime family friend Bernie Adler.

L
OOKING
back on his year of “Hell on Earth” in Saratoga, Steven Spielberg reflected in 1994 that the experience “enlarged me as a person, made me more tolerant toward my fellow man, and perhaps ironically prepared me at the end of that year to leave my family for the first time to go into an uncertain world alone….”

A
LTHOUGH
he often has been described as part of “The Film School Generation,” Spielberg never attended film school. Unlike such contemporaries as George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Brian De Palma, who learned their craft at prestigious film schools in the 1960s, Spielberg remained essentially an autodidact. He took the few rudimentary film and television courses then available at California State College at Long Beach, but as he had done from his boyhood beginnings as a maker of 8mm films, Spielberg followed his own eccentric path to a professional directing career.

Universal Studios, in effect, was Spielberg's film school. But it was a training ground much different from the film schools of USC, UCLA, and New York University, giving him an education that, paradoxically, was both more personal and more conventional than he would have received in an academic environment. Spielberg devised what amounted to his own private tutorial program at Universal, immersing himself in the aspects of filmmaking he found most crucial to his development, both as an observer and, later, as a TV director. Universal had as many as twenty-two series in production during that period, a phenomenal amount of activity, enough to give even a youngster a chance to direct—if that youngster was as promising as Steven Spielberg.

Unusual though Spielberg's apprenticeship was in the Hollywood of the 1960s, it resembled the kind of training he might have received if he had worked his way up through the studio system in the 1930s. Universal was the one studio in the late sixties that still functioned like a studio factory from the “Golden Age” of Hollywood. Both in its production methods and in its choice of material, Universal tended to be a conservative place, institutionally resistant to the cultural and political upheavals that were tearing the country apart. Spielberg's solid grounding in the classical studio system set him apart from most of his contemporaries. While other young filmmakers were trying to change the system, Spielberg was learning to work within it. Spielberg's early years at Universal did much to shape his distinctive personality as a filmmaker, not only by honing his organizational skills and technical expertise, but also by strengthening his instinctive affinity for popular filmmaking.

A
1968
Time
magazine article on “The Student Movie Makers” observed that students all over the country were “turning to films as a form of artistic expression…. The reason for this celluloid explosion is the widespread conviction among young people that film is the most vital modern art form. Jean Cocteau believed that movies could never become a true art until the materials to make them were as inexpensive as pencil and paper. The era he predicted is rapidly arriving.” Spielberg began making films earlier than any of the other famous directors who would emerge from his generation. But he was so far out of the trendy film school loop that he was not mentioned in the otherwise remarkably prescient article, which highlighted the student work of Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas, and John Milius.

At the time “The Film School Generation” came to Hollywood, generations of nepotism had made the studios terminally inbred and unwelcoming to newcomers. The average age of the Hollywood labor force was fifty-five. There was no organized apprenticeship program to train their replacements in an industry that appeared moribund. The studio system, long under siege from television, falling box-office receipts, and skyrocketing costs, was in a state of impending collapse. The movies Hollywood made in the late sixties tended to be bloated, soulless, and increasingly out of step with the cultural and political views of youthful moviegoers. The future seemed daunting for the determined young movie fanatics who came of age in the sixties and for whom film historians Michael Pye and Lynda Myles coined the phrase “The Movie Brats.” Spielberg vividly remembers how he and such other “self-starters” as Lucas and Scorsese “had to chisel and dynamite their way into a profession that really never looked to young people, except as actors or possibly as writers…. There were no willing producers at the time I was trying to break into the business. My first thrusts were met with a great deal of animosity.”

George Lucas, who attended USC, says that “the credo of film school that
we had drilled into us every day” was that “nobody would ever get a job in the industry. You'll graduate from film school and become a ticket-taker at Disneyland, or get a job with some industrial outfit in Kansas. But nobody had ever gotten a job in Hollywood making theatrical films.”

The “USC Mafia”—who also included such other future Spielberg collaborators as John Milius, Robert Zemeckis, Robert Gale, Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins, Gloria Katz, and Willard Huyck—were unwilling to settle for such limited dreams. They ate, breathed, and slept movies with a passion earlier generations had brought to writing or painting. The funkier UCLA Film School—whose most prominent students from that period included Coppola, writer-directors Paul Schrader and Colin Higgins, and director Carroll Ballard—encouraged its students to take a more personal approach to filmmaking. USC's Milius defined the difference between the films made at the two schools: “Ours were trying to be professional and imitative of Hollywood. Theirs always had beautiful naked girls running through graveyards. … They were, I guess you could say, more left-wing, a little more far-out. They used more powerful chemicals and they smoked stronger things.”

Ironically, it took a UCLA student, Coppola, to start breaking down the doors of Hollywood for other film school graduates in the late sixties. He became, as Spielberg put it, “all of our godfathers.” Like many UCLA film students, Coppola was as strongly influenced by literature and theater as he was by movies. But he was pragmatic enough to start his professional filmmaking career by making nudie movies and working for
schlockmeister
Roger Corman, the only producer in Hollywood at the time who regularly gave jobs to young filmmakers. Coppola quit school when he was offered a screenwriting contract by Warner-Seven Arts. His Hollywood directing debut,
You're
a
Big
Boy
Now
(1967), was not only a Warner–Seven Arts production, it was also his UCLA master of fine arts thesis, a dual achievement that inspired both envy and awe among his contemporaries.

Largely due to Coppola's groundbreaking example, others fresh out of film school began to be given opportunities to tap into the growing youth market, a market little understood by the “suits” in the studio executive suites other than as a welcome source of untapped profit. With the runaway success of Dennis Hopper's 1969 counterculture movie,
Easy
Rider
,
“A bit of history opened up like a seam,” Lucas said, “and as many of us who could crammed in. Then it drifted back closed again.”

