Steven Spielberg (89 page)

When it came to starting DreamWorks, however, he knew he needed her blessing as much as Lew Wasserman’s. Concerned about Jeffrey Katzenberg’s legendary work habits, Kate laid down the law to her husband: “I love Jeffrey. But I never want you to become Jeffrey. I don’t want you to become involved in that lather of workaholism.” Perhaps chastened by the failure of his previous marriage, Spielberg promised he wouldn’t make that mistake again. When asked how he can manage starting a new studio while simultaneously running the Shoah project and directing movies, he said with characteristic optimism, “All important things get done in my life…. Somehow this is all fitting nicely into my life and I’m still home by six and I’m still home on weekends. That’s the miracle.”

As he goes about creating his own private moviemaking domain, Spielberg is realizing another of his lifelong dreams. His actress friend Joan Darling remembers, “What Steven wanted more than anything else when he was
young was somehow to set up his life so he could just go on a soundstage and make movies.” The alienated, anxiety-ridden boy who turned to filmmaking to find “a place where I felt safer: in front of my camera” has turned his refuge into a kingdom. If the promise of
Schindler’s
List
is fulfilled, he should rule it with wisdom and responsibility. Rabbi Albert Lewis observes that moviemaking gave Steven “the strength or the courage to be what he was … the opportunity to stay sort of in the shadows, i.e., behind the camera, and to be part of the outside world.” And when Steven learned to use a movie camera, it “made a
mensch
out of him.”

T
URNING
their new
multimedia
company, DreamWorks SKG, from a dream into a reality proved far more difficult than Steven Spielberg and his partners imagined. The grand vision Spielberg laid out in 1994 of “a place driven by ideas and the people who have them,” an innovative twenty-first-century studio encompassing all forms of moving imagery on a high-tech, cutting-edge “campus,” collided with some of the oldest obstacles in the business. Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen found their goal of total independence from the Hollywood system frustratingly elusive, but as Spielberg juggled his responsibilities as a mogul with his primary career as a director over the following years, he still managed to maintain a remarkable degree of filmmaking autonomy.

Did the myriad problems of running a studio, and the growing
complications
of life as a billionaire celebrity, impact the quality of his work as a
director
? If so, the effect, paradoxically enough, seemed largely positive. Spielberg’s penchant for multitasking, which he finds vital to keeping himself creatively stimulated, stood him in good stead as he took on responsibilities that would give most people vertigo. “He is a workaholic and likes to do many things at the same time,” Geffen has said of him. “I have multitasked my whole life,” Spielberg told
Variety
in 2009. “I think the past has shown that I can direct a picture and still supervise a robust slate of development and production with
my partners.” He added that his busy home life as the father of seven children “shapes your work ethic and arranges your priorities, and there is no better training than that.” And he said on another occasion, “I’ve been doing this long enough to know how I work best. When I focus on one project to the exclusion of all else, I lose my objectivity…. I fall in love with every scene that I shoot. I think something is wonderful when it isn’t.” His antidote for monomania is to read scripts for other projects and help colleagues with their films and TV shows. Running a studio may be an extreme form of
multitasking
—very few other filmmakers have tried to do so, and even the great Ernst Lubitsch couldn’t make a go of it in the 1930s—but Spielberg thrives on what most people would consider chaos.

He took a three-year hiatus from directing to concentrate on building up DreamWorks, which proved to be one of the busiest periods of his life, but one that made him anxious over his new responsibilities and the resulting distraction from his major focus as a filmmaker. After a somewhat bumpy return to his craft in 1997, he showed a new rush of creative energy that he managed to sustain over the following decade and beyond. He continually
explored
fresh artistic terrain as a director in one of the most creatively fecund, versatile, and adventurous periods in his career. In the process, he made a series of films in various genres reflecting and examining the traumatic effects of the September 11, 2001, attacks and the repression of civil liberties in the United States during the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney regime. Those films, which address contemporary issues either directly or obliquely, include
Minority Report, The Terminal, War of the Worlds,
and
Munich
. No other major American artist confronted the key events of the first decade of the century with such sustained and ambitious treatment. In those films as well as in such unjustly maligned works as
Amistad
and
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
, Spielberg put his reputation on the line time and again by taking artistic risks and defying predictable attacks to make highly personal and passionate films. He said in 2002: “Right now in my life I’m in a period where I’m experimenting, and I’m trying things that challenge me. And as I challenge myself, I in turn challenge the audience. And now I feel like I’m just striking out in all directions trying to find myself, trying to discover myself in my mid-fifties. Which is why I think films like
A.I
. and
Minority Report
are a little bit experimental for me.”

