The God of the Techies
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, in January 1994, a pimply young technician saw a man in baggy jeans and a salmon-colored sweatshirt wandering the caverns of the Convention Center, hands clasped behind his back like a general surveying conquered territory. The man wore a baseball cap that read "Brown University" — his stepdaughter had just been admitted — and the gray in his beard seemed, to those who remembered the wunderkind, almost improbable. Around him orbited Lew Wasserman, the dapper chairman of MCA, and Sidney Sheinberg, the company's president, two of the most powerful men in Hollywood, hanging back like courtiers. Everywhere one looked there were variations on themes from his movies: dinosaur simulators, archaeological adventure games, shark-attack rides, alien encounters. The techie murmured to his companion, "Look, it's God." His companion craned his neck. "Hey, you're right," he said. "God."
The god in question had, at that moment, no idea what he wanted to do next. For the first time in a career that had been defined by relentless forward momentum — a new project always begun before the last one's receipts were tallied — Steven Spielberg was adrift. He had just completed a black-and-white, three-hour-and-fifteen-minute film about the Holocaust that he'd spent a decade avoiding, a film so far outside the visual grammar that had made him the most commercially successful director in history that it seemed to have been made by someone else entirely. And in a sense, it had been. The man who emerged from the production of Schindler's List was not the man who had entered it. "I'm kind of in a pickle," he told a reporter, "and I'm looking forward to not getting out of it for a long time."
This is the central paradox of Steven Spielberg's life, and it has never been resolved: the boy who wanted nothing more than to please an audience — who measured his worth by filled seats, who felt "more like P. T. Barnum than John Ford" — was also the boy who grew up around people with numbers tattooed on their forearms, who learned to count from a Holocaust survivor who turned his arm over and said, "See, it becomes a six. It's magic. And now it's a nine. And now it's a six." How do you reconcile the man who invented the summer blockbuster with the man who made the century's definitive film about its greatest evil? How do you reconcile the sandbox with the gas chamber?
You don't. You hold both.
By the Numbers
The Spielberg Empire
$10.7B+Worldwide box office gross as director
34Feature films directed (1971–2025)
3Academy Awards for Best Director
7Best Picture Oscar wins as director/producer
59,000+Testimonies collected by USC Shoah Foundation
$22MBudget for Schindler's List
103.5Age at death of his father, Arnold Spielberg
The Tree Outside the Window
He was afraid of everything. He will tell you this with something between pride and bewilderment — that there was nothing that didn't scare him. The tree outside his bedroom window in New Jersey, a massive naked thing whose branches looked like arms with long fingernails. The dark. Small places. The sounds that drifted through the house when his grandmother was teaching English to Hungarian Holocaust survivors around the dining table in Cincinnati — languages he didn't yet know were Yiddish, German, Hungarian — and the numbers on one man's forearm that became his first arithmetic lesson. He was three years old. He did not know what the numbers meant. He did not know who these old-looking people were, though they were probably only in their thirties or forties. It was only years later, when his parents and grandparents filled in the gaps, that the image — a man croaking his arm, inverting a nine into a six, performing a small magic trick with the instrument of his dehumanization — acquired its full weight.
Steven Allan Spielberg was born on December 18, 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the first child of Arnold Spielberg and Leah Adler. Arnold was an electrical engineer, a veteran of the China-Burma-India theater in World War II, a man of the generation that brought home the bacon and said little about how they'd earned it. Leah was a former concert pianist, a woman of enormous vitality trapped in the amber of midcentury domesticity. She was prone to whims — she once purchased a monkey from a Phoenix pet store and brought it home in the back of her Jeep — and she gave her son permission to want more than the world seemed prepared to offer. "My mom always wanted more," Spielberg has said. "She was the 'more mom.' Enough wasn't enough for her." Arnold supported his son's interests but expected him to eventually set them aside for something practical. The marriage was a mismatch from the start: science and art, discipline and abandon, the man who read the manual and the woman who played Chopin with seven friends in the living room. The tension between them — which would eventually destroy the family — also happened to be the perfect combustion chamber for a filmmaker.
The Spielbergs moved from Cincinnati to New Jersey when Steven was three, following Arnold's job at RCA in Camden. They lived first in the Washington Park Apartments, then in a modest two-story house at 267 Crystal Terrace in Haddon Township, where they paid $14,000. It was here, in 1952, that Leah and Arnold committed the act of inadvertent creation that would reshape American popular culture: they took their five-year-old son to see The Greatest Show on Earth at the Westmont Theatre.
