#209 Steven Spielberg: A Biography

What I learned from reading Steven Spielberg: A Biography by Joseph McBride. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ----Whatever is there, he makes it work. Spielberg once defined his approach to filmmaking by declaring, "I am the audience.""He said, 'I want to be a director.' And I said, 'Well, if you want to be a director, you've gotta start at the bottom, you gotta be a gofer and work your way up.' He said, 'No, Dad. The first picture I do, I'm going to be a director.' And he was. That blew my mind. That takes guts."One of his boyhood friends recalls Spielberg saying "he could envision himself going to the Academy Awards and accepting an Oscar and thanking the Academy.” He was twelve. He was disappointed in the world, so he built one of his own. Spielberg remained essentially an autodidact. Spielberg followed his own eccentric path to a professional directing career. Universal Studios, in effect, was Spielberg's film school. Giving him an education that, paradoxically, was both more personal and more conventional than he would have received in an academic environment. Spielberg devised what amounted to his own private tutorial program at Universal, immersing himself in the aspects of filmmaking he found most crucial to his development. At the time he came to Hollywood, generations of nepotism had made the studios terminally inbred and unwelcoming to newcomers. The studio system, long under siege from television, falling box-office receipts, and skyrocketing costs, was in a state of impending collapse. When Steven was very discouraged trying to sell a script and break in, he always had a positive, forward motion, whatever he may have been suffering inside. In the two decades since Star Wars and Close Encounters were released, science-fiction films have accounted for half of the top twenty box-office hits. But before George Lucas and Spielberg revived the genre there was no real appetite at the studios for science fiction. The conventional wisdom was science-fiction films never make money. Your children love you. They want to play with you. How long do you think that lasts? We have a few special years with our children, when they're the ones who want us around. So fast, it’s a few years, then it's over. You are not being careful. And you are missing it. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  One of his boyhood friends recalls Spielberg saying he could envision himself going to the Academy Awards and accepting an Oscar and thanking the Academy. He was 12. "I've been really serious about filmmaking as a career since I was 12 years old," Spielberg said. "I don't excuse those early years as a hobby. Do you know what I'm saying? I really did start then." That was an excerpt from the book that we talked to you about today, which is Steven Spielberg: A Biography, and it was written by Joseph McBride. And that is one of the reasons I wanted to read a biography of Spielberg. It's because I think it's so-- there's a few reasons, but one of them is the fact that from 12, from the age of 12 to 74, which is how old he is today, he's had the same goal.

• 0:44David Senra?

  He has been making movies for 62 years. It's very rare for somebody to do something for that long, for 62 years. So I think that's somebody that we should obviously be studying and learning from. Another reason that he came to my attention is because he appears in one of my favorite books that I've ever read for the podcast. That's back on Founders number 35, and that's the biography of George Lucas. It's called George Lucas: A Life. And George and Steven met when they were in their early 20s, and they became best friends and collaborators throughout their entire career. And I actually just re-listened to that episode, and then I reread. I want to make sure I'm rereading my highlights from that book, from that George Lucas book every year, because I think what he did, his approach to filmmaking that made him a multi-billionaire, there's a lot of ideas that he used.

• 1:28David Senra?

  He just, in his work that we can use in ours, where he just approached the industry, he's like, well, why is-- he just kept asking why. Like, why are movies made this way? Why are they financed this way? Why are they owned this way? Why are they distributed this way? And he constantly questioned every aspect and realized, hey, I could come up with a better way to do things. And my favorite sentence in that entire book, and that's another gigantic book, it's like 500 pages, is George Lucas unapologetically invested in what he believed in most: himself. And we'll see today that Steven Spielberg did the exact same thing. So for today's podcast, it took a really, really long time. This is a gigantic book. It's almost 500 pages. The author interviewed 320, over 325 people that knew Steven Spielberg. It goes into amazing Detail of all the movies he made up until the end of the book.

• 2:13David Senra?

  The book ends, he had just finished Schindler's List and Jurassic Park. He's just over 50 years old. And in addition to reading the book, I also watched and took notes on this documentary that's on HBO Max right now, which is a bio, serves as another biography of Steven Spielberg as well. It's two and a half hours long. So between the book and watching the documentary and taking notes, it took me about 30 hours of prep work before I'm sitting down to talk to you about it. So I'm going to be working off my notes from the book and the notes from the documentary as well. Before I jump into the book, I want to tie something that's remarkable that maybe you knew this. It blew my mind when I found this out because I'll tell you how Steven Spielberg reminds me of Coco Chanel. So a few weeks ago, a few months ago, I read the second biography of Coco Chanel that I read.