Spielberg’s willingness to risk his reputation was a measure of how secure he felt in it; risking box-office failure for projects he believed in was a sign of how his old hunger for acceptance had largely abated now that he had achieved all the worldly success anyone could ever need. His energy level in his fifties and early sixties was astonishing, and in his versatility and productiveness, he deliberately emulated such filmmakers from Hollywood’s Golden Age as John Ford, Victor Fleming, and Michael Curtiz. When Spielberg received the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in 1995, he recalled having attended the first AFI award ceremony honoring Ford, “an artist whose body of work totals more than a hundred and thirty motion
pictures
….
I have to get off my ass.” By 2003, Spielberg’s once-shaky standing with reviewers had risen to the extent that A. O. Scott of the
New York Times
could write that he “has long since passed through his phases of brilliant apprenticeship and precocious triumph to become a senior member of the Hollywood establishment—and, more important, a conservator of the nobler visions and traditions of American cinema.”

How did Spielberg manage to do all his ambitious work as a director while being involved with hundreds of other films and television programs in
various
production or executive capacities between 1997 and 2010, and while helping steer DreamWorks through some calamitous financial waters?

I
T
took DreamWorks three long years to get its first film into release—a delay that raised questions in Hollywood and elsewhere about the viability of the new enterprise.
The Peacemaker
was distinguished only by having a woman director (Mimi Leder), though that was not much of a step forward
considering
the routine nature of this film about loose Russian nukes, an action thriller that could have been turned out by any other Hollywood studio. The film’s premiere was not an auspicious occasion. On the way to Mann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood on September 23, 1997, the chauffeured Lincoln Town Car containing Spielberg and his wife, Kate Capshaw, collided with another vehicle in West Hollywood. Spielberg later told
Los Angeles Times
reporter Bill Higgins, “We were pushed out of the intersection, spun 90 degrees, air bags went off, glass shattered, the car filled with the acid smell from the air bags and the horn stuck, which is a cliché I would never have put in a movie.” Spielberg was taken to a hospital with a shoulder injury. When he finally made it to a DreamWorks premiere later that year (the debut of
Amistad
), Spielberg joked, “The last time we tried, we were in a wreck, on the way to
The Peacemaker
. So this time we put on seatbelts and drove very slowly.”  

The studio began with grand promises. The media and the public eagerly embraced the DreamWorks SKG founders’ vision of a full-service studio
headed
by three adventurous men: a star director of uncommon versatility who could wow audiences with the spectacle of
Jurassic Park
in the same year he moved the world’s conscience with the devastating subject matter of
Schindler’s List;
an energetic and visionary studio executive (Katzenberg) with a knack for boisterously contemporary animated films that went well beyond the old Disney formulas; and a brash and savvy music producer (Geffen) who had made his fortune by beating the major labels at their own game. The three partners in DreamWorks, with their liberal political views and generous support of social causes, also seemed poised to make films with a higher degree of seriousness than the typically crass Hollywood fare. And their demonstrable ability to push technical boundaries in innovative ways gave credibility to their talk about creating a studio that would differ from its competitors in aggressively applying new electronic tools to all areas of the often-hidebound entertainment business.

The euphoria surrounding DreamWorks in its formative stages was such that few stopped to consider the almost insuperable difficulties of building a new studio from scratch to rival the long-established Hollywood majors and their fully functioning production and distribution systems, especially in a time of soaring costs for both production and marketing. DreamWorks set the bar even higher by pushing the conceit that it did not intend to conduct
business
as usual. “We don’t run with the herd,” Spielberg said in 1997. “Every major studio has to make a number of films every year that they don’t want to make, to compete with the Joneses next door. We want to do pictures and television that appeal to us personally, not to follow trends or be compelled by the fiduciary obligation of a public company.” And in 1999, at a time when the new company was still struggling to establish itself in the marketplace, production executive Laurie MacDonald declared, “We don’t want to
disappoint
those who’ve seen us as an eccentric company from the beginning. We want to stick to our tradition.”

T
HE
first rock on which DreamWorks began to founder was its
centerpiece
, Spielberg’s “wish from [his] heart” to “create a home port, where people with similar dreams could rally on one piece of land, under many rooftops, to do what they do best.”

