Secret Lives: Steven Spielberg

Close encounters of the cine kind

 

JUST SCAN these popular American movie titles ~ The Sugarland Express, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, The Color Purple, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, The Adventures of Tintin, War Horse .

Quick! Three guesses! What’s exceptional about this roll call? They come from a single director ~ Steven Spielberg! Isn’t that far out?

His Jewish mother Leah gave birth to Spielberg on December 18, 1946, at Cincinnati, Ohio. Over the next few years, he was followed by three sisters.

Oddly enough, on June 24, 1947, the first UFOs were sighted over the U.S. Equally strangely, Spielberg  ~ like Leah ~ still hates to fly.

Spielberg was a short boy with skinny arms. His beaked nose so embarrassed him that he once taped its tip tautly, hoping it would tilt. He had a piercing gaze, not unlike a bird’s unblinking eyes. He was physically so awkward that there were few school races he didn’t lose.

When Spielberg was four-plus, his father Arnold ~ an electronics engineer ~ built him a crystal set that entranced him. “I don’t like reading. I’m a very slow reader. I have not read for pleasure in many, many years,” the director confessed, as an adult. Instead his childhood fare was comics, then cartoons, and finally, TV.

At home, the siblings witnessed massive rows, as their parents’ marriage fell apart by degrees. How did Spielberg cope? By stuffing towels under his bedroom door, while constructing model planes.

Spielberg was unusual. Up to 14, he’d often try to hypnotize himself through a mirror reflection. His imagination worked round the clock. He remembers staring at a crack in his bedroom wall in the dark, “One day, the crack opened five inches and little pieces fell out. I screamed a silent scream… I was frozen… I was afraid of trees, clouds, the wind, the dark… I liked being scared. It was stimulating.”

In 1952, Arnold shared two extraordinary experiences with his son. He bundled a blanket-wrapped Spielberg out to watch a meteor shower in an open field. And he took him to a theatre to watch his first ever movie, The Greatest Show on Earth, which was about a circus. Its train wreck was often recreated at the Spielberg home with a toy train set.

You won’t believe this, but little Spielberg used to be terrified of the movies, including Disney cartoons like Snow White and Bambi, perhaps because they were larger than life.

While growing up at Scottsdale, Arizona, Spielberg had eight free-flying parakeets as pets. By the way, he still loves those birds.

During the summer, the family often pitched tent in the Grand Canyon, immersed in trekking and nature study, including scorpion hunts in the Arizona desert.

Spielberg’s first camera was an 8 mm Kodak that Arnold was gifted on Father’s Day. As the family camper pulled out of the driveway, the young cameraman lay flat on his belly, shooting the rotating hubcabs, a glimpse of his future genius. But once Spielberg had mastered the single lens, flip-up viewfinder and 35-second clockwork motor, he persuaded his dad to buy him a three-lens turret camera.

As a Boy Scout of 12, instead of telling a story through still photographs, Spielberg filmed a 3 ½ minute, $8.50 western about a shootout. He raised the funds by whitewashing the trunks of neighbour’s citrus trees at 75 cents each. Other Scouts with plastic revolvers were its stars. The director even persuaded an adult to blow cigarette smoke into a gun barrel, so that the sheriff could thrust a smoking pistol into his holster!

Spielberg earned his Scout badge. “In that moment, I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” he recalled. He hasn’t looked back since, as we know from our close encounters of the cine kind.

Even today, between shots, guess where you’ll spy Spielberg? Often on a camera crane, playing with a Game Boy! Or immersed in his iPod or iPad, on the sets of War Horse. Does he remind you of someone else? You?