He had never been to a movie before. He thought they were taking him to an actual circus. He remembers the betrayal — no big top, just a structure with red seats and a red curtain — and then the enchantment as the curtain opened and a huge, grainy image in color filled the screen. He didn't understand the story, didn't understand what anyone was saying. But the imagery was amazing. And then came the train crash. The terror was total. He sank as low as he could in his seat, knocked on his parents' shoulders, begged to leave. "My first movie was a movie that scared my pants off," he has said, "and I'll never forget that."
What happened next was the founding act. Back home, the boy who was afraid of everything began crashing his Lionel electric trains into things — watching the cars pile up, the caboose derail — and when his parents threatened to take the train set away, he borrowed his father's 8-millimeter Kodak Brownie camera and filmed the crashes instead. Now he could watch them over and over. The fear was still there, but he was the one causing it. "I was able to, I think, intuitively wrest back control of my fear," he told Terry Gross decades later. "I was the one causing something that was going to maybe have a chance to scare other people but no longer myself."
This is the primal scene, the ur-myth, and like all origin stories, it functions on multiple levels simultaneously. The boy who filmed the train crash was not merely conquering fear. He was discovering that the camera was a kind of instrument for transforming reality — for taking the chaos of experience and imposing narrative order. He would later put a tree that attacked children into Poltergeist. He would put the terror of bigness into the shark in Jaws, the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, the alien mothership in Close Encounters. He would put the sounds of grown men sobbing — the sounds he heard when his father's Air Force buddies came over for reunions, the PTSD he didn't yet have a name for — into the beaches of Normandy. Every major Spielberg film is, at its root, a child's attempt to film the train crash.
The A.V. Kid and the Bully
In 1957, when Steven was ten, the family moved to Phoenix, Arizona. The desert opened something in him. His father handed over the 8-millimeter camera for family excursions, and the boy never gave it back. For a Boy Scout photography merit badge, he made a nine-minute Western — his father's suggestion — and when his troop cheered, something irreversible happened. He had found the mechanism by which the pencil-necked kid, the "Spielbug" of Gentile suburbia, could command attention and even admiration. "He could make people do things," his sister Anne recalled. "He made everything he was going to do sound like you wished you were a part of it."
Anne Spielberg — two years Steven's junior, later a co-writer and co-producer of the movie Big — remembers her brother's adolescence differently than the legend has it. "He had more friends than he remembers having," she says. "I don't think he realized the crushes that some girls had on him. Some of my friends had major crushes on him. If you looked at a picture of him then, you'd say, yes, there's a nerd. There's the crew cut, the flattop, there are the ears. There's the skinny body. But he really had an incredible personality."
By twelve, he had made his first Western for the Scouts. By fourteen, he was shooting a World War II Air Force movie called Fighter Squadron in black and white. By sixteen, he had directed Escape to Nowhere, a forty-minute war film that won first prize at a film festival — a production so commanding that high school football players took orders from him without question. One participant later marveled: "He became a totally different person. 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."
The camera, in other words, was not merely a defensive weapon, though Spielberg has used that exact phrase. It was a transfiguration device. The kid who couldn't win a footrace — who once deliberately lost to a developmentally disabled classmate, then stood on the track bawling, unable to sort out the pride from the shame — could, behind the camera, become a general. He cast his own bully in one of his war films. He filmed the school beach party and screened it at prom, discovering in the process something disturbing: the camera had the power not just to record reality but to reshape it, to make a person appear heroic or ridiculous, and the person depicted might not agree with the portrait. One boy, glorified in the footage, was furious about how he'd been shown. Spielberg never understood why. "Sometimes, you know, there is no logic to the choices and the emotional reactions people have to things," he reflected decades later. "You just have to tell it the way it happened to you."
The family's Jewishness was both central and concealed. At home, they were "Orthodox when my grandparents were visiting," Spielberg has said with characteristic dryness. "The second they went back to Cincinnati, the lobster and the clams came back in." His grandparents were from Ukraine; there was Russian and Yiddish spoken in the house when they visited, which was often. But at school, in the overwhelmingly Gentile suburbs of Phoenix and later Saratoga, California, where the family moved in 1964, Steven shrank. He never denied being Jewish, but he "tried to make myself as tiny as possible when that conversation came up in the schoolyard." The antisemitism he experienced — the taunts, the ostracism — drove him deeper into the camera, and deeper into denial.
