The Story of Steven Spielberg: The Man Behind the Greatest Movies of All Time

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Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people coming to you from where the West begins.

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Speaker 2: In Fort Worth, Texas.

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Speaker 1: Steven Spielberg has been wholeheartedly embraced by both mainstream audiences and critics alike throughout his long and prolific career. He’s universally regarded by both his peers and film historians as one of the greatest American filmmakers in history.

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Speaker 2: Here’s his story.

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Speaker 3: Stephen Alan Spielberg was born on December eighteenth, nineteen forty six, in Ohio. World War II was over and the country was finally getting back to normal. Stephen grew up in suburbia with his three sisters. His Jewish parents, Leah and Arnold, were the children of him Grits. Arnold, a World War Two vet, loved science and machines. After finishing his studies in electrical engineering, he quickly found work in the brand new field of computer science. Here’s Steven Spielberg.

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Speaker 4: He was on the team that engineered the first commercial data processor at RCA in the early fifties, and my mom was a confort penist, so they got my attention in two different directions.

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Speaker 3: It was difficult to find a place where the family could put down roots. Because Arnold was such an outstanding engineer, he was always being offered new and better jobs, which meant that the Spielbergs.

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Speaker 2: Moved a lot.

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Speaker 3: Going from one school to another was hard for Stephen. He was always the new boy in class. His refuge was a cluttered bedroom, and he wrote stories instead of doing his homework. Stephen often longed for a friend who was different like he was. Sometimes he thought that a small, kindly alien would be ideal. When he was required to read A Tale of Two Cities, Stephen’s doodles opened up his future.

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Speaker 5: So what right was?

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Speaker 6: I just made little stick figures in the dog eared sections of the book.

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Speaker 5: You know, anime, one frame at a time, different positions. It was like a flipbook. And I lifted flipbooks and saw these images come to wife.

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Speaker 4: And that was the first time I actually was able to create an image that moved on the pages of that classic.

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Speaker 3: In nineteen fifty seven, Stephen’s life changed when his father, Arnold, received a movie camera as a Father’s Day gift from his wife. The eleven year old Stephen couldn’t wait to use it. At first, he staged film crashes with his Lionel trains and watched the films over and over. He thought they were great. His dad’s movies, on the other hand, were blurry and boring. Stephen had lots of suggestions for improving them, but his father had a better idea. He simply gave Stephen the camera.

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Speaker 4: So I took over the camera, and I began to make stories. My three sisters, younger sisters sold tickets to these at late nolimeter movies I was making.

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Speaker 5: They go door to door to door to door, selling tickets.

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Speaker 3: In nineteen fifty eight, he became a boy scout and made a nine minute film titled The Last Gunfight to earn his Merit badge in photography. Spielberg cast his fellow scouts as cowboys, and when he screened it for them, the troop went wild, shouting, whistling, and cheering. In that moment, Stephen later said, I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. He was twelve years old. Here’s Spielberg on how it all started.

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Speaker 6: I was infatuated with the control that movies gave me in creating a sequence of events or a feeling or a train wreck with two lineal trains that I could then repeat and see over and over and over again. And I think it was just a realization that I could change the way I perceive life through another medium to make it come.

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Speaker 5: Out better for me.

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Speaker 6: And when I realized I could make life better for me through this little eight middlemeter rinky dink medium, I felt really good about my life, myself and possibly bringing some other people into this amazing medium to.

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Speaker 5: Enjoy what I was putting together.

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Speaker 3: Young Spielberg didn’t play sports and could barely run a mile. He was practically invisible to girls. He was short and skinny, and he was Jewish. Living in Phoenix, a city with very few Jewish families, made him a little different. But with a camera, he was less lonely and less of an outsider. While making these films, he found out that given his classmates parts was like inviting them to a really great party, and they all wanted to come. In high school, he attained the rank of Eagle Scout before finding out that his family were moving again. This time it was to Saratoga, California, where his dad would be working for IBM. For Stephen Far worse than the move was the news that his parents were separating. It was the unhappiest time in his life. Yet the move brought him much closer to the center of the film industry. The chance came the summer before his senior year of high school. While visiting cousins in Los Angeles, Stephen took a tour of Universal Studios.

