Steven Spielberg (25 page)

Asked why he went so far out of his way to help Steven, Silvers replied simply, “I
liked
him. I admired this lump of raw material. When Steven wasn't involved or talking about his involvement in pictures, he really didn't have a whole big personality besides that. There were two Stevens, if you will. There was the one that made the movies and the other one was immature. One of them I knew would grow up and the other one was damn near fully formed.”

As it became increasingly clear to Arnold Spielberg that Steven was not concentrating on college but wholeheartedly pursuing a film career, the tension between them grew. “His dad always had the attitude, ‘Get a job and get out of the apartment,'” felt Steven's friend Ralph Burris. “Steve was having problems with his dad, who just didn't want him around, basically. I don't think he was all that supportive of Steve. I'm sure he felt Steve wasn't living up to his potential. He [eventually] kicked him out and we ended up living together.”

Don Shull, who visited Steven and his father occasionally during Steven's first two years of college, had more sympathy for Arnold's viewpoint: “Steve started out doing the starving-artist routine. He was cutting every corner he could cut to make a go. He wasn't making money and he had to rely on his dad. It was apparent that Steve was just using Dad as a place to hang his hat. The last few times I visited I found myself spending my time with Arnold. I ended up going out to dinner with Arnold and Steve wasn't there. Dad's footing the bill and Steve's too busy to go to dinner with him. He bought him a car, gave him a safe place to live—the mom sure wasn't around.”

Leah, who was living in Arizona, shared Arnold's concern about their son's lackluster performance in college. Long Beach State Radio-TV teacher Dan Baker remembers that “Steven's mother would call all the time and she'd get very upset he wasn't paying more attention to his classes. She would call [department chairman] Hugh Morehead and ask, ‘How's he doing?' Hugh would tell her, ‘Not very well, frankly.' She was very upset he was not going to get a degree. He wasn't interested.”

Spielberg did forge a friendship with one of the Radio-TV teachers, a Texan named Billy Joe Langston. The late Joe Langston was “a concerned person” who became “very close” to Spielberg, recalls teacher Howard Martin. Spielberg later paid Langston an affectionate tribute in his 1974 feature,
The
Sugarland
Express
,
which takes place in Texas and revolves around the abduction of an infant known as Baby Langston. But Hugh Morehead felt Spielberg showed more interest in his English classes than in his handful of
beginner-level Radio-TV courses. His embryonic writing talents were stimulated by an English teacher, the late Ronald Foote. Morehead recalls that he and Foote “used to talk about this unusual and wonderful kid. Steven was an excellent student in English.” “His interest was in writing,” Dan Baker agrees. “He had all these stories running through his head, and he was always jotting down little story ideas. His TV series
Amazing
Stories
is part of the storehouse [of those ideas]. He was saying that writing was something he wanted to do as much as anything.”

Around the Radio-TV department, Baker says, Spielberg acquired the reputation of “a great talker and a great manipulator, talking his way out of certain things that were due for school projects. He would come in and out and he wanted it to go his own way. To me he didn't exemplify responsibility and sticking to it. I thought he was a young fly-by-night kid who needed to grow up.”

Spielberg has expressed some lingering regrets about not paying more attention to his college education. “I wanted to direct my first movie the day I graduated from the university,” he said in 1984. “That was the goal: first I'll do four years of college, make my father very happy. Actually, looking back now, I wish I hadn't had that attitude, because college could have helped me. If I'd paid more attention to college and less to motion picture making, I might have delayed my career by a couple of years, but I think I would have had a much more well-rounded education.”

S
PIELBERG
arranged his class schedule so that he could spend three days a week at Universal, watching filmmakers at work and trying to make useful contacts. He frequently slept overnight in an office at the studio where he kept two suits so he could emerge onto the bustling lot each morning looking as if he hadn't slept in an office.

“He just became part of the wallpaper,” Shull relates. “Nobody would stop him. Nobody would ask anything. He would always look presentable. The gate guards always knew him. He said, It was just like I owned the place.' There was definitely a method to that madness.”

