BOOKS

A boy forever is a thing of beauty?

David Sexton

STEVEN SPIELBERG: THE UNAUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY by John Baxter HarperCollins, £18, pp.457 \When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away chidish things'. So St Paul. Not so Steven Spielberg and his audiences.

Spielberg gets adults to go to children's films, such as Jurassic Park, without realis- ing that that is what they are doing. That is his triumph, the key to his success. Bizarrely, hardly anybody seems to notice. What age of audience was Jurassic Park aimed at? Silly question. In mass entertain- ment, money cannot be contradicted. When rock music started, most of its stars sincerely expected to grow out of it them- selves before they were 50. It hasn't hap- pened and the fans haven't grown up either.

The negative view of Steven Spielberg is that, whatever the merits of particular films, 'his work has contributed to the sen- timentalising — even the infantilising — of Hollywood's output'. The positive view embraces this development as a release of 'the child within' us all. Martin Amis, who in 1982 wrote what is still the best short essay on Spielberg, put this favourable case most forcefully:

This is the primal genius of Spielberg. . . By now a billion Earthlings have seen his films. They have only one thing in common. They have all, at some stage, been children.

One of the recurrent complaints in John Baxter's not very friendly biography is that Spielberg is, since no longer a child, child- ish.

In adulthood, Spielberg's ideal social and intelluctual level remained that of his life as a suburban schoolboy in the late 1950s,

he tells us. One of Spielberg's colleagues is quoted as saying 'He has all the virtues — and defects — of a 16-year-old.'

Richard Dreyfuss, on the set of Jaws, estimated him a little lower:

What comes out of Steven unconsciously is that he's a big kid who at 12 years old decid- ed to make movies, and he's still 12 years old.

Others go further. When one of his employees stopped working for him and told his mother about it, she

laughed and asked, 'Have you ceased to exist yet?' She knew the deal,' said the employee. That's his childlike personality. If you do something a baby doesn't like, he shuts you out.

Spielberg's own childhood was not espe- cially happy. 'He was short and thin. His ears stuck out', says Baxter crisply. 'When teams were chosen for any game, he would always be the last one to be picked. Nobody wanted jerky little Steven.' His mother was a frustrated musician. His father worked in the early electronics industry:

An obsessive tinkerer, he would bring home bits of equipment, or drag the family off in the middle of the night to observe some natural wonder. His son thought him inflexi- ble and workaholic.

His resort was not to books, however. Born in 1946, he belonged to 'the Eisen- hower generation of television'. 'I did begin by reading comics. I did see too many movies. I did, still do, watch too much tele- vision.' Baxter emphasises that, with the exception of Schindler's List, Spielberg has always organised his films through

storyboards, like a giant comic book .. . Storyboards dictated a two-dimensional style, reducing narrative to a handful of poses. Fol- lowing style, dialogue was scaled down to the two or three lines needed to fill a talk bal- loon. Teenagers raised on the same visual conventions loved the result but, applied to a serious subject, it imposed a Classic Comics glibness.

Spielberg first got his hands on a movie camera by commandeering his father's 8mm Kodak. At 12, he made a three-and-a- half-minute Western to win his Photo Proficiency badge in the Boy Scouts. Over the next few years, he made many more home movies, progressing to a full-length science fiction adventure, Firelight,

the story of scientists who, investigating lights in space, provoke an alien invasion during which the visitors steal an entire city from earth and reassemble it on another planet,

shown once in a local cinema.

To avoid the draft, he went to California State College at Long Beach, the best place he could get into with his poor grades. He began hanging around Universal Studios so regularly that the security guards assumed he had a job there and he pulled off much the same stunt at the University of South- ern California film school. Then the owner of an optical company lent him $10,000 to make a 35mm short, Amblin', about hitch- hiking lovers. On the back of this, Univer- sal gave him a contract at the age of 22. Spielberg preferred to pretend it had hap- pened before he had turned 21.

Although his initial efforts as a trainee television director were pretty disastrous, in 1971 he was allowed to make Duel, the story of a motorist being pursued by a malevolent fuel-tanker. Shown on tele- vision in the States, it came to Europe as a cinema release in 1973 and was acclaimed by the critics, if not always with great understanding: In Rome, left-wing critics pressed Spielberg to endorse their reading of Duel as a socialist parable: working-class truck v. bourgeois sedan. Four of them left noisily when he wouldn't agree.

His second feature, Sugarland Express, flopped, but then the immese hits started. Jaws in 1975 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977 were followed by the unfunny comedy, 1941; but ET in 1982 and the Indiana Jones series confirmed his dominance of the business.

Baxter slogs through Spielberg's career without much enthusiasm. For an unauthorised Hollywood biography, there are pitifully few disclosures to make. In one depressed paragraph, he says:

Of all people in Hollywood, Spielberg seemed the least likely to become embroiled in scandal. He no longer even drank coffee, let alone smoked pot, carrying bags of Roastaroma herbal tea everywhere.

All he can muster in the way of sexual excitement is an insistence that a 'Rites of Spring' atmosphere always prevails on loca- tion shoots. For Spielberg, film-making itself is the primary erotic activity. He has said: 'When I'm making a movie I become celibate. I get into the routine of fucking my movie.' A pretty picture. On a Twilight Zone episode he was co- producing in 1983, a helicopter crashed killing three people, two of them children working against union rules. 'Spielberg always insisted he knew nothing of these arrangements', says Baxter suspiciously, and makes as much as he can of the episode: The Twilight Zone case damaged Spielberg's image in the film comunity, less because of the deaths, for which he could hardly be blamed, than for his weak, evasive, almost infantile response to the questions posed by the press and the law.

Apart from this, though, he is reduced to a kind of lame snideness. In 1989, Spiel- berg was divorced from Amy Irving and not yet prepared to live with his second wife, Kate Capshaw. 'As so often before when his emotional life soured, Spielberg had turned to the undemanding arms of an actress. She was Holly Hunter,' sniffs Bax- ter, a man who presumably soars far above such dreariness. His way of describing Spielberg's indecision about accepting Sony's backing for his Peter Pan project is this remarkable sentence: 'The trough beckoned, but still Spielberg was uneasy.'

He goes to town on Speilberg's worst film, Hook, calling it 'profoundly shame- making'. But he has evidently been sorely constrained by the knowledge that most customers for this biography would be Spielberg fans who might not like to see their idol too severely assaulted.

His final (and hence introductory) ver- dict is that 'Spielberg has immured himself in the prison of his own facility' and that 'his vision is closer to that of a politician or a corporate CEO than to a film-maker.' His success is the product of an unlikely combination of forces, he argues: 'Child- hood enthusiasms jostle for space with the structures of corporate power.'

Baxter's own exasperation at the dispari- ty between the simplicity of the ideas and the economic power they have created is not always well concealed.

The plot of ET is so transparently simple, even naive, that one can hardly credit the years of thought that went into it, he exclaims, before explaining that this too is 'the distillation of Spielberg's decade of loneliness in adolescence'.

The daft plots on which such great for- tunes have been raised are indeed hard to credit: trucks, sharks, aliens, flying saucers, dinosaurs, the Lost Ark . . . Near the end, Baxter reports: On 10 October 1994 he announced the pur- chase for 2.5 million of an original script by Michael Crichton and his wife Anne Marie, Twister, about scientists who track tornadoes.

Momentarily misreading this last as 'tomatoes' I was surprised, but not by this stage disbelieving. Baxter himself sorrow- fully accepts that 'cinema is, above all, an organism whose medium is money.' It makes his scandal free biography one of the most disheartening studies of the busi- ness yet.