Steven Spielberg

A
SEARCHLIGH
T
 swept the night sky of downtown Phoenix as a limousine pulled up under the theater marquee. The director and his stars stepped out, bedazzled by the glare of strobes and exploding flashbulbs. Inside, a packed house awaited the world premiere of a science-fiction epic from American Artist Productions. For the next two hours and fifteen minutes, the audience watched enrapt at the spectacle of mysterious colored lights emerging from the heavens to abduct humans for an extraterrestrial zoo. At the night's end, the box-office take from that screening at the Phoenix Little Theatre, at seventy-five cents a head, was enough to put the movie into profit.

The date was March 24, 1964. The movie was
Firelight.
Its production cost was under $600, and it was the first feature-length film written and directed by a high school junior named Steven Spielberg.

The precocious seventeen-year-old billed himself as “Steve” in the credits, not Steven, but some of his classmates mockingly called him “Spielbug.” He may have looked like a “nerd” and a “wimp” in those years, as he himself recalled, but he was already making a name for himself in Phoenix with his moviemaking. His mother proudly called him “Cecil B. DeSpielberg.” A Jewish kid who “felt like an alien” while growing up in a succession of increasingly
WASPish suburbs and turned to making movies as a way of finding the social acceptance he craved, Steve Spielberg had been shooting film obsessively for more than seven years, with a monomaniacal dedication that made him virtually oblivious to schoolwork, dating, sports, and other normal adolescent pursuits.

“I was more or less a boy with a passion for a hobby that grew out of control and somewhat consumed me,” he said years later. “… I discovered something I could do, and people would be interested in it and me. I knew after my third or fourth little 8mm epic that this was going to be a career, not just a hobby.”

One of Steve's grade-school classmates, Steve Suggs, has never forgotten the day in seventh grade when he received a phone call from a mutual friend who told him, “Spielberg's making a movie. Do you want to be in it?” It was a World War II movie called
Fighter
Squad.

Steve Suggs was one of the school jocks, and he was not close to Spielberg: “I had no insights into his level of talent. He wasn't athletic at all, nor was he necessarily a brainchild. On the surface, in the six or eight hours a day we spent in school together, he didn't have any redeeming qualities. I didn't know if he was going to have his Brownie out there pointing at us and have us dressing up as girls.

“I went to Spielberg's house and got into a car; Steve's father was driving. We went out to the airport. Somehow Steve had arranged access to a fighter and a bomber! He took a shot of me in the fighter with ketchup coming out of my mouth when I was shot. He had a script; he knew what he was doing. It wasn't just the boys going out and screwing around—he knew how to deal with people.

“I remember telling my mom about it afterward. Here was this kid who was sort of a nerd and wasn't one of the cool guys; he got out there and suddenly he was
in
charge.
He became a totally different person, so much so that I as a seventh grader was impressed. He had all the football players out there, all the neat guys, and he was telling
them
what to do. An hour ago at home or on the campus he was the guy you kicked dirt in his eyes.

“It was miraculous. It just blew me away. It's as if you hear this nerd play piano and suddenly he's Van Cliburn.”

P
EOPLE
all over Phoenix soon began to pay attention to the youthful filmmaking prodigy. A local TV news crew covered the filming of Spielberg's forty-minute World War II movie,
Escape
to
Nowhere
(completed in 1962), which won first prize in a statewide contest for amateur filmmakers. The filming of
Firelight
was the subject of two articles and photo spreads in
The
Arizona
Republic,
which hailed him in December 1963 as a “Teenage Cecil B.” with “an amateur but honored standing and a professional outlook.”

“We're all for Steve's hobby,” his mother, Leah, told the newspaper. “This
way we know and the parents of his teenage friends know where they are; they're not cruising up and down Central Avenue.”

The Army surplus jeep Leah drove around town was prominently featured in
Firelight,
and she sometimes slapped a helmet over her short blond hair to play a German soldier in her son's war movies. “Our house was run like a studio,” she recalled. “We really worked hard for him. Your life was not worth a dime if you didn't, because he nagged you like crazy. Steven had this way of directing everything. Not just his movies, his life. He directed our household…. He was a terrible student in school. But I never thought, What's going to become of him? Maybe if it had crossed my mind, I'd have gotten worried.”

Leah was so tolerant of her son's lack of interest in school that she often let him stay home, feigning illness, so he could edit his movies. All he had to do to convince her was “hold the thermometer to a light bulb and put the heating pad over my face”—a trick he had Henry Thomas's Elliott play on his mother in
E.T.
Steve's father, Arnold Spielberg, a pioneer in the field of computer engineering, was frustrated by his attitude toward schoolwork. “The only thing I ever did wrong,” Arnold says, “was try to coax him into being an engineer. I said, ‘Steve, you've gotta study math.' He said, ‘I don't like it.' He'd ask me to do his chemistry for him. And he would never even
do
the damn chemistry lab, he would just come home and say, ‘Dad, I've gotta prepare this experiment.' I'd say, ‘You don't have any data there. How am I supposed to tell you what you've done?' So I'd try to reconstruct the experiment for him, I'd come down with some answers. He'd come back and say, ‘Jesus, Dad, you flunked!'

“Leah recognized that he really wasn't cut out for [science]. She would say, ‘Steve,
I
flunked chemistry two times. Don't even try.' After about a year, I gave up. He said, ‘I want to be a director.' And I said, ‘Well, if you want to be a director, you've gotta start at the bottom, you gotta be a gofer and work your way up.' He said, ‘No, Dad. The first picture I do, I'm going to be a director.' And he
was.
That blew my mind. That takes guts.”

