The Unauthorised Biography
STEVEN SPIELBERG
JOHN BAXTER
Further reviews for Steven Spielberg:
‘Diligent, perceptive and with every available anecdote’
SIMON HATTENSTONE, Guardian
‘riveting… retains a healthy objectivity throughout his enthralling account’
PENELOPE DENING, Irish Times
‘… a film-lover’s book, a review of a remarkable era, an exhaustive filmography – a movie about the evolution of Hollywood, with Spielberg as the central character’
JEREMY LESTER, Jewish Chronicle
‘Baxter may have a blockbuster on his hands.’
RICHARD E. GRANT, Sunday Times
‘highly entertaining, packed with interesting information. If you want to know how a Spielberg film was made, what shenanigans went on during the making, or who fell out with whom, it is all here.’
WILLIAM RUSSELL, The Herald (Glasgow)
‘Its usefulness lies in Baxter’s shrewd assessment of Spielberg’s relationship with the wider context of the entertainment industry in general and Hollywood power-politics… the account of Spielberg’s unsettled early years… is illuminating in terms of his later preoccupations.’
HUGO DAVENPORT, Sunday Telegraph
‘Baxter is quietly professional… and makes good use of the copious interviews Spielberg has given throughout his career.’
ANTHONY QUINN, The Observer
‘A very valuable book… the thing that most impresses in his book is the calm, careful and nearly gentle way in which it builds up our disquiet that the movie kingdom and our society as a whole should be so ordered that Steven Spielberg is its Gatsby, its Kane, and such a shining young example… it is Baxter’s most intriguing point that Spielberg not only caters to youthfulness, but extends and preserves it… What is so clever, I think, is Baxter’s sense of a man too narrowly focused to amount to a villain… Baxter’s success is beyond question.’
DAVID THOMSON, Independent on Sunday
‘An impeccably professional film-biographer (he’s already done Buñuel, Fellini, Ford and is now working on Kubrick), Baxter leaves no document unrifled, no fact unchecked, no anecdote untold.’
Sight and Sound
‘… a full, frank and readable account of a man who the public regards as one of the greatest enchanters in the history of film.’
STUART GILLES, Manchester Evening News
Contents
2 The Boy who Swallowed a Transistor
8 Close Encounters of the Third Kind
11 Poltergeist and E.T: The Extraterrestrial
12 The Twilight Zone: The Movie
13 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
16 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
18 Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List
19 The Dream Team
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by the Author
Pre-Credit Sequence The Sandcastle
Filmography
Copyright
About the Publisher
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
I wish that man would go away.
Traditional rhyme
THE FORCE of American popular art lies in its directness, its simplicity, its economy of means and of scale. Analysis may uncover cultural and autobiographical references, sophistications of technique, even profundity of intellect, but the first appeal of a George Gershwin song, a Walt Disney cartoon, a Norman Rockwell painting is, and must be, commonplace delight.
Steven Spielberg embodies this tradition. His films, even the sombre Schindler’s List, are machines for delighting us. Almost always they succeed in doing so. It’s not hard to see why. He traffics in what authors of science fiction, his preferred form, call ‘a sense of wonder’, a heightened apprehension