The Inside Man : For Steven Spielberg, it’s movies at work, movies at play, movies around the clock

While Hollywood scampered around trying to get the Sony-Guber-Peters story right--trying to figure out how Sony hand-picked Jon Peters and Peter Guber to run Columbia Pictures--Steven Spielberg returned from Hawaii and put it all in Zen-like perspective: “Sony,” he explained, “is simply giving the movie business another checking account.”

Spielberg knows something about checking accounts and he has an uncanny, possibly unmatched, understanding of the politics of Hollywood. He has been directing successfully at major studios since the late 1960s--and watching closely. “Sony isn’t pretending to become involved in the creative parts,” Spielberg said, in the middle of a long interview at his Amblin offices on the Universal Studios lot. “Sony knows it’s Americans who know the movie business, and the fact of Guber-Peters doesn’t personally bother me . . . but I’m wondering something: The Columbia logo is the lady with the torch. So will she become a geisha? And I’m wondering what a compact movie feels like. Does a compact movie get great gas mileage?”

Steven Spielberg is emerging from what observers call a prolonged adolescence--into a kind of social mainstreamism. At 41, he is finally assuming a visible role in the film community rather than operating in the background. In April at the American Cinematheque’s Moving Picture Ball--at which he was guest of honor--he roamed the room with the ease of a boulevardier. It was the first time in years his entire family was reunited. It was also probably the last public appearance of Spielberg and actress Amy Irving as a couple. But his separation from the actress is only one of the shifts in the director’s life.

Last summer’s third Indiana Jones movie is probably the end of the most profitable Boy’s Dream fantasy series ever. In his upcoming “Always,” he’s working with stars (41-year-old Richard Dreyfuss and 31-year-old Holly Hunter) close to his own age, in roles that are not larger-than-life. The film, an adaptation of the 1943 “A Guy Named Joe,” is a personal project in a way even “The Color Purple” wasn’t. (“A Guy Named Joe,” a fantasy about a daredevil World War II pilot who dies and returns as the guardian angel for another pilot, has been a sentimental favorite of Spielberg’s since he was a teen-ager. In his updated version, which had been in development for nearly 10 years before shooting began this summer, the pilots are firefighters working in the contemporary American Northwest.)

Spielberg’s receiving the Cinematheque honor represents an aging-down of the Hollywood establishment--Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, and Bette Midler are other Cinematheque honorees. (“The idea,” said Cinematheque founder and artistic director Gary Essert, “is to get people on the crest of the wave, at the peak of their creativity.”) The Cinematheque is about community, on some levels, and Spielberg understands his responsibilities.Simultaneously there seems to be a new relaxed quality about him. It’s as if he might shave his beard any day now, and his friends wouldn’t be surprised. Even the baseball caps could go.

Spielberg says he wants to work less hard in the 1990s than he has in the ‘80s. He wants to have the kinds of experiences he had in Paris when Francois Truffaut spent an afternoon taking him through the Cinematheque Francaise, and they talked all day about movies. He wants to sit again on the beach in Hawaii with a friend like George Lucas or cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, as he did in the early ‘70s, and share dreams.

In person, Spielberg has the same guru quality John Huston used to exude with journalists. Almost nothing he says is unquotable, yet he leaves so much unspoken. There are hardly any “Steven” stories. His life is too relentlessly private to be controversial; his friends are too protective--and besides he’s a symbol, and he knows it. He’s The Untouchable. “I’m a perfect example of the American dream,” is the way he puts it. He’d like it better if his life was more open--he wants to be around actors (“Julia Roberts was here yesterday”) or cronies.

Surrounded by Hopi, Navajo and Apache blankets in his cedar-beamed office--an atmosphere he told author Denise Worrell (“Icons”) was “campus hacienda”--you see why Spielberg is the real star of any Spielberg movie, and why he’s the biggest star in Hollywood. It’s because his whim--about casting or the camera or costuming--is always adhered to. In an era where, as he puts it, “you have to do everything yourself,” he does anything he wants.

It was in the name of the American Cinematheque that Spielberg talked one recent morning, with his friend, fellow director and Cinematheque chairman Sydney Pollack (“The Way We Were,” “Tootsie”). This is how Spielberg ideally perceives Hollywood--more of a creative center, with more schmoozing about movies and less about business. It turned into several hours of talking. “One reason I’m so involved in the Cinematheque,” said Spielberg, “is that I want an atmosphere that’s conducive to an exchange of ideas.”