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Speaker 6: They gave everybody a bathroom break about midday, and I got off to go to the bathroom, and I hid in the stall, and I waited until it was really quiet in the bathroom, assuming everybody had left, and gotten back on the bus and left again, and I came out at half an hour later, and I was free. I was on the Universal Studios a lot, but spent the whole afternoon just walking in and out of doors, basically soundstages and cutting rooms, and took my own tour and had an amazing time. At the end of the day, I went to borrow a telephone to call my cousin to come pick me up, and I fortuitously borrowed the telephone of the Universal Studios film librarian, a man named Chuck Silvers, who asked me what I was doing there. I told him the story I just told you, and he laughed and thought that was had a lot of hootspun and showed ambition and showed that I really wanted to be a director, or at least I wanted to break into the business in some way. And he gave me a three day pass on his own name, and I did that, and then I came back on the end of the third day, and so I took a shot at maybe the guard would recognize me without having to show on my papers. And so on the fourth day, I same clothes, walked onto the lot and waved at Scotti the guard mirror Scotti. Scotti waved back. The next two and a half months, during summer vacation, I was on the lot five days a week, every day for two and a half months until school began.

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Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Greg Hangler and to Steven Spielberg himself telling the story of his early life and at twelve, discovering that he was infatuated with the control movies gave him, and gave him a direction that would allow him to make a better life for himself. When we come back more of the life of Stephen Spielberg here on our American Stories. Plee habibe here again, and I’d like to encourage you to subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Every story we are here is uploaded there daily, and your support goes a long way to keeping the great stories you love from this show coming. Please subscribe to the Our American Stories podcast at the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts, and we continue with our American Stories and the life of Steven Spielberg.

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Speaker 2: Let’s return to Greg hanging.

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Speaker 3: Stephen roam the sound stages taking notes. One day, he found an empty office on the lot, so he called the switchboard and had the office’s phone hooked up. Then, with his fake office as a base, he spent his days hanging around sets, talking with directors, editors and actors and learned everything he could about the business. It was the education of his dreams. Even getting kicked off in Alfred Hitchcock’s set was a thrill. Returning to high school for his senior year was quite a letdown, so was getting rejected by the film schools at the University of Southern California USC and the University of California at Los Angeles UCLA. Because of his poor grades, the only school that would take him was California State at Long Beach, and it didn’t even have a film department. Stephen didn’t want to go, but his parents felt differently, so he enrolled as an English major, went to as few classes as possible, and spent most of his time at Universal Studios as an unpaid intern. In order to get a pain job at Universal Studios, Stephen had to persuade people to take a look at his films. So Spielberg wrote and shot a short love story and showed it to the execs at Universal. They loved it and offered him a seven year contract to direct television. Spielberg confessed later, I quit college so fast I didn’t even clean out my locker.

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Speaker 6: I think when I came back on the lot, this time professionally, the first thing I realized when I moved into my official office, not my life legal office, but my legal office, was I knew where all the sound stages were, I knew where post production was, I knew where the back lot was, I knew where all the bathrooms were, especially when I hit in. When I first got off the bus, and I felt like I had come home. I felt like Universal Studios had always been my home, was ordained to be my home for the rest of my life, and I realized I felt very, very much at home.

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Speaker 3: Spielberg’s first job at Universal was directing an early episode of Night Gallery, a series of spooky half hour shows with twisty surprise endings.

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Speaker 6: Now I was doing my first television show, starring Joan Crawford, no less, and the average age of the crew was fifty, and I realized that, oh my god, this was the crew that made my favorite movies of all time. This was the generation that had produced the Golden age of Hollywood. And when I showed up with my acne and my long hair and the viewfinder pretentiously around my neck like some kind of a talisman that would protect me from all evil, I think they took one look at me and they said, this kid better prove himself quickly, or he’s out of here. Because I remember being greeted by tremendous hostility from the crew, from the motion picture crew, and the only friends I had on that first television show were my actors. Surprisingly, maybe not so surprisingly, Barry Sullivan, Tom Bosley, John Crawford. They were the people that backed me, but the rag and file of the crew were just sending daggers my way, working as slowly as they could, not to get themselves fired, maybe to get me pushed off the show because I wound up four days behind schedule on my first professional job.

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Speaker 5: But I learned so much from doing that show.