One day in 1967, Spielberg went to UCLA's Royce Hall to see a festival of student films made at UCLA and USC. The movies included Lucas's futuristic short
THX
1138:4EB
(Electronic
Labyrinth),
which Lucas later expanded into a Warner Bros, feature,
THX
1138.

When he saw the short, Spielberg “was jealous to the very marrow of my bones. I was eighteen [actually twenty] years old and had directed fifteen short films by that time, and this little movie was better than all of my little movies combined. No longer were John Ford, Walt Disney, Frank Capra,
Federico Fellini, David Lean, Alfred Hitchcock, or Michael Curtiz my role models. Rather, it was someone nearer my own age, someone I could actually get to know, compete with, draw inspiration from….

“I met George that day, and I realized that there
was
an entire generation coming out of NYU, USC, and UCLA, and I was kind of an orphan abandoned in Long Beach at a college that didn't really have a film program. So I even redoubled my efforts [at] that moment to attend those two [California] universities. And every time I went in with my application for transfer, they kept saying, ‘No, your grades aren't high enough.' I remember one teacher at USC said, ‘You're probably going to Vietnam anyway.'”
*

G
OING
to Long Beach State served its two primary purposes for Spielberg, helping keep him out of Vietnam and keeping his parents relatively pacified. But he later boasted to the school paper, “In college I didn't learn a bloody thing!”

“I didn't think any of us could teach him anything,” admits Hugh Morehead, chairman of the Department of Radio and Television when Spielberg was a student. “Steve knew more about cameras than anybody in the department. He could
teach
the department.”

The word “Film” was not added to the department's title until after Spielberg left. With film studies in their infancy at most American colleges, Long Beach State, even with its proximity to Hollywood, felt no urgent compulsion to invest the money and manpower to begin competing with USC or UCLA. While Spielberg was there, from September 1965 through January 1969, the department existed mainly to train students for journeyman careers at local TV or radio stations. It offered courses in film appreciation and film production, but there was hardly any budget for filmmaking equipment; the production course used 8mm cameras instructors rented or brought from home. To practice editing, students would buy silent 8mm prints of old Laurel and Hardy movies and recut them. Spielberg was far beyond needing basic training in loading a home-movie camera and putting together a story on film. Acutely frustrated over his rejection by the gilt-edged USC, Spielberg felt being at Long Beach State was a “deterrent” rather than a help in furthering his Hollywood aspirations.

“He was always kind of disenchanted with things,” Morehead recalls. “We didn't have the film courses the guy wanted and thought he should be taking. He would drop by my office to talk, and he would say he wished we would get those courses and the equipment he wanted. The kid was absolutely captivated by motion pictures. I never saw him without cameras hanging around his neck. He was always shooting film. College didn't seem to hold
much interest for him, and quite rightly as it turned out. I felt he was passing through on the way to Hollywood. He should have been at USC. He was marking time [in Long Beach], but he found some people who were helpful to him. He was a very nice boy, the kind of kid you liked and admired.”

A
S
A
freshman, Steven commuted from his father's apartment in the posh West Los Angeles community of Brentwood. Their relationship, one of mutual support in the first few months after the family breakup, deteriorated during Steven's college years.

Arnold Spielberg's financial support made it possible for Steven to lead his dual life as a college student and unpaid studio apprentice, but Arnold, who was working for Max Palevsky's computer firm Scientific Data Systems, remained frustrated by Steven's indifference toward education. Steven agreed to attend Long Beach State “just to be close to Hollywood, even though Dad still wanted me to major in computer engineering.” Arnold wryly recalls that Steven did do some serious studying during his college years—when it came to the subject of filmmaking: “Once he went to college he started reading up on it. He'd take theater arts, creative writing, anything but science.”

Shortly before Steven started college, Arnold made a phone call to Chuck Silvers, Steven's mentor at Universal, who describes their conversation, the only substantial one he and Arnold ever had, as “spirited.”

“Steven's going to come and stay in Los Angeles,” Arnold told him. “He's going to go to Long Beach State. I'd appreciate it if you would do what you can to make sure he goes to school.”

Silvers said he couldn't do that.

“Look, there's something you've got to understand about this motion picture business,” he told Steven's father. “For Steven to realize his ambitions he's going to need a hell of a big break. Somebody's going to have to put a lot of faith and a lot of money up so the rest of us can see if Steven is who he appears to be. I'm Steven's friend. If it comes to a choice of Steven having the opportunity to direct something that he could use as a showcase, I will advise Steven to do it, school be damned. Lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place in the industry, so you'd better be ready for it. They don't care whether he's got a degree or not. What they are interested in is what he can put up on screen.”

As Silvers recalls, Arnold reiterated that he “wanted him to go to school and get a degree. My reaction was, With talent like Steven Spielberg you don't set that kind of goal. What the hell good is a
degree
? That wasn't Steven. You can tell if somebody is academically inclined or not, and he wasn't. Steven didn't have a whole hell of a lot of support from his father. His father tried to do the right thing. I don't fault Mr. Spielberg. There's no question in my mind, he was a good father. He was doing what a good father would do. I don't agree with him.

“I think Steven thought I was some kind of guru, which I wasn't. I was determined not to be his father, either. Mr. Spielberg made it clear that I should, in effect, be Steven's father. I didn't want to play the part of a father. He had a father. My idea of encouragement [during his college years] was to
be
there. Basically that's the only function I really served. Somehow I always became a listening board every time he got a story idea, every time he shot some film and had dailies.”