The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (48 page)

In 1933 Goodman met the young John Hammond, an independently wealthy jazz promoter and critic, a meeting which would prove pivotal in the history of American popular music (and in Goodman’s life—he would marry Hammond’s sister). Hammond helped guide Goodman’s professional development and assemble jazzmen for his ensembles. More and more, these players were African-American. A year later, BG put together his first permanent band. He hired important arrangers such as the genius Fletcher Henderson and Benny Carter to develop new styles of orchestration, set in vibrant jazz rhythms people started to call “swing.” Whole sections of instruments played as one. A new period of musical arrangements had begun.

Professional musicians were not only “sent” by Goodman’s band but also dazzled by its precision, drive, and musicianship. When the band played at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles during August 1935, the swing era was in full swing. It was music that one could dance to, listen to, swing to; it was so technically outstanding, one could not resist it. BG’s band included many great musicians, black and white, many who would go on to create their own bands. Ziggy Elman, Harry James, Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson, Gene Krupa, Bunny Berigan, Dick Haymes, Patti Page, Peggy Lee and Charlie Christian were some of the great names which regularly appeared with the Goodman band.

Benny Goodman shown on the cover of sheet music.

At the same time Goodman was electrifying radio and ballroom audiences with his amazing band, he decided to form chamber jazz ensembles to apply in a smaller, more intimate setting many of the techniques and styles first attempted with his large group. First as a trio with drummer Krupa and pianist Wilson, then as a quartet with vibraphonist Hampton (and later as a sextet or septet or whatever), Goodman’s combos pioneered an improvisatory style of jazz playing, which led directly to the bebop revolution of the postwar era.

BG’s use of the elegant stylist Teddy Wilson as his pianist was the first national example of integration in popular music. When Lionel Hampton later joined the ensemble, it was not a matter of another black musician playing with whites, but rather the addition of the most brilliant vibes player around. Over ten years before baseball or the army were integrated, Benny Goodman’s bands used the best players regardless of race.

Goodman also broke down the barriers as to what was the proper venue for musical performance. In 1938 he brought his band to Carnegie Hall. This fabulous concert was recorded to great acclaim, bobbysoxers dancing in the aisles, classical music’s bastion of elite culture brought down to earth and then sent soaring.

The Second World War broke the spell of swing on the American public. Swing music had helped release young people from the sadness of the Depression. The war turned the musical mood first to patriotism, then to smooth-sounding vocal music, tied more to the ballad than to instrumental jazz. New jazz artists appeared, such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, creating music that was more esoteric and intellectual, music that only one’s mind could dance to.

Goodman’s reaction was to retreat from pop music into performing classical repertoire. He was the first great jazz artist to cross over successfully, and serves as a model to this day for artists such as trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and flutist James Galway who perform with ease in many styles. Racial and musical barriers simply did not exist for the gracious virtuoso Benny Goodman. Only superb musicianship mattered.

H
is films have been seen by more people than any other director’s. No other director has made so many movies as consistently entertaining and as action-packed. Perhaps only Walt Disney exhibited greater talent than Steven Spielberg in appealing to the widest possible audience. Spielberg’s entertainments have worldwide appeal. His films have been dubbed into over a dozen languages, and to most of the world today represent the best in American cinema.

Spielberg is a member of an extraordinary generation of directors. With Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone, and George Lucas, Spielberg (the only Jewish director in this premier group) has dominated commercial filmmaking in the United States since the overwhelming success in 1975 of his shark-infested
Jaws.

As a teenager, Spielberg studied Alfred Hitchcock at work. Like the English master, Spielberg shares an uncanny ability to draw his audience right into the action on screen. Many people have likened the feeling of watching his films to riding a roller coaster. Indeed, among the most popular attractions at both Disney World and Universal Studios amusement parks are the
Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular
and the
Jaws
and
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
rides.

Academic critics have criticized not only Spielberg’s melodramatic instincts, but also his sentimentality. The poignancy of many scenes in
The Color Purple
undermines such criticism. His “gushiness” is sometimes so appropriate, telling, and comforting.

Spielberg relates his talents with a kind of boyish amazement. When things in his films appear to be beautiful or awesome, this great director just sits the camera back and lets his audience gape.
In Jurassic Park
(the second-biggest grossing film in history, right behind
E.T.),
a genetically bred brachiosaur is viewed, roaring up on its hind legs, stretching to munch on the top leaves of a gigantic tree. This colossal sight confirms for the viewer Spielberg’s genius for the image aptly framed. More often than most filmmakers, he conveys precisely what he intends with the sharpest clarity and the most thrilling majesty.