• 2:57David Senra?

  And she became, she started off as an orphan and then wind up before she died, she was the richest woman in the world. And part of the way she got that way was because she signed one of the most lucrative deals in history. She previously made a mistake when she started her perfume company. She wound up giving away 90% of it. Didn't realize that Chanel number five was going to be one of the most successfully commercial products ever made. And so like 20, 15, 20 years later, she winds up redoing the deal and she gets 2% of all sales globally for Chanel number five. That made her the, in today's dollars, so that means she made $300 million a year. And she had a clause in that deal where the company had to pay for every single one of her living expenses. So Spielberg has a very similar deal.

• 3:42David Senra?

  I just found out because I'm going to be reading a biography of Michael Jordan soon as well, that he has a deal like this. He gets, Michael Jordan gets 5% of all sales from his Jordan shoe brand. And he's estimated to make about $150 million a year in present day because they're doing around $3 billion a year in sales. So Spielberg winds up, and this deal is done after the book ends, but he winds up signing a deal where he gets 2% of all the ticket revenue at Universal Studios, the theme parks. And so that's rumored to pay him out. Again, this is just from this one deal. It's rumored to pay him about $50 to $75 million a year. They keep trying. Universal keeps trying to buy him out.

• 4:25David Senra?

  They say, hey, we'll give you a couple billion just to buy you this contract. And he keeps saying no. And one of the reasons I think that he keeps saying no is because in that contract, it's not only the Universal theme park that's in Orlando, but it's any future theme park that they built. And I think they're making a new one in China and somewhere else. I can't remember the other destination or the other place, rather. But he's going to get 2% of all ticket sales on that. And the last time I looked, it was something like 10 to 12 million people a year buy tickets to just their Universal theme park in Orlando. And for some reason, when I was reading about that, an idea or quote from the founder of Shopify, Tobey Luque, popped into my mind. And he says, "You have to remember that the world is nonlinear." Spielberg had this passion for movies that started when he was 12 years old.

• 5:08David Senra?

  He had no idea what opportunities him pursuing that passion over multiple decades could unlock in the future. Certainly couldn't have predicted that, hey, I can get 2% of all tickets at Universal Studios, you know, multiple decades in the future. So let's go to right when he's 16 years old. He had just made this movie. It's called Firelight. He winds up remaking this movie when he becomes a professional filmmaker. That's the movie. The remake of this movie is Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But we see his personality at 16 years old, and a lot of this sticks with him for his whole life. And he went by Steve Spielberg at this point in his career. "Steve Spielberg had been shooting film obsessively for more than seven years with

• 5:51David Senra?

  a monomaniacal dedication that made him virtually oblivious to schoolwork, dating, sports, and other normal adolescent pursuits." So this idea of monomaniacal dedication is something that's going to appear over and over again in the book. It appears over and over again in the documentary as well. He repeats it over and over again. He's like, "I had one focus. I was obsessed with movies. I knew right away that this is what I was going to do for the rest of my life." And as he says, now they're quoting him, when he was a... He's reflecting back at this time as being a young man, a young filmmaker. "I was more or less a boy with a passion for a hobby that grew out of control and somewhat consumed me. I discovered something I could do, and people would be interested in it and me."

• 6:36David Senra?

  I knew that after my third or fourth little film, that this was going to be a career, not just a hobby. And that's another thing that just makes Spielberg extremely interesting. How many people realize from such a young age? Two people come to mind that were similar to Spielberg. It was like, OK, I knew by the time I was a teenager what I was going to do for my life. Ingvar Kamprad, which is the founder of IKEA. I've covered him back on, I think, on Founder's Number 102. He started IKEA like 14 years old, worked on it till he died when he was in his 80s. And then Kobe Bryant knew from the time he was a teenager. He's like, OK, I want to be the-- my goal is to be the greatest basketball player of all time. So I think it's rare for anybody to find what they really want to do in life. But even more rare that you know from such a young age. It's just remarkable. So that's a little bit about the family life and the fact that his--

• 7:19David Senra?

  he was really uncontrollable. He was a born director, and we're going to see this. So his mom is talking. She said, "Our house was run like a studio. We really worked hard for him. Your life was not worth a dime if you didn't, because he nagged you like crazy. Steven had this way of directing everything." Remember, he's 16 years old at the time. "Not just his movies, his life. He directed our household. He was a terrible student in school, but I never thought what was going to become of him." His mom was so tolerant of her son's lack of interest in school that she often let him stay home, feigning illness so he could edit his movies. So there's a lot about the uncertainty of his early family life that pops up in his movies. He talked about it at length in the documentary. It's covered over and over again in the book as well.