A
LTHOUGH
Spielberg never lived at the frat houses Theta Chi maintained in Seal Beach and later in Long Beach, his limited social life at the college centered around the frat.
†
Shull thinks Steven “was always looking for connections somewhere” and joined the clean-cut brothers of Theta Chi as another way of advancing himself professionally. Being part of a frat at a
large, WASPish commuter college on the border of ultra-conservative Orange County no doubt was a form of protective coloration for the socially insecure Jewish kid from Arizona.

But even though joining Theta Chi was characteristic of Spielberg's youthful desire for assimilation into the American mainstream, it put him somewhat out of step with the changing culture of student life. Fraternities had fallen in disfavor with many students by the time Spielberg entered college. The social values of Greek life seemed hopelessly old-fashioned and reactionary to iconoclastic students galvanized by opposition to the Vietnam War and the incipient hippie movement. The antiquated racial and ethnic exclusionary practices of many fraternities and sororities also inspired a growing antipathy. Some fraternities at Long Beach State were known for excluding Jews, and there was one Jewish fraternity on the campus, Zeta Beta Thi. Theta Chi's Zeta Epsilon chapter, formed only a couple of years before Spielberg's arrival by what Burris calls “all the goofy guys in the dorm,” had some members who were “prejudiced against anyone who wasn't white”; there were no blacks among its thirty-four members. But whether a prospective member was Jewish or not was “never really an issue,” Burris says.

After Spielberg was brought to rush by Radio-TV student Charles (Butch) Hays in the fall of 1965, Burris quickly forged an enduring friendship with Spielberg, becoming sensitized in the process to Steven's complicated feelings about his ethnic identity.

“If anything, he kind of downplayed being Jewish,” Burris recalls. “He never talked about it that much. But his kid sister [Anne] once gave him a small laminated bagel. He wore it around his neck until it turned green. I knew his Hebrew name was Shmuel. I used to call him that. He would go, ‘Don't call me that.' One [other] thing bothered him; I didn't understand it then, although I do now. I used to have a striped dark-blue and light-blue bathrobe. He used to cringe when I wore it. He told me his grandfather had been in a concentration camp, and they wore outfits with stripes like that. [Neither of Spielberg's grandfathers was in a concentration camp, but Spielberg might have been referring to one of his other relatives who died in the Holocaust.] It never dawned on me it was such an issue, because I'm not Jewish. At one point he asked me not to wear it. I thought, ‘What do I care?'”

When Spielberg met Burris at the rush party, Burris was a senior majoring in English. He had always been interested in show business, and while growing up in San Bernardino, he had his own magic act. He took the film appreciation and TV production courses at Long Beach, but was planning to attend law school. The first words Spielberg spoke to him were enough to make Burris start questioning the course of his life.

“You look like a producer,” Spielberg declared.

When Burris asked what he meant, Spielberg said the seersucker jacket he was wearing reminded him of the jackets worn by the production coordinators he knew at Universal.

Burris's first impression of Spielberg was that he was “a nerdy little guy, but something about this guy was unique—the passion he had, the total involvement and interest in films. There was something so charismatic about him you couldn't avoid liking him.” His fascination with Spielberg intensified when he began watching Spielberg's amateur films. After only one semester of law school, Burris dropped out to pursue a career in the film industry. “He's really the reason I came to this town,” Burris acknowledges. “I don't know whether to thank him or curse him.”

In 1967, he and Spielberg moved into a house in the Palms section of West Los Angeles, and they continued living together in West Hollywood and North Hollywood until Spielberg bought his first house in 1971. Aside from their common interest in film, their friendship was a classic case of opposites attracting.

“I was flaky and a dilettante,” Burris recalls. “I was kind of the hippie, and he was sort of the straight guy. He was always very straitlaced and driven. Steven was never a drinker. He never used drugs. He was a different kind of guy for the era. He was the nerd who became the king. You couldn't get him laid—then you couldn't get girls off him.

