Pass the Popcorn

What does Steven Spielberg know, and when did he know it?

That he’s had a dazzling technical grasp of filmmaking for what seems like forever is beyond question. He also knows, as much by intuition as anything else, what people want to see. With a flair for popular filmmaking unparalleled in his generation, he has, as biographer Joseph McBride suggests, “a rare gift for making audiences throughout the world share his own primal fears and fantasies.”

With that synergy come considerable spoils, and the films Spielberg has directed have grossed an unprecedented $4.5 billion worldwide. In a studio culture where a good movie is one that makes money, Spielberg’s box office success has made him Hollywood’s version of He Who Must Be Obeyed, a figure held in so much awe that in 1984, Universal absorbed the entire cost of his $3.5-million Santa Fe-style office complex without even getting an exclusive production agreement as a quid pro quo.

But does what Spielberg know include how to put adult emotional content into his films? Or is he someone who, as McBride acknowledges, critics are prone to chastise as “emotionally arrested and overly infatuated with technique for its own sake.”

The undeniable power of “Schindler’s List” and its seven Oscars, including those for best picture and best director, muffled those dissonant voices for a time, but they’ve not gone away. Did special circumstances make “Schindler’s List” stand apart from Spielberg’s previous films, or is Spielberg a director with an indiscriminate eye for what is entertaining, whether it’s focused on sharks, extraterrestrials, dinosaurs or the heroes and victims of World War II? And is he right when he claims: “The critics in awe of how much I’ve stretched just don’t know me. This is no stretch at all.”

As long as questions are being asked, how suitable is Spielberg for a biography? A successful life ensures numerous books (and there have already been dozens in several languages with the director’s name on them), but are they worth reading? The days when filmmakers like John Huston, William Wellman and William Wyler lived lives outside of camera range are long gone, and many of today’s directors seem devoid of the kind of exterior--or even interior--life that draws one to the page.

While Tom Powers’ slender young adult biography adds little to the mix, both McBride’s and John Baxter’s books, which total nearly an impressive 1,000 pages, add considerably to the nagging questions Hollywood has been asking about Spielberg. Each presents a close to diametrically opposed point of view, a polarization that extends even to the choice of cover portraits.

McBride, a former Variety film critic whose most recent book was the well-received “Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success,” offers a photo of Spielberg as a sensitive thinker, his hand on his forehead in a classic pensive pose. This image works well with McBride’s thesis that “Schindler’s List,” far from being an anomaly, is in many ways “profoundly characteristic of Steven Spielberg.” Offended by “the disdain of the self-styled intellectual elite for this great popular artist,” a hostility that put him in mind of “the condescension with which such Golden Age directors as Hitchcock, Hawks, and Capra were treated,” McBride constructs a he-always-had-it-in-him scenario intended to counteract what he calls “the contempt of Spielberg’s detractors.”

Concentrating heavily on Spielberg’s childhood (he doesn’t even graduate from high school until page 133), McBride posits that the director, feeling twice cursed as awkward and Jewish in the Gentile environments he grew up in, turned to film when he was 10 as “part of his deep-seated need for acceptance by a society that made him feel an outsider.” Behind a camera, Spielberg has said, is where he’s always felt most at home.

Baxter, a journeyman film biographer with a dozen books to his credit, takes a different approach. Promising an underground account of Spielberg’s life, he calls his “the unauthorized biography” (never mind the fact that both books are), and the jacket photo HarperCollins has chosen shows Spielberg, with black gloves and a baseball cap pulled low over eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses, looking sinister enough to scare himself.

From Baxter’s more cynical point of view, Spielberg, a man who “became instrumental in transforming a cinema of stories and characters into one of sensation,” epitomizes what’s wrong with today’s Hollywood. And on a personal level, Baxter insists that this publicly beloved man is, if not actually “the most hated man in Hollywood,” at very least someone who is “hard to like.”

