Word: spielbergisms
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...working title for E.T. was A Boy's Life. And as surely as any work of science fiction can be its author's autobiography, the boy here is Steven Spielberg. His parents seeded the mix of science and art that would surface in Spielberg's films: his father Arnold was a computer engineer, his mother Leah a former classical pianist. (They were divorced when Steven was 17.) In many ways, he was a typical boy. He loved animals, especially cocker spaniels-and parakeets, which he kept in his bedroom, flying free. "There would be birds flying around...
...biggest fear was a clown doll," he says. "Also the tree I could see outside my room. Also anything that might be under the bed or in the closet. Also Dragnet on TV. Also a crack in the bedroom wall-I thought ghosts might come from it." For Spielberg, film making has been a profitable form of psychotherapy: those boyhood fears form the spine of the Poltergeist plot...
...others-"and the others were all girls"- found he could win friends and influence people with his movies. He enrolled in a Boy Scout photography program, where his success made him at 13 one of the youngest Eagle Scouts ever. ("If I hadn't been a Scout," Spielberg cheerfully admits today, "I'd probably have ended up as an ax murderer or a butcher in a Jewish deli.") One high school jock who used to taunt Steven was won over when the young director cast him in an 8-mm movie called Battle Squad. At Phoenix...
...leagues were calling. After his debut feature film The Sugarland Express, an eccentric car-chase comedy starring Goldie Hawn, Spielberg found himself off the coast of Martha's Vineyard directing a huge cast and crew-and one wayward mechanical shark-in Jaws. A 55-day shooting schedule ballooned to 155 days; the $4 million budget soared to $8 million. Studio executives were threatening to close down the film and put "Bruce," the shark, on exhibit as part of the Universal City tour. The crew was wavering daily between seasickness and shell shock. "It was almost Mutiny on the Bounty...
...much, too fast, too easy. Few worried when Spielberg spent double his Jaws budget and then overextended himself by $6.2 million on Close Encounters; after all, everybody got rich anyway. With 1941 there was no such reprieve. Though the film eventually broke even-and though, frame for frame, it was every bit as adroitly assembled as his hits had been-1941 tarnished the boy wonder's luster. "Until then I thought I was immune to failure," he says. "But I couldn't come down from the power high of making big films on large canvases. I threw everything...