When he made his first primitive little movies, Steven was “editing in the camera.” Since Steven had no film splicer then, his father explains, “When he had two guys shooting it out, he’d say to one guy, ‘Now, you pull.’ And he’d photograph him pulling. Then he’d say, ‘Stop right there.’ The guy’d stop. He’d change the film, turn to the other guy, and say, ‘Now you pull.’ So you could see, in the continuity state, one guy pull before the other, and then Bam!
“I was over to his house a week and a half ago [in December 1995]. For Christmas and Hanukkah, he had put up a train set for Max [his ten-year-old son]. He takes it out once a year and sets it up. It’s a real elaborate, German-made set, everything detailed. Max had invented a movie. Steve was the cameraman, Max was the director: ‘Now, let’s see, we gotta put this man on the rail, the train’s gonna run him over.’ Kids’ gory stuff. Steve had this new video camera and he was videoing the thing up real close, because it had a lens that will allow you to get up within three or four inches. He was filming the trains and editing it in the camera, just like he did as a kid. He said, ‘Yeah, Dad, I’m editing it in the camera!’ Back to the beginning.”
*
STEVEN’S filmmaking hobby was a natural outgrowth of what he admitted was his boyhood need for attention. That need grew following the births of his three sisters in six and a half years during the 1950s. With his father often absent, both physically and emotionally, Steven felt he lived in “a house of women. Even the dog was female. I was the only guy in the entire house. I was eight, nine, or ten at the time, and I was supposed to be the oldest in the family, but [my sisters] had the run of the house. I just remember my sisters were terrors. They’d run through the house, they’d come into my room and they’d knock my models off the shelf; they’d do anything. I had no choice, I had to do something to make my presence felt.”
Steven spent much of his childhood thinking up increasingly sophisticated ways of bullying his three sisters. “I used to do anything in my imagination to terrify them,” he admitted. “I was terrible. From seven to thirty-three I was really awful to them.” It did not take him long to recognize that being a movie director was a socially permissible form of bullying: by casting his sisters in his films, he could subject them to any kind of violence and mayhem he desired, just as long as it was fictional.
Moviemaking enabled him to turn his feelings of sibling rivalry and powerlessness into something more positive: “I saw it as a way to compete with my sisters for my parents’ attention. It was my way of saying, ‘Hey, I’m here, too. Look what I can do!’ I wanted approval and applause. Well, the camera gave it to me…. I discovered something I could do, and people would be interested in it and me.”
“Steven didn’t get involved too heavily in the neighborhood activities until he came around with his little movie camera, and that kinda caught our attention,” says Phoenix schoolmate Steve Lombard. “He got interaction that way with all the kids in the neighborhood, as he directed them. Everybody was excited to be in his movies and they couldn’t wait to see themselves onscreen.”
*
WHEN a visitor enters Steven’s old neighborhood in Phoenix today, with its 1950s-era ranch houses still lining a broad, tranquil street crisscrossed by friendly kids riding bicycles, the feeling is inescapable: You’re not only going back in time, you’re entering into a Spielberg movie. If Steven’s anxiety-ridden life as a small boy in Haddon Township lends that neighborhood the aura of Poltergeist, this suburban neighborhood, with its deceptively idyllic surface hiding powerful undercurrents of tension, is redolent of E.T.
E.T. is “a very personal story,” Spielberg has said. “… I’m not into psychoanalysis, but E.T. is a film that was inside me for many years and could only come out after a lot of suburban psychodrama…. E.T. was about the divorce of my parents, how I felt when my parents broke up. I responded by escaping into my imagination to shut down all my nerve endings crying, ‘Mom, Dad, why did you break up and leave us alone?’… My wish list included having a friend who could be both the brother I never had and a father that I didn’t feel I had anymore. And that’s how E.T. was born.”