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Speaker 3: Next, Spielberg directed an episode of Colombo starring Peter Falk, which earned him the rights to direct two action films, Duel and The Sugarland Express. And then there was The Shark. It was decades before modern CGI, so a real mechanical shark was made for a movie they were calling Joe, weighing twelve tons with a body the size of a stretch limo. Spielberg named the shark Bruce, after his lawyer, but while shooting the opening scene of the movie, Bruce sank to the bottom of the ocean and the crew started calling the movie flaws. Here’s Spielberg on how we handled this setback.

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Speaker 5: And the next morning we got the word that they were going to be down maybe three to four weeks with a shark.

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Speaker 6: That’s when I realized, okay, plan B Now, I never planned for a Plan B, but that Monday I suddenly had to improvise a Plan B, which was basically to make the film as scary as I possibly could by suggesting the shark without having to show the shark, and that became my motif for the rest of the picture.

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Speaker 3: Johnny, take my wife for it, don’t look by slap Charlie sla.

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Speaker 6: I promise you that if the shark had been working that first day, and Chrissy Watkins had been taken in that first scene and the way my storyboards had, I had a fin in that shot. I had a conical nose coming out of the water and never.

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Speaker 5: See the whole shark out of a tail.

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Speaker 6: Had there been any evidence of the shark, even on the scene where the peerist pulled out and comes back again and chases the swimmer back in the fishermen, I promise you the audience wouldn’t have left three feet out of their seats and thrown their popcorn into the air when the shark came out. When Roy Schotter was chumming, you wouldn’t have had that shock. Had the shark been used too often and too clearly before that, the shark not working when we needed it to work. Probably added one hundred and seventy five million dollars to the box office.

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Speaker 3: Jaws was a spectacular hit, the first ever summer blockbuster, earning a whopping two hundred and sixty million dollars. It also became the top grossing film in history. Already planning another film, Spielberg knew one thing for sure, My next picture will be made on dry land, he said. When Spielberg wrote Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he decided that there would be no bad guys in it. But looking back today, there is one thing he would have done differently.

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Speaker 6: The difference in when I wrote the story in my twenties and what I would have done today is I don’t think today, with being a dad of seven kids, I would have let my Richard Dreyfus character actually get on the mother ship and abandon his family to this alien obsession and leave the planet. But in my twenties it was something that was absolutely.

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Speaker 5: Would have been my choice.

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Speaker 3: Spielberg’s close friend George Lucas just wrapped Star Wars and came to this set of Close Encounters to see how things were progressing.

00:14:41
Speaker 7: Read five Standing by.

00:14:43
Speaker 3: Here again is Spielberg ook trust Joe Felle.

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Speaker 6: George came back from Star Wars a nervous wreck. He didn’t feel Star Wars came up to the vision that he had initially had.

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Speaker 5: He felt he had just made this little kids movie.

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Speaker 6: And he came to Mobile, Alabama, where I was shooting on the humongous set, and George hung out with me for a couple of days and looked around and said, oh my god, your movie’s going to be so much more successful than Star Wars.

00:15:08
Speaker 5: This is gonna be the biggest hit of all time.

00:15:09
Speaker 6: I can’t believe the set, and I can’t believe what you’re getting, And oh my goodness.

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Speaker 5: So I’ll tell you what. I’ll trade points with it. You want to trade some points, he say, I’ll tell you what.

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Speaker 6: I’ll give you two and a half percent of Star Wars if you give me two and a half percent of Close Encounters. So I said, sure, I’ll gamble with that. Great and I think I came out on top of that bet.

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Speaker 5: I think I did a lot better than George. Both of our movies wildly profitable.

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Speaker 6: Close Encounter has made so much money, rescued Columbia from bankruptcy, and the most money I had ever made on the movie before.

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Speaker 5: Was from Close Encounters.

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Speaker 6: Close Encounters was just a meager success story, and Star Wars was a phenomenon, and of course I was the happy beneficiary of a couple of net points to that movie, which I.

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Speaker 5: Am still seeing money on today.

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Speaker 3: Close Encounters brought Spielberg his first Oscar nomination for Best Director, and Star Wars passed Jaws as the top grossing film in history. It was time for these two mega directors to team up. The two put a screenplay together and hired actor Harrison Ford, who had just played Hans Solo for Lucas and Star Wars. Lucas named Harrison Ford’s character Indiana Smith, and the movie would be called Raiders of the Lost Ark. Spielberg liked everything but the hero’s name. Well, how about Indiana Jones, Spielberg suggested. George Lucas produced, Steven Spielberg directed, and.