Arnold humored his rebellious son by bankrolling the production of
Fire
light.
He also helped Steve design miniature sets, rigged the lights for scenes filmed in Steve's studio (the carport of their house), and built a dolly for the elaborate tracking shots that were already a hallmark of the Spielberg visual style. Steve enlisted his three younger sisters, Anne, Sue, and Nancy, in the production as well. Anne served as a script supervisor, Nancy played the key role of a little girl abducted by aliens, and all three of them bounced up and down on the hood of the jeep inside the carport to make the jeep look like it was speeding through the desert night around Camelback Mountain.

Steve Spielberg's ambitions were grandiose, if as yet intellectually circumscribed: he told his young collaborators during the making of
Firelight,
“I want to be the Cecil B. DeMille of science fiction.”

Many of his schoolmates, teachers, and neighbors thought him an “oddball”
and a “nut” for being so consumed by moviemaking, but “one thing I never heard anybody associate with Spielberg was that he was blowing smoke,” recalled a high school friend, Rick Cook. “A lot of people were skeptical about his chances, but I don't think you can find anybody who didn't think he would give it his all.”

B
Y
the time of the
Firelight
premiere, the teenaged Spielberg had already started the process of turning his dreams into reality. He had met a man at Universal Studios who recognized his extraordinary potential as a filmmaker, gave him advice about the making of
Firelight,
and eagerly awaited a chance to see the finished movie. Spielberg saw
Firelight
as his
entrée
to a career as a Hollywood director. He hoped to persuade Universal to back him in making a big-screen version of his sci-fi tale. But though Universal would sign him to a directing contract five years later, it was only after Spielberg had served an apprenticeship in television and directed what was then the biggest hit in film history,
Jaws,
that he was able to raise the $19 million he needed from another studio for his transmutation of
Firelight
—
Close
En
counters
of
the
Third
Kind.

After becoming a professional filmmaker, Spielberg publicly disparaged
Firelight
as “one of the five worst films ever made anywhere.” But his extraordinary promise was obvious to everyone who attended the Phoenix premiere in 1964.
“Firelight
is just as good, although this may be construed as criticism, as some of the science-fiction movies seen by the late-late television viewers,” wrote
Arizona
Journal
reviewer Larry Jarrett. “The plot, the action, the basic material of the movie, is sound and not as far out as some of Hollywood's fantasies-de-science.”

Allen Daviau, the cinematographer who has shot such Spielberg films as
E.T.
The
Extra-Terr
estrial,
The
Color
Purple,
and
Empire
of
the
Sun,
was shown
Firelight
by Spielberg in the late 1960s. “It's what you expect with a kid's film, the acting and so on, but oh, God! Some of it was
so
audacious,” Daviau says. “The effects were what was really amazing—that's what his heart was in. What he did with crumpled aluminum foil and bits of Jell-O on a kitchen table was pretty amazing.”

S
PIELBERG
'
S
canny flair for self-promotion, which has served him so well in his professional career, was already much in evidence in his teenage years, although then, as now, it was carefully concealed within a personality that seemed outwardly shy and modest, even deferential. People in Phoenix still speak in awestruck tones of how Spielberg talked his way into shooting scenes for
Firelight
at a hospital and at an airport, using an actual jet plane.

“When he was making
Firelight,
and he had to get into a hospital,” his father says, “he went down to the Baptist Hospital in Phoenix and talked
them into letting him have a room. They lent him some oxygen tanks and stuff like that, and he put one of his actresses in a bed and put an oxygen mask on her. He did it all on his own. I didn't help him at all. He said, ‘What do I do?' I said, ‘Call the office and ask 'em.' ‘Well,' he said, ‘how do I get on an airplane?' I said, ‘Just get down to the [Sky Harbor] airport and ask American Airlines if you can have the use of a plane for about ten minutes when it lands and before it takes off again.' And they let him!

“I would just give him the lead and then he'd go do it. Because I figured, if I ask for him, then he's not really doing it. He had more guts than
I
did, asking for things that I would say, ‘Oh, they'll turn you down, Steve.' Besides, he was a novelty in Phoenix, a bright young kid there, and made the newspapers. So people cottoned onto that and they were very cooperative. He had something special. Mostly he had drive. He had a will to do it.”

Betty Weber, whose daughters Beth and Jean worked on
Firelight,
let Steve shoot part of the film at her house. A volunteer stage manager at the nonprofit Phoenix Little Theatre, Betty cajoled the theater's board members into donating their facilities for the premiere. She barraged the local newspapers and radio stations with announcements about the young filmmaker, arranged for photo spreads in
The
Arizona
Republic,
and made sure the title of
Firelight
was displayed on billboards at businesses all over town. Beth Weber, the film's leading lady, typed and mimeographed the programs distributed to the opening-night audience. The limousine that brought Steve and his actors to the theater was supplied and driven by a cast member's father who owned a local brewery. The searchlight was borrowed from a nearby shopping center.

Arnold Spielberg helped Steve play the complicated soundtrack for the movie, and Leah Spielberg climbed a ladder to put the title of her son's first feature on the marquee. As she did so, she was thinking, “This is a nice hobby.”

That triumphant evening in March 1964 marked a coming of age for Steve Spielberg. His debut as a feature filmmaker was also his farewell to his boyhood years in Arizona. The day after the premiere, he and his family moved to California. He told the local press that he hoped to be working for Universal that summer before finishing high school and going to film school at UCLA.

Making movies “grows on you,” Steve declared. “You can't shake it…. I want to write movie scripts, but I like directing above all. All I know for sure is I've gone too far to back out now.”