Steven Spielberg (71 page)

Spielberg's headquarters was officially known as Bungalow 477, although
the entranceway sported the new Amblin logo, the image from
E.
T.
of a boy flying a bicycle past the moon. The compound included a forty-five-seat screening room, two cutting rooms, a video arcade, a kitchen with a professional chef, a gym, an outdoor spa, gardens, and a wishing well with a miniature
Jaws
shark. Spielberg decorated the offices with his favorite movie posters and Norman Rockwell paintings, as well as Indian blankets, rugs, and pottery. While the southwestern ambience of Spielberg's “home away from home” served as a comforting reminder of his boyhood roots in Arizona, and, for Amy, of her home in New Mexico, Hollywood wags quickly began referring to the hideaway as Spielberg's “Taco Bell.”

Writer Richard Christian Matheson
‡
recalls a bizarre experience when he visited the high-tech, high-security Amblin complex with a screenwriting partner in 1987. As they strolled through the gardens with Spielberg, discussing film and TV projects, “Every once in a while, from a rock or a tree, you'd hear, ‘Steven, your two-thirty is here.' Obviously there were microphones among the rocks that talk, because you'd hear a voice saying, ‘Steven, do you want something?' He'd say, ‘Guys, do you want some Popsicles?' And then he would say to nobody, ‘Bring us three root-beer Popsicles.' The whole place was obviously tracking his whereabouts.”

The palatial Pacific Palisades estate Steven and Amy bought in early 1985 from singer Bobby Vinton—situated on an isolated hilltop overlooking Malibu and bordering on Will Rogers State Park—was similarly redecorated in the southwestern style. “The only difference between redoing the house and making a film is that I paid for it,” quipped Spielberg, who added, “The history of the house attracted me instinctively. It was important for me to know that David Selznick had lived there during the time he produced
Gone
With
the
Wind.
”
§
The remodeled house had more than its share of idiosyncratic Spielbergian touches, including “the Hobbit room,” a family room with a retractable television set and mushroom-shaped fireplace and windows. “Hobbits were part of my personal mythology growing up,” said Spielberg. “I wanted to have the TV room, where I spend most of my life, to have a Hobbit feel.”

With the turmoil of recent years subsided, Spielberg was happy to be a homebody, boasting of his very un-Hollywood squareness: “I don't live on the French Riviera with seven women feeding me while I sit in the sun with a reflector under my chin. I'm proud that I go home at night and watch TV until I fall asleep, and then wake up the next morning to go to work.”

M
AX
Samuel Spielberg was born on June 13, 1985, at Santa Monica Hospital. The exultant father described Max as “my best production yet.”
The baby's middle name was chosen in honor of Steven's grandfather. Amy said they had no particular reason for choosing the name Max, a popular name with baby boomer parents in the 1980s. But it was a fitting (if unintended) reminiscence of Max Chase, the Spielberg relative who gave Arnold Spielberg his first movie camera.

During her pregnancy, Amy played one of the two women Dudley Moore impregnates in Blake Edwards's farce
Micki
and
Maude.
Since she was nearing delivery when Spielberg's film version of Alice Walker's
The
Color
Purple
began shooting, he arranged to film the studio interiors at Universal before the company departed for the location site near Monroe, North Carolina. “We had to wait for Max to arrive,” recalled the film's cinematographer, Allen Daviau, “and we want to thank him—he showed up on schedule, bless him.” The timing of Max's arrival was uncanny, for Spielberg was shooting the childbirth scene on June 12 when Amy “called Steven on the set to let him know I was in labor. He ran to the phone from the middle of filming a dramatic childbirth, and I told him very calmly, ‘Honey, now come and direct my delivery.'”

The baby's cries in the film were those of Max Spielberg, recorded by his father at home one night while Max was taking a bath.

W
HAT
was a white male director doing making a movie of
The
Color
Purple?
What, of all people, was Steven Spielberg doing making
The
Color
Purple?