• 8:03David Senra?

  His mom, he didn't really consider her a mom. She was more like a friend. She basically had no rules. She wasn't interested in growing up. His parents wind up getting divorced, and I'll get into the bizarre story. Just crazy story, what his mom does. But then you have-- so on one end, you have his mom, who's kind of like a friend, right? And then his dad is this really gifted engineer that is highly recruited by the major technology companies of his day. So they move around from the East Coast to Phoenix, to then he winds up in Silicon Valley. And his dad was a workaholic. So Steve-- Steven winds up emulating his dad. But in Steven's movies, a lot of them has to do with like an absentee dad. So they wind up reconciling later on in life. But Steven had a really hard time with that.

• 8:48David Senra?

  And Steven's dad also took a bad approach, in my opinion, a bad approach. We kind of tried to direct what his son was going to do with his life, force him into, hey, study math, then study engineering, be an engineer like me. And Steven didn't, he just wasn't interested in that. He wasn't interested in school. He knew, OK, I'm going to be a director. Not only, not just, I'm going to work in the film industry. I'm going to be a director. So he starts talking to his dad about wanting to be a director. And his dad tries to, what's the way to put this? He tries to make him think smaller. So you'll see what I mean right here. So he says, he said, I want to be a director. And I said, well, if you want to be a director, you've got to start at the bottom. You've got to be a gopher and work your way up. And he said, no, Dad.

• 9:31David Senra?

  The first picture I do, I'm going to be a director. And he was. That blew my mind. That takes guts.

• 9:41David Senra?

  And here's another quote from a young Steven Spielberg. Making movies grows on you. You can't shake it. I like directing movies above all. All I know for sure is I've gone too far to back out now. And so this idea, there's no turning back. This obviously conflicts with a lot of conventional life advice, but it appears over and over again in these biographies, these people are just like, I have no plan B. I'm all in on this idea. This is something he talks about in the book, a quote from the documentary. Says it there, too. And now, you know, the book ends, this book ends, he's just over 50 years old. The documentary takes place, he's in his early 70s. And he says, I realized there was no going back. This was going to be what I was going to do, or I was going to die trying. This was going to be the rest of my life.

• 10:27David Senra?

  So a few pages later, there's two sentences, each on separate pages, that I think are very interesting, very quick lessons here. And one is that it's obvious Spielberg was, one, capable of independent thought. And part of that came out of the fact that he just felt like a misfit. He felt different than everybody else. He felt he wasn't understood. He was not interested in the other things that were expected of a kid, a young person his age. And he says, I never felt comfortable with myself because I was never part of the majority. I felt like an alien. Then he talks about his approach to filmmaking, which is very common for, I think, how you make a good product. The fact that you put your place in, you put yourself in the place of the customer. Like, you make what you want to see. And so he says Spielberg wants to find his approach to filmmaking by declaring,

• 11:12David Senra?

  "I am the audience." Recently, it's the 10-year anniversary of Steve Jobs' death, and I was rereading some notes from this book about how they created the iPod. And Steve Jobs and his team at Apple said they knew that the iPod was going to be a success because they loved using it. And Spielberg has a similar approach. He's like, "I make movies that I want to see." A trait that we see in his early life, that he keeps up for his entire, the rest of his career. The book ends with Jurassic Park, with them discovering, oh, my god. Like, he winds up trying to hire, he didn't know that CGI had advanced so much, right? That they could actually have the velociraptors and Tyrannosaurus rex look like they did in that movie.

• 11:55David Senra?

