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Last month he took two giant strides toward answering critics who say he refuses to grow up, artistically or personally. On June 5 he began directing The Color Purple, an adaptation of Alice Walker's stark, poetic novel about Southern blacks. Eight days later, his live-in love, Actress Amy Irving, presented him with 7-lb. 7 1/2- oz. Max Samuel Spielberg, whom the proud father describes as "my biggest and best production of the year."
That will sound like gentle facetiousness to anyone who does not realize that Spielberg's movie productions are his children too. He can be criticized for photocopying the boy-meets-his-better-self wonder of E.T. in his more recent films; the copy is rougher and darker in the comic nightmare Gremlins, a bit crumpled and smudged in the fun-house frenzy of The Goonies. But the films' very limitations are identity badges on a body of work as personal, even as obsessive, as that of Ingmar Bergman, David Lean or any other monarch of cinema academe. Spielberg the director is supposed to be a movie machine, and if that is so, fine. We need more artisans with his acute eye and gift for camera placement and movement, lighting, editing and the care and feeding of actors. But he is also a compulsive teller of stories about himself as he once was and still is. Each new film he directs or oversees is like another chapter in the autobiography of a modern Peter Pan.
The self-referential touches start with jokes on his own name. As Critic Veronica Geng has noted, Spielberg translates from the German as "play mountain." The hero of Close Encounters finds his way to the starship by molding a mountain out of a dirt hill. At the beginning of both Raiders and Indiana Jones, the hilly Paramount Pictures logo dissolves into other fantasy mountains. More directly autobiographical is the genesis of several of his films. Close Encounters was born one night when young Steven's father woke the six-year-old and drove him to a large meadow to see a meteor shower. E.T. and The Goonies find their wellsprings in the need of a young outcast for a playmate, real or imagined. Poltergeist, which Spielberg describes as being "all about the terrible things I did to my younger sisters," also emerged from a spooky encounter (ethereal figure, shivery bedroom, car that wouldn't start) that the filmmaker experienced in 1972. Each picture has allowed him to remake his own childhood, then to generalize it so it touches millions of once-again kids.