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Speaker 1: You’ve been listening to Greg Hangler and Steven Spielberg telling the life of Steven Spielberg, and we learn how he got to where he got and it wasn’t the usual way. Rejected from UCLA and USC’s film schools, ultimately his film school was the backlots of Universe. And then he got his chance, a seven year contract to direct TV and his first reel shot a night Gallery episode, one of the best ever, starring the great Joan Crawford, and the actors thank goodness at his back because the technicians most surely didn’t. Then came Colombo, then came a few movies, and then came Jaws, and the rest was history. And if it weren’t for Bruce the mechanical shark not working, Spielberg noted, the movie would have made one hundred and seventy million less dollars and John Williams soundtrack would have been meaningless. And when we come back more of the life of Stephen Spielberg. Here on our American stories. And we continue with our American stories and the story of Steven Spielberg.

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Speaker 2: Let’s return to our own Greg Hengler.

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Speaker 3: Despite blistering heat a scene with seven thousand live snakes, including five deadly cobras, in another scene with hundreds of tarangulas, Spielberg finished almost two weeks early. When Raiders opened a few months later, it was a smash, the most successful film of nineteen eighty one. Spielberg became a household name. During one of the nights on location for Raiders of a Lost Ark, Spielberg began writing a story of a little alien. What if I were ten years old again, he wondered, and he needed me as much as I needed him.

00:18:54
Speaker 6: When I first came up with the idea of ET. I came up with the actual idea probably when I was a little little kid, feeling very lost and alienated, being this Jewish kid in always all gentile neighborhoods. But then later in life when my parents were divorced, feeling very much.

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Speaker 5: Lost and alone.

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Speaker 6: And I remember on the set of Close Encounters, when I had Richard Dreyfus and Et returning to the mothership.

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Speaker 5: It’s when I get swallowed up into the light.

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Speaker 6: And I had this kind of amazing epiphany at that moment while the cameras were rolling, and I thought, I wonder if I should change the ending of this movie, not another movie, but Close Encounters.

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Speaker 5: What if ET is an foreign exchange student.

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Speaker 6: What if that extraterrestrial who we called Puck stayed behind with Truffau and Dreyfus goes and they take that ET back to Langley or write Patterson Air Force Base, and start to study him and communicate with him and really try to figure out what their race is like and how we can further our relationship.

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Speaker 5: Wouldn’t that be a great movie?

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Speaker 6: Then I said, no, no, no, I’ll save that for another movie. But I was haunted by this idea of an Et that gets trapped on Earth and doesn’t go back into the mothership. So in a sense, when I wrote the story of Et, that was the progression of epiphanies that led up to the actual story of Alien who’s lost and alone in three million miles from home.

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Speaker 5: He doesn’t go a well, he’s curious.

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Speaker 6: He’s his curiosity gets the better of him, and maybe the other aliens were the botanists were too busy categorizing and finding plants on Earth to put in their little greenhouse. But Et was interested in the big redwood trees, and he was walking away. Six hundred year old Et is probably the most lost of all the kids I’ve ever had in a film, but he’s no less lost than Eliot, lost in a divorce, no real friends in his life. And that was the bonding of Et and Elliot, the alien and the alienated, the two souls, lost souls who absolutely require each other for a very short amount of time so they can both survive in a spiritual way. I mean, for me, T it’s the most spiritual movie ever made. And that was not an accident. I mean it was something that I always deeply felt.

00:21:13
Speaker 3: And what Spielberg movie would be complete without the music of composer John Williams.

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Speaker 6: John Williams has made the most remarkable contribution to all of my movies, and they reach the heart universally in every country, on every continent of the planet. John Williams speaks to people, and John rewrites my movies musically, and.

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Speaker 5: I think with ET, especially at the end, I lem and I can make.

00:21:42
Speaker 6: Those bicycles lift off and get off the ground. We can do that, but John Williams is the only one who can make them truly airborne, because the audience lifts off the ground on John Williams violins, and the audience is carried across the moon or the sun with John Williams string section and his horns later on when they land.

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Speaker 5: And I think the last.

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Speaker 6: Fifteen minutes of ET is as close to an opera because of John Williams contributions to that movie. Did anything I’ve ever done before in my life.