Plans for building the studio campus in the Playa Vista area of West Los Angeles, on land once owned by Howard Hughes, ran into opposition from environmental groups and difficulties in closing the financial deal with land developers. Environmentalists trained an unwelcome spotlight on the fact that the plans for the studio threatened one of the city’s last major surviving
wetlands
. Although DreamWorks tried to assure the public that some of the
Ballona
Wetlands would be preserved, noisy publicity portraying the maker of
E.T.
as an enemy of frogs had a damaging effect. Criticism of city tax breaks for the three wealthy partners also took its toll on public support for the
project
. A writer in the Los Angeles alternative newspaper
New Times
denounced Spielberg as a “soulless phony” and attacked other Hollywood liberals, as well as liberal politicians, for hypocrisy in being unwilling to criticize him. As the months dragged on, DreamWorks also labored under the unfortunate
symbolism
of trying to build a studio where Hughes had built the Spruce Goose, an overly ambitious leviathan of an airplane that had trouble getting off the ground. The plans for the Playa Vista complex suffered from grandiosity not only in the design of the studio facilities but also in its elaborate vision of an entertainment factory as a media city of the future, tied in aesthetically with modern commercial and residential development.

Eventually, when the project’s developers encountered serious trouble
raising
the necessary funding, the DreamWorks partners, who had agreed to pay $20 million for the land, were asked to put up more of their own money to get building underway, and they balked, on the advice of their own
financial
experts. When the project was abandoned in 1999, Spielberg recalled, “I
wanted to cry. It was so, so sad when that part of it didn’t come into play. I really wanted—more than Jeffrey, more than David—I was pushing to have a homeland, to really have a base of operations.”

But in the end, even he proved insufficiently committed to make it happen. When the teenaged Spielberg met John Ford, the veteran director cautioned him against spending his own money to make films. Although Spielberg had violated that advice by investing some of his fortune to help found
DreamWorks
, he wasn’t willing to risk enough of it to build the “campus” he envisioned. By 2009,
Forbes
estimated Spielberg’s net worth at $3 billion, ranking him 205th on its list of the world’s wealthiest people; in 2010, his estimated wealth was the same, but he had slipped to 316th. According to Geffen, Spielberg amassed his wealth partly by being a conservative investor: “He has an enormous bond portfolio, which is to say he has no appetite for risk.” About 80 percent of his holdings were in cash or other liquid assets. “Money to me is not a factor in my life,” Spielberg said in 1999, and Geffen commented, “Like most very successful, very creative human beings, he likes the idea of getting paid a lot of money. But I wouldn’t say it’s the focus of his interests.”

The dream that launched their studio was gradually being whittled down to more manageable dimensions. DreamWorks was turning from a major studio into a boutique, one with unusual cachet, yet not fundamentally different from other vanity enterprises operating within the shadow of the
much-diminished
yet still-dominating Hollywood studio system.

Spielberg had doubts from the beginning about the scope of the
enterprise
, worrying that they could have eased into it more gradually, a film at a time, “the conservative, play-it-safe side that haunts me before I fall asleep.” Those comments were given to
Time
magazine just five months after the launch of DreamWorks. He also worried about becoming distracted from his true calling and seemed to express signs of buyer’s remorse. One of his colleagues told
Time
in 1997, “You can tell he was depressed over the
business
stuff he’s got into. He always says, pleadingly, ‘I’m only a film director!’ But, of course, he’s much more: studio owner, pop icon, a father, a mentor, a major mogul in spite of himself.” Over the years, Geffen and Katzenberg shouldered more of the responsibilities for running the company than did Spielberg, who gave primary credit to Geffen, saying in 2008, “Jeffrey and I were like the kids.”

Many Hollywood observers would ask the same questions Spielberg was asking himself: Was he better suited to directing than to being a mogul? Was DreamWorks overly ambitious as a start-up enterprise? Was it simply too challenging for anyone, even Steven Spielberg, to create a new studio from the ground up in a time when the cost of making films had ballooned out of control? Were the DreamWorks partners spreading themselves too thin? Were they (especially Spielberg) insufficiently committed to the daily grind of running a business? And were their ideas too conventional to truly challenge the system in any meaningful way? The events of the following decade and beyond would bring no definitive answers to those questions. But the fact that
the questions were continually raised demonstrated the scope of the problems besetting even such three talented and prominent Hollywood players.