The Secret Between Mother and Son
In 1964, the Spielbergs moved to Northern California, and seventeen-year-old Steven enrolled at Saratoga High School, where his name was misspelled in the yearbook ("Stephen Allen Spielberg") and his sportswriting column in the school paper, "Athlete's Feats," betrayed the style of a future filmmaker more than a future journalist. "As precious seconds ticked away," he wrote of a JV football game, "fingernail fragments flew high into the static filled air." He was reducing chaos to a single memorable image — the same instinct that would later produce the bald Nazi removing his coat before a fight scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
But the defining event of these years was not at school. It was at home, and it was discovered not with naked eyes but through the lens of a camera. At sixteen, Spielberg learned that his mother was having an affair with his father's best friend — a man the children thought of as an uncle. He has never fully described how the camera revealed this; the exact mechanism is dramatized, obliquely, in The Fabelmans. What he has said is that the discovery gave him "a secret between myself and my mother. And no kid should ever be allowed to hold that kind of information secret. But I did because my mom wanted me to."
The weight of this secret — and the way it reorganized his understanding of his parents — cannot be overstated. He went from seeing his mother as a parent to seeing her as a person, "almost in a way as a peer because we both had secrets." When the divorce finally came, Arnold Spielberg fell on the sword, telling the children it was his decision. Steven, who knew the truth and was forbidden from saying so, blamed his father anyway — for not being strong enough, for being the kind of man who wore the figurative apron, who deferred to Leah's stronger will. The estrangement lasted roughly fifteen years. "Not close to any longer," Spielberg has said. "We didn't spend time with each other. We didn't visit each other at home and have long talks."
Arnold Spielberg lived to 103. They made up. But the scar tissue is visible in virtually every film Spielberg has ever made. The absent fathers, the failed fathers, the fathers who become distant or evil or unrecognizable:
E.T.,
Close Encounters,
Empire of the Sun,
The Color Purple,
Hook,
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,
Jurassic Park. Even
Schindler's List can be read as a story of patriarchy — of an irresponsible child-man who must become father enough to protect his immense "family" from annihilation. Fatherhood in Spielberg's cinema has a mystical shimmer, precisely because fatherhood in Spielberg's life was so damaged.
Making this movie — $40 million of therapy — and turning my story into a motion picture is never going to help me assuage my guilt about how I separated emotionally from my dad for all those years.
The Boy Who Walked onto the Lot
The summer before his senior year, Spielberg visited Universal Studios and, through sheer chutzpah, turned a multiday visitor's pass into a summer-long residency. He wore a suit and tie. He carried a briefcase. He walked past the guard every morning as if he belonged. "I was trespassing," he acknowledged decades later. "There were a number of books they could have thrown at me if they had caught me but they never caught me."
This is the Spielberg origin story that has passed into Hollywood myth — the kid who hustled his way onto the lot — and it rhymes, in ways that Spielberg himself seems to find amusing, with the premise of Catch Me If You Can, his 2002 film about Frank Abagnale Jr., the teenage impostor. "I was chasing my dreams," Spielberg said. "Whereas all the things that Frank Abagnale does — his chutzpah is based on getting away with something as he's being chased."
He enrolled at California State College, Long Beach, but his heart was never in the classroom. In 1968, at twenty-one, he directed a twenty-four-minute romantic short called Amblin', bringing a record player and a stack of soundtrack albums into the editing room, pacing for two weeks while constructing the film. The short caught the eye of Sheinberg — then head of Universal's television department — who signed the kid to a seven-year contract. Spielberg was the youngest director ever to secure a long-term deal with a major Hollywood studio. He directed episodes of Columbo, Marcus Welby, M.D., and Night Gallery, Rod Serling's anthology series, where he was twenty years old and telling people twice his age what to do.
His first television movie, Duel (1971), was a taut thriller about a motorist menaced by an anonymous truck driver — a film so claustrophobic and intense that it was released theatrically in Europe. It announced, in miniature, what Spielberg would spend the next five decades elaborating: the ordinary person confronted by an extraordinary, inexplicable threat; the camera that never lets you forget the pressure of danger against your back; the refusal to explain the evil, only to make you feel it in your body.
His first theatrical feature, The Sugarland Express (1974), was a commercial failure and a critical success. Richard Zanuck, who produced it with his partner David Brown, remembered Spielberg's first day on set with something approaching disbelief. Zanuck — whose father, Darryl, had run 20th Century Fox — was a man who had seen everything in Hollywood except a twenty-four-year-old kid with acne directing a major motion picture.