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Speaker 8: Right, here’s a clip of Spielberg and Williams collaborating on the music for et.

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Speaker 3: Spielberg operates the film projector well, Williams sits in front of the piano. If it would be convenient to go into the call.

00:23:01
Speaker 5: And done?

00:23:02
Speaker 9: Yeah, I like that matter. It seems like a very natural transition into the loneliness and out of the tenderness.

00:23:13
Speaker 5: Let’s see if you can’t do it, okay, let me go think.

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Speaker 3: The thing is, where do we shift from the call to the theme? Is it on his smile? Is it when he touched his face?

00:23:21
Speaker 7: And the wonderful question?

00:23:23
Speaker 9: And your choices are as many frames long as a sequence.

00:23:27
Speaker 7: It wouldn’t let anybody.

00:23:30
Speaker 2: We could go up together in the team.

00:23:34
Speaker 1: That’s certainly the call.

00:23:36
Speaker 7: Yes, that’s the call. That’s the call.

00:23:40
Speaker 9: And this is the loneliness. This, this is Elliott’s love, this is his heartbreaking?

00:23:43
Speaker 3: Is he looked up again?

00:23:45
Speaker 7: He looks up a second time?

00:23:46
Speaker 2: But then the call has to be there?

00:23:48
Speaker 7: Oh?

00:23:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you’re right. Let’s get that absolutely.

00:23:54
Speaker 9: I always get that confused or sometime sometimes has on the movie. Yet it hasn’t gone up yet.

00:24:07
Speaker 3: Yeah, I’ll say et with Spielberg’s biggest hit yet it made more money than any other movie in history, topping Jaws and even Star Wars. Then there’s Jurassic Park.

00:24:30
Speaker 8: Well.

00:24:32
Speaker 2: To Jurassic Buck.

00:24:33
Speaker 6: I’d want to make a dinosaur picture all my life because I’m a huge fan of Ray Harry Holsen, but I could never find a realistic way to do dinosaurs until Michael Crichton figured out a science that would make it almost allowable, which is, hey, if a mosquito bites, say dinosaur one hundred fifty million years ago, it gets trapped an amber and it’s preserved in amber, and you extract the DNA from the blood inside the mosquito of the Trantosaurus Rex, can we not bring back the t Rex? And it was enough credible science that I went that is one of the most genius combinations of science and imagination I had ever witnessed anybody come up with.

00:25:15
Speaker 5: And that was all Michael Crichton.

00:25:17
Speaker 6: There were a lot of risks involved in an art form that had never been perfected. A main character digital dinosaur had never been done before for the movie, So in a way, Jurassic Park was the first movie that ever made. Its made characters where the entire success or failure of the story was dependent on these digital characters. That was the first time that was ever done, and that was the risk I think all of us took. When you have something which is so unfamiliar to us in our.

00:25:47
Speaker 5: Time, which is a Tyrannosaurus.

00:25:49
Speaker 6: Rex thirty four feet standing upright, something that menacing. It’s not as interesting for me to have people running through a jungle being menaced by a t rep because the people are in a prehistoric terra firma. But it’s much more interesting for an audience, I think, to put a t Rex next to a modern car, or put raptors inside a modern industrial kitchen or inside a laboratory with computers everywhere.

00:26:19
Speaker 3: Jurassic Park was a landmark in visual effects and earned an unprecedented nine hundred and fourteen million worldwide.

00:26:28
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Greg Hanglo tell the story of Steven Spielberg, and we heard about raiders in the Lost arc A huge hit then came et and even bigger hit et and Elliott Spielberg noted with the alien and the alienated, they required each other to survive in a spiritual way. Quote it was the most spiritual movie I ever made, end quote. And the last fifteen minutes of et, Spielberg would go on to note was the closest thing to an opera than anything I’ve ever done in my life. And that, of course was thanks to the music of John Williams. And then, of course came Jurassic Park. And that was the first movie, Spielberg noted, in which the movie is dependent on digital characters. When we come back more of the remarkable story of Stephen Spielberg here on our American stories, and we continue with our American stories and the life of Steven Spielberg. Let’s pick up where we last left off with Greg Hengler and Spielberg himself.