A generation apart, which means Pollack is more older brother than father, each man is probably a touchstone for the other. Also, they’re both Jewish Midwesterners--Spielberg born in Ohio, Pollack in Indiana--and together they give a new spin to the term Midwestern reach.

Both made the horrific leap from TV directing to movie directing; both can produce and seduce the business and creative communities with ease. But in a community as socially closed as Hollywood, insularity becomes a way of life. Spielberg thinks this reclusiveness is due in part to Hollywood protocol. The image of 1940s Sunday poker games (as depicted in Scott Berg’s “Goldwyn”), or of 1970s Sunday brunches at director Roman Polanski’s, has been replaced. Hollywood’s top operators are family oriented. And you don’t do the same business at Richard Dreyfuss’ son’s fourth birthday as you do in Ray Stark’s sculpture garden.

“I’ve done that a lot,” said Spielberg about the notion of a creative round table. “Didn’t Joyce Haber call our generation the New Hollywood? Before that, George (Lucas) and I were. . . .”

“The Rat Pack?”

“No, not rat. . . . But literally myself and Marty Scorsese and Brian DePalma and George, about a dozen of us, we did hang out. We did go to each others’ rough cuts. We did sit in screening rooms and solicit ideas from each other about how to make the cut better. . . . I sat with Martin Scorsese at the Astoria Studios on Long Island during the making of ‘Taxi Driver,’ and I made suggestions with him and with Marcia Lucas, the editor.”

Spielberg looked satisfied with that memory; it’s from a time when he was less completely preoccupied with his own movies--and offshoots. So you try to keep him in that frame of mind, reminiscing.

“There was a geographic thing (in “Taxi Driver”) in a scene with Robert DeNiro. I said to Marty, ‘Gee, if you shoot that scene over his shoulder, you’ll get full coverage on the scene.’ And DePalma was in my cutting room when we did ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind.’ When he said, ‘I’m really confused about this movement”--Spielberg paused, then corrected himself. “As a matter of fact, it was Brian DePalma who got me interested in using a Rosetta stone for the character’s revelations. Brian said, ‘That mountain better be so unique and specific. We don’t want them to think it’s 10 mountains in 10 parts of the country.’ ”

Spielberg makes DePalma sound patriarchal, almost a fear figure. “ ‘You better find the most unique mountain,’ Brian said. And I said, ‘You know, Brian, you’re right.’ So I went out and found Devils Tower, Wyoming, which is the most unique mountain in the country. . . . That’s the kind of creative stuff that I like, where your ego doesn’t get in the way of accepting something from a close associate or a close peer.”

But “Close Encounters” was a decade ago. Time and multiple Spielberg offshoot movies make the clubbiness hard to come by. Pollack, who comes out of the rough-and-tumble time of early TV, has the kind of sturdiness that reassures people; it wouldn’t be surprising to see him playing one of the father figures in “Field of Dreams,” although he’s only 55. It’s Pollack who’s been called the Svengali of the movie business because he can pull a movie out of a hat--when the screenplay is unfinished or there are other calamities: “Tootsie” and “The Yakuza” are examples. Pollock is up from the ranks, in a way Spielberg isn’t.

“It was four ‘Ben Caseys’ at a time,” Pollack remembered. “Prepare, shoot. Prepare, shoot. Pure practical stuff. You try to put it together as well as a carpenter. And after four or five years of that, maybe somebody would give you a film to do. Some of us were able to do a little more, and some of us weren’t. Some stayed in television, some faded away.”

Spielberg nodded knowingly. From the beginning he had a sense of politesse about the community--his short tenure directing episodic TV taught him enough that he wanted out, and got out. But Spielberg’s longing for camaraderie is almost palpable. “Don’t you think that when Reagan and Gorbachev first met, one of the first things they wondered was what was in each other’s refrigerators? Beyond any agenda, there’s a curiosity about what’s in the other guy’s refrigerator. It’s the same thing with film makers.”

Yet Spielberg doesn’t deny the privacy label. He admits to watching movies primarily in his screening room at Amblin, and often by himself. (When Spielberg’s own life story is filmed, one can imagine this scene.) “When I have a couple of hours, and I can order up a film, I’ll always run an old movie, some old MGM classic. Because the difference in looking at ‘Mrs. Miniver’ on videotape and looking at ‘Mrs. Miniver’ on 35-millimeter good black-and-white film is the difference between observation and inspiration.”

