HBO’s Spielberg Premieres at the New York Film Festival

Director Steven Spielberg seems too young to have a biopic made about him, a filmmaker perpetually in mid-career. His The Post, about the Pentagon Papers will be out this November, he told the crowd pressing around him at HBO’s dinner at Lincoln following the Alice Tully Hall premiere of Spielberg, to air this week. Documentary filmmaker Susan Lacy goes far creating a narrative of Spielberg’s career—and what a career so far! Beginning with footage of the epic movie, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia as inspiration, the film shows Spielberg sneaking onto the Universal Studios lot and literally, in due time, commanding an office and a world in which to operate.

Of course, Lacy goes into the stories around his major films, how Jaws had no shark, or script when they started shooting, how Jurassic Park was innovative because Spielberg wanted to see the dinosaurs walk, and his digital effects team had to deliver. In 1993, he followed shooting on that film with his groundbreaking Schindler’s List, which brought the reality of the Holocaust to the public as never before through a fictionalized version of the story of a businessman who saved 1100 Jews. Accounts of making his films allows Lacy to connect the work, on such masterpieces as ET, Empire of the Sun, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, on and on, with his personal desire to explore families that have broken, through war, death, divorce, much as his own world was hurt in the divorce of his parents.

At Lincoln, Paul Haggis came over to speak about his favorite movie, Munich, and Barry Levinson came by too, and Spielberg lauded him for being the first to use digital effects on his film about Sherlock Holmes. Spielberg was supposed to have directed Rain Man, and claimed that if he had, he would have made it too sentimental. Levinson did a better job on that. Spielberg also features lots of archival footage of himself with his gang, Brian DePalma, George Lucas, and Martin Scorcese from 1968, when they were helping each other with their films. Paul Haggis gamely offered to put that material together, but Spielberg said, he cannot make that documentary because he’d have to get their permission, --and there was a lot of contraband.

Meantime, Meryl Streep was all the rage sporting a plastic purse with the Obamas on one side, and Michelle on the other. She got it from a street vendor, on 34th Street, she repeated proud of her purchasing coup. And the party, with Marlo Thomas and Phil Donahue, Meryl’s daughter Grace Gummer, Taryn Simon, Blythe Danner chatting with Steven’s wife, Kate Capshaw, Greta Gerwig, Eric Fishl and April Gornik, Harris Yulin, and Bennett Miller, to name a few, went well into the night.

Regina Weinreich

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