Steven Spielberg by Joseph McBride Read Free Book Online Page A

would put him to sleep by the imaginative means of using an oscilloscope to reflect wavy lines on the wall. Though Steven showed no interest in following his father into engineering, he picked up his interest in filmmaking from his father. Steven’s fascination with all kinds of cutting-edge technology and his mastery of the tools of filmmaking have been evident from the earliest days of his professional career.
    The influence of music is also strongly evident in Spielberg’s career. He played the clarinet (though not very well) in his grade school and high school bands, and sat in as first clarinet for composer John Williams in the beach scene of Jaws. He still noodles on the instrument for pleasure and relaxation. He has been a passionate collector of movie scores since childhood, and has said, “If I weren’t a filmmaker I’d probably be in music. I’dplay piano or I’d compose. I’d probably be a starving composer somewhere in Hollywood right now, hopefully not starving, but I probably would not have been successful.”
    In the view of Williams, who has written the scores for most of Spielberg’s films, he is being overly modest about his musical sense: “Steven could have been a composer himself. He has that rhythmic sense in his whole being, and I think that is one of the great things about his directing—this rhythmic, kinetic sense he has.”
    Through his parents, Spielberg inherited his love of music from Grandpa Shmuel, who performed in the Russian army band, and from Grandpa Fievel, the Russian immigrant Jew who was not allowed to go to school but used his music to proclaim “How wondrous are Thy works.”
    Perhaps the most joyous scene in all of Spielberg’s movies is the ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which the scientists finally devise a way of communicating with the alien mother ship by using their computers to play synthesized music together. The musical interchange between the humans and their extraterrestrial visitors starts as a few tentative notes and quickly becomes a rapturous duet of spiritual celebration.
    â€œWhen I saw Close Encounters, ” Millie Tieger recalls, “I thought, There’s Leah with the music and Arnold with computers. That’s Steve, the little boy. Steve wrote a movie about Mommy and Daddy.”
    * While Spielberg’s maternal grandparents were Orthodox, his mother kept kosher only intermittently and his family attended Conservative synagogues.
    â€  Steven Allan Spielberg’s Hebrew name, Shmuel, is a tribute to his grandfather, who died before he was born. Asked why Steven was not given the first name of Samuel, Arnold says, “We gave him an Anglicized ‘Steven.’ We just artificially made it that. Leah and I wanted to give him a non-Biblical name. ‘Allan’ came from the Hebrew Aharon. And we just liked the name Allan, out of nowhere.”
    â€¡ Spielberg announced in 1989 that he planned to make a movie dealing with his childhood years in Cincinnati, from a script by his sister Anne, I’ll Be Home. The movie would have to be shot on location, he said, because “there’s nothing in L.A. that looks like Cincinnati—nothing.”
    Â§ Arnold is still shooting home movies today, mostly of his travels, using a Sony High-8 video camera and a professional-quality Avid editing system his son gave him. In his current occupation as an electronics industry consultant, Arnold also has been making industrial films: “Ever since I retired, they say to me, ‘With the name Spielberg, you’ve got to be able to make movies.’ So they got me making movies.”

T WO
“ M AZIK”
    W E HAVE A WORD FOR HIM IN Y IDDISH. W E’D CALL HIM A MAZIK – IT’S SAID LOVINGLY, YOU KNOW, BUT IT MEANS A MISCHIEVOUS LITTLE DEVIL. A ND HE WAS THAT!
    â€“ S TEVEN S PIELBERG’S AUNT N ATALIE G UTTMAN
    S TEVEN Allan Spielberg’s birth