Away from the Typewriter and in Front of the Camera

Steven Spielberg is a man known worldwide. His name can be currently seen on the big screen as a producer in Jurassic World, a franchise movie he created. People who watch movies for fun have certainly watched, at least, one of his movies. While those who are hardcore fans enjoy his movies and his life story. I was first introduced to Spielberg’s work when I saw E.T. – The Extraterrestrial, at the age of eight. I fell in love with the art of moviemaking ever since. Spielberg helped me see what I wanted to do in my life. Learning who he is as a filmmaker became the key to understanding his movies.

The world knows him as the director of blockbusters; some of the biggest blockbuster movies in the history of Hollywood. After taking a closer look at his life, I noticed there were two big events in the early years of his life that helped him choose his career. Steven was born in Cincinnati on December 18, 1946. His mother was a classical pianist and his father was an electrical engineer that led to a change of jobs and homes every few years.

Through his interviews, Spielberg revealed he was twelve years old when his father bought an 8mm Kodak camera, and Steven asked to become the family photographer. His father handed over the camera. Steven became obsessed with his new hobby. That camera meant everything to him. Then, when he attended high school. It was the beginning of a nightmare. Teenagers would cough the word “Jew," as he passed them in the hall and threw pennies at him. He recalled being the butt of jokes and the target of anti-Semitism. “I was embarrassed, I was self-conscious, I was always aware that I stood out because of my Jewish-ness.” A bully kicked him to the ground in P.E., in the locker room, and in the shower. If that wasn’t enough, a bully threw a cherry bomb between Steven’s legs while he was sitting on the toilet at school.

Spielberg figured out that, “If you can’t beat him, try to get him to join you.” Spielberg told a high school bully he was making a film about World War II and wanted to cast him as a John Wayne-type of hero. “He did look a little like John Wayne. He sure was as big as Wayne.” The bully eventually succumbed to the lure of movie stardom. “I converted him to being a friend, even though I don’t think I was ever his friend, because I never quite forgot the taunting and how intimidated I was around him. Even when he was in one of my movies, I was afraid of him. But I was able to bring him over to a place where I felt safer: in front of the camera. I discovered what a tool and a weapon a camera was, what an instrument of self-expression it is.” In Spielberg’s case, this bully-turned-buddy became one of the turning points in his life to understand the power of the camera in his hands. He started making 8 mm films with his father’s camera. He revealed that after the third or fourth little 8mm, “I knew this was going to be my career, not just a hobby. I had learned that film was power.”

He started working on small projects as his mother encouraged him to. “From twelve on, he was always writing little scripts and enlisting everyone to act in them. I supplied the cold cuts,” she admits. Steven also admitted, “Movies took the place of crayons and charcoal, and I was able to represent my life at twenty-four frames per second.” But things didn’t come that easily. When he graduated from Arcadia High, he applied to UCLA, but as a C-student, Steven didn’t even get close to being considered. He ended up at Cal State University Long Beach (CSULB), where he majored in English literature. Back in those days, the school didn’t have a film program, just a basic production course. He met Dennis Hoffman at CSULB. Hoffman wanted to become a film producer and gave Spielberg $15,000 and a script called Amblin to shoot. Steven shot Amblin in 10 days. “That’s what I consider my big break. It was all based on five pages that Dennis believed in. The only reason why I did Amblin was to get the attention of studio executives.” It did. The title of this short film would later become Spielberg’s company’s name: Amblin Entertainment.

It was in the summer of 1966 that his parents got divorced, a theme that Steven would use over and over in his movies (even in the current Jurassic World, the boy is crying because he knows his parents are getting divorced). That same year, Steven took the Universal Studios tour and, somehow, managed to sneak off the tram. “We were all let off to go the bathroom. Instead I hid between two soundstages until the bus left, and then I wandered around for three hours! I went back there every day for three months. I walked past the guard every day, waved at him, and he waved back. I always wore a suit and carried a briefcase, and there was nothing in it but a sandwich and two candy bars. So every day that summer I went in my suit and hung out with directors, writers, editors, and dubbers. I found an office that wasn’t being used and became a squatter! I went to the camera store and bought some plastic name titles and put my name in the building directory: ‘Steven Spielberg, Room 23C.’”

On the day that Steven sneaked off of the tram, Universal’s Film Librarian, Chuck Silver, spotted him and asked what he was doing. Steven managed to communicate his enthusiasm to Silver. Steven showed Amblin to Silver who showed it to Sid Sheinberg, then head of production for the studio’s TV production arm. Ironically, it took Universal two years to discover he was on the lot. “Those two years I was there,” Steven says, “I never made any deals, but I used the phone a lot and learned how to play the game.” Sheinberg offered to put the young man under contract. Before closing the deal, Steven said, “I just have one request, and I’d like you to give me not so much a commitment but a promise. I want to direct something before I’m twenty-one.”

