The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (18 page)

Steven Spielberg's films have grossed approximately $1,500 million. He is thirty-four, and well on his way to becoming the most effective popular artist of all time... What's he got? How do you do it? Can I have some?

'Super-intensity' is Spielberg's word for what he comes up with on the screen. His films beam down on an emotion and then subject it to two hours of muscular titillation. In
Jaws
($410 million) the emotion was terror; in
Close Encounters
($150 million) it was wonder; in
Raiders of the Lost Ark
($310 million) it was exhilaration; in
Poltergeist
($480 million and climbing) it was anxiety; and now in E.T. — which looks set to outdo them all — it is love.

Towards the end of E.T., barely able to support my own grief and bewilderment, I turned and looked down the aisle at my fellow sufferers: executive, black dude, Japanese businessman, punk, hippie, mother, teenager, child. Each face was a mask of tears. Staggering out, through a tundra of sodden hankies, I felt drained, pooped, squeezed dry; I felt as though I had lived out a year-long love affair — complete with desire and despair, passion and prostration — in the space of izo minutes. And we weren't crying.for the little extra-terrestrial, nor for little Elliott, nor for little Gertie. We were crying for our lost selves. This is the primal genius of Spielberg, and E.T. is the clearest demonstration of his universality. By now a billion Earthlings have seen his films. They have only one thing in common. They have all, at some stage, been children.

It is pretty irresistible to look for Spielberg's 'secret' in the very blandness of his suburban origins — a peripatetic but untroubled childhood spent mostly in the south-west. As I entered his offices in Warner Boulevard, Burbank Studios, I wondered if he had ever really left the chain-line, ranch-style embryos of his youth. The Spielberg bungalow resembles a dormitory cottage or beach-house — sliding windows, palm-strewn backyard. The only
outre
touch is an adjacent office door marked
twilight zone accounting:
perhaps it is into this fiscal warp that the millions are eventually fed, passing on to a plane beyond time and substance ...

Within, all is feminine good humour. Spielberg has always surrounded himself with women — surrogate aunts, mothers, kid sisters. These gently wise-cracking ladies give you coffee and idly shoot the breeze as you wait to see the great man. That girl might be a secretary; this girl might be an executive producer, sitting on a few million of her own. Suddenly a tousled, shrugging figure lopes into the ante-room. You assume he has come to fix the coke-dispenser. But no. It is Mr Spielberg.

His demeanour is uncoordinated, itchy, boyish: five foot nine or so, 150 pounds, baggy T-shirt, jeans, running-shoes. The beard, in particular, looks like a stick-on afterthought, a bid for adulthood and anonymity. Early photographs show the shaven Spielberg as craggy and distinctive; with the beard, he could be anyone. 'Some people look at the ground when they walk,' he said later. 'Others look straight ahead. I always look upward, at the sky. This means that when you walk into things, you don't cut your forehead, you cut your chin. I've had plenty of cuts on my chin.' Perhaps this explains the beard. Perhaps this explains the whole phenomenon.

Spielberg sank on to a sofa in his gadget-crammed den, a wide, low room whose walls bear the usual mementoes of movie artwork and framed magazine covers. 'I had three younger sisters,' he began. 'I was isolated, left alone with my thoughts. I imagined the very best things that could happen and the very worst, simply to relieve the tedium. The most frightening thing, the most uplifting thing.' He stared round the room, seemingly flustered by the obligation to explain himself for the thousandth time — weighed down, indeed, by the burden of all these mega-hits, these blockbusters and smasher-oos. 'I was the weird, skinny kid with the acne. I was a wimp.’

His mother Leah has confirmed that Steven 'was not a cuddly child'. Evidently he kept a flock of parakeets flapping around wild in his room. Leah never liked birds, and only reached a hand through the door once a week to grope for the laundry bag. She didn't go in there for years. Steven also kept an 8mm camera. According to his sister Anne, big brother would systematically 'dole out punishment’

while forcing the three girls to participate in his home movies. This technique is well-tried in Hollywood: it is known as
directing.

Spielberg's films deal in hells and heavens. Against the bullying and bedevilled tike, we can set the adolescent dreamer, the boy who tenderly nursed his apocalyptic hopes. One night, when he was six, Steven was woken by his father and bundled into the car. He was driven to a nearby field, where hundreds of suburbanites stood staring in wonder (this is probably the most dominant image in his films). The night sky was full of portents. 'My father was a computer scientist,' said Spielberg. 'He gave me a technical explanation of what was happening. "These meteors are space debris attracted by the gravitational..." But I didn't want to hear that. I wanted to think of them as falling stars.’

All his life Spielberg has believed in things: vengeful ten-yard sharks, whooping ghosts, beautiful beings from other worlds. 'Comics and TV always portrayed aliens as malevolent. I
never
believed that. If they had the technology to get here, they could only be benign ... I know they're out there.' The conviction, and desire, lead in a straight line from
Firelight
(one of his SF home movies) to the consummation of E.T. 'Just before I made
Close Encounters
I went outside one night, looked up at the sky and started crying. I thought I was falling apart.’

In
Poltergeist,
a suburban family is terrorised by demons that emerge from the household television set. When Spielberg describes the film as 'my revenge on TV', he isn't referring to his own apprenticeship on the small-screen networks. 'TV was my third parent.' His father used to barricade and boobytrap the set, leaving a strand of hair on the aperture, to keep tabs on Steven's illegal viewing. 'I always found the hair, memorised its position, and replaced it when I was through.’

