b. Steven Allan Spielberg

Schindler makes pots and pans; he then buys thelives of Jews who would otherwise die in camps.The numbers are precise—as in any serious business. And so, in one year, 1993, Steven Spielberg delivered to the screen Jurassic Park andSchindler's List, enamelware and human flesh, ifyou like. Jurassic Park , it seemed to me, was shoddy, foolish in plot and characters, and nearlyimmediately forgettable. It was also, for a while,the biggest grossing film of all time; the numbersare precise, if growing still. It was made to make obscene amounts of cash and its reason for being is that alone. It is a film without spirit, without soul; it is a nowhere film. "Life is Elsewhere" as Milan Kundera would say.

The difference between a great director like Spielberg and, say, Hitchcock, another great director, is that when they both make real films of the unreal, Spielberg gives us Jurassic, without caring that the characters are one dimensional, unreal, and just a kind of nuisance getting in the way of the real stars, the dinosaurs; whilst Hitchcock makes The Birds, where in the unreality of birdworld the realness of the human characters makes us care for them. Hitchcock's spirit and concern for humanity is there in every second of the movie.

Don't agree? You think Jurassic was made for any other reason than to gross shit loads of cash? Then explain away what The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) is doing in Spielberg's filmography? What the hell is that movie's reason for being if it ain't for the colour of your money, cos it sure ain't there for it's decisive insight into the metaphysics of the characters!

Jurassic Park is asuperb producers coup according to the principle"Show them something they've never seen." Andin its comprehensive revelation of a lifelike, ormovielike, fluency for unreal, unborn things itmay prove more influential than any film sinceThe Jazz Singer. "One day, all movies will be like this" you can almost hear the producers say. And ever since, mainstream Hollywood has been working flat out to replicate it.

Schindler's List is the most moving film I haveever seen. No-one can deny its place among the top 100 greatest films ever made but I don't reallybelieve in Spielberg as an artist: I don't believethat much soul or doubt is there, or that muchheartfelt trust in the organic meaning of style. ButSchindler's List is like an earthquake in a cultureof gardens. And it helps persuade this viewer thatmainstream cinema—or Hollywood cinema, to be precise—is not a place forartists. It is a world for producers, for showmen,and Schindlers. Sure, there are some fine artists in American film but they are cut far, far adrift from Hollywood in independant land. If art is to be found in cinema then look to Europe, to Bergman, Michael Powell, Cocteau, Lean etc., and you don't have to look beyond Europe's borders to find art for art's sake. The closest Schindler's List comesto art may be in aiding Steven Spielberg to backinto the upheld coat of his own mysterious, brilliant, actorly nature. The film works so wellbecause he is Schindler, and 1993 has been his1944.

From the mid-1970s, there was an acceptedwisdom that Spielberg was the junior mechanic asmovie director. It grew out of the interest in carsand trucks in his first two films; a motorized sharkin the third; and some of the most elaborate special effects ever organized in Close Encounters. Even Spielberg himself acknowledged the prominence of smooth-working parts in his films, and looked forward to smaller, more intimate, and by implication, more humane pictures. He had nothing to be ashamed of, even if he uttered regrettable industry homily of approaching "movie ideas that you can hold in your hand" - as opposed to those that dwell in your mind.

The rivalry of car and truck in Duel is a vivid allegory of the common man facing an enigmatic threat of terror and destruction. The motorcades of Sugarland Express never obscure the frantic emotions of a redneck mother blind to all but the need to retain her child. The mechanical shark in Spielberg's hands was a wittier version of the truck in Duel, and the means to an authentic pop art Moby Dick. And Close Encounters had a flawless wonder, such that it might be the first film ever made. Its laboratory effects and its models are all harnessed to an unusual plot structure, a view of personal stories that is remarkably detached for American pictures but never cold, and a kind of inquisitive awe for the unknown that transcends the paranoia and melodrama so widespread in science fiction. Close Encounters is a tribute to the richness of the ordinary human imagination. The inevitable comparison of Star Wars and Close Encounters reveals Lucas as a toymaker, and Spielberg as an admiring explorer of the mind's power.

The son of an electrical engineer and computer expert, Spielberg began making 8mm films in high school with his father's camera. At that time he lived in Phoenix, Arizona, and he learned and commandeered his father's hobby. Firelight was a twenty-one-hour epic, according to its maker, anticipating some of the themes and images brought to fruition in Close Encounters. He took a degree in English at California State College, Long Beach, but was always working on movies. Amblin' was a short that won prizes and earned a release with Love Story—early evidence of Spielberg's ability at drawing together good luck and commercial acumen.

He moved into TV and quickly won a reputation as an efficient director—the height of TV's needs. He worked on the pilot for Night Gallery and contributed episodes to Columbo, Marcus Welby, The Name of the Canw, The Psychiatrist and Owen Marshall. On that basis, he did Duel as a movie-of-the-week for ABC. Its impact was such that it got a theatrical release outside America. Deservedly so, for it stands up as one of the medium's most compelling spirals of suspense. The ordinariness of the Dennis Weaver character and the monstrous malignance of the truck confront one another with a narrative assurance that never needs to remind us of the element ot fable. The ending is unsatisfactory, partly because the rest of the film is so momentous, but also because sheer skill needed more philosophy for a fitting resolution.

Sugarland Express is another epic of the road—raucous, feverish, and based on an actual incident. What makes its quest and journey so touching isthe treatment of the central characters. They arenot self-aware, enlightened, or stereotyped, andthe movie never patronizes them. Goldie Hawn'swife is an untidy, vibrant woman, a robust departure from the social gentility that usually encloses Hollywood women. She is genuinely vulgar, but isnever mocked because of it.