"I was thinking, Well, let's take it easy," Zanuck recalled. "Let's get the kid acclimated to this big-time stuff. But when I got out there the first day he was about ready to get this first shot, and it was the most elaborate fucking thing I've ever seen in my life. I mean tricky: all-in-one shots, the camera going and stopping, people going in and out. And it worked incredibly well — and not only from a technical standpoint, but the performances were very good. I knew right then and there, without any doubt, that this guy probably knew more at that age about the mechanics of working out a shot than anybody alive at that time, no matter how many pictures they'd made."
Zanuck and Brown immediately hired him to direct another picture. Its working title was Jaws.
The Shark That Sank and the Summer That Changed
The mechanical shark sank on the third day of shooting. By the time it could be made functional, the production was a hundred days behind schedule and more than a hundred percent over budget. The primary filming location was Martha's Vineyard, making Jaws the first major motion picture set at sea to be shot on the actual ocean — a decision that Spielberg later characterized as insane. He was twenty-seven years old. He had acne. He looked seventeen. "I was panicked," he said. "I was out of my mind with fear — not of being replaced, even though people were trying to fire me, but of letting everybody down."
The malfunctioning shark forced one of the great creative pivots in cinema history. Unable to show the creature, Spielberg found ways to convey its presence without showing it: the foreboding approach signaled by
John Williams's two-note score, the barrels dragged across the water's surface, the shadow beneath the hull. The constraint became the source of the film's genius. What you can't see is always more terrifying than what you can.
Williams — forty years old when they met in the fall of 1972, a serious musician with nearly two decades in the business — sat across from the excitable, nerdy twenty-five-year-old director who had just been offered his first feature. Spielberg whistled a song Williams had written for the 1967 Dick Van Dyke movie Fitzwilly. He had been collecting soundtracks since he was ten. His mother had trained as a concert pianist; his parents took him to Philadelphia Orchestra concerts, where he sat "trapped in between them," he recalled. "It wasn't because I was bored. It was because I was terrified — because of the power of Stravinsky, the power of Prokofiev, the power of Mahler." As a teenager, he wore out a record of Williams's score for The Reivers and wrote an early screenplay while listening to it. "If I ever get a shot at directing a movie," he thought, "I really want to see if this guy will write the score." The partnership that began with The Sugarland Express in 1974 would span more than fifty years and produce some of the most recognizable music in cinema history.
Jaws opened on June 20, 1975, in more than 400 theaters simultaneously — a distribution strategy that was, at the time, revolutionary. Before Jaws, films typically debuted in a single major city and expanded gradually over weeks. Before Jaws, summer was reserved for lesser-quality fare. Before Jaws, no film had broken $100 million at the box office within sixty days. The film displaced The Godfather as the highest-grossing picture in history. Spielberg collected three million dollars, which in 1975 was enough to make him very rich — even Hollywood rich.
But he didn't stop to enjoy it. By the time Jaws was in theaters, he was deeply into production on Close Encounters of the Third Kind. By the time Close Encounters was released, he was into 1941. Before 1941 was over, he was in preproduction on Raiders of the Lost Ark. "I never had a chance to sit down and pat myself on the back or spend my money or date or go on vacations in Europe," he said. "I thought that if I stopped I would never get started again, that I would lose the momentum."
The momentum of what? Not of making hits. Not of keeping the ideas coming. "The momentum of being interested in working. I was afraid that if I stopped I would be punished for enjoying my success by losing my interest in working."
The Ordinary Revealed as Astonishing
If
George Lucas's
Star Wars films imagined an extraordinary world and peopled it with ordinary characters, Spielberg began with the ordinary and then revealed its astonishments. The distinction matters. The boy from the suburbs, the A.V. kid who threaded the movie projectors in junior high, made films that started in recognizable bedrooms and backyards and shopping malls — in the world of brand names and jokes everyone knew — and then cracked them open to reveal the miraculous hiding inside.
Close Encounters (1977) placed a telephone lineman in the path of alien contact.
E.T. (1982) gave a lonely child from a broken home an extraterrestrial best friend.
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) dressed an archaeology professor in a leather jacket and sent him punching Nazis across three continents. The gesture felt generous. It told audiences they already were remarkable.
Spielberg became, in the late seventies and through the eighties, the defining filmmaker of the American mainstream — the man whose visual vocabulary engulfed the culture's own. When car manufacturers wanted to seduce, when political candidates wanted to persuade, when soft-drink companies wanted to enchant, the language they employed was Spielbergese: the upturned faces awaiting miracles, the otherworldly white backlighting, the mischievous golden-hearted suburban children, the toys that fidgeted by themselves. "The way Steven Spielberg sees the world," wrote Stephen Schiff in The New Yorker, "has become the way the world is communicated back to us every day."