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Yet, despite its cheek and its flair for odd facts (it claims, among other things, that Spielberg avoided elevators for years, didn’t take his shirt off in public until he was 30 and worried so much in the early ‘80s that his pubic hair turned gray), Baxter’s book feels like a once-over lightly. When it comes to considering why, for instance, the director felt compelled to shave a year off public declarations of his age or how he came to have carte blanche on the Universal lot before he even finished high school, it is McBride’s book you invariably trust on a factual level.

For whatever its flaws, “Steven Spielberg: A Biography” is based on a prodigious amount of research. McBride interviewed 327 people (including father Arnold Spielberg), dug up documents as far back as a grandfather’s will and even got an invitation to the director’s 30th high school reunion. McBride found acquaintances who told him how the boy Spielberg behaved at the movies (“a bit rowdy”) and performed on a first date (“On a scale of one to 10, he was probably a four”). Was the 6-year-old future director frightened by a crack on his bedroom wall, as one story has it? McBride tracked down the house’s current owner for a report of the wall’s condition.

Demon researcher that he is, McBride has come up with more negative stories about Spielberg than Baxter, starting with a relish for torturing his younger sisters that verged on the sadistic. As an adult, Spielberg did some questionable fancy footwork to escape the implications of the “Twilight Zone” tragedy, in which three people were killed, and although he spent $65,000 to buy a Rosebud sled from an auction of “Citizen Kane” memorabilia, he balked at helping Orson Welles find work. (“Why can’t I direct an ‘Amazing Stories,’ ” McBride quotes Welles as plaintively wondering about the Spielberg-run TV series. “Everybody else is doing ‘Amazing Stories.’ ”) But after reporting his findings, McBride seems uncomfortable with the implications of what he’s turned up. You can almost sense a darker Steven Spielberg lurking in the shadows, eager to burst the bounds of this book, a Mr. Hyde to McBride’s Dr. Jekyll.

But even if you buy McBride’s insistence that the director’s most disappointing works, like “Hook,” “fascinate because they reveal so much about their maker,” even if you are convinced of Spielberg’s preeminent artistic worthiness by the book’s at times ponderous and hectoring tone, it is difficult to consider the director’s career without giving credence to Baxter’s point: Spielberg’s success has not been good for the movies.

As Roger Bannister’s sub four-minute mile made runners reconsider what was possible, Spielberg’s knack for pushing the envelope of potential worldwide gross (“Jurassic Park” has made a record $900 million, and its sequel, “The Lost World,” is already at $200 million-plus domestically) has made the studios believe in the Grail of astronomical profits. Which means an increase in films whose characters are more artificial than their special effects, films dumb enough to make any sane person weep.

Though he can’t be held personally responsible for each of those films, Spielberg can’t escape their shadow either, especially when his own work (“1941,” “Always,” “The Color Purple,” “Hook”) has been frequently lacking in meaningful character development. Notwithstanding films like “Schindler’s List” and “E.T.--The Extra-Terrestrial” and McBride’s determination to infuse sensitivity and meaning everywhere, his thesis that Spielberg’s other films are generally underappreciated does not hold. Just because yesterday’s popular filmmakers were undervalued does not mean we have to compensate by excessively venerating today’s.

There are other reasons “Steven Spielberg: A Biography” is not completely satisfying, reasons that are out of McBride’s control. First, the director is still in the prime of his career, and it is frankly too soon for the kind of definitive biography this volume would like to be. More distance is needed, both by the author and from the gushing schoolmates and dazzled co-workers who are interviewed at length.

Second, the truth is that, heretical as it may sound, Spielberg’s life is not all that interesting. Even factoring in the experience of anti-Semitism in high school that looks to have been the key factor in giving “Schindler’s List” its special quality, very little about the circumstances of his life is dramatically compelling. Spielberg, without doubt, is ideally experienced through his work on screen. As for the rest, consider the words of Henry Miller. “In books, you get the best part of the man,” he wrote to a fan who wanted some personal contact. “To see and touch the author is just a sort of fetishism.”