  And so originally, they were trying to physically make, like, these costumes that were going to have, whether they were machines or they had people dressed up as them, trying to run and trying to emulate what wound up being reproduced by the computer in the movie. But from the very beginning, he was obsessed with finding the latest cutting-edge technology that he could apply to his craft. This is something that's very important. And really, the way to think about technology is not just computers. It's technology is just a better way to do something, right? And you should invest in it because the savings compound. The money he saved, instead of having 30 or 50 different people running around, think about all the people that had to make the actual, the steel, the plastic, the materials

• 12:35David Senra?

  that the dinosaurs had to be made out of, could all be replaced by software. And Jurassic Park winds up being one of the most profitable movies. I think he made, like, $250 million. He's probably made more since then, you know, in the 20 years since then, just off that movie. It's just remarkable. And part of that was investing in technology. Invest in technology, savings compound. Steven's fascination with all kinds of cutting-edge technology and his mastery of the tools of filmmaking have been evident from the earliest days of his professional career. And there's actually a scene, well, I'm getting ahead of myself, but there's a scene in that documentary where Steven goes up to Industrial Light and Magic, which is George Lucas's special effects company.

• 13:15David Senra?

  And they created the CGI for, I think it was the Tyrannosaurus rex running, if I remember the scene correctly. And they just could not believe what they were seeing on the computer screen. They compared that moment, right? That was taking place at Industrial Light Magic to when sound was first introduced to movies. The fact that they said it opened up a whole new way. If you could imagine it, you could do it. You weren't limited to plastic or steel. Another thing from his early childhood, and then I want to get into how he breaks into the industry because there's a lot of interesting lessons in there. One of my favorite quotes that I've read in all the books that I've covered for this podcast comes from Yvon Chouinard in his book, Let My People Go Surfing. And he says, one of his favorite sayings about entrepreneurship is, if you want to

• 14:00David Senra?

  understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent. The delinquent is saying with his actions, this sucks. I'm going to do my own thing. And Yvon's like, that's how I approached my work. Steven was very much the same way, but he was like a bad little devil since he was a little kid. And this is his aunt talking about that. He's like, we have a word for him in Yiddish. We call him amazing. It's said lovingly, you know, but it means a mischievous little devil. And he was that. Okay, so this is a little bit at the very beginning. How did, you know, he becomes the youngest director ever signed. He's very much like a prodigy, like a wonder kid. So, main theme in Spielberg's work, singular focus, which I'll repeat over and over again today. And enthusiasm attracts mentors.

• 14:44David Senra?

  And it is extremely important, especially when he was a 21, 20-year-old kid, 21-year-old kid, 22-year-old kid, even in his early 30s. He's constantly, when he's already successful, constantly seeking out older, wiser people that can help him. And one thing that they're attracted in return to him is because he gives a damn. He clearly has soul in the game. His enthusiasm, you and I talked about this on the podcast over and over again, passion is infectious. We just respond to it. And so you see the mentors found his passion and enthusiasm for film and like, wow, okay, I want to help, I want to help this kid as much as I can. So it says he cares about one thing, making films. Spielberg was a genuine, you know what? Before I read this sentence to you, another note, I left myself on the page.

• 15:29David Senra?

  "You can change an existing industry." Lucas and Spielberg did. And so this is a description, when they come in, you know, the golden age of Hollywood's over. And now, in large part to Lucas, Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, all of which are friends, which is one of the most amazing things about this book and about the documentary as well. Because you have all these young filmmakers, they came in an existing industry, an already successful, mature industry, and started questioning everything. And at the time, we're about to read to you, it's like, young people were just actors. You were not put in a position to make movies, to be in charge at all. And through their talent, their enthusiasm, their hard work, they're like, no, no, we're going to do it differently.

• 16:10David Senra?

  You don't have a monopoly on the medium of filmmaking, which I find personally very, very inspiring. Spielberg was a genuine novelty when he arrived in Hollywood. The movie industry at the time was still a middle-aged man's profession. The young people on the Universal lot were actors. One of the first contacts he made in Hollywood was Charles Chuck Silvers. This guy is extremely important. Older generation, he's the Universal Pictures Film Librarian. And he became the earliest mentor, Steve's earliest mentor, in the film industry. And so his relationship with Silvers, because he starts as an intern there, develops a relationship with him, Silvers helps him get signed to this other, the other, the

• 16:52David Senra?