Those questions were asked by many people when Spielberg filmed Walker's passionately feminist novel about a black woman in the Deep South of the early 1900s. Celie Johnson—played as an adolescent by Desreta Jackson and as an adult by Whoopi Goldberg, in her film debut—suffers decades of abuse, first from her incestuous stepfather and later from the violent, chauvinistic husband she calls simply “Mister.” Although he came to respect “the genuine sweetness of Spielberg's regard for his characters,”
Newsweek
reviewer David Ansen initially considered the conjunction of director and material “as improbable as, say, Antonioni directing a James Bond movie. … Early on I had the disorienting sensation that I was watching the first Disney movie about incest.”

Many people assumed Spielberg could only have made
The
Color
Purple
in a calculated and cynical attempt to win an Academy Award. There was no doubt he was impatient with the widespread perception of his work as juvenile escapism, and that he was seeking greater respect by making an “adult” film from a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel dealing with the kinds of themes that often impress Academy voters. The director spoke frankly of wanting “to challenge myself with something that was not stereotypically a Spielberg movie. Not to try to prove anything, or to show off—but just to try to use a different set of muscles.” The lingering shadow of the
Twilight
Zone
court case, which was in the headlines throughout this period, also may have
played a role in Spielberg's need for greater respect from the Hollywood community.

But there was something profoundly cynical in his critics' suggestion that winning an Oscar was all that motivated Spielberg to make
The
Color
Purple.
That argument assumed a white director could not
really
be interested in a story about black characters without having some kind of ulterior motive. To Peter Rainer of the
Los
Angeles
Herald-Examiner,
the movie was “ostensibly about the ordeal of being black and poor
¶
and a woman in the South in the first half of this century. But the movie is really about winning awards.” Sneered
Time's
Richard Corliss: “[F]rom the geriatric elite of Hollywood, Spielberg got no respect—no Oscars, that is. So here comes Steven the Nice, with his first ‘respectable' motion picture.” Hollywood wags referred to the movie as Spielberg's
Close
Encounters
with
the
Third
World.

Because of Spielberg's habitual reticence on the subject of his Jewish heritage and his experiences with anti-Semitism—a subject he did not discuss publicly with complete candor until he made
Schindler's
List
—few people seemed to realize how personally he empathized with the plight of Walker's abused heroine. “Someone someday will write a Spielberg psycho-biography which will tackle the particular significance this project has for him,” J. Hoberman wrote in his largely negative
Village
Voice
review. While recognizing that Spielberg's decision to make
The
Color
Purple
stemmed from his long-standing concern with “the healing of wounded families” and the celebration of “a kind of ambiguous matriarchy,” Hoberman speculated that the film was “Spielberg's apology for the rampant white male suprema-cism of
Indiana
Jones
and
the
Temple
of
Doom.
”

Celie's determination to survive the twin burdens of racism and sexism made her kin to Spielberg because it touched a secret place in his heart that had never healed. “Spielberg shares the torment with us,” said Quincy Jones, the black composer who was one of the producers of
The
Color
Purple.
“He cares…. He cares about fighting prejudice.” As a high school senior living through his own “Hell on Earth” of ethnic prejudice, Spielberg had shown a passionate interest in the civil rights movement. His instinctive feelings of solidarity with members of another oppressed ethnic group, like those of many other Jews who supported the civil rights movement in that era, bore out the observation of Spielberg's 1960s icon Lenny Bruce: “Negroes are all Jews.” Spielberg dates his acceptance of his Jewish heritage to the birth of his son, and that event's occurrence during the filming of Celie's
childbirth scene intensified Spielberg's emotional identification with her character.

Some journalists writing about
The
Color
Purple
questioned Spielberg's sincerity by claiming that his previous work had not shown much interest in African Americans. But
The
Color
Purple
was not the first time Spielberg had told a story with a black protagonist, even if the two earlier instances were minor efforts. His 1970
Night
Gallery
segment “Make Me Laugh” starred Godfrey Cambridge as an unhappy nightclub comedian, and his “Kick the Can” segment of
Twilight
Zone
—
The
Movie
featured Scatman Crothers as the elderly miracle worker. And after seeing
E.T.,
Alice Walker observed, “From the very beginning of the film, I recognized E.T. as a Being of Color.”

