Word: spielbergisms
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Perhaps The Color Purple will bring Spielberg the one triumph that has thus ( far eluded him: an Oscar for Best Director (though Clint Eastwood wonders if the industry may not think Spielberg is "a little too young and too successful. He has done so well, it may be a long time before anyone bestows on him any brassworks for the fireplace"). But even with that statuette, one suspects that Spielberg would still be restless. He would still crave those moments when he can spin amazing stories for himself, his kid sisters and a world of children in the dark...
...Spielberg has surprised us before: as an auteur prodigy, as the thrillmaster of Duel and Jaws, as the savvy director who could reinvent the movies' innocence. The man is only 37 now, and his toughest audience is himself. You needn't be a child to believe that this movie magician still has astonishments in store...
...refuses to grow up, artistically or personally. On June 5 he began directing The Color Purple, an adaptation of Alice Walker's stark, poetic novel about Southern blacks. Eight days later, his live-in love, Actress Amy Irving, presented him with 7-lb. 7 1/2- oz. Max Samuel Spielberg, whom the proud father describes as "my biggest and best production of the year...
That will sound like gentle facetiousness to anyone who does not realize that Spielberg's movie productions are his children too. He can be criticized for photocopying the boy-meets-his-better-self wonder of E.T. in his more recent films; the copy is rougher and darker in the comic nightmare Gremlins, a bit crumpled and smudged in the fun-house frenzy of The Goonies. But the films' very limitations are identity badges on a body of work as personal, even as obsessive, as that of Ingmar Bergman, David Lean or any other monarch of cinema academe. Spielberg the director...
...self-referential touches start with jokes on his own name. As Critic Veronica Geng has noted, Spielberg translates from the German as "play mountain." The hero of Close Encounters finds his way to the starship by molding a mountain out of a dirt hill. At the beginning of both Raiders and Indiana Jones, the hilly Paramount Pictures logo dissolves into other fantasy mountains. More directly autobiographical is the genesis of several of his films. Close Encounters was born one night when young Steven's father woke the six-year-old and drove him to a large meadow...