  other most important, or I guess now he has more, another important mentor, this guy named Schoenberg. I'll get there in a minute. But before I get there, what I'm going to read to you is also important. It's like, yeah, you're passionate, yeah, you're enthusiastic, but you also have to have a piece of work that you can point to. You need a calling card. You can't just say, hey, I'm excited about making films. Okay, well, have you made a film? And that's also advice Steve, I was watching him on YouTube, advice he gives to young filmmakers that want to make films. It's like, you can do this with your phone now. Like, you have to make films. You need a piece of work that you can point to, to access a calling card. And so Spielberg goes out and he makes a short film. It's called Amblin, which is also, then later on, becomes the name of his company. But it says Spielberg did manage to direct an independent short film called Amblin

• 17:37David Senra?

  in the summer of 1968, several months after his 21st birthday. Amblin was what brought Spielberg to the attention of Sid Schoenberg, then vice president of production for Universal TV, who offered Spielberg a directing contract. So these two mentors lay the foundation for his career, his relationship with Universal. Think about how crazy it is, he's going to start out as an intern and eventually get 2% of all their ticket revenue later on, many decades later. So that's Chuck Silvers and Sid Schoenberg are the important characters. Spielberg, 21, is believed to be the youngest filmmaker ever contracted by a major studio. So I want to go back to what his parents say about him as a young person, too, because

• 18:20David Senra?

  this is important, because one of the main takeaways I took from his life story is the fact that if you don't like your life, you don't like the world that you're living in, you can create your own. And he definitely had a very unhappy time growing up, not only the dissolution of his parents' marriage, they're fighting all the time, but also, they kept moving around. They went from a Jewish community to being the only Jewish people around, so there's a lot of antisemitism he had to deal with. But it says, "When he was growing up, I didn't know he was a genius," his own mother later admitted. "Frankly, I didn't know what the hell he was. You see, Steven wasn't exactly cuddly. He was scary. When Steven woke up from a nap, I shook. My mother used to say, 'The world is going to hear of this boy.'" She continues, "No one ever said no to him.

• 19:05David Senra?

  He always gets what he wants. Asked how she influenced her son's development, she replied, 'I gave him freedom.'" Steven inquired what he called his father's workaholic personality. He was like this even in high school. And he definitely liked that for, I mean, it's funny, because later in the book, he's like, yeah, his first son's born, I think he's around 40 years old. So he's like, you know, I'm going to just not work weekends, I'm going to be home. He does that for a very short amount of time, but he's definitely an obsessive. Steven inquired what he called his father's workaholic personality, along with such shade as his love of storytelling and his fascination with high technology that his father introduced him to. Steven's tendency to withdraw into his own world is also a legacy from his father. Like Steven, his father was an introverted person.

• 19:49David Senra?

  Then talks about more about his mom's influence on Steven just realizing, hey, I don't really want to be an adult. I want to create these, I want to live like this fantasy world. The rule at home was just don't be an adult. Who needs to be anything but 10? We never grew up at home because she never grew up, Steven commented. And so, one of his favorite stories when he was younger was Peter Pan. And so, something he took away from that story, he says, he was mightily impressed by Peter's defiant declaration. I don't want to go to school and learn solemn things. No one is going to catch me, lady. I always wanted to be a little boy and have fun, Spielberg admitted. I've always felt like Peter Pan. I still, I still feel like Peter Pan. It has been very hard for me to grow up. And that theme continues throughout the book. There's a quote in here that's

• 20:30David Senra?

  describing Citizen Kane, the movie that comes from the main character of Citizen Kane, which is Charles Foster Kane, which is, which was actually built upon the real life of William Randolph Hearst. And I think this quote from William Randolph Hearst also applies to Steven Spielberg, which he says the same thing later on. And the quote about William Randolph Hearst is, he was disappointed in the world, so he built one of his own. That's a way to think about Steven's approach to his work and his career. And so, Steven said, I never felt life was good enough, so I had to embellish it. That was also something that caught me semi by surprise, is how much Steven lies, constantly just making up stories. He would lie about his age over and over again, constantly wanted to make it seem like he

• 21:15David Senra?

  was younger than he actually was. So, it's more impressive if, you know, he starts directing TV when he's 20 or 21, when he's actually maybe 22 or 23. There's just a ton of stories about that, a ton of stories he made up about like his origination story, about how he broke into Universal Studios, commandeered an office, and then went to, just went to work and nobody noticed for two years. That wound up being not true. But just this whole theme of like, I'm just gonna, you know, I don't like my life. I'm gonna create it, even if I have to lie and bend the truth is definitely something that appears in the life story of Steven Spielberg. This is about also something like, I was surprised at how many of things that happened

• 21:56David Senra?

  to his childhood, in his childhood, that he would reference in movies many, many decades into the future, over and over again. And so this is one of them. I think this is actually a scene that is in his movie Catch Me If You Can, which he made, I think, in 2002. And this is something that happened to him back in his 60s. And this is the fact that, this is very traumatic for him, but Steve's mom marries his dad's best friend, that the family considered like an uncle. They didn't tell their kids, Steven's dad, even though his mom fell in love with his best friend and left him and married him, Steven's dad told his kids that he was responsible for the divorce.

