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Steven Spielberg (2)

One key to Spielberg's success is his urge for cost control. With all its effects, The Lost World cost about $75 million, peanuts compared with Speed 2: Cruise Control, heading for $140million, and The Titanic, sailing past the $200 million mark. During an Amistad preproduction conference, Spielberg flummoxed Katzenberg and DreamWorks film exec Walter Parkes by demanding that the already relatively frugal $56 million budget be cut an additional $20 million. "I saw The English Patient," he said. "I know we can do this for less." Because of weather troubles during the New England location shooting, Spielberg didn't save quite as much as he wanted. But, as Katzenberg says, "The budget has a three in front of it."

As he prepares a shot on the Amistad set, Spielberg muses, "I'm deciding whether to use my castle or my bishop. How am I being threatened here? How can I advance? Directing is about seeing 20 moves ahead while you're working on the next five." He explains that "each scene is like a little movie," with a beginning, usually a middle and no end. "If there's an absolute ending to a scene, then the movie can play like a series of camel humps. I want each scene with a great beginning and a really good middle."

Spielberg has always maintained that for him, family is the most important thing. Amy Irving gave him his first child, Max, in 1985. With Kate Capshaw, whom he married in 1991, he has a brood of seven. He was often too preoccupied to be a perfect dad. "It's full-time work," Spielberg says of fatherhood, "because every one of our kids is a leader. Seven leaders, no followers — which makes our kitchen at dinnertime look and sound like the House of Commons between the Labor Party and the Tories." This genial chaos is managed by Capshaw and a live in couple in the Spielberg's palatial home in the Los Angeles suburb. "I really love the diaper part," Kate says, "the rocking and the bottle-feeding and the lunch menus. The things Steven does are the things he can do uniquely, like telling stories and drawing creatures I could never imagine. The two of us blessedly allow each other to do what we do best."

The family room is the food room. "We have about six wasted rooms in our house," Spielberg says, "because we just live in the kitchen." There he helps the kids build highways of dominos that wind around the furniture and down the cellar steps. On one wall hangs a large board that notes every-one's activities, from karate lessons and art classes to Dad's location shoots. "There's also this couch," says Capshaw, "which is Steven Central. He has a bunch of scripts to read, and tapes — casting reels, bits of animation, etc. — that he pops into the VCR. But if one of the kids asks him to build a castle, he's immediately down on the floor, building that castle. The kid runs away, Steven crawls back on the couch and gets back to business."

"What binds my films together," he says, "is the concept of loneliness and isolation and being pursued by all the forces of nature. That comes from who I was and how I was raised." Leah Spielberg is the matriarch everyone knows. "Once Nancy Reagan saw me," she recalls, "and said, 'Look, there's Steven Spielberg's mother.'" She is the one for whom her son throws a surprise party at the Beverly Hills, and is told to pick out anything she wants. Spielberg adores his mother. Leah doesn't even pretend to be the shaper of her famous son's blooming genius. Looking back on his youth, she says, "He scared me! I didn't know anything about raising children — and it took a concerted effort just to get him past his infancy. Now he has dimensions I can't even fathom. Most people dream. Steven dreams; then he fulfills."

In Phoenix, where the Spielbergs lived from 1957 to 1964, four kids — Steven and his three younger sisters — filled the house with noise. The boy's imaginative sense of destruction made him a terror to his sisters. He pulled the head off one of their dolls and set it on a plate garnished with lettuce and tomatoes, like a pig at a luau. "When I was a baby," says Anne, later a screenwriter (Big), "they had to put chicken wire around the crib so he wouldn't throw toy cars at me.

Arnold, an electrical engineer, played the disciplinarian in the family. "My father would be upset that Steven got detentiond," recalls Anne, "while my mother encourage him to play hooky. Dad would ask what we were going to do with our lives, while mom would say, 'Don't worry, just live for today.'" Arnold worked hard to be a good, traditional dad. "Steven was terrible in chemistry," he says, "and I'd try helping him with his homework. Once, when he got a D in the subject, he came home and said, 'Dad, you flunked.'"

But some of Arnold's teaching took. He had been an Air Force sharpshooter in World War II, and he taught Steven this skill. In a grander game — filmmaking — Arnold was the flight instructor spurring his boy to be top gun. "Arnold turned Steven on to filmmaking," notes Joseph McBride, author of the new Steven Spielberg. "Arnold helped Steven learn to direct; he was the family storyteller; he was interested in science-fiction. Steven is the combination of two remarkable parents."

The elder Spielbergs divorced when Steven was 19; he remained close to Leah and her new husband Bernie Adler. "Bernie didn't want me around," says Arnold. "It became an uncomfortable situation. The kids suffered, and I just had to ride it out. At the premiere of Jaws, we sat at separate tables." With his father at a distance, Steven looked for new father figures, finding one in Steven J. Ross, the charismatic boss of Warner Bros. "When my son got his honorary degree at Brandeis, I saw the way he looked at Steve Ross, and I could tell Ross was his surrogate father," Arnold says. "I'll admit I had a touch of envy — not enough to make me feel sour, just enough to give me a little itch."

A few years ago, both Ross and Adler died. Says Anne: "It shocked Steven into seeing the fragility of people's lives." Deprived of surrogate fathers, he thought more about his real one. "I didn't want to be as wrapped up in my work as my dad," says Spielberg, "and yet inexorably I was becoming my dad. So we finally reached out to each other. It was like coming home again, making up for lost time. Now we're so close, it's fantastic."

As a major American icon, Spielberg has written, acted in, directed and produced many award-winning, top grossing movies of all time, along with some of the most remembered and loved. He is also the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute and the prestigious Irving G. Thasberg Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Roger Ebert (Sun-Times film critic) has stated "If Spielberg never directed another film, his place in movie history would be secure. No other director has been more successful at the box office and few have placed more titles on various lists of great films."

(from TIME, July, 2001)

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