Although Arnold and Leah Spielberg were not divorced until 1966, after the family had moved to California, the problems in the marriage became obvious to Steven and his sisters while they were living in Phoenix. The children’s daily lives were clouded by their parents’ unspoken antagonisms, and at night those differences would find expression in arguments the children could not help overhearing in their bedrooms. Steven and his sisters came to dread their parents’ nocturnal talk of divorce, a melodrama that dragged on for years and left the children emotionally ragged, clinging to each other for support. The mounting tension at home during Steven’s boyhood years “was hard on him,” teacher Pat Rodney observes, “but I think it made him a caring person.”
Living under such strain heightened Steven’s sense of social alienation and took away some of the solace that a happy home life could have provided for a boy who felt uncomfortable being Jewish in a mostly gentile environment and often was bullied at school and on his way home.
Although people who lived near the Spielbergs at the time agree that the neighborhood was generally harmonious and that blatant expressions of anti-Semitism were not everyday occurrences, ugly incidents occasionally did take place. Janice Zusman, who grew up in the house directly behind the Spielbergs, remembers a neighbor boy drawing swastikas on the sidewalk so that she and another Jewish girl would see them on the way to school. Steven’s mother recalled that the children in one neighbor family “used to stand outside yelling, ‘The Spielbergs are dirty Jews. The Spielbergs are dirty Jews.’ So one night, Steven snuck out of the house and peanut-buttered all their windows.”
“All of us are part of some minority,” Spielberg reflected after making The Color Purple, his film version of Alice Walker’s novel about a southern black woman. “I was Jewish and wimpy when I grew up. That was a major minority. In Arizona, too, where few are Jewish and not many are wimpy.”
*
ARNOLD Spielberg was chief engineer for the process control department of General Electric, working long hours at its plant in Phoenix and on field trips throughout the United States and abroad. Process computers, then in their early developmental stages, run the controls for complex industrial processes, such as utilities, steel mills, and chemical plants. Arnold later shifted to GE’s business-computer department, which he had started as a spinoff from the process-control department.
“Arnold is tremendously intelligent, and sort of like a kid, like his son,” says Walter Tice, a GE application and sales engineer who was responsible for the industrial marketing of Arnold’s process computers. “Arnold was not the typical engineer—he really wanted to learn about the processes, he wanted to go to steel mills and see the steel being made. He’s like Steve, he’s always interested in the whole story. Some of the best engineers are deadheads, no personality, zero. Arnie’s not dull, he has a lot of charm and wit about him. As far as being an engineer goes, he was very creative.”
Arnold insists he did not spend a great deal of time traveling while working for GE: “Leah had the impression I traveled a lot, because she hated to be left alone. So anytime that I was gone, it was like a big deal. When I went to Russia, I was gone for a month. I was offered an opportunity to go to Russia as a representative of GE at the first international control conference, held in Moscow and Leningrad. And I wanted Leah to come, but she couldn’t bring herself to go: ‘Oh, I can’t fly, I’m afraid of flying.’ Now she flies, reluctantly, but then she could not fly. I felt so bad that when I came home, I said, ‘I’ve got to get you something.’ We found an ad for a lovely Steinway grand piano. So we bought this piano, and she loved it.”
Steven also felt Arnold’s absences keenly. His sixth-grade teacher Eleanor Wolf has a poignant memory of a rare appearance Arnold made at the school. When he came back from the Soviet Union, Arnold “brought slides in to show us. That was
the only time I saw the kid excited, maybe because his father would take the time to come in. I gathered his father didn’t have too much time for him.”
“I made some movies over in Russia, and Steve edited and titled them,” Arnold adds. “I got him a titler. He spelled a couple of things wrong, but he’d do special effects. He’d put one letter at a time down and take a picture, then another letter, dot-dot-dot-dot-dot, like each letter in the title spelled itself out.”
“His father traveled a lot, and I think that’s why Steve was close to his mother,” says his teacher Pat Rodney. “She was a really strong person in Steve’s life. She gave a lot of time and energy raising her kids, and she didn’t think her raising ended at 8:00 A.M. when they went to school. A lot of kids envied how she showed up at school. She wasn’t a pain in the neck like some moms. She just would drop in and bring Steve his lunch, and she used to come in and clean tables in the cafeteria. She said, ‘I’m the only person with a master’s degree that you have cleaning tables. You may wonder why I spend so much time here. I have a neighbor who comes over and sits in my kitchen. She’s the kind of person who has an orgasm over Beads of Bleach.’”
