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Undoubtedly, tens of millions of moviegoers hope the filmmaker stays the precocious little boy he seems to be. Only the Hollywood graybeards and a flank of film critics feel like shouting, "Steven, grow up!" Whichever path he chooses, there are dangers. Walt Disney kept recycling the magic of his animated fables until the gold turned into dross. Charlie Chaplin got serious + and lost his audience. Spielberg, who says, "I want people to love my movies, and I'll be a whore to get them into the theaters," means to have it both ways: to mature as an artist while retaining his copyright on adolescent thrills and wonder, to blossom as a director while he diversifies as a mogul.
Scorsese, who has known Spielberg since 1971, detects "a pressure in Steven to top himself. The audience sees his name on a project and expects more and bigger. That's a tough position to be in." And Spielberg, who boasts that "I can dump on me better than anybody else," confesses that "I find my leg stuck in the trap I built. To have directed a movie like Young Sherlock Holmes would have gnawed that leg right off."
He hardly needs to be told that fables about know-nothing adults and feel-it- all children are not the only tales worth spinning; that adults must face such plot twists as pain, exultation and emotional compromise; that there is drama to be found in the grown-up compulsions of power and, dare we say it, sex. Sure, Spielberg knows there is life after high school. "But after E.T.," he says, "people expected a certain kind of film from me, a certain amount of screams and cheers and laughs and thrills. And I was caving in to that. I knew I could give it to them, but I realize it made me a little arrogant about my own style. It was all too easy. The whole titillation I've always felt about the unknown -- of seeing that tree outside my bedroom window and shutting the drapes till morning -- was taken away from me. And I got scared. I don't want to see where I'm going."
Enter The Color Purple, an epistolary novel about incest, sexual brutality, sapphic love and the indomitable will to survive. It did not seem the sort of material Steven Spielberg would touch with a ten-foot wand. Which is precisely why he went for it. "The Color Purple is the biggest challenge of my career," he proclaims. "When I read it I loved it; I cried and cried at the end. But I didn't think I would ever develop it as a project. Finally I said, I've got to do this for me. I want to make something that might not be everybody's favorite but, this year at least, is my favorite. The Color Purple is the kind of character piece that a director like Sidney Lumet could do brilliantly with one hand tied behind his back. But I'm going into it with both eyes wide open and my heart beating at Mach 2."