00:27:47
Speaker 3: The tremendous success of what Spielberg dubbed his popcorn movies gave him more creative freedom, freedom to create Schindler’s List. Schindler’s List relates a period in the life of Oscar Schindler, a Nazi German businessman who saved the lives of more than thirteen hundred, mostly Polish Jewish refugees from the Holocaust by employing them in his factories during World War II. Spielberg did post production work on Jurassic park at night in Poland and film Schindler’s List during the day. Here’s Spielberg sharing with us the story of casting real Germans to play the Nazi SS soldiers and why people should see Schindler’s List.

00:28:34
Speaker 6: Many of the German actors who interviewed for Schinder’s List, and I saw many of the interviews on tape, many of them actually knowing I was watching the tape or would be watching the tape, apologized for the generation for sitting theirs when I got there, and I began to work.

00:28:50
Speaker 7: On Schimmler’s List.

00:28:52
Speaker 6: Once those same German actors put on the uniforms of the Waffen SS, my attitude chained and I couldn’t talk to them. I couldn’t, and in between shots they would be smoozing with me, trying to ask me questions about et and Raiders of the Lost Ar, questions that someone who liked those movies would ask the director. And I didn’t really want to make small talk. I couldn’t get past the uniform, and then my prejudice began to come out, and I began to look at it and I began to say, my goodness, you know, how can I be blaming you know, the sins of the fathers on to the sons and daughters. And then one day an amazing thing thing happened, very early in the schedule, Thank goodness, we had passover.

00:29:31
Speaker 7: It was a rabbi there and a lot of.

00:29:32
Speaker 6: My crew and cast came in and then in walks all the German actors they put on yamkas. They sat next to the Israeli actors and these really has opened up the ha Goddess the prayer books and began to show the German actors what Passover is all about.

00:29:48
Speaker 7: And I cried because.

00:29:50
Speaker 6: I saw something beautiful that was essentially an entire generation of young German actors that are not culpable and should never be blamed and should never have any fingers pointed at them for something that.

00:30:05
Speaker 7: They weren’t around to stop.

00:30:07
Speaker 6: And that was the message I wanted people to hear, that generations were saved by Oscar Schindler. Thirteen hundred people spawned six thousand descendants, compared to the four thousand descendants that are alive in Poland today, down from three million Jews before nineteen thirty nine.

00:30:31
Speaker 3: One of the reasons Spielberg made Schindler’s list was that he wanted his children to understand this terrible time in Jewish history. It was the first time my children ever saw me cry, he said. When Schindler’s List opened, audiences cried too. Though it was sad and sometimes shocking, it also showed courage and decency overcoming terrible evil. The film won the Oscar for Best Picture in nineteen ninety three, and Spielberg won his first Oscar for Best Director. In nineteen ninety four, Spielberg’s friends Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen approached him about starting a film studio together. It was a daring idea. Nobody had launched a new studio in decades because it was so difficult and expensive. Yet Katzenberg had produced a string of animated mega hits for Disney, including The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King. David Geffen, whose work in the music business had made him a billionaire, was one of entertainment’s most powerful deal makers. Spielberg was now considered the world’s most successful director. If anybody could launch a new studio, it was these three. In October nineteen ninety four, DreamWorks Studios opened for business. It was under the DreamWorks label that Spielberg shot saving Private Ryan. Here’s Spielberg.

00:31:58
Speaker 6: What motivated me to do Private Ryan was this was a tribute to my dad. This was one hundred percent for my dad. When I got the Oscar for Ryan and I said, Dad, this is for you, This is yours. I mean, I told my dad many many years ago I was going to make a World War two movie for him.

00:32:12
Speaker 5: The only thing the.

00:32:12
Speaker 6: Disappointed my dad was it was about Europe, not Asia. And my dad said, but Steve, you didn’t tell my story. What about the four four hundred and nineteth bomb squadron. You know, what about those who flew the Hump, my friends who were lost flying the Hump?

00:32:25
Speaker 7: You know?

00:32:26
Speaker 5: I said, oh, Dad, you’re right, I didn’t tell that story. But this is for your generation.

00:32:30
Speaker 6: I remember having the first industry screening of Raiders the Lost Ark, and I had two director friends of mine who I really respect, saying, wow, the greatest sequence of this movie is the first fifteen minutes for that rolling ball and the spiders on the guy’s back.

00:32:45
Speaker 5: And I kept thinking, oh my god.

00:32:47
Speaker 6: I taught myself and Raiders and the movie never recovered, and I felt that I was about to do the same thing.