There is always a wonderful sense of place in his films. The brutality of a marauding Great White stalking its human prey is more horrible for being starkly set in the clear light and warm ocean spray of Cape Cod in summer.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
is more thrilling for its placement in the overheated locales of gangster-plagued Shanghai and a lushly green India burned into dust by religious fanaticism.
E.T.,
a benevolent and unique creature from outer space, meets his match in a wide-eyed boy who lives in a house with his mother and brother and little sister, on a street in a development of houses all looking the same, in suburban sprawl. The spaceman meets the boy who has no space. A ride on a bike through the air releases both from the confines of childhood and society.

Strangely, like some other great film directors, Spielberg’s films do not have memorable screenplays. What characters say in his movies is not so easily remembered. What remains most vivid is his mastery of visual imagery. He tells grand stories with grand cinematic gestures, John Williams’s proud music triumphantly moving the story along. In this, Spielberg is closest to the half-Jewish Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein was certainly Spielberg’s direct precursor in the use of broadly shaped visual imagery accompanied by surging, symphonic underscoring (for
Alexander Nevsky
and
Ivan the Terrible
the composer was Williams’s essential model, Sergei Prokofiev).

Spielberg’s strong commercial sense led to his production (by his company named after his first film,
Amblin’)
of a new crew of Warner Brothers cartoon characters (apparently Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck have nephews and nieces), newly beloved by youngsters, as well as science-fiction television shows unfortunately weakened by his failure to direct them.

His films display the cinematography of a virtuoso. Spielberg is among the greatest technicians in movie history. His epic World War I drama
War
Horse is but one recent example. He always seems to find the camera angle, focus, coloring, and framing best suited for the emotion or characterization desired. More often than not, his films have a freshness that derives not simply from magical special effects. The films are repositories of cinematic devices and techniques sure to influence young moviemakers for generations.

Spielberg’s stories often seem to be told through a child’s eyes (whether or not the protagonist is young). In
Empire of the Sun,
the horrors of war in the Pacific during the Second World War are retold through the saga of a young boy separated from his parents under Japanese occupation. Indiana may have a young boy as his sidekick in the second of his thrillers, but then, no kid ever had as much fun as Dr. Jones. The perspectives in
E.T.
are mostly kid level, the strange world of suburban America viewed by the alien not much higher than three feet.

Spielberg apparently had a great deal of fun as a kid, making home movies and being dubbed his family’s official photographer. After studies in English at California State College at Long Beach, he produced a series of vaguely artistic films, culminating when he was twenty-three with the commercially viable
Amblin’
(paired with the sickly
Love Story
in national distribution). Spielberg’s work on television dramas honed his technical skills on weak scripts. The made-for-television film
Duel
and his first feature-length presentation,
The Sugarland Express,
gave him an early reputation as a specially gifted craftsman. When Universal movie executives gambled on the young director to direct
Jaws,
a show-business legend was born (along with immense profits).

Spielberg has used his influence, gathered in the glowing after burn of huge corporate bottom lines, to help younger directors find their voice (such as Robert Zemeckis, director of the
Back to the Future
series), largely independent of the pressures of big studio executives. Whether Spielberg’s films themselves have lasting influence, it is still much too early to predict. No other director has had more blockbuster films. Few other creative artists have left so large a mark on popular culture.

Only Steven Spielberg could have made
Schindler’s List.
To most people,
Gone With The Wind
represents the American Civil War. Next to the remembrances of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel and the opera and chamber music of the composer of the “model Ghetto” Terezin, Viktor Ullmann (who died in Auschwitz), Spielberg’s Oscar-winning
Schindler’s List
will remain a vital testament of and most people’s link to the Shoah. With virtuoso camera work not seen since the silent era (only the work of D.W. Griffith is comparable), an unparalleled ease with a talented actors’ ensemble, and a refusal to sentimentalize or shield the audience from the darkest reality, Spielberg created the greatest film about the worst catastrophe in Jewish history.

U
ntil Camille Pissarro, Chaim Soutine, Jacques Lipchitz, Amedeo Modigliani, and Marc Chagall, there were no great Jewish painters. Biblical prohibitions of representational art stifled any creative impulses to express images in living pigments. Jewish artisans may have carved lions out of wood to adorn sacred arks or stained glass in dull colors, but no portraits of nobles or pastoral scenes were permitted, no classical nudes lounging in the grass ever imagined.