SPIELBERG’S ESCAPE FROM ESCAPISM

A year and a half ago, Steven Spielberg says, he told Warner Bros. that “The Color Purple” would probably not make a dime, but that he was shooting it as cost-efficiently as possible and would do whatever he could to help it break even.

Instead, it looks as if Spielberg, who was 38 in December, has yet another box-office success on his hands, with some $33.3 million in box-office grosses at the latest count and with the strong possibility of Academy Award nominations later this week to create additional interest in the picture.

Spielberg’s operational base is his Amblin Productions compound, a two-story building in a hollow on the northeast side of the Universal lot. It is so thoroughly in the Sante Fe style that Zorro would feel at home.

Spielberg, who says he might have been an architect if he had not become a film maker, took 500 Polaroids of buildings in New Mexico to guide the designs. It is a handsome and comfortable environment of tile, prematurely aged beams, adobe brick (fired right there at Universal), rustic planters and Indian rugs.

There is a large working vegetable garden for salads in season and there are such non-Zorro features as power-operated drapes, an editing room inspired by one George Lucas planned at his Skywalker Ranch, a stunning screening room (in which Whoopi Goldberg did part of her nightclub act as an audition for “Color Purple”), an exercise room, a game room where cast and crew can relax after a day’s shooting and a board room featuring what looks like an antique sideboard but whose innards--an elaborate TV/VCR electronic console--are lifted into view on the kind of hydraulic column you find in gas stations.

The whole shebang was an outright gift from a grateful studio. “Lew Wasserman said, ‘Don’t worry about it; it’s the rentals on “E.T.” from Venezuela,’ ” Spielberg says. “But I keep wondering if they’ll want to take it away from me.”

What he means is that he is slowing his pace considerably. Amblin made five films in 1985, including the delayed “The Money Pit,” directed by Richard Benjamin, which now opens March 21. In addition to “The Color Purple,” there were Barry Levinson’s “Young Sherlock Holmes,” made in London; “Goonies,” directed by Richard Donner, and Robert Zemeckis’ enormously successful “Back to the Future.”

“It was the best year of my life,” Spielberg says: “My marriage to Amy (Irving), the birth of our son Max, ‘Color Purple’ and the other movies, ‘Amazing Stories.’ ”

Now, he says, he is going to take it easier. “We have only one film scheduled to start in the next six months. I really decided to take it easy, and the success of ‘Color Purple’ has helped me to do it. For the first time, I’m almost satisfied-- almost --with the way a film has turned out.

“Now it’s time to spend time away from the grind of picture making. If you’re here working every day, you tend to start Xeroxing your own style. It gets incestuous.” He may direct a film later this year, but for the moment, Spielberg says, “My career is on hold for Amy. She’s being considered for two Broadway plays, and if one of them comes through I’ll go back with her. She’s been very supportive of me. She spent the entire time with me on ‘Color Purple’ in Monroe, N.C., and that’s not a fun place to spend three months. Nice people, lovely people, but you get the feeling it’s the fast-food testing ground for the country, which is what I used to say about Phoenix.”

Although his track record as a mini-mogul, helping to choose and shape film projects for other directors, in tandem with his co-producers, Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, has been uncommonly profitable, Spielberg says: “I don’t like being a general. I’d never done it before; I’d always been available for hire as a director. Have raw film stock, will travel. I like to think of myself still as a journeyman director.”

But, having had no dynastic ambitions, he insists, he found himself producing two Bob Zemeckis films, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “Used Cars,” and then “Gremlins” and finally in 1985 with five films on the shooting floor.

“I sat back and said, ‘Never again; life is too short.’ ” He, Amy and Max took a six-week vacation, somewhat interrupted, but Spielberg says that after the interruptions he was drawn back to the itinerary, not back to work.

Don Bluth (“The Secrets of NIMH”) is completing an animated feature for Amblin and there are two major projects in preproduction: “Dad,” from a novel by the pseudonymous William Wharton, who wrote “Birdy,” and “Dust,” which Bruce Beresford will direct, an original script about the Amerasian children of GIs and the women of Vietnam. “They’re called the children of the dust,” says Spielberg, “and they’re beginning to be able to come here and join their fathers.”

Spielberg has been consulting with his old friend George Lucas about the film Spielberg may direct later this year. It is, he says guardedly, a love story.

Spielberg can still remember vividly the first film he ever saw. He was 4 1/2 and it was “The Greatest Show on Earth,” whose train wreck can be said to have shaped his life. “When that train came off the screen and into my lap . . .,” Spielberg says, it was destiny that hit him.

His father, who worked in computers for RCA, GE and IBM and who led the family from Cincinnati, where Spielberg was born, to Phoenix, where he spent most of his school years, to Palo Alto and finally Los Angeles, gave Spielberg a Lionel train set. The lad arranged a succession of spectacular head-on collisions, at some risk to the trains. His father threatened to stop having them repaired.

The father had an 8mm camera and Spielberg, then 7 or 8, decided to stage one last grand wreck and film it. “Intuitively, I guess,” Spielberg says, “I put the film together the right way. I figured if you shot one going right to left and one going left to right, it would be clear they were going to crash.” Thereafter, he simply looked at the film whenever the urge to stage a wreck took possession of him.

By the time he hit high school, he had made 16 or 17 short films, and when he was 14 the Phoenix Gazette did a feature story on him, which had the effect of bringing groups of competing film makers into being.

