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Without family, paradise is a house but not a home. So the suburban boy has assembled a professional tribe remarkably like his own in Scottsdale. The roles of his kid sisters are taken by a sorority of doting, efficient junior staff members. And Steven's "parents" are his fellow Amblin bosses, Kathleen Kennedy, 32, and Frank Marshall, 38. They share executive-producer credits on the films he presents; they keep four sharp eyes on a dozen or so film projects; they grease the tracks that connect Steven with the studios and the press; they act as a DEW line to monitor the unguided missiles of his imagination. Notes Kennedy: "Ten times a week Steven will rush into my office and say, 'Kath, I have a great idea.' And sometimes I feel like, 'Oh, not another one.' " In private life, Kennedy and Marshall live together. Brandy is their dog.
Spielberg has gone his original nuclear family one better. In Screenwriter Chris Columbus (Gremlins, The Goonies) and the writer-producer-dir ector tandem of Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future), he has found the younger brothers and bright playmates he never had. Columbus is now writing the third Indiana Jones film, which Spielberg will shoot next summer. Of Back to the Future, says Spielberg: "My main contribution was making Bob Zemeckis aware of his own best work and getting him to do it" after the script had been rejected by just about every studio in town. "I'm not the bank," he cautions. "Sometimes I'm the guy holding the flashlight, trying to show filmmakers where the holes are so they don't fall in." Zemeckis faced a gaping crevasse when he realized that the performance of his star, Eric Stoltz, was too intense for the picture's comic-romantic mood. After five ; weeks and $4 million spent, Stoltz was fired and Michael J. Fox signed to replace him. Spielberg calls this "the hardest decision I've ever made."
Tough calls come with the territory of moguldom. Spielberg insists that "George Lucas has an empire; I just have a small commando operation." Yet Amblin is producing almost as many feature films this year as Lucas has in a decade. Often Spielberg will wait till the last minute before deciding whether he will direct a film or not. The Goonies, for example, was "a film I didn't want to direct but I did want to see, so I asked Richard Donner to do it. I've always been very zealous about directors' rights. I retain final-cut privilege, but I won't exercise it unless the director has a complete nervous breakdown, tries to burn the set down and is found one morning in the corner eating Ding Dongs."
Still not busy enough, Steven? How about masterminding an anthology series for TV? Amazing Stories won a unique guarantee from NBC: the network agreed to buy 44 shows, or two years' worth instead of the customary six to 22 weeks, and to pay a record-breaking license fee of $800,000 to $1 million an episode. Spielberg explains the series' origin: "I get too many ideas, and I want to act on them all. Amazing Stories is a foster home for ideas that will never grow into adulthood, that aren't strong enough to stretch beyond 23 minutes." Spielberg has hired Eastwood, Scorsese, Peter Hyams, Paul Bartel, Bob Clark and Irvin Kershner to direct segments. (Eastwood says his involvement is the result of "part friendship, part lark.") Spielberg has also anointed four young film school grads for their big-time directorial debuts.