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Good burgher that he is, Spielberg has also taken up cigars. "Makes me look like John Ford, eh?" he asks a visitor to the set of Amistad, where a metal pail sits by the camera to catch the boss's dead stogies. (While talking to a reporter he was careful to smoke a non-Cuban cigar: "I want to be invited back to the Lincoln Bedroom!") He'll also take the occasional drink. During a toast celebrating the first day of shooting The Lost World, Spielberg gulped down a considerable quaff of champagne. "I can't believe you're drinking!" exclaimed Janusz Kaminski, the director of photography. "Yeah," Spielberg replied. "I'm drinking; I'm smoking; I'm making babies. I haven't made a movie in three years, but I've picked up all these other habits."
Once upon a time, they were all kids--all the movie brats of Spielberg's generation. And to look back at the mid-'70s is to see these prodigies fulfilling their promise: Spielberg with Jaws and Close Encounters, Lucas with American Graffiti and Star Wars, Martin Scorsese with Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver, Brian De Palma with The Phantom of the Paradise and Carrie, Terrence Malick with Badlands and Days of Heaven. But Lucas and Malick stopped directing; De Palma slipped into self-parody, then faceless professionalism; Scorsese and Spielberg, with the great exceptions of Age of Innocence and Schindler's List, mostly elaborated on the themes of their first mature work. The "kids with beards," as Billy Wilder called the Brat Generation, have become the Establishment, turned 50 and watched as younger, hungrier directors tried to defibrillate the nearly comatose cinema muse.
Grateful for the help given him by Ross and Universal's Sidney J. Sheinberg, Spielberg has sponsored the work of the next Hollywood establishment. He handed crucial breaks to such directors as Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future), Chris Columbus (Mrs. Doubtfire) and Joe Dante (Gremlins), and to producers Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy (Congo). Spielberg says he's not looking for directors who'll be Baby Stevens. "I don't need any more clones of myself out there," he says. "The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves."
Spoken like an indulgent parent. In fact, spoken like the new Spielberg hero. For his recent films are less about kids than about their spiritual fathers: the fretful, grownup Peter Pan in Hook, the twinkly Disney-dino entrepreneur in Jurassic Park and The Lost World, businessman and reluctant savior Oskar Schindler, Amistad's John Quincy Adams. All are Establishment types who buck the Establishment to help the young, the hunted, the disfranchised. They are adults trying to help: mentors, dads-in-waiting, surrogate Stevens.
For himself, Spielberg may have new ambitions as a filmmaker, may see old rules he can find new ways to break. Though he expects to direct a fourth Indiana Jones adventure for Lucas, he says he needs to do "a lot between now and then that will frighten me." A lot of that time will be spent on another interval of serious dadding, this time 18 months, during which he will move his family to New York City for at least a year. "Fathering is a major job," he says, "but I need both things in my life: my job to be a director, and my kids to direct me."