• 22:39David Senra?

  And so for 20, 30 years, he was largely alienated from his father based on another lie. This is bizarre. And they talk about it in the book, which I'm about to read you now. And then his sisters are interviewed in the documentary. It was like, this was bananas. Like, this was our Uncle Bernie, and our mom runs off and marries our Uncle Bernie. So it says Bernie Adler was an engineer who followed Arnold out from New Jersey and worked as his assistant at GE, at General Electric. Bernie was almost like a member of the Spielberg family. The kids called him Uncle Bernie. He was always there. He did everything with them. Steven Spielberg's mom would enter into an enduring marriage with Bernie Adler. She said she found Bernie so funny, so bright, so moral, that I fell madly in love with him.

• 23:24David Senra?

  And so this was rather embarrassing for the kids, because even there's quotes from the neighbors in Phoenix, they're like, we weren't actually sure who the father was. And so there's a scene where Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can is sitting down with his dad, saying, hey, you know, let's call your mom, let's call mom, whatever the case is. And the dad says, no, she ran off and married my best friend. That actually happened in Spielberg's life. And then in another plot twist, Bernie winds up dying many years later, and now Steven and his mom, or Steven's dad and his mom, who are like in their 80s or 90s, they're extremely, they gotta be in their 90s, are back together.

• 24:03David Senra?

  Okay, so let's go, I want to move ahead a little bit because Steven has this like encyclopedic knowledge of the history of films and he's constantly going back, doing the same thing you and I are doing right now. We go back through the history of entrepreneurship, find ideas that are useful and apply them to our work. He did that in film, over and over again. He's like, "Oh, I like that idea. In fact, I will take that exact same shot." And so, this was very similar to David Geffen, when I read his biography for the podcast. That's Steven's, obviously, future partner. He was obsessed with show business. He would just hang out at the movies all day. In Steven's case, it's the movies. I think in David Geffen's case, it's Broadway shows. So you pay like a quarter and you can sit and hang out there all day. So it says, "Steven's movie fanaticism was nurtured at the Kiva Theater on Main

• 24:48David Senra?

  Street in Scottsdale, Arizona. Parents would drop off their kids on Saturdays and leave them all day with 50 cents admission to a program that would include westerns and Tarzan movies, sci-fi and monster movies." "Saturdays were great," Spielberg recalled. "I was in the movies all day long, every Saturday. I've seen absolute duplicates in Spielberg movies of scenes that we used to see back in the 1950s at the Kiva Theater." Let me give an example of this. "When Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark rides his horse down the hill and jumps onto the truck carrying the ark, Spielberg got that shot from the 1937 serial, Zorro Rides Again. Even the camera angle." One of Spielberg's heroes, and he has a bunch of filmmakers that he will look up to and

• 25:31David Senra?

  idolize and in many cases emulate, would be Alfred Hitchcock. So it says, "Arnold, his dad, Arnold Spielberg, took Steven to see Alfred Hitchcock's movie Psycho." Now, what's crazy is, this idea, does it even say in the book? No. Okay, let me read this to you, and then he talks about this in the documentary. "Steven later told a neighbor how impressed he had been with Hitchcock's employment of the power of suggestion. Steve talked about the shower scene in Psycho. How Hitchcock never showed any real violence. He showed you the knife, and this and that, but most of it was in the viewer's mind." So he uses that idea, the shower scene from Psycho. Steve uses that. The power of suggestion with Jaws, in the movie Jaws, the shark runs a breaking down, right?

• 26:16David Senra?