Rather to the alarm of his girlfriend, Kathleen Carey, Spielberg still soaks up a great deal of nightly trivia. 'All I see is junk,' she says, 'but he looks for ideas.' It is clear from the annuals and pot-boilers on his office shelves that Spielberg is no bookworm (this is Hollywood after all, where high culture means an after-dinner game of Botticelli). TV is popular art: Spielberg is a popular artist who has outstripped but not outgrown the medium that shaped him. Like Disney - and, more remotely, like Dickens — his approach is entirely non-intellectual, heading straight for the heart, the spine, the guts.

All right, conceded Spielberg, shirting up a gear in his own defence. 'I do not paint in the strong browns and greens of Francis [Coppola], or in Marty's [Martin Scorsese's] sombre greys and whites. Francis makes films about power and loyalty; Marty makes films about paranoia and rage. I use primary colours, pastel colours. But these colours make strange squiggles when they run together on the palette ... I'm coming out of my pyrotechnic stage now. I'm going in for close-ups. Maybe I will move on to explore the darker side of my make-up.’

The line of thought is interrupted, as telephones ring and doors swing open. During the interview Spielberg has been attentive enough in his restless way, but some sort of minor crisis is rumbling through the office. His youthful co-producer, Kathleen Kennedy, peers into the room. 'What's happening?' Spielberg asks. 'No, Steven, you don't even want to hear about this.' But Steven does. The row has something to do with a music-publishing spin-off. Later, as I prepared to leave, I could hear Spielberg coping with his stacked calls. 'I'd rather dump the song than get involved in a political war... We think it'll go to number one, which is good ... This has to be solved, and not tomorrow. Two hours.' He doesn't sound like a dreamy kid any more. He sounds like Daryl Zanuck with a bit of a hangover.

Spielberg's career has on occasion resembled that of the old-time Hollywood moguls — and it will do so again, perhaps much more closely. His induction into the studios wasn't quite a case of 'Kid, I'm going to give you a break', but it had its classic aspects. At eighteen, the weird, skinny kid more or less abandoned his studies at California State College and started hanging round the Universal lot. He was thrown off a Hitchcock set; John Cassavetes gave him some unofficial tuition. He raised $10,000 and made a twenty-minute film called
Amblin'.
(His office now bears the nostalgic logo, Amblin' Productions — though these days Sprintin' would be nearer the mark.) On the basis of this modest short, which was designed to show that he could do the simple things, Spielberg became the youngest director to be signed up by a major studio, and was set to work in television.

The full apprenticeship was never served out. Spielberg made episodes of
Columbo, The Name of the Game
and
The Psychiatrist.
He made TV specials. One of these was called
Duel.
It was pure Spielberg, and showed just how quickly the tiro found his line. A faceless suburbanite makes a business trip by car; he is inexplicably menaced by a steam truck whose driver is never seen. By the end of the seventy-five-minute film, the truck is as monstrous, blind and elemental as anything out of
Poltergeist or Jaws.
Released in Europe as a feature,
Duel
made its money back thirty times over. Spielberg was shifted up into the real league. After an inconclusive sortie on
The Sugarland Express
(a chase movie whose only Spielbergian ingredient was its concern with a mother's forcible separation from her child — a recurring crux), the twenty-five-year-old went on to make
Jaws.
The rest is history: box-office history.

After
Close Encounters,
however, Spielberg's career did take a salutary wobble with the chaotic Second World War satire, 1941. Characteristically in a way, the movie was a megaflop — a snowballing fiasco. By now it has laboriously recouped its $30 million budget, yet Spielberg still shows a surprising touchiness about his only brush with failure: 'I haven't read a review of that movie to this day — I just flew into it and forgot to read the script. It taught me that creative compromise is more challenging than the blank cheque-book. And it taught me that I'm not funny when I'm just being funny. There
has
to be a dramatic context.”

In all his major films, that context has not varied. It places ordinary people, of average resources, in situations of extraordinary crisis. How would
you
shape up to a shark? Would
you
enter that cathedral-organ of a mothership and journey to the heavens, never to return? Accordingly, as the strength of his bargaining position has increased, Spielberg has been less and less inclined to use star actors in his films. One scans the cast-lists of
Poltergeist
and
E.T.
in search of a vaguely familiar name. Craig T. Nelson? Dee Williams? Peter Coyote? These are useful performers, but they are not headliners, and never will be.

Coppola, for instance, has another way of ducking the star system. Look at the constellation that was formed by
Godfather I
alone: Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, James Caan, Al Pacino. Spielberg uses a more radical technique for avoiding the big salaries and big egos that always accompany the big names. He casts his actors for their
anti
-charismatic qualities. 'The play's the thing,' says Spielberg. 'In every movie I have made, the movie is the star.' He is the first director with the nerve to capitalise on something very obvious: audiences are composed of ordinary people.

After his 1941 debacle, Spielberg brought himself violently to heel with
Raiders of the Lost Ark,
and this perhaps explains why it is the most anonymous of his major films. (It was the most personally profitable too, before E.T.: Spielberg and producer George Lucas simply offered the studios distribution rights — in other words, they kept it
all.)
With
Raiders,
Spielberg completed a movie under budget and within schedule for the first time, and has not erred since. A perfectionist and non-delegator, a galvanised handyman on the set, he worked loo-hour weeks to keep the production under tight control.
'Raiders
was popcorn,' he admits, 'but great popcorn.' It also brought him to the end of something. It marked the apotheosis of Spielberg the pyrotechnician.

Up until this point in his career it was just about possible to regard Spielberg as merely a brilliant hack. Flitting from studio to studio, he was the lucky mercenary, the big-budget boy with a flair for astronomical profits.
Poltergeist
and, far more centrally,
E.T.
put such dismissals quietly out of their misery. The time had come to acknowledge that Spielberg was unique.