Spielberg paused, and suddenly he seemed to be a teen-ager. “I can just sit in a screening room and see this movie and suddenly time stops. There is no distance between myself and that generation of the 1940s. I’m right there. That’s the . . . kinetics between the viewer and the screen. I’m talking about a large screen versus a little 21-inch screen. If you see a movie that’s truly great, you just don’t recover.”

Spielberg stays current, too. “If it’s new,” he said, “I’ve seen it.” But asked whether he considers this a great period for movies, he takes a deep breath and says sadly, “The last great movie was ‘Godfather I.’ That was my last great movie. And before that it was ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’ I’m a real snob in that sense. Those were the two last great films. . . . I’m not saying (“Godfather”) is the only great movie before or after. I’m just saying it’s the last one in terms of a classic, of ranking right up there with ‘Grapes of Wrath.’ ”

You can’t put Spielberg and Pollack in room without mentioning movie stars. Pollack works strictly with stars; Spielberg almost never does.

“Sydney has directed Meryl Streep, Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Natalie Wood, Barbra Streisand, Al Pacino, and on and on,” said Spielberg, with some awe of the names rolling off his tongue. “I think to myself, ‘I’m 41. Will I have the time to direct Dustin Hoffman or Robert DeNiro or Barbra Streisand?’ ”

Said Pollack in a kind of flip aside: “I am lazy. I read a picture and I see a movie star. Maybe if I started differently, I’d have developed differently. But the first movie I ever did had two stars in it (“Slender Thread” starred Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft). To me, growing up in Indiana, everybody in the movies was a movie star. Debra Paget was a movie star in South Bend.”

(Pollack has just started directing “Havana” in the Dominican Republic. It’s his first film since his Academy Award-winning “Out of Africa,” and his eighth effort with Redford. “I don’t know,” Pollack said, “I keep saying I’m gonna do a movie with a nobody.”)

“I don’t know that you should,” said Spielberg, adding that he doesn’t feel he’s hurt himself by avoiding using big stars in his films. “I’ve been OK without stars,” he said. “The reason I didn’t use stars is that I liked people who bring very little baggage. It’s very hard when you have an icon playing an ordinary person. My main drive since I began was not to use people who were on the cover of Rolling Stone.”

And now? “At 41, I’m starting to want to work with Meryl Streep. I have a stomach ache because I haven’t worked with and directed Dustin Hoffman yet. I have a pain in my right side because I haven’t worked with Robert DeNiro. I would love to do something with Tom Cruise.”

Could one reason be that Spielberg was the star of every Spielberg movie? That he was always the muscle? No confrontations, please, no star wars.

“That’s a myth,” Spielberg answered flatly. “You don’t give up a single bit of control.”

Pollack picked up the cue: “I’ve done 14 films, and none of them haven’t had major stars. And I’ve never not had control. . . . In most cases, movie stars hire themselves out because they trust and are seduced by the character they want to play. The idea of real luxury to intelligent movie stars--and most of them are intelligent--is to find a director they can trust, so they can bury themselves in the part they are playing. . . . I don’t mean you don’t clash. But I’ve worked with people who are supposed to be the toughest, going all the way back to Burt Lancaster, who had a fiendish reputation, and that was when I was a kid. Barbra, Pacino, Redford, Newman, Faye (Dunaway), Meryl. . . . I’ve worked with people who have reputations. You think ‘Boy, oh boy, you are gonna get into a big pissing contest.’ It’s just not true. Or it’s not true unless something is wrong.”

“Making movies is too practical,” Spielberg added. “There’s too little intimacy and too much immediacy about getting the shot, getting the day’s work before the sun is covered. It really is work.”

All work and no play? On a Sunday afternoon, from a window of Pia Zadora’s oceanfront house, you might spot her next-door neighbor Spielberg walking the beach with his son Max, or with one or two of weekend-neighbor Goldie Hawn’s kids. (Dreyfuss and Hawn are probably Spielberg’s two closest star friends; the three have been through various ups and downs, including parenthood--which is taken very seriously in Hollywood now, as opposed to a decade ago, when children weren’t seen or heard.) Spielberg says Warner chairman Steve Ross is trying to teach him to relax, and he sounds relaxed enough when talking about a social evening at Spielberg’s beach house in New York’s East Hampton. But the anecdote, if you really hear it, is all about work.

“The (Abstract Expressionist) Willem de Kooning,” began Spielberg, “was turning 80. And we were having a little birthday party in East Hampton. Dustin (Hoffman) and myself and Steve (Ross) and his wife Courtney and Bill’s wife Elaine, who just died this year, and a few other people.” Spielberg’s truly private self is obvious here--he sounds slightly nervous: He doesn’t want to impress by name-dropping, and on the other hand this is the world he travels in. He doesn’t sculpt or perfect anecdotes as actors do. A Jack Lemmon or a James Stewart can become instantly intimate with an interviewer because it’s part of the job, and the training.

