WHEN Steven Spielberg picked up his Oscar for Schindler's List in March 1994 there wasn't a dry eye in the house. It might have taken nearly 30 years, but the multi multimillionaire whose position had enabled him to escape the scandal of the decapitation by helicopter of two illegally employed child actors on Twilight Zone, was graciousness personified. For so long hated and resented by "old Hollywood", acceptance into the family was all that mattered to him.
Yet for Spielberg - a name synonymous with adventure and family entertainment - win the ultimate accolade for a film about the Nazi holocaust seemed a curious paradox. The mystery, however, was not how the director of Jaws and ET could make Schindler's List, (after all, the first memory of this second generation Polish Jew was of learning numbers from those tattooed on the arm of a relative who survived Auschwitz) but rather how the man who made Schindler's List could have made Jaws and ET.
Steven Spielberg was born in December 1946 or 1947, depending on who you believe. Though apparently minor, this discrepancy, according to John Baxter, the author of Steven Spielberg, The Unauthorised Biography, is central to understanding both the man and his work: "It has been through and by myths that he has chosen to define himself." Like his hero Orson Welles, he wanted to have directed a film by the time he was 21. And according to the record, his record, he did. Amblin, a half hour short that was seen by millions when it ran with the "sleeper" hit of 1969, Erich Segal's Love Story - was made in 1968.
Hollywood in the late 1960s was a graveyard in waiting. And the killer virus was television. Like other apprentice movie makers, Spielberg took his turn on the TV treadmill and waited for his chance at the real thing. But unlike Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola, who would reinvent the excitement of movie going for a new generation by mining their Italian American roots, Steven Spielberg mined his more recent heritage - the movies of the 1930s and 1940s.
Spielberg turns out to be the ultimate post modernist, a filmic magpie whose ability to "scavenge Hollywood's scrapyard" is the key to his success. From the cinema classics of Orson Welles and Spencer Tracy to the Bmovie trash that was young Steven's diet at home, every film he has ever made is a patchwork of references, from casting and performances to camera movement and individual frames. (In The Colour Purple, he said to movie buff Whoopi Goldberg "Give me a little of Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend".)
Spielberg hardly ever instigates an idea says his biographer, an Australian who retains a healthy objectivity throughout his enthralling account. "His ability to resuscitate moribund material was unique. His approach to the shark of Jaws, to Puck, "the Little Green Man of ET" Jurassic Park's velociraptor dinosaurs and the Nazis of Schindler's List was identical. In each case, he animated a cliche by showing that even cardboard thinks and feels."
The success of the improbable icon ET owes much to Disney, who knew that the most loveable faces were those closest to a baby's. He pasted onto the photograph of a baby's unjudgmental face the eyes of poet Carl Sandburg and the forehead and nose of Ernest Hemingway and Albert Einstein. The result was a one size fits all father figure without the censoriousness that comes with age.
Like Disney, Spielberg is now above all a tycoon, a one man studio who may treat his employees better than Uncle Walt (staff get a creche and playroom and free food) but sees Amblin Entertainment as his surrogate family. He is equally paranoid about loyalty and employees have to sign a lifelong confidentiality agreement. Nonetheless someone once, anonymously described Amblin as "a very dysfunctional place emotionally because Steven is perceived as a deity. He's not really, the head of a company, he's a sort of god." He's protected at all turns from everything that will be unpleasant.
One of the most unpleasant things that Spielberg had to be protected from in 1986 was the Twilight Zone scandal. "The Twilight case damaged Spielberg's image in the film community, 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. Spielberg seemed to be playing at life, insulating himself from reality by means of a team of acolytes, from whom he demanded absolute obedience."
For Wall Disney, his films were the children he never had. Although now the proud father of five, Spielberg was a late developer in terms of relationships and for many years, says Baxter, "the erotic gratification of films transcended sex. `When I'm making a movie I become celibate,' he has said. `I get into the routine of f**ing my movie'." He also avoids seeing other films when shooting, "fearful of his work being impregnated by the ideas of others".
Spielberg was a lonely child (hence all the TV watching), short, spotty, "with a beaky nose he found so embarrassing in childhood that he stuck tape to the tip of it and to his forehead". He had a squeaky, high pitched voice and was probably dyslexic - he never made it through college and never has a script with him on set. He has bitten his nails to the quick since he was four and was so embarrassed by his thin arms that until Close Encounters of the Third Kind never took off a shirt in public. He is still short on personal charisma and only rarely emerges from behind a beard.
Spielberg, says Baxter, "makes a credible alien. He's most comfortable with those who live in private worlds." His friendship with Michael Jackson is a case in point, although post small boys scandal, he would appear to have backed off. Just after making ET he visited Jacko's sub Disneyland estate to discuss the singer's ET based Storybook album and said "If ET hadn't come to Elliott, he'd
The technology of the cinema and the camera in particular acts as Spielberg's defence against a hostile world, his security, blanket. Everything is filmed, from his latest flame (in the early days he and Brian De Palma - an enthusiast for voyeurism and porn - would go out on joint dates and shoot their excursions on 16 mm) to the birth of his children and, most bizarrely, his own face. His reaction when his first wife left him and he found himself in tears was to grab the camera and "dispassionately record the stranger inside him".
Certainly the Hollywood Baxter describes learned in decades alone in the dark with, other people's dreams and pursued in an environment of inflated egos and expectations, sudden death deadlines and Brobdingnagian profits and losses."
But if Spielberg is truly an artist, says Baxter, "his art is the deal". Spielberg's willingness to innovate has made him an architect, like Bill Gates of Microsoft, of the late 20th century domination of the world economy by entertainment and the audio visual media. Spielberg's personal fortune is extraordinary. Jaws, his first block buster grossed $458 million worldwide. As a beginner he hadn't the clout to ensure more than a fraction went his way, but it was enough to make him a multi millionaire. His next, movie, Close Encounters, brought his personal fortune to $200 million. And that was before ET, Poltergeist or the Indiana Jones trilogy. It makes the pre marriage contract he, negotiated with his current wife, actress Kate Capshaw ($2 million on signature then $2 million for each year of marriage thereafter), seem positively restrained. He has had only three duds 1942, Hook and Always none, of which actually lost money.
But Spielberg, who made it to Hollywood the hard way, is generous to young film makers, lending not his money but his name which, linked with his uncanny nose for both, talent and commercial success is "the next best thing to a guarantee of profit".
SCHINDLER'S List took eight years to come to the screen. The elements that so enraged the Jewish community were the elements that made it accessible to the young who were, as ever Spielberg's target audience. Because even the most cursory analysis shows that the Hollywood formula is still at its heart. Indeed, says Baxter, the relationship between Stern (Ben Kingsley) and Schindler (Liam Neeson) mirrors that of Spencer Tracy's priest to Clark Gable's night club owner in San Francisco, a film made in 1936 and which, structurally, he says, Schindler's List much resembles. "It was only through formula, tradition and consensus - his gizzard stones - that Spielberg could digest any subject."
Lacking a strong moral structure of his own, Spielberg has absorbed the structure of the moralists he knows best, John Ford and Frank Capra, whose It's A Wonderful Life is, he claims, his favourite film.
Both directors embody the essence of Hollywood at its greatest. As does Spielberg who shares with them the ability to invest the seemingly sentimental with the dignity of a universal truth. Martin Amis, not known for his sentimentality, was "barely able to support his own grief and bewilderment" when watching ET. Everyone around him was crying. "We were crying for our lost selves. This is the primal genius of Spielberg."