  They didn't expect it to break down. So now you have the star of the movie can't even use. And he comes up with this idea, if you've seen the movie, of the barrels, those yellow barrels that are tied to the shark. And he uses the power of suggestion, showing the movement of the barrels, never barrels, rather, never actually showing the shark. And that's an idea that he learned when he was a young person watching Alfred Hitchcock. This is another example of how important studying the filmmakers that came before him were for his career. He says, "The movies that impressed Steven the most when he was a boy were two epics directed by David Lean, The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Lawrence of Arabia. Spielberg later called Lean 'the greatest influence I ever had.' He emulated Lean's sense of visual storytelling throughout his career."

• 27:01David Senra?

  He says, "The scope and audacity of those films filled my dreams with unlimited possibilities." You know what's crazy? In the documentary, he says that he watches great films over and over and over again, right? Just like we should be reading books or any kind of experiences that we have. Books is the most obvious example here. You might read a book once and then you read it five years later and it's like, oh, the book changed. It's like, no, the book's the same, you changed, right? He still sees Lawrence of Arabia every year. He talks about that in the documentary. The movie came out in 1962.

• 27:34David Senra?

  Okay, so now he's college age. This is where he meets, we're going to go into more detail, but where he meets that mentor, Chuck Silvers. He gets a meeting and a tour where the Universal's head librarian. And this was Silvers' impression of Spielberg at that age, okay? "He explained how he wrote, photographed, and directed his own pictures, casting them with neighborhood and school friends, devising the special effects, and even making the costumes. Steven was such a delight, he said. That energy, not only that impressed me, but with Steven, nothing was impossible. That attitude came through. It was so clear. He was so excited by everything. When we walked onto a dubbing stage, how impressed he was. At some point in time, it dawned on me that I was talking to somebody who had a burning ambition.

• 28:19David Senra?

  And not only that, he was going to accomplish his mission." He was very young for his age in all other respects. But when it came to motion pictures, god damn, I knew he was gonna do something. I didn't know what the hell he was gonna do, but he was gonna do something. You can't walk away from a kid like that. Just out of curiosity, you want to sit and watch. And so this is a quote from, he's a senior in high school, from the school newspaper. This is right after he met Silver's. So he says, "Steve Spielberg worked with Hollywood directors this summer at Universal Pictures. Spielberg spent the whole vacation working as an unpaid clerical assistant in the Universal editorial department. The job enabled Spielberg to roam the lot, watching films and television shows being shot,

• 29:04David Senra?

  and to hang out with film editors and other post-production people, learning the craft of professional filmmaking. He would continue hanging out on the lot all through his college years until, with Silver's help, he was hired as a director." This is more on the beginning, this beginning opportunity to Universal. And I know to myself, this is amazing. He starts out as an intern at Universal, now gets 2% of all Universal tickets. Reminded me of, remember that book, The Gambler, on Kirk Kerkorian? I think it was like Founder's Number 67, somewhere back there. But Kirk Kerkorian starts out as a day laborer on the lot of MGM Studios. I think he's like moving around heavy rocks for production, right? He's getting $2.60 a day.

• 29:47David Senra?

  30 years later, he owns MGM and the return on investment makes him $260,000 a day. From $2.60 as a day laborer a day to owning MGM and making $260,000 a day. A lot can happen in one lifetime. But the reason I'm bringing this up to you is because Spielberg does something here that you and I have talked about over and over again. The importance of developing your own curriculum. We call this personal curriculum. I think a better term for it comes from Bill Gurley, that talk. It's called "How to Run Down a Dream." It's on YouTube, and he talks about what he learned by studying Danny Meyer.

• 30:30David Senra?

  Not Phil Knight, Bobby Knight and Bob Dylan, I think is the musician. But the fact that they would, all the work that they're doing that's not work. So all the stuff that they're trying to learn that they apply to work. He called it professional research. And he goes into detail in that talk, how they all did that and how it enhanced their work. It's a fascinating talk. But anyways, so it says Spielberg began his apprenticeship at Universal in the summer of 1964. His mentor Chuck Silvers recalls that the ambitious teenager gradually worked out his own curriculum. They say it specifically here. He's working out his own curriculum on the lot, visiting sets, talking with editors and sound mixers. He was kind of a guest, a self-appointed observer who made his own arrangements with the people who responded to him.

• 31:14David Senra?

