Spielbergmaster 16/6/04 12:24 pm Page 2 Also by James Clarke The Pocket Essentials:George Lucas The Virgin Film Guide:Coppola Spielbergmaster 16/6/04 12:24 pm Page 3 Steven Spielberg James Clarke www.pocketessentials.com Spielbergmaster 30/4/04 3:08 pm Page 4 This second edition,first published in Great Britain 2004 by Pocket Essentials, P.O.Box 394,Harpenden,Herts,AL5 1JX Distributed in the USA by Trafalgar Square Publishing,PO Box 257,Howe Hill Road,North Pomfret,Vermont 05053 http://www.noexit.co.uk Copyright © James Clarke 2004 The right of James Clarke to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.No part of this book may be reproduced,stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,or transmitted,in any form,or by any means (electronic, mechanical,photocopying,recording or otherwise) without the written permission of the publisher.Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.The book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,re-sold,hired out or otherwise circulated,without the publisher’s prior consent,in any form or binding or cover other than in which it is published,and without similar conditions,including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publication. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1 904048 29 3 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Book typeset by Avocet Typeset,Chilton,Aylesbury,Bucks Printed and bound by in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman,Reading,Berks Spielbergmaster 30/4/04 3:08 pm Page 5 For Mum and Dad and Leela Kapeela Spielbergmaster 30/4/04 3:08 pm Page 6 Spielbergmaster 30/4/04 3:08 pm Page 7 Contents Introduction 9 Seeing Through Spielberg’s Eyes 11 Primal Screen:The Monster Movies 25 Duel (1971),Jaws (1975),Jurassic Park (1993), The Lost World:Jurassic Park (1997) Awfully Big Adventures: The Indiana Jones Movies 45 Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981),Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984),Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) To Fly 61 ET:The Extra Terrestrial (1982),Always (1989), Hook (1991) From Sugarland To Omaha Beach 77 The Sugarland Express (1974),Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977),1941 (1979),The Color Purple (1985),Empire of The Sun (1987),Schindler’s List (1993),Amistad (1997),Saving Private Ryan (1998) Spielbergmaster 30/4/04 3:08 pm Page 8 CONTENTS Shadows,Doubt and Little Rays of Sunlight: 129 AI:Artificial Intelligence,Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can. Future Pictures:The Terminal and Beyond 141 Reference Materials 149 Books,Articles,Filmography,Videos,DVDs and Websites Spielbergmaster 30/4/04 3:08 pm Page 9 Introduction ‘There’s a rescue mission involved in the best movies.And that person is saved from his own undoing or what other people are doing to him.You have to bring people down to the bottom before you can recover in an operatic third finale.’ Steven Spielberg,Rolling Stone,1985 As the summer of 2001 cooled, Steven Spielberg’s latest movie AI: Artificial Intelligence divided, confounded and frustrated critics and audiences who had been expecting something akin to the ‘warm embrace’ (to quote Spielberg) of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and ET:The Extra Terrestrial.Instead,the new movie fused the chilling, the unsettling, the breathtaking and the melancholy. It wasn’t as easy on the heart and mind as his other fantasy pieces had been.The film did not leave audiences with an up feeling but instead a real sense of sadness as David,the boy robot at the heart of the story,seeks out his place in the world and the approval that comes with love. Staying true to the apparently exhausting but,for audi- ences,hugely welcome multi-picture pace that he estab- lished in 1989,Spielberg followed AI with Minority Report (far more Kubrick inflected than AI ironically) and then 9 Spielbergmaster 30/4/04 3:08 pm Page 10 JAMES CLARKE the lighter, brighter but still emotionally resonant caper chase movie Catch Me If You Can. Without doubt, Spielberg’s ever strengthening interest in diversity (at least on the surface) in his choice of screenplays was apparent to all.At the time of Minority Report’s release Spielberg noted ‘Not a lot of scepticism has gotten into my work ... I feel as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more coura- geous.’(WIRED,June 2003,Spielberg in The Twilight Zone, by Lisa Kennedy,pp.106–113,p.146 – this excerpt from p.112) By 2003, Spielberg’s TV producing track record had also proved compelling evidence of his contribution to small screen pop culture, on a wide-ranging scale. In autumn 2001,American TV broadcast the mini series Band of Brothers,which followed American citizen soldiers under fire in Europe during World War Two.Based on the book of the same name by historian, the late Stephen J. Ambrose,and something of an expansion of the milieu of Spielberg’s 1998 hit Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers was a hugely successful project, which looks to be succeeded soon enough by another Spielberg supervised World War II series set in the Pacific Theatre of War. In contrast to the historical realism of Band of Brothers (its opening credits sequence and theme music by Michael Kamen were exquisite),Spielberg was also the executive producer of Taken,a science fiction series that spanned the second half of the twentieth century,dramatising encoun- ters with extra terrestrial life. The opening episode, directed by Tobe Hooper who had achieved great things twenty years before with the film Poltergeist (incidentally based on a Spielberg storyline), recalled Close Encounters of 10