“We had an apartment, but we didn't hang out that much together. The truth is we led separate lives. He was exposed to the hippie movement through me. I think it was a source of constant embarrassment to him when we were living together. I would always bring these chicks to the apartment. He would be going crazy because they would be passing around nude. It may have embarrassed him, but it certainly
intrigued
him. I remember one time when two chicks came down from Canada and they jumped him. They were horny.”

D
URING
his college years, Spielberg recalls with some exaggeration, “I did almost nothing except watch movies and make movies.”

The Los Angeles area was a paradise for a film buff in the late sixties. Spielberg watched new movies at art theaters in Long Beach, Seal Beach, and West L.A., and haunted revival theaters such as the Nuart near the UCLA campus and the Vagabond near MacArthur Park. This was a period when his aesthetic horizons were broadened by intensive exposure to foreign films: “Anything that wasn't American impressed me. I went through a period of Bergman. I think I saw every picture Ingmar Bergman made. It was wonderful! You'd go to the theater and see all the Bergman films one week. You'd go to the same theater the next week and see … maybe, Jacques Tati. I loved him! Truffaut is probably my favorite director. I saw all the New Wave French films while at school.”

But Spielberg had trouble finding people who would take
him
seriously as a filmmaker. When he tried to persuade executives at Universal to watch
Firelight
and his other 8mm movies, they told him they wouldn't be interested unless he could show them something made in l6mm or 35mm. Taking
that advice to heart, Spielberg “earned enough money working in the cafeteria and other odd jobs to buy a roll of film, rent a [16mm] camera from Birns & Sawyer, and go out weekends to shoot small, experimental films…. I made a film about a man being chased by someone trying to kill him. But running becomes such a spiritual pleasure for him that he forgets who is after him. I did a picture about dreams—how disjointed they are. I made one about what happens to rain when it hits dirt. They were personal little films that represented who I was.”

Lacking the resources of a film school, Spielberg relied on Theta Chi to provide most of his cast and crew. “He drew upon us as his slave pool,” says Burris. “He had a way of hooking you into what he was doing.” Burris was most impressed by
Encounter
, a 16mm, black-and-white film Spielberg made in his freshman year with the help of frat brother Butch Hays. “When I saw it, that's when I really got interested in Spielberg. I could see he had a lot of talent.” A
film
noir
with existential overtones,
Encounter
—about twenty minutes long—evidently was the film Spielberg had in mind when he talked about running for one's life becoming a “spiritual pleasure.” Frat brother Roger Ernest
‡
played a sailor in the merchant marine who is set upon by a mysterious attacker. A knife-and-gun duel on top of a water tower leads to a twist ending akin to an Alfred Hitchcock TV drama, involving a murderer (Theta Chi's Peter Maffia) who, it is revealed, staged the attack to do away with his identical twin.

A much less artsy project brought Spielberg's filmmaking activities to the attention of the school paper.
The
Forty-niner
reported in February 1966 that “the starting gun went off last week in the campus cafeteria” on a short comedy called
The
Great
Race.
§
Noting that “Spielberg has been studying directing for one year as an apprentice at Universal Studios,” student reporter Bruce Fortune wrote that the Keystone Kops-like farce was being filmed by Spielberg in collaboration with Butch Hays. Roger Ernest and Halina Junyszek, Hays's diminutive Russian girlfriend, played the lead roles. The 16mm black-and-white movie, “complete with sound and musical score,” dealt with “a young man who, after an argument with his girl, chases her around the campus. Filming will go on all semester and so, during his chase, Spielberg plans to link events of the college together … as Halina and Roger rush through crowded hallways, campus buildings, Pete's Gulch, and the Theta Chi toilet race.” Pete's Gulch was the makeshift Western town erected every year by campus social groups for the school's annual 49er Days, a frolicsome charitable fund-raising event. As part of the festivities, Theta Chi staged a race with students riding toilets mounted on soapbox-derby racing cars.