  Many chapters later, it picks up this theme about the importance of developing your own personal curriculum, your own professional research. So it says Spielberg remained essentially an autodidact. Spielberg followed his own eccentric path to a professional directing career. Universal Studios, in effect, was Spielberg's film school. He couldn't get into film school. Every single film school rejected him, giving him an education that was both more personal and more conventional than he would have received in an academic environment. Spielberg devised what amounted to his own private tutorial program at Universal, immersing himself in the aspects of filmmaking he found most crucial to his development. And so it's this point where he finds other like minds. And this is just, again, I repeat myself, but this just blew my mind.

• 31:57David Senra?

  Like, the day Jaws comes out, Spielberg's driving around with Martin Scorsese. Before Martin Scorsese was Martin Scorsese. The idea that you have George Lucas, Brian De Palma, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, you have a group of crazy people who were all obsessed with movies, all struggling to make it at this point, right? Now you fast forward 50 years and they're all hugely successful, but not at this point. And the whole group winds up becoming successful and dominates the movie business. All the time, though, they're giving each other feedback. They're friendly, but they're trying to compete with each other. They go back and forth between producing like the most financially successful movies at a time. First it's Godfather, then I think Spielberg passes them, and then I think Lucas passes Spielberg.

• 32:40David Senra?

  It's just absolutely remarkable. And I've already read biographies on Lucas and Spielberg. I'm looking for biographies on the rest of these people as well. But let me just tell you a little bit more about this time in history, because I find this fascinating. And I find it fascinating because, again, they're doing this to an already, like, mature industry. There's always room for more opportunity. It just starts with questioning why things are done the way they are, right? So they're called the movie brats, this whole crew. And sometimes referred to as the USC mafia. And there's a bunch of us, not just these five people. There's screenwriters, there's entertainment attorneys. They're all helping each other. It's very fascinating. At the time, they came to Hollywood, generations of nepotism had made the studios terminally inbred and unwelcoming to newcomers. The

• 33:24David Senra?

  studio system, long under siege from television, falling box office receipts and skyrocketing costs, was in a state of impending collapse. So how fascinating is that? From the outside, it's like, why are you wasting your time making movies? What is wrong with you? Television is the future. This, look at this. They're making less money. You can't get in. You have to go, people are going to film school and the professors are saying, don't go to film school because you'll never get hired. It's just very fascinating. That's when they're like, okay, at the very bottom of the market, so to speak. They're like, okay, well, this is where the opportunity can't go anywhere up from, can't go anywhere else from here but up, right? The future seemed daunting for the determined young movie fanatics, who came of age in the 60s and for whom film historians coined the phrase, "the movie

• 34:06David Senra?

  brats." Spielberg vividly remembers how he and such other self-starters, that's how he's describing himself, Lucas and Scorsese, had to chisel and dynamite their way into a profession that never really looked to young people, except as actors. "There were no willing producers at that time I was trying to break into the business. My first thrusts were met with a great deal of animosity." But all these people, the movie brats, USC mafia, this is a description of them, were unwilling to settle for such limited dreams. They ate, breathed, and slept movies with a passion earlier generations had brought to writing or painting. And so what they needed is, they needed somebody like Francis

• 34:50David Senra?

  Ford Coppola, who was the first young director to break through. And then, once they saw, wait a minute, that guy can do it? And he's great, talented. They weren't saying he wasn't talented, but it's like, okay, he's like a couple of years older than me. I can do it too. It's extremely important. It took Coppola to start breaking down the doors of Hollywood for other film school graduates in the late 60s. He became, as Spielberg put it, "all of our godfathers." And so now we fast forward to when Spielberg and Lucas start becoming friends. They wind up being pals, inspirers, collaborators, but they're pushing each other because of how talented they were. So Spielberg, you know, is like, "I'm a young hot shot. I'm good too." Oh, wait, there's another me, right? There's always another you. Like, you

• 35:33David Senra?

  gotta know that. And so what Spielberg realizes, like, he watches Lucas's film. He's like, "Oh, my God, I'm sick to my stomach at how good this guy is." So he says, "When he saw the short film, Spielberg was jealous to the very marrow of my bones. I was 20 years old and had directed 15 short films by that time, and this little movie was better than all of my little movies combined." So he says, now, you know, before he had all these people like Frank Capra, Walt Disney, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean, all these people, but he's like, "Now I can have a role model and a collaborator and somebody inspires me that's my own age that's doing the same stuff I'm trying to do." So he says, "Now, instead of having those role models, rather it was someone nearer to my own age, someone I could actually get to know, compete with, and draw inspiration