Teaching Us How to Fly | How the Films of Steven Spielberg Changed My Life (Series #10)
You might not be reading this if it weren't for Spielberg
I’m 11 years old. I tell my older sister to come downstairs and that I have something important to show her.
I take her into the laundry room and stealthily pull out two VHS tapes, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jurassic Park. I tell her that these movies were directed by the same person, Steven Spielberg, and that I’ve found his address (technically the address to his company, Amblin Entertainment) online.
But it gets better, I tell her: my plan is now to send a letter to Amblin and tell him of my great plan for a Jurassic Park 4. Spielberg will see my vague treatment and decide, “Yeah, it’s time for Jurassic Park 4, and this is how we’re gonna do it.”
I unfortunately don’t think I ever sent that letter, maybe reality set in, or I got distracted with other ambitious ideas. I don’t remember much from whatever pitch I had, except that I’m pretty sure it involved a grown up Tim from the original Jurassic Park and involved a pterodactyl chasing a school bus (this also may have been a dream I had). Either way, clearly he already had plans for continuing the franchise.
How did I even know who Spielberg was at that age? Sure, my parents had shown me E.T., and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull had just come out and I had gotten a Lego set based on the movie for my birthday the previous year.
I was also super, SUPER into dinosaurs1 but my dad waited a while to show me Jurassic Park because he was afraid it would scare me away from dinosaurs forever. This didn’t stop me from reading about it in books on movies I found at the library, but when it finally came time to watch it at my aunt’s house I was mesmerized…until the T-Rex attacked and I ran to turn the TV off.
For a long time, most of what I learned about Spielberg came from books. Every time I went to the library I would pick up at least three books on movies and three books on dinosaurs (eventually the ratio favored books on movies). A lot of the movie books I would pick up in the kids section had to do with Star Wars, but there were a handful of books on special effects, most of which mentioned Spielberg.
That hyper-obsession was only fueled when I discovered Wikipedia, which provided me a magic portal into all the information I could ever want on any movie, even movies that hadn’t come out yet. This eventually led me to discover trade sites like ComingSoon.Net and /Film.com, and this led to obsessively reading film news sites, something that absolutely influenced my desire to start a website of my own to write on movies.
But reading about movies, especially Spielberg’s, did not only give me a desire to write on movies.
It gave me a desire to make them.
For many, Steven Spielberg was the first filmmaker to become a household name outside of Alfred Hitchcock.
But unlike Hitch, Spielberg has never cameoed in one of his own films (he has cameoed in at least one film to my knowledge and its one that’s on our original list), or hosted his own television anthology series.
People knew Spielberg because he simply made the most popular movies of all time.
Only one filmmaker has more than one film on the above list, and it’s Spielberg.
His films command not only an innate understanding of more than half a century of film language, but he also makes movies specifically with the audience in mind, every time.
The reason I make these pictures is that they give me a chance to be, not myself, but a lot of people sitting in the dark watching a movie. It's a chance to put on two hats: the directing hat and the audience hat. I get the opportunity to jump back and forth from the director's chair wondering, 'Gee, if I were the audience how would I like this scene to turn out?' And then I jump back onto the floor of the soundstage and say, 'Now that I'm the director, I can give audiences what I think they would like to see in a movie like this.'2
Spielberg, having grown up during peak Americana in the 1950s, often drapes his films in the nostalgia of a forgotten time. Yet this is why I find it interesting that in recent years the less successful his films have become, at least at the box office. To quote critic Armond White, from his book Make Spielberg Great Again:
Spielberg’s exceptionalism parallells American exceptionalism. His trajectory from the most popular filmmaker in the world to his current marginal status that no longer guarantees a box-office hit—nor popularity—parallels the trajectory of the nation that produced him. Spielberg once excited the imaginations of America’s young cultural consumers, but consumers of the current generation ignore his recent entreaties.
In the 1980s, Spielberg’s films, along with his friend George Lucas’, dominated the box office in the Reagan era- American optimism had been renewed in a post-Watergate world and audiences were ready to have fun at the movies again. In the 1990s, the box office continued to surge, but Spielberg was able to leverage his massive success to be able to start making less commercial, more dramatic fare like Schindler’s List and Amistad. The 2000s brought us the darkest Spielberg films at the turn of the century, including the science-fiction parables A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report and War of the Worlds.
It is still the case that audiences have a certain expectation when Spielberg is attached to a project, even when he is producing. The word “Spielbergian” refers typically to a film about a family jeopardized by a fantastical, destructive outside force: sometimes aliens, sometimes dinosaurs, and in the case of many of his films, divorce.
Many have been hailed as the “new Spielberg”: M. Night Shyamalan, J.J. Abrams, to name a few, but none can equal his prowess (don’t get me wrong, I love Shyamalan). His upcoming Disclosure Day will be a test of whether or not the Spielberg name still means something to filmgoers, particularly Gen Z. Being of that generation myself (although I prefer the specific classification of “zillenial”) I am certainly excited for the film, as it looks to be a return to form to “audience-mode Spielberg”.
But to return to my story, all this has been to say that simply knowing who Spielberg was at a young age gave me a better idea of what it meant to make a movie. That someone could make movies that were wildly different but still retain a style throughout all of them that was easily identifiable. I could put on Last Crusade and Jurassic Park and identify some of the same zoom close-ups, bloom effects, and whip pans that comprise a Spielberg movie.
Having some sense of what it meant to be a director allowed me to shape and refine my own dreams for the future, and learning about the way Spielberg approached his films gave me the specific desire to make movies for audiences rather than simply for myself. To approach art that way gives the act of making a film, book, or painting a dimension of service and self-giving that I think is important for every artist to have.
I won’t post everything I’ve ever made here- it’s really not all worth seeing although I will link my YouTube channel below for the curious- but following the path to be a filmmaker has led my life to a lot of interesting and unexpected places that I am grateful for and constantly surprised by: co-founding this blog was certainly one of them.
I’m excited for you to read the essays that are forthcoming in this long overdue series, but I’ll leave you with this: in 2020 I fulfilled (partially) a long-held dream to remake the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark, one of the greatest cinematic openings of all time. It was at the height of the pandemic, thus being the perfect opportunity to make something fun with my siblings while we were at home. It’s unfinished, but I’ll leave it as my humble, extremely low-budget tribute to the master.
The summer before 1st grade, I remember going to a week-long “dinosaur camp” at my school. I still remember grievous errors that were taught there that I couldn’t stand, like the idea that Brachiosaurus and Triceratops were friends (they existed in different time periods) and that sauropods had long necks so that they could swim underwater to evade predators (this had long been disproved). My dad still laughs to this day about this.
https://legacy.aintitcool.com/node/67449
Incredible! My favorite Spielberg is Catch Me if You Can
Isn’t James Cameron on that highest gross list twice with #2 and #3 spots? Great article besides, thank you.