Word: spielbergisms
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Spielberg hopes that with E.T. and Poltergeist he will be taken seriously as a director of actors. He has every reason to be. In both pictures, the children are natural and winning. As the mother in Poltergeist, Jobeth Williams, who Spielberg predicts could some day be on a par with Jill Clayburgh, creates a surprisingly rounded character. She gives the movie audience an electrifying shiver the moment her character feels Carol Anne's spirit moving through her body. In E.T., Dee Wallace has some quietly affecting scenes as Elliott's mother, who cannot quite hide from her children...
...neural wiring. Such a tangle of contradictions. His upbringing should have produced a temperamental brat. He peanut-buttered the neighbors' windows. As his endlessly indulgent mother Leah says, "His badness was so original that there weren't even books to tell you what to do." Steven Spielberg's precocious success might have created a pampered tyrant. But as Leah says, and as everyone who knows him agrees, "He doesn't have a blown-upness about...
Screenwriter Melissa Mathison, 32, who wrote the script for E.T., was struck by the unusual warmth of the production family Spielberg has gathered around him, notably Producers Frank Marshall, 35, and Kathleen Kennedy, 28. Says Mathison: "None of us is afraid to tell Steven he is wrong. He's a softy, as big a sap as anyone. But he rarely lets that show in his movies. He kept fretting that E.T. was too soft, until finally he stopped worrying about pleasing the men in the audience." Spielberg sees his relationship to Mathison as symbiotic: "Melissa is 80% heart...
There is a tough face to Spielberg. "You have to ride people hard," he says. "You have to say things more than once. About the third time you get what you want." Still, this is hardly the portrait of the director as autocratic auteur, in the French model. In fact Spielberg is the kind of American, extremely intelligent and utterly unintellectual, who can baffle Europeans. He claims without regret that his mental development stopped at 19. When he says he is not satirizing the amiable suburban householders of Poltergeist, who never turn off their television set, he means...
...Spielberg is a lean, brown-bearded, medium-size man whose considerable physical presence seems stressed by his steadily ticking analytical intelligence. He wears a standard director's outfit, a khaki safari jacket and jeans. Otherwise, there is very little that is standard about him and almost nothing suggesting Hollywood. He is obsessive about self-control and, perhaps for that reason, takes no drugs, virtually no alcohol and carries herbal tea bags to avoid caffeine drinks. When he is in Beverly Hills he does the food shopping, to the frustration of his maid Bertha Kanafil, and cooks often...