And yet. The very gifts that made him commercially peerless — the instinct for spectacle, the willingness to please, the thunderous John Williams scores, the reaction shots that cued the audience to feel wonder or terror — also marked him as something less than a serious artist. "He was a kind of adolescent savant doomed to accomplish nothing beyond Spielberg movies," his less charitable contemporaries murmured — "boys'-book fantasies, light shows, theme-park rides." You could be smug about a filmmaker like that, even if he was richer and more powerful and more famous than you, because the gap between his technological gifts and his artistic maturity seemed almost comical.
The Color Purple (1985), his first attempt at a grownup drama, was met with criticism for sentimentalizing Alice Walker's novel, downplaying its lesbian content, and perpetuating stereotypes. The film received eleven Academy Award nominations and won zero. Empire of the Sun (1987), a carefully detailed World War II prison-camp story scripted by Tom Stoppard from J.G. Ballard's autobiographical novel, drowned under its own pyrotechnics. Always (1989) — a remake of the 1943 film A Guy Named Joe — failed to find an audience. Hook (1991), his lumbering Peter Pan saga, was the most expensive film he'd ever made, and practically nobody liked it, including Spielberg. Throughout the eighties, his films often felt like imitation Spielberg, only preachier.
The message from the industry was clear, and he heard it. "Everybody had sent me the message loud and clear that I was, you know, bad casting," he said. "I was a kid for life. And I almost slept in the bed they made — no, I made the bed for myself. But when I wanted to wake up and do something different many people tried to get me to go back to bed. 'Go to your room. And don't come out until it's something my kids will love, young man.'"
The Fever in Poland
He first learned of Oskar Schindler in 1982, when Sidney Sheinberg called to tell him about the box office for
E.T. — then the most successful film in history — but was less interested in the numbers than in a book he'd just read a review of in
The New York Times. The book was Thomas Keneally's
Schindler's Ark, later published in the United States as
Schindler's List, a historical novel about a German Nazi industrialist who began by exploiting Jewish labor in his Kraków enamelware factory and ended by saving more than 1,100 of them from the death camps. Universal bought the film rights. And then Spielberg froze.
He approached Roman Polanski, Sydney Pollack, Martin Scorsese — anyone who seemed more suited to the material than the man who had made
E.T. and
Indiana Jones. Scorsese was attached for a time; the two directors essentially swapped projects, with Spielberg taking Scorsese's
Cape Fear remake while Scorsese took
Schindler's List. But Scorsese eventually concluded the material was too close to Spielberg's identity as a Jewish filmmaker to give away. Spielberg, too, came to this realization, though it took a decade. "I had to grow into that," he said. "I had a lot of projects on my shelves that were of a political nature and had 'social deed' written all over them. And I didn't make those films, because I was censoring that part of me."
The censorship was not merely professional. It was personal, even spiritual. Spielberg had spent years running from his Jewishness — minimizing it in school, burying it under blockbusters, marrying a non-Jewish woman (Kate Capshaw would later convert to Judaism). The birth of his first son, Max, in 1985, had begun to pull him back. Schindler's List was the culmination of a process that started in the seventh grade, when a 16-millimeter projector was wheeled into his classroom in Phoenix, and a black-and-white documentary called The Twisted Cross showed him, for the first time, images of death — bodies stacked like cordwood. "I was repulsed. And I was terrified," he recalled. "It was a film that got me really to realize that something had happened that would change me forever."
I made Schindler's List thinking that if it did entertain, then I would have failed. It was important to me not to set out to please. Because I always had.
He shot the film in seventy-two days, on location in Kraków and at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, using handheld cameras roughly 40 percent of the time. The cinematographer was Janusz Kamiński, a whimsical, moon-faced, thirty-four-year-old Pole with prodigious dimples — not the brooding artist one might expect — who created a documentary-like black-and-white aesthetic that made the horror feel not staged but remembered. Spielberg threw away all his usual contrivances: the storyboards, the cranes, the zoom lenses. "It looks and feels as though it had been directed in a kind of fever," Schiff wrote, "and fevers are difficult to conjure on demand."