Although Leah “thought Steve was perfect,” she was “concerned about his personal habits,” his teacher adds. “She came in to my room one time and said they were going to condemn their house if he didn’t bathe. She said, ‘He likes you and his dog, not necessarily in that order. Would you talk to him about his personal cleanliness?’ So I asked him, ‘Listen, do you want those people to remember you as Smelly Spielberg?’” Steven shared his cluttered bedroom with an uncaged lizard and loose parakeets. Leah went in there only to pick up his dirty clothes.
The Spielbergs’ living room was dominated by Leah’s white grand piano, with its lovingly displayed photo of Brahms. “One time Steve ruined the whole top of the piano,” neighbor Bill Gaines reports. “It was never quite the same after that.” There was not much other furniture on their blue shag carpet, partly because Steven often took over the room for filming and partly because Leah didn’t seem interested in that kind of domesticity. “They didn’t have great stuff, except for an Eero Saarinen kitchen table and chairs,” recalls family baby-sitter Susan Roper Arndt. “The TV was [often] broken. I remember when Steven blew up the TV set, the way he hooked it up.”
Leah played classical piano with the Scottsdale Chamber Orchestra, which she helped organize. She also took ballet lessons and “said it was better than going to a psychiatrist,” recalls her neighbor Katherine Galwey. “She used to practice by walking on curbs.” The unconventional Leah also raised eyebrows in the neighborhood with her Army surplus jeep. When Leah drove around in her jeep, “she’d haul,” Sue Arndt says. “You knew she was coming. She was so creative and wonderful. She had short bobbed hair, she always wore short jean dresses, way above her knees, and she always had a great tan, a major great tan.”
Bernard (Bernie) Adler, an engineer who followed Arnold out from New Jersey and worked as his assistant at GE, was a good friend of both Arnold and Leah Spielberg. Bernie, who was unmarried at the time, “was almost like a member of the Spielberg family,” says Walter Tice. “He and Arnold got along great. The three of them would go on vacations together to California. The kids called him Uncle Bernie. He was always there. He did everything with them.”
Later, after divorcing Arnold Spielberg, Leah would enter into an enduring marriage with Bernie Adler, returning to the Orthodox religious practices of her youth, from which she had drifted since marrying the more liberal and assimilated Arnold Spielberg (Bernie died in 1995). Leah found Bernie “so funny, so bright, so moral. I was madly in love.”
Some of their Phoenix neighbors found Leah’s romantic history a bit outré. “I was always confused as to who [Steven’s] father was,” says Steven’s friend Chris Pischke. Katherine Galwey recalls that Leah “told me she loved both men. She said she couldn’t marry ’em both, so she married Mr. Spielberg.”
“We were bohemians growing up in suburbia,” Steven’s sister Sue recalled. Steven once yelled at his mother during his adolescence, “Everyone else’s mother is normal. They go bowling. They go to PTA meetings, and they play bridge.”
“The conventional always appealed to Steven,” Leah once remarked. “Maybe because we weren’t.”
*
MUCH like Elliott in E.T., who has to cope with an absent father and a mother who is so distracted she doesn’t notice for quite some time that he has an alien living in his bedroom, Steven compensated for the instability, isolation, and myriad anxieties of his childhood by taking refuge in a soothing world of magic—in his case, the magic of filmmaking.
“To me, Elliott was always the Nowhere Man from the Beatles song,” Spielberg said. “I was drawing from my own feelings when I was a little kid and I didn’t have that many friends and had to resort to making movies to become quasi-popular and to find a reason for living after school hours…. I was always drowning in little home movies. That’s all I did when I was growing up. That was my escape.”