But Spielberg wanted to make a point here: “We were sitting there, and Dustin was trying to express to Willem de Kooning how fortunate he is to be a painter. There is nothing between himself and his impulse and the canvas. There is nothing there but divine inspiration. And De Kooning wasn’t understanding this. And Dustin said, ‘Well, we make movies. We have a hundred people on the set all the time. And there are people hovering to fix your makeup, and the noise of pounding nails into wood all the time, and headaches from the noise. . . . You can take as long as you want to finish a canvas, but we have pressure to finish a film.’

“Willem didn’t understand. He was 80 years old, and he’s really into his art. And Dustin said, ‘Here’s an example: “There’s a train track. Say Steven is standing on a train track, with a camera, and he’s trying to get a shot in another direction, and the train is coming, and he’s working to get the shot. The train is getting closer and closer. He’s got the actors saying their lines as fast as they can. Just as he gets the shot, he cuts to the track--and the train passes.”

Spielberg paused before the punch line. “Willem looked at Dustin with great sincerity and said, ‘Why does he make movies on railroad tracks?’ ”

It was the kind of memory that made Spielberg laugh out loud. “Dustin was trying to show Willem the metaphor, the analogy. . . . That we don’t have time to think of ourselves as artists. Or to wax poetic. That all takes place when you’re writing the screenplay, or when you rehearse. But once you’re making a movie. . . .”

In conversation, Spielberg’s age--rather, his youth--keeps popping up. It puts him in perspective, in a way, to remember that he’s just 41. “But I’m only made aware of that when I’m at a ceremony like the Moving Picture Ball, an honor like that . . . and yet I know I got started very young. I was within two months of my 21st birthday when I directed Joan Crawford. I was making movies when I was 12 . . . so, I feel a lot older than I actually am. I’ve been really serious about this as a career since I was 12 years old . . . I don’t excuse those early years as a hobby, do you know what I’m saying? I really did start then.”

And there really was a turning point. “I was 15 1/2 when I saw ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ and it turned me around,” Spielberg said. “I really kicked into high gear and thought, ‘This, I gotta do. I gotta make movies. I gotta really make movies.’ But even before that I was passionate about it, I had a lust for it. So, even though I’m 41, I feel like I’m older in terms of my experience.”

There is real nostalgia here for other eras: “You have to do everything yourself now,” complained Spielberg; he has at moments a quality that might be called “fixer-psychic”--he sees things and people as they should be seen. He’s not thrilled with what he sees around him. “In the old days, you had editors who were like your right arm. Casting directors who were like your left arm. Producers who were real producers, who shared your heart, and they were your alter-egos. The producer was the person whose taste filtered down. And they had conscience. And, with that kind of teamwork, you can make more than one film a year.”

Spielberg sounded defeatist when asked how such a hierarchy got so fractured (with lower-budget exceptions like Woody Allen). “It became every person for themselves. The business got too expensive. People say it’s inflation.” Spielberg went into a businessman mode for a moment.

“You’d think Bette Davis would have been making the same money that Meryl Streep is making today, if you figure where the dollar was in the 1930s, and where the dollar is in the ‘80s. But that’s not true. In fact, Bette Davis’ equivalent per picture is $350,000, where Meryl Streep’s price is several million dollars.. . . Bette Davis made about 40 films in seven years, and Meryl Streep has done something like 11. And she works more than anybody.”

What Spielberg is talking about is a drastic difference in the movie business of 1939 and 1989. What he sees “all around me is . . . anxiety everywhere. There’s a palpable tension. Careers begin or end based on one movie. Your membership in the club is extended or denied based on one picture. There’s no room for naivete now. Everything has to succeed--or else. I’m telling you it’s viral.”

Spielberg wasn’t finished: “I shouldn’t have anything to worry about,” said the man whose personal fortune can only be guessed at. “I suppose people will always give me jobs. Or I could go away and hide. But I still feel tension all around me, everywhere I look.”

So what happened?

“It stopped being a family, Hollywood did. And it became everyone for himself. It stopped being a community. And started becoming independent acts of heroism. The director is thought of as no longer a collaborator, but as a kind of supreme being. I don’t believe that, by the way. As a director I can make ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ but I can’t be in it, like Harrison Ford. And I like that. I like it when somebody else does it for you.”