The screenplay, by Steven Zaillian, went through years of development. Spielberg wanted the story to be "less vertical — less a character story of just Oskar Schindler, and more of a horizontal approach, taking in the Holocaust as the raison d'être of the whole project." The liquidation of the Kraków ghetto, which in Zaillian's original draft ran two or three pages, expanded to thirty. "Spielberg said, 'I want to follow everybody we've met up to this point through this sequence,'" Zaillian recalled. "His great strength is really in being able to visually interpret a script. There are three hundred and fifty-nine scenes in this movie, and every one of them has to have a visual idea. And he didn't run out."
The finished film cost $22 million to produce. It earned more than $322 million at the box office. It won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director — the latter an honor that Hollywood, in its cynicism and Schadenfreude, had denied the neighborhood rich kid for nearly two decades. Jeffrey Katzenberg, who ran the
Walt Disney film studios, declared: "I think it will bring peace on earth, good will to men." This was absurd, of course. But the mood of flabbergasted awe was real. Prince Hal had become Henry V. The dauphin had emerged a king.
Twenty-Five Days for Twenty-Five Minutes
Five years later, Spielberg returned to World War II. Saving Private Ryan (1998) opened with a twenty-four-minute sequence depicting the first wave of Allied troops landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day — a sequence that cost $12 million of the $59 million production budget, required some 1,500 people, and took twenty-five days to shoot. One minute per day.
Spielberg did not storyboard it. He shot the entire sequence in continuity — beginning with the Higgins boats, moving through the Belgian Gates, progressing up the beach until, on day twenty-five, they reached the top. He kept imagining the nine surviving photographs taken by Robert Capa, the wartime correspondent who had landed on Omaha Beach with the first wave and whose film was largely destroyed in a processing accident. "If I can make the whole Omaha Beach sequence look like the Bob Capa salvaged photos," Spielberg told his crew, "it might give us a little glimpse into what it was like to actually fight a war like that."
He put most of the principal actors through six days of military-style boot camp. He shot the movie almost entirely in narrative order, so the actors could experience the devastation of their squad's gradual destruction in something approaching real time. He instructed camera operators using handheld devices to run alongside the actors and film whatever caught their attention. The result was controlled chaos — or chaotic control, depending on where you stood. Many World War II veterans who saw the film reported that the combat scenes triggered their post-traumatic stress disorder. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs set up a nationwide hotline.
"I was willing to sacrifice the funding," Spielberg said. "I just wanted to tell the truth, and I didn't think anyone would see that film." More than $480 million in worldwide box office receipts suggested otherwise. He won his second Best Director Oscar. The film lost Best Picture to Shakespeare in Love, an outcome so widely regarded as a miscarriage of justice that it has itself become a cautionary tale about Academy politics.
The man who had started making war movies at twelve — filming toy soldiers in the Arizona desert, eavesdropping on his father's Air Force reunions, watching grown men fold over sobbing from memories they couldn't yet name as PTSD — had finally made the war movie that told, as he put it, "the low down, dirty truth of what it was like for these young boys."
The Sandbox and the Monk
Kathleen Kennedy ran Amblin Entertainment from 1983 until 1994 — a decade during which she witnessed, at close range, the mechanism by which Spielberg produced his work. What she described was something closer to a spiritual practice than a creative process.
Kennedy — who would go on to become president of Lucasfilm and one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood — is a small-town Californian who rose through the industry by sheer organizational genius, the kind of person who could manage a hundred-and-twenty-cut airplane sequence in her head. She understood Spielberg's mind better than most, and what she saw there unnerved her slightly.
"Steven has trouble with a level of intimacy," she said. "He gets close to people to a point, and then it begins to break down, because I don't think Steven is always comfortable communicating his feelings. But I also think it comes from just wanting to be by himself and be close to some creative, inanimate world he can live within, rather than deal with the real world and real people. I've sometimes witnessed him doing this thing: I see him withdrawing, and he's going into a place where he's more comfortable. He goes to that place, and it is completely devoid of other people and other pressures — it's almost Zen-like. And he comes out with extraordinary things. He goes there just like a monk. And he doesn't even know what it is."
What it is, perhaps, is a kind of sandbox. And once he is in it, everything is mutable — subject only to the laws of play. Whatever you throw at him — the Holocaust or Casper the Friendly Ghost, the D-Day invasion or a submarine-sandwich restaurant chain — gets taken back into the sandbox and played with until he has made it marvelous. "The thing about Steven," Tom Hanks once said, "is he's still the A.V. guy in junior high school. You know, the guy who brings the movie projectors around and knows how to thread them."