*
PEOPLE who live in the “Valley of the Sun,” as the Phoenix area is known, are accustomed to seeing movies and television shows being filmed on location. For young movie buffs such as Spielberg and his friends, living in Phoenix was almost like living in a suburb of Hollywood. If Hollywood seemed an almost impossibly remote dream for a kid growing up in a small town in New Jersey, a career in moviemaking or other forms of show business seemed more tangible for a kid living only an hour’s plane trip from Los Angeles. Three students from Spielberg’s high school would become actors in Hollywood: Lynda Carter (TV’s Wonder Woman, who grew up around the corner from him), Dianne Kay (the ingenue in his movie 1941), and Frank Webb (who was directed by Spielberg in a 1970 episode of TV’s Marcus Welby, M.D.). Many parents in the Spielbergs’ comfortable middle-class neighborhood had 8mm or even 16mm movie cameras to document family activities, and there were at least a dozen other young filmmakers besides Steven who were busy making their own amateur movies in town on a regular basis.
One of their inspirations was the daily local TV kiddie show Wallace & Ladmo, a zany potpourri of studio skits, cartoons, and silent slapstick comedy footage (including frequent Western spoofs) shot off-the-cuff in the parks and desert around Phoenix. Wallace & Ladmo had a weekly showcase for young filmmakers, “Home Movie Winners.” Spielberg appeared on the KPHO program in the early 1960s to show a brief piece of film he had shot that “looked like space guys glowing in the dark,” according to series costar and writer Bill Thompson (“Wallace”). “He was very inventive, a bright guy. He was very highly thought of, even as a kid.” When Steven was interviewed about his filmmaking on another local TV show, his father was “amazed—he just was so cool and collected. He was sixteen or seventeen, but he handled it just like he’d been doing it for years.”
Steven was not the only kid in his neighborhood making movies. His budding interest in film was stimulated by his friendship and collaboration with three other amateur filmmakers—Barry Sollenberger, Barry’s younger brother Jim, and Chris Pischke. “Most of us were considered kooks or goofs,” Pischke admits. “When other kids were doing whatever—sports, chasing girls, playing with cars—we were playing with guns and making films. All of us were pretty much self-taught.” “We got our ideas from watching movies and TV—Westerns, sci-fi, war movies, those were the popular types of movies in those days,” Barry Sollenberger recalls. “We all appeared in each other’s movies, and when we were all in a scene and had no one to film it, we’d say, ‘Steve, come and film this scene,’ and vice versa. The person who made the most movies was Steve.”
“It was helpful to Steve, indirectly, that there were other people in the neighborhood equally interested in what normally would be considered an offbeat or off-the-wall type of thing—making movies,” observes Jim Sollen-berger. “If Steve had been a Lone Ranger, the only kid on the block making movies, he might not have been able to pursue it. But since there were two
or three other kids, that gives you some support, instead of people looking at you as a complete geek. It was a pretty good place to incubate.”
*
STEVEN’S budding interest in filmmaking remained unfocused, however, until he became a Boy Scout, a member of the Flaming Arrow Patrol of Ingleside’s Troop 294. He made his first real attempt at a story film in order to earn his photography merit badge in 1958. “Scouting gave me my start,” Steven has said. “… Boy Scouts put me in the center of the loop. It sort of brought out things I did well and forgave me for things I didn’t.” He found that the Boy Scouts helped him fill a growing emotional void. With his father becoming “as much a workaholic as I am today,” he later explained, “as a child I didn’t understand, and Scouting became like a surrogate dad.”
Troop 294 went out into the desert in convoys of station wagons to pitch tents for weekend campouts and also made week-long visits to Camp Geronimo, the Phoenix area’s organized Scouting camp. Arnold Spielberg was treasurer of Steven’s troop. He went along on a few outings, and Steven wistfully remembered that on those weekends, “We became our closest.” Dick Hoffman, who supervised the boys on many outings, says that Steven’s father “wasn’t a big participator in our activities. He was a hardworking engineer. Few parents will go out in the wilds for the weekend—they don’t like that. Those of us who do get interested are zealots. I think we all felt we were filling a need for these kids.”
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