Steven Spielberg

160 Pages·2004·1.019 MB·English

by  James Clarke

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Also by James Clarke
The Pocket Essentials:George Lucas
The Virgin Film Guide:Coppola
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Steven Spielberg
James Clarke
www.pocketessentials.com
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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
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For Mum and Dad and Leela Kapeela
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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)
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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
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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
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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
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