Consider a scene from January 1994. Spielberg is at lunch with Kamiński, the man who photographed the gas chambers of Schindler's List. Spielberg suddenly changes the subject. "You know what you should try, Janusz? You take a piece of Saran Wrap and put it over a flashlight, and wrinkle the Saran Wrap up. What I do is, I do shadow shows with my hands for my kids. I lie in bed with my kids — we have a white ceiling — and I put a flashlight pitched between my legs and I do these shows where my hands are huge on the ceiling. I do T. rexes attacking lawyers — I do everything. And then last night I had put the flashlight down, and it happened to be next to some Hanukkah wrapping that was clear like cellophane. And I saw the pattern against the wall with the flashlight. And it was amazing — it's like ocean waves on your wall. I don't know how you use it, but it was amazing!"
Kamiński, who is nearly as boyish as Spielberg, looks puzzled beneath his grin. But this has always been Spielberg's problem — "the simultaneous urgency and impossibility of communicating what it is he sees."
The Empire of Play
In 1994, Spielberg joined forces with Jeffrey Katzenberg and
David Geffen to form DreamWorks SKG — the first new major Hollywood studio in decades. Katzenberg, the former Disney executive who had greenlit
The Lion King and then been denied the promotion he felt he'd earned, was a man whose intensity matched Spielberg's own, but whose ambition was more nakedly corporate. Geffen — the legendary music and film mogul who had introduced Spielberg to his architect and, more importantly, to the pleasures of philanthropy through the example of the late Steve Ross — completed the trio with his deal-making genius and cultural omnivore's eye.
DreamWorks would produce Saving Private Ryan, American Beauty, Gladiator, the Shrek franchise, and dozens of other films. It would also hemorrhage money, struggle with distribution, and eventually be absorbed by larger entities — a trajectory that revealed both the power and the limits of creative ambition in an industry increasingly dominated by corporate conglomerates. But for Spielberg, the studio was never primarily a business venture. It was the adult version of the sandbox — a place where he could produce, develop, and direct with a freedom that no existing studio structure could provide.
Through Amblin and DreamWorks, Spielberg became not just a director but an empire. The Amblin compound at Universal — twenty-five thousand square feet of offices, editing rooms, screening rooms, a palatial day-care center, a restaurant-size kitchen, a video-game room, a separate building for directors called Movies While You Wait — was built in 1983 in the style of a Santa Fe pueblo, with genuine baked-adobe bricks that somehow managed to look kitschy and unreal, like the world's fanciest Taco Bell. Nothing was higher than two stories, because Spielberg has a phobia about elevators. His own office sat above a sunny courtyard; walking there, you felt as though you were padding from the pool back to your room at some Mexican resort hotel.
The compound was a physical manifestation of Spielberg's personality: generous, playful, controlling, slightly unreal. It was also a working environment of extraordinary productivity. At any given moment, Amblin might have television series in production, animated features in development, theme-park rides in design, and several feature films in various stages of preproduction. Spielberg flitted from project to project "like some pollinating insect," Schiff wrote, "sinking proboscis-deep into the fantasy at hand, and then going on to the next."
The Anger You Didn't Expect
There is, of course, a difference between Casper and the Holocaust. And the difference lies not in the subject matter but in the quality of emotion Spielberg brings to it. Schindler's List is angry. The terror in Jaws, the wonder in Close Encounters, even the longing for love in E.T. — all those things come, in some way, from the boy in the sandbox; they are beautifully manipulated, but manipulated all the same. The anger in Schindler's List is not. It feels earned and vital; it feels as though it took even Spielberg by surprise.
This anger — the rage of a man who learned to count on a survivor's forearm, who lost more than fifteen relatives in the Holocaust, who spent decades denying his own Jewishness because it was "alienating to identify and to declare yourself as being Jewish" — is what separates the film from everything else he has made. It is not the anger of a craftsman deploying emotion for narrative effect. It is the anger of a person confronting, finally, something he had spent his entire life avoiding.
With the profits from Schindler's List, Spielberg established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation — later the USC Shoah Foundation — to record firsthand accounts of Holocaust survivors. The impetus came from his experiences during production, when survivors shared stories they had never told their own families. "It's a lot easier to talk to a stranger about something painful than it is to your own grandchildren or daughter," he said. "That's what gave me the idea to create a body of living history." By 2001, the foundation had collected 52,000 testimonies across 56 countries and in 32 languages. It has since expanded to include testimonies from survivors of the Armenian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, and other mass atrocities — the largest collection of its kind in the world, now containing almost 59,000 searchable testimonies.