Jaws is Spielberg's most old-fashioned film, andthe occasion on which he was under most commercial pressure. But, like Coppola on The Godfather, Spielberg asserted his own role and deftly organized the elements of a roller coaster entertainment without sacrificing inner meanings. The suspense of the picture came from meticuloustechnique and good humour about its own surgicalcutting. You have only to submit to the travesty of Jaws 2 to realize how much more engagingly Spielberg saw the ocean, the perils, and the sinister beauty of the shark, and the vitality of its human opponents. The terror of his films is healthy and cathartic because his faith in the unknown is so generous and sensible and his trust in the plain mans ingenuity and pluck so precise.

Close Encounters is as close to a mystical experience as a major film has come, but it is the mysticism of common sense. I don't think Spielberg believes in UFOs or specific answers in the universe. But he believes in man's vision and the determination that trusts its own experience more than official versions of the truth. The Dreyfuss character is no fanatic; he is another ordinary man whose life is disrupted by what he believes in. The way his domestic life is violated by increasing obsessiveness gives the film the flavor of surrealism. But the characters are smaller than the happenings that inspire them. Smallness never diminishes them. There is no violence to oppress them, only an invitation to the highest flights of fancy. The movie could have been naive and sentimental—it was inspired by Disney—but Spielberg never relinquishes his practicality and his eye for everyday detail. It is extraordinary that so big and popular a film should have such a slender dramatic thread, and that the central marriage should be permitted to break up without apology, adultery, or the promise of reunion. It is the essence of Spielberg's attitude that when Dreyfuss and Melinda Dillon embrace, it is not as lovers brought together by plot, but as fellow believers.

At first sight, the Spielberg of the eighties may seem more an impresario—or a studio, even— than a director. Yet he directed seven films in the decade, including the Indiana Jones trilogy, the phenomenon of E.T., and Empire of the Sun (a fine work, rather "explained" by Schindlers List), an adaptation of J. C. Ballard's book about childhood in Shanghai after the Japanese invasion. Empire of the Sun was among Spielbergs box-office failures, and there are signs that he writesfailure out of history. Yet it combines the life of achild with the momentous world of adults in a wayscarcely attempted in his other films. So busy, soenterprising, Spielberg had time for three flat-outbad films—The Color Purple, Always, and Hook (warning enough to any critic who seems ready tocategorize Spielberg as a master of control andmarket forces).

At the same time, he became a producer, a tireless master of many ceremonies, and many of themsimultaneous. Even E.T. feels calculated—to these eyes, it is not as inspired or involuntary as the wondrous Poltergeist (82, Tobe Hooper), on which Spielberg was producer, author of the story, andreshooter. Some argue that Hook was personal; Ifound it maudlin, fussy, and misjudged. Could it bethat Spielberg's judgment smothers the vestiges ofpersonal expression he can muster? Or is it that heis truly most himself when satisfying the enormousaudience? He is a tycoon such as few can comprehend. He has done astonishing things; he hasbecome vital to the business. And like Schindler,he has made us all think deeply about the nature ofbusiness. As a director, he took a rest after 1993—and then came back with a new, improved JurassicPark, Amistad, and Saving Private Ryan, all in thespace of a couple of years. Ryan changed war films: combat, shock, wounds, and fear had never beenso graphically presented; and yet there was also atrue sense of what duties and ideas had felt like in1944. I disliked the framing device. I would haveadmired a director who trusted us to get it withoutthat. Never mind—Ryan is a magnificent film.Which is very much more than I could say for A.I., which seemed to me far too self-conscious in its thinking (and can no director coax a performance from the made entirely from wood, Jude Law that shows even the faintest flicker of emotion?). Indeed, I suspect that, for all his powerwith futuristic technology, Spielberg's mind wasmade in the forties and fifties. There were worsetimes to be raised.

At any event, the filmography would be incomplete without the list of works that he has produced: I Wanna Hold Your Hand (78, Robert Zemeckis); Used Cars (80, Zemeckis); Continental Divide (81, Michael Apted); Poltergeist; Gremlins (84, Joe Dante); Back to the Future (85, Zemeckis); The Goonies (85, Richard Donner);Young Sherlock Holmes (85, Barry Levinson); TheMoney Pit (86, Richard Benjamin); the animatedfilm, An American Tail (86, Don Bluth); . . . batteries not included (87, Matthew Robbins); Innerspace (87, Dante); Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (88, Zemeckis); Back to the Future II (89, Zemeckis); Dad (89, Gary David Goldberg); Joe Versus the Volcano (90, John Patrick Shanley);Arachnophobia (90, Frank Marshall); Gremlins 2: The New Batch (90, Dante); Back to the FutureIII (90, Zemeckis); and An American Tail: FievelGoes West (91, Phil Nibbelink and Simon Wells).

On The Flintstones (94, Brian Levant) he wascredited as Steven Spielrock (yeah, it's still not funny); Twister (96, Jan De Bont); Men in Black (97, Barry Sonnenfeld); Deep Impact (98, Mimi Leder); The Mask of Zorro (98, Martin Campbell); Shrek (01, Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson); Jurassic Park III (01); and theHBO miniseries Band of Brothers (01), which heand Tom Hanks had spun off from Saving PrivateRyan.

In fact, his producing hat had grown larger stillwith the formation of DreamWorks in 1995. Withthat enterprise (formed with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen), Spielberg was part of a newstudio, involved in decisions on whether to buildstudio space as well as every individual projectthey took on. So it is one more measure of theinhuman—or of a level of performance beyondcommon humanity—that Steven Spielberg is alsostill a writer and a director. Moreover, he hasmaintained his own level of excellence for close totwenty-five years. He has never had significant orprolonged failure.

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