It was Kathleen Kennedy who brought
The
Color
Purple
to Spielberg's attention, telling him, “Here's something you might enjoy reading.” One of the few people in whom he had confided about his persecution as a youth in Saratoga, Kennedy recognized that Spielberg and
The
Color
Purple
might make a good emotional match, however unlikely it may have seemed on the surface. “You know, it's a black story,” she told him. “But that shouldn't bother you, because you're Jewish and essentially you share similarities in your upbringing and your heritage.” Kennedy also understood his yearnings to expand his artistic horizons. “I always believed he would feel confident at some point to do other things,” she recalled in 1993. “That's why I brought him
The
Color
Purple.
After he read it, he said, ‘I love this, because I'm scared to do it.'”

Even after he agreed to become involved with the Warner Bros, project under his Amblin Entertainment banner, Spielberg kept it gingerly at arm's length for a while. “I didn't really think I was going to direct the movie until much later, into the development of the second-draft screenplay. To me it was a wonderful diversion from all the Saturday matinee kidflicks I was executive producing [including the 1985 releases
The
Goonies,
Back
to
the
Future,
and
Young
Sherlock
Holmes
]…. With open arms and great hosannas I would sit with Menno Meyjes, the writer [of the
Color
Purple
screenplay], and we'd spend a lot of time dealing with adult truths. Then we'd finish something and I'd go back and put on my waders and go into five feet of water on the
Goonies
set and shoot an insert for [director] Dick Donner.” While on location for
The
Color
Purple,
Spielberg said the principal reason he took so long to commit to directing it was that he was accustomed to making “big movies. Movies about out there. I didn't know if the time was right to do a movie about in here [tapping his chest].”

Another reason he hesitated was that he anticipated the kneejerk reaction many critics would have to his involvement in the project. “I don't know that I'm the filmmaker for this,” he told Quincy Jones. “Don't you want to find a black director or a woman?” Jones replied, “You didn't have to come from Mars to do
E.T.,
did you?”

B
EFORE
the cameras could roll, Spielberg had to pass an interview with Alice Walker. It was the first time in eleven years that he found himself in the position of being interviewed for a job.

The author had misgivings about letting Hollywood film her epistolary novel, written largely in a southern black-English idiom of the period. Hollywood's record of dealing with African Americans generally had been dismal, and the book presented minefields for any moviemaker with its stylistic audacity, its fiercely feminist themes, and its explicit treatment of incest, domestic violence, and lesbianism. Her respect for Jones helped overcome her qualms, but when Spielberg was proposed as director, she at first did not recognize his name. Later, however, she would recall having seen part of
The
Sugarland
Express,
whose “passionate intensity and sense of caring” made her realize he had an affinity for
The
Color
Purple.

Following his visit to her home in San Francisco with Jones on February 20,1984, Walker wrote in her journal, “Quincy had talked so positively about him I was almost dreading his appearance—but then, after a moment of near I don't know what, uneasiness, he came in and sat down and started right in showing how closely he had read the book. And making really intelligent comments.” Spielberg's “absolute grasp of the essentials of the book, the feeling, the spirit,” was what convinced her to trust him with the project.

Walker sensed that Spielberg, for all his worldly success, remained a minority person. She recognized that his sensitivity enabled him to share the feelings of characters of another race and another gender. For a filmmaker whose own feelings about the pain of childhood were still raw, it was no emotional stretch to empathize with Celie's suffering at the hands of her father and her tyrannical husband. “I saw Alice Walker's book as a Dickens piece,” said Spielberg, whose idea it was to have Celie reading
Oliver
Twist.
As a child of a broken family, Spielberg empathized instinctively with Celie's pain at being forcibly separated from her sister and her two children. Nor was it difficult for Spielberg, who knew what it was like to be physically mistreated by bigots, to enter into the agony of Sofia (Oprah Winfrey), the strong, defiant black woman who loses her children by refusing to submit to white racist authority. Perhaps with his difficult relationship with his own father in mind, Spielberg also heightened the story's emphasis on the estrangement of blues singer Shug Avery (played by actress Margaret Avery) from her father, a puritanical Baptist preacher. As Susan Dworkin reported in her
Ms.
magazine article about the film, Walker “saw that these women and their breaking hearts and soaring spirits did not feel strange to Spielberg.”