"Schindler's List was never a cure for antisemitism," Spielberg has said. "It was a reminder of the symptoms of it." He has watched those symptoms resurface with undisguised horror — Charlottesville, the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, the October 7 attack on Israel. "I've never seen antisemitism so much on the surface," he told Terry Gross. "It used to be subcutaneous. It used to be hinted at through innuendo and smart-aleck remarks. But I've never seen it so blatantly a part of an entire ideology, which is appalling to me."
The Fable of the Man
For decades, Spielberg had slipped his autobiography into his films under the cover of spectacle. The father who abandons his family — to board a spaceship. The lonely boy from a broken home — who befriends an alien. The dad and son who struggle to reconcile — while hunting a mystical artifact. "I can't think of a single film I've directed that hasn't had some personal element," he said. But he had never made the film without the cover.
Tony Kushner — the Pulitzer-winning playwright of Angels in America, who had collaborated with Spielberg on Munich (2005), Lincoln (2012), and West Side Story (2021) — kept pushing. The more he learned about Spielberg's childhood, the more frequently he found himself saying, "You have to make a movie about that someday." Spielberg had toyed with the idea for decades. But the crushingly personal memories — the affair, the divorce, the estrangement from his father, the antisemitic bullying, the camera that revealed truths he didn't want to see — were not the kind of things he wanted to share with the world.
Kushner — born in Manhattan in 1956, raised in Louisiana, a gay Jewish intellectual whose own work had always trafficked in the intersection of the personal and the political — was the only collaborator Spielberg trusted enough to write the story. Their friendship, forged over the intensity of Munich, had become the kind you usually only have in childhood: the kind where someone knows everything about you. "The decision to make the movie was maybe one of the scariest lines I've had to cross," Spielberg said. "Once, with Tony's help, I got past that, it was a very interesting experience."
The Fabelmans (2022) stars Gabriel LaBelle as Sammy Fabelman, a lightly fictionalized young Spielberg, with Michelle Williams as his free-spirited mother and Paul Dano as his buttoned-down engineer father. It is the story of a boy who falls in love with movies, discovers through the camera a truth about his family that he cannot unsee, and learns that the instrument of his art is also the instrument of his pain. It is, by Spielberg's own reckoning, "$40 million of therapy."
The film received seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. It earned modestly at the box office. It is, by any measure, the most nakedly autobiographical work by a major American filmmaker since — well, since nothing quite comparable comes to mind.
My job is to create a world that lasts two hours. Your job is to create a world that lasts forever.
The Flashlight on the Ceiling
At seventy-eight, Spielberg is preparing a new film — an untitled UFO project for Universal Pictures, with David Koepp writing the script, and Josh O'Connor, Emily Blunt, Colman Domingo, and Colin Firth on board for a May 2026 release. He remains, half a century after Jaws, the most prolific and commercially potent filmmaker alive. In 2026, he became the twenty-second person to achieve EGOT status — the holder of Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards. His influence on the American popular imagination is not a matter of debate; it is a matter of record.
But the image that lingers is not the empire or the awards. It is the flashlight on the ceiling. Spielberg, lying in bed with his children, a flashlight pitched between his legs, making shadow shows — T. rexes attacking lawyers, dinosaurs consuming the bedroom, hands becoming huge on the white surface above. And then the accidental discovery: Hanukkah wrapping placed over the flashlight, and the pattern it throws against the wall, and the man's voice, still boyish at forty-six or fifty-six or seventy-eight, saying, "It was amazing — it's like ocean waves on your wall."
He doesn't know how you use it. He just sees it.
The boy who was afraid of everything found a way to take every fear — the tree outside the window, the shark in the water, the train crashing, the number on the forearm, the father who left, the mother who lied — and project it, enormous and flickering, onto a white surface where it could be examined, mastered, shared. The camera was always a flashlight in a dark room. The audience was always the ceiling.
In his Pacific Palisades house — the one that Douglas Fairbanks Jr. once lived in, and David O. Selznick when he was making Gone with the Wind, and Cary Grant when he was married to Barbara Hutton — there hangs a small Modigliani on one wall and a luminous Monet on the adjacent one. Under the Monet, on a table in the Arts and Crafts style, sit three scripts under glass: originals of Citizen Kane, Casablanca, and Orson Welles's radio broadcast The War of the Worlds. Everywhere else, Norman Rockwell paintings — twenty-five of them. The America that never was, rendered with such conviction that it becomes the America you remember. Spielberg's collection. Spielberg's country.
