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.