Blockbuster Or, How Hollywood Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Summer

Introduction: The Boys of Summer When he was five, Steven Spielberg was taken by his father to see The Greatest Show on Earth, Cecil B. DeMille's movie about the circus -- except he didn't hear his father say the word "movie," only the word "circus." He'd never seen a movie before, but he knew what to expect from a circus: elephants, lions, ringmaster, clowns...After a wait in line for an hour and a half, they entered the theater, and he laid eyes on the row upon row of chairs, all folded up, in front of a blank screen, "nothing but a flat piece of white cardboard, a canvas, and I look at the canvas and suddenly a movie comes on and it's The Greatest Show on Earth." He thought it the Worst Swindle in Town, couldn't believe his father had done this to him. "'Gee, that's not fair,' he thought, 'I wanted to see three-dimensional characters and all this was was flat shadows, flat surfaces.' I was disappointed by everything after that. I didn't trust anybody....I never felt life was good enough so I had to embellish it."The embellishments took many forms, each requiring the sort of improvisational skills known only to those growing up in suburban Cincinnati in the fifties. There was the time he rigged his mother's pressure cooker to explode, splattering the kitchen with food, or the time he tossed one of her cherry pies to the ceiling and watched as all the pie filling glooped to the floor. He was fascinated by anything that had the texture of blood -- cherries, ketchup -- which he could then use to smear over the walls or the heads of his sister's dolls. He was a scrawny kid -- crew cut, ears out to here, like the kid on the cover of Mad magazine -- and ravenously curious, endlessly bombarding his father with questions relating to fire engines and things blowing up. Teachers worried about him; he seemed to go in such fits and starts, always starting one thing, then, getting bored, moving on to the next. "I didn't know what the hell he was," said his mother later. "Steven wasn't exactly cuddly. What he was was scary."It was when the family moved from Cincinnati to Phoenix that the boy's experiments in pandemonium kicked up a notch. The landscape itself promised so much: on the one hand a suburban sprawl of lawns, backyards, and sprinklers, and edging it, the Arizona desert with its scorpions and Gila monsters. The perfect place to lock yourself in the upstairs bathroom, until the Phoenix fire brigade were summoned -- great red trucks tearing up and down the quiet suburban streets, much to the admiration of his neighbor's children. "I thought it was really neat," said one, "seeing the fire department coming through the windows and everything." By this time Spielberg had rediscovered the movie theater, and made the secondary, but equally important discovery that they needn't be just for watching movies. If they had balcony seats, for instance, they were also a perfect place from which to projectile-vomit a mixture of peas, cream cheese, and milk, as Spielberg did on the audience who had come to see Irwin Allen's The Lost World in 1960.The only thing that seemed to induce anything like calm in the boy was TV. He would soak up as many episodes of The Twilight Zone and Science Fiction Theater as he could, and when his parents tried to limit his intake, he would sneak down at night and stick his eye right up to the snow on the RCA nineteen-inch screen, seeking ghostly communion with the black-and-white images that flickered past. "I was this far away from the TV set and there would always be some out-of-the-way channel, some far-off channel that was getting its signal through the station that wasn't broadcasting and there would be ghosts and images of some broadcasting station five hundred miles away."Seven hundred miles away, in Modesto, California, the young George Lucas was tuned into much the same wavelength -- a pixilated blur of Adventure TShone, Tom is the author of 'Blockbuster Or, How Hollywood Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Summer', published 2004 under ISBN 9780743235686 and ISBN 0743235681.