CBS Sunday Morning Interview With Steven Spielberg

[erik]

Leslie Stahl interviews Steven Spielberg on his career and his childhood upbringing (a great deal of which took place while growing up in Arizona) on CBS Sunday Morning. His newest film The Fabelmans will be out in select cities this coming Friday (November 11th) and in wide release at Thanksgiving:

[MokyWI]

Thanks erik, I am seeing this movie ASAP. Right up my alley and down my drain!

[erik]

I obviously have a huge personal bias towards him, but Spielberg has this way of glomming onto a story that he believes in and that he wants to bring to film. And while the box office take of his films is quite staggering (it's estimated in the billions), that particular fact only tells part of the story. It's not always easy to articulate what it is about his films that cause people to flock to them as they have done for decades.

[rick]

https://www.instagram.com/p/ClVFP4jOeQV

[erik]

A lot of times that's what he had to do in order to keep his self-worth. He and his family lived in neighborhoods around America that were almost exclusively WASP enclaves, and it often seemed like his was the only Jewish family in those places. be it Cincinnati, where he lived from the time he was born in December 1946 until 1952; Camden, New Jersey [from 1952 to 1957]; Phoenix from 1957 to 1964; and Saratoga from 1964 until he moved to Los Angeles in mid-1965. Saratoga, which is on the edge of what we now know as Silicon Valley, was not only very WASP, but, as one of Spielberg's teachers at the time said, politically it was somewhere to the right of Attila The Hun; and this was where he experienced the most virulent form of anti-Semitism.

He always considered Phoenix his actual hometown because it was really there that he started on that "hobby" of his that obviously morphed into, how shall we say, something a bit more. In fact, one of the neighbors who participated in the home movies he made there in Arizona went on to do some great things of her own in the entertainment field, namely Lynda Carter, a.k.a. Wonder Woman.

I am struck by how much Spielberg actually has in common with Linda Ronstadt herself. Both are Arizonans (though Linda was actually born there); both were shy and self-conscious in their youth; both experienced and/or saw bigotry of some form directed against either them or those like them; and both went on to do transformational things in their fields, while losing none of their humanity or becoming so utterly full of themselves, which happens far too much in the entertainment industry.