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Hollywood's last boy scout

Steven Spielberg
  • Posted at 6:20pm
  • 14 December 2007
  • by AndrewCollins-RT

He was short and thin. His ears stuck out. His beaky nose was so embarrassing that he stuck tape to the tip of it and his forehead, praying it would develop a tilt. When teams were chosen for any game, he was always the last to be picked.

Not my description of the young Steven Spielberg, but biographer John Baxter's. The boy who would become arguably the greatest popular film-maker of our time was never cool. At high school in Phoenix in the early 1960s, he joined the Boy Scouts, learned the clarinet and was obsessed with movie music rather than rock 'n' roll.

The classic nerd, he dealt with social isolation by becoming a showman, putting on puppet shows and, eventually, making home movies. The rest is cinema history.

A new feature-length documentary, Spielberg on Spielberg, showcases a long conversation with the man. It offers countless insights into the film-making process, but reveals little of his personality.

This fits in with his reputation as one of cinema's great technicians (as Baxter notes, "He communicates best from behind a protective grille of technology"). Though he was one of Hollywood's "movie brat" generation of the 1970s, unlike George Lucas, Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola, he didn't attend film school, learning his craft in television. (His first feature, Duel, was made for TV.) He was unfashionable before he started, and steered clear of the drug-taking that became so emblematic of the "New Hollywood".

Once his breakthrough, Jaws, had reinvented the summer blockbuster, Spielberg was too successful to be cool. And with the belated Oscar success of the powerful Schindler's List in 1994, he even lost his "outsider" cachet. Although he doesn't shy away from depicting violence in films like Saving Private Ryan and Munich, it's never gratuitous. Even the mass destruction in War of the Worlds comes with a 12A certificate.

His next project, the "fourquel" Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (due for release in May 2008), sees him playing to the gallery once again. Perhaps, like his populist forebears Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock, it will take French critics, or his own death, to finally bestow cool upon Steven Spielberg. But for now, he remains Hollywood's last boy scout.

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