“We all made films about World War II,” Spielberg says. “It was because our fathers had fought in the war and their closets were full of props: souvenirs, uniforms, flags, revolvers that had been fixed so they wouldn’t shoot. I don’t know how many times we blew up Saddleback Mountain. I used good old cherry bombs as my concussion grenades.”

He shot every weekend and, for seven years, he claims, he faked a fever every Monday or Tuesday so he could stay home from school and edit his footage. “I found out I could hold the thermometer to a light bulb and put the heating pad over my face.” (Henry Thomas revealed this autobiographical trick in “E.T.”)

After the first year, his mother caught on to the trick but she was so impressed by his films, Spielberg says, she didn’t protest. But his parents used to coerce him into doing his homework by threatening to take his splicer away from him. Even so, the editing sessions did his grades no good whatever, and he was rejected by the USC film school and went to Long Beach State instead, where he majored in radio and television. His prize-winning short, “Amblin,” led on to a tryout at Universal, and thence to glory.

Until “The Color Purple,” Spielberg’s favorite among his films has been “E.T.,” not simply for its phenomenal commercial success alone but for its human values. He grew up with a strong sense of family (he has two younger sisters) in a tidy middle-class setting.

Exactly a child of the television age (born in 1947, TV’s first full year of operation in this country), Spielberg remembers the family got its first set, a round-tubed DuMont, he thinks, in 1949. But his parents were almost Calvinistically strict about what he could and couldn’t watch. (“Sid Caesar was OK, ‘Dragnet’ and ‘M Squad,’ no.”) Actually it wasn’t Calvinism, it was a combination of Dr. Spock and party-telephone-line neighborhood wisdom in all matters of child-rearing. “You couldn’t use the phone; the line was always busy with wisdom,” he says.

He had successive crushes on Darlene, Karen and Annette of the Mickey Mouse Club and remembers, almost as vividly as the train wreck, those moments when puppy infatuation became what he calls “sexual awe--I hate to use the word sexual ; it’s a little heavy, but there it was.”

His parents separated when he was 15 (a fact of life reflected in “E.T.”), and it reinforced his appreciation of warm family ties.

Spielberg had been working on a treatment of “Schindler’s List,” Thomas Keneally’s book about the colorful and contradictory German industrialist who saved many Jews from the gas chambers, when Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” came to his attention. The decision to depart from the escapist adventures he had done so successfully had already been made. “I was prepared to make a break from the expected,” he says.

What attracted him to the Walker book was “a chance to make a movie that relied on characters to tell the story, not on a story to reveal the characters.

“I was insecure about it commercially, but I was secure about it in that it seemed so worthwhile to present that material to people who would allow themselves to feel it. I made it for people who can think with their hearts.

“The incest, the rape, the brutality are more the surface than the foundation of the book. What attracted me was the underlying sweet optimism of it, the idea that this sweet girl will grow up to be a strong person with a full sense of her own worth.”

The film transcends race, Spielberg thinks, and becomes a more universal celebration of the human spirit in triumph over adversity and of the persistence of love across the miles and the years.

“There’s free verse at the heart of it, a kind of poetry,” Spielberg says. “I didn’t want to take an ax to it and make the kind of film you see every seven weeks on television, another tale of senseless black-white conflicts.”

He shot one scene from the book, he says, a fist fight, that Alice Walker described as such, between a husband and wife, Harpo and Sofia. Looking at the rushes, he decided to drop it because it seemed to confirm an anti-black stereotype. When he announced his decision, Spielberg says, he discovered that Walker, making one of her half-dozen trips to the location, had hoped he would but had been reluctant to say so.

Audiences have embraced the film; critics have been divided, sharply. Spielberg insists he tries not to read reviews, good or bad. “I have friends who memorize the bad ones, word for word, and forget the good ones. That’s crazy.” Some friends of his insisted he read a transcript of Gene Shalit’s rave on the “Today” show.

“I just presume all the reviews are like Shalit’s,” he says, grinning, and knowing it isn’t so. To the complaint that the film goes out of its way to solicit and manipulate a mass audience, Spielberg says: “If you’re a nightclub entertainer, do you want to perform for three drunks or for a packed house? Show me a film maker who says, ‘My film isn’t for everybody; it’s for maybe 2.5 million people in the big cities only.’ When I hear from that guy, I’ll report him to the Directors Guild or to you or somebody. Any artist wants the largest possible audience. I never met a director who didn’t want the biggest audience he can get. It’s not dialing for dollars, but it’s communicating, and if that’s not what you’re trying to do, what are you doing?”

And, he points out, it’s his film, not a product of market research, pollings in parking lots and skin-tension tests--the demographic approach to film making that sends his blood pressure soaring.

“They tested the concept on ‘Close Encounters,’ ” Spielberg says. “I couldn’t believe it. The response was negative. They said I’d better have a lot of sex and sensationalism in it or I’d be in real trouble. But a picture’s never succeeded on market research yet. It’s still the picture-maker’s passion.”

There are various rewards. “One of the pleasures of doing ‘The Color Purple,’ ” Spielberg says, “is that I get two lovely letters a month from Alice Walker.” She liked the picture.

Last in a series on the Directors Guild of America, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary. The other directors interviewed (Rouben Mamoulian, George Sidney, Fred Zinnemann, Arthur Penn) each represented about a decade of the DGA’s growth.