Sunday, June 8, 1997
STEVEN SPIELBERG,
by Joseph McBride
Distican
$39.50
The American thriller writer Michael Crichton has called him "arguably the most influential popular artist of the 20th century. And arguably the least understood." Biographer Joseph McBride attempts to shed some light on the most successful director in movie history, Steven Spielberg, who, at age 50, is already an American legend.
Responsible for blockbusters like Jurassic Park and its sequel, The Lost World, Jaws, E.T., the Indiana Jones trilogy and his Oscar-winning Schindler's List, Spielberg -- until the latter movie -- had always been undervalued by critics who seemed to resent the huge commercial success of his films.
McBride tracks Spielberg's career from the obsessed young home moviemaker who knew at 12 he was going to make films his life's work, to the wunderkind apprentice at Universal Studios, soaking up all he could learn and dropping out of university, to his parents' dismay. He, in turn, was troubled by their divorce and by difficult days at high school, where he claims he encountered anti-Semitism -- although colleagues believe he was tormented more because he was a loner and "different." Spielberg escaped into his movie-making, earning his first critical success with the 1971 TV movie Duel, a chilling tale of a monster truck pursuing a hapless motorist. It won international awards and prompted directors like Francois Truffaut, Fred Zinnemann and David Lean to look at him with respect.
Despite huge early hits such as Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, Spielberg stumbled occasionally with turkeys like 1941. But he regained his crown with E.T., a film that echoed Spielberg themes of childhood loneliness, family disruption and being an outsider.
Spielberg was always reluctant to acknowledge his Jewishness. But when he finally decided he was ready to make the Holocaust movie Schindler's List, it proved the catharsis that liberated him as man and artist, integrating the different parts of his personality. A book that does justice to this man born to make movies.
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