00:32:53
Speaker 5: When I shot Saving Private Ryan.

00:32:55
Speaker 6: I didn’t quite know what that opening sequence was going to be, because I shot the whole movie in continue and I also certainly shot the whole first sequence in continuity. The first shot of the movie is Tom Hanks’s hand shaking his canteen to his face, reveal his captain’s bard and show its Tom Hanks and pull the camera back in the Higgins boat.

00:33:14
Speaker 5: That was the first shot of the movie.

00:33:16
Speaker 6: And I went right through to the end of the picture in continuity, which meant that I was making up the entire opening attack of Omaha Beach the landings. When I say made it up, I didn’t make up things that didn’t actually happen, that Steven Ambrose hadn’t written about her, other veterans hadn’t informed me of. But I did the whole thing stream of consciousness. I had no storyboards, no pre visualization on the computer. Did the whole thing from actually up here in a weird way because the whole thing was being improvised in a very safe, rational control way. But improvided nonetheless, and I think if anything gave that scene its impact, its first person in your face impact It was because I didn’t know what was going to happen next.

00:34:02
Speaker 3: Just like real combat, Spielberg knew that, like Schindler’s List, saving Private Ryan could be painful to watch, and he was prepared for his audiences to stay away.

00:34:14
Speaker 6: This particular movie. We felt like we were making a contribution. We’re actually thinking, you know, without patting ourselves in the back, that this movie was going to come out. And I thought nobody would go to see this picture. They might see a few people go the first weekend because Tom Hanks to the Star, but they’re going to be so turned off by the violence they’re not going to come back to the second weekend. And I thought this would be a one weekend wonder But I thought the film was going to add something to inform audiences what soldiers have to really go through when they’re in the hell fire of combat. It’s honoring all the dads who were part of the Greatest Generation by having an old man going to the American semeteritarian Normandy and visiting that actual site.

00:34:56
Speaker 5: Every time I go, I cry. I think the book and place it.

00:35:00
Speaker 6: In a much larger historical context and show audiences today that this really is about the old men now, who were the boys then who allowed us to have a life today the way we live our lives and to have the relative freedoms that we now enjoy.

00:35:17
Speaker 3: Saving Private Ryan was far from a one weekend wonder. It was the most successful film of nineteen ninety eight. It was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and won Spielberg his second Oscar for Best Director. In closing, here’s Spielberg on the secret to his success.

00:35:37
Speaker 6: My job is to put the audience inside the movie. My job is to reduce the esthetic distance between the audience and the experience. I don’t say, okay, now, I just have to make light audience popcorn movies to give them relief from whatever my subconscious demons are that have pushed me into more historical, darker sub I don’t think that way, and I think my intuition has been about seventy five percent right on and twenty five percent not right on, And so I’m.

00:36:08
Speaker 5: Going with the odds. I’m just going with the odds.

00:36:14
Speaker 3: Steven Spielberg has one hundred and fifty nine credits as a producer, in fifty six as a director. A few more of those include Poltergeist, The Color Purple Hook, Catch Me if you can, Munich and Lincoln. His films have set and broken box office records for decades. They often show how acts of personal courage can change history. They have made people, millions and millions of people laugh, think and cry. Nobody, not even Walt Disney, has been so completely wired into what the public wants to see in the cinema, and as a result, his personal wealth is now so vast people have given up trying to estimate it. And it all started in nineteen fifty seven when he borrowed his father’s movie camera.

00:37:08
Speaker 1: Had a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling by our own Greg Engler, And we’d like to thank the John Williams Fan Network, NDTV, the Times of Israel, and the Federal News for the interview footage we used in the storytelling. We learned in this last segment why Spielberg was doing those popcorn movies because in the end, he wanted the creative freedom, the freedom to make Schindler’s List, which would win him an Oscar for Best Picture in nineteen ninety seven and his first Oscar as Best Director, and of course soon thereafter dreamwork starts and a new studio hadn’t been launched in decades, and here were Spielberg, Katzenberg, and Geffen starting it up and their first film, Saving Private Ryan. What he says in the end about what films are about and what he tries to accomplish is putting the audience inside the movie. No market researchers, just one man’s instinct and creative talent.

00:38:10
Speaker 5: The story of Steven Spielberg.

00:38:11
Speaker 2: Here on our American Stories.”