Steven started to shoot TV pilots, and after that, as author Frank Sanello points out in “Spielberg: The Man, The Movies, The Mythology,” he spent “several months writing three screenplays.” He wrote his first feature, which was The Sugarland Express while the second one was called Ace Eli and Roger of the Skies. Steven was anxious to get away from the typewriter and in front of a camera, any camera, any medium. So, after Amblin (1968), he worked in TV, even though his goal was to direct movies.

He got his first commercial success in 1974, when Zanuck-Brown hired Steven to direct the movie he wrote, The Sugarland Express. It gave him enough credit for his next movie: Jaws, which was a novel that Zanuck-Brown had already paid $175,000 for the film rights. Sanello brings attention to the fact that even though the book adaptation into a film was attached to a more established director, “Brown handed the project to a twenty-five-year-old school dropout.” Jaws became the biggest surprise as it had taken in $60 million at the box-office and made Spielberg the man of the moment. After the success of Jaws, “the rest,” as people say, “was history!”

Immediately after the success of Jaws, Spielberg worked non-stop, making successful movies, year after year, as he continues to do so today. His name is attached to, at least, five more future projects as a director and a few others as a producer. A list of his works is vastly long. In order to discuss all of his works with the merit and attention they deserve would require another biography. Therefore, the analysis below is to help us see that, although the busiest man in Tinseltown became known as a director and later as a producer, in the early years of his career, he started as a screenwriter and kept in mind a simple rule of screenwriting: “Keep it simple.”

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) was a “compendium of research I had done,” revealed Spielberg, and he got involved with the project after he spoke with people who had had close encounters of the second kind. Raiders of the Lost Ark was an agreement between he and George Lucas that happened on a beach in Maui. When the movie was released in 1981, Spielberg had to go on defense with Raiders, “If a film works, it’s because of the characters and not the special effects.” Spielberg’s next two projects were writing Poltergeist and giving birth to E.T., his most autobiographical movie thus far. In E.T., the film’s themes of loneliness, fear of separation, and longing for friendship came straight from Spielberg’s own lonely childhood.

The film adaptation of the novel The Color Purple happened next. The movie received eleven nominations, but not for director. It didn’t win a single Oscar, sadly. Empire of the Sun (1987), a coming of age war film, followed the same steps. It received six nominations at the Academy Awards, but not for director, and it didn’t convert any of the nominations into awards. At that time, I remember hearing a few times that the Academy didn’t seem to like Spielberg, but would nominate his films. Jurassic Park was released in 1993 and it received critical acclaim. It won in the three technical categories it was nominated for: best sound editing, sound mixing and visual effects. The success was tremendous. Curiously, Spielberg helped with the editing of Jurassic while filming Schindler’s List in Poland. Schindler became a remarkable achievement according to film critics and audiences. Of the twelve nominations, Schindler won seven, including best film and director for Spielberg.

The man went on with his projects: The Lost World, a sequel to Jurassic Park, and Amistad that received four nominations at the Academy Awards. Another big hit was in the works: Saving Private Ryan. It received eleven nominations at the Academy Awards and won in five categories, including best director, but lost as best picture to Shakespeare in Love. Spielberg said the inspiration for Private Ryan came from the stories he heard from his father and his father’s friends about the horrors of war, and wanted to depict it the way it was truly told and not falsely portrayed. Stanley Kubrick brought Spielberg along for the production of A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Spielberg found post-production on A.I. difficult because he was simultaneously preparing to shoot Minority Report, a sci-fi thriller with Tom Cruise. Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal and War of the Worlds were also big box-office successes for Spielberg.

It is also important to note that Spielberg began his career in TV. Although his main goal was to create movies, he never completely abandoned the little black box. He produced TV shows such as Band of Brothers, Terra Nova, Smash, and Falling Skies. In 2007, he ventured with a reality TV show, On the Lot, that didn’t succeed and only lasted one season.

Last, but not least: every Spielberg film has a defining image. Here are some examples: in Jaws, it was the giant white shark swallowing the shark hunter Quint whole. In E.T., it was the alien flying through the sky in a bicycle basket, framed by the moon in the background. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, it was, indisputably, the rolling boulder that almost flattens Indy. In Jurassic Park, it is the moment the kids are in the car and the dinosaur is about to eat them. Spielberg creates situations – an image or a moment – that will stay in our minds forever.