Show Business: I Dream for a Living

Steven Spielberg, the Prince of Hollywood, is still a little boy at heart

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(8 of 10)

Amazing Stories may not be an instant hit; with the exception of the Walt Disney series, no anthology show has finished in the Nielsen Top 25 since Alfred Hitchcock Presents a quarter-century ago. But it could blaze trails, or at least reopen them. With this show Spielberg is attempting to transform the weekly series from a comfortable habit to an event worth anticipating and savoring. Each Sunday night at 8, a new baby movie, with a spooky story, feature-film production values and, often as not, a distinctive visual style. One of Spielberg's own episodes, an hourlong drama called The Mission, envelops its suspense in a visual style that suggests Rembrandt on Halloween. More important, it finds a new twist for the Spielberg credo: the miraculous power of the artistic imagination. This story of a World War II gunnery ace + who, in the author's provocative words, "literally paints himself out of a corner," is a fairy tale for the technocratic 20th century. It should be the first movie that Mom and Dad show to Max Samuel Spielberg.

Fall in with Spielberg and you fall into a Spielberg movie. Such is the testimony of Amy Irving, 31, as she sits in the lavish Coldwater Canyon home they share (they call it "the house that Jaws built"). In 1979 Irving had broken up with the filmmaker after a four-year affair. Then in 1983 she was on location in India and "one night, in front of three friends, I made a wish. I said, 'I wish I'd have a visitor, and I want it to be Steven.' Later that night my assistant came to me and said, 'Steven arrives in the morning.' " Irving then surprised Spielberg, who was in India scouting locations for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, by meeting him at the airport. Says she: "From that moment, I knew. Now we're really in love. And here I am with the Prince of Hollywood. I guess that makes me the Princess."

Turn a page of the storybook and see Steven and Amy walking hand in hand through the rain toward Claude Monet's house in the Paris suburb of Giverny. "Just as we arrived," Irving recalls, "the rain stopped, so we were able to walk around the gardens. When we walked inside, it started pouring again. Then, during lunch, a double rainbow appeared outside our window. It was very magical, and then I threw up. That was the first time I realized I was with child." As a memento of their visit, Spielberg bought a Monet, which hangs on their living room wall. In the den is the original Rosebud sled used in Citizen Kane. As for the discipline of fatherhood, Spielberg will let history be his guide: "My mom spoiled me. I'll spoil the baby. Amy will be strong with Max, and I'll be the pushover." But he promises a change. "Until now Amy and I have looked elsewhere for our 400 cc of real life -- spell that r-e-e-l. I'm great with a movie camera between me and reality. But with the baby, I have an excuse to finally look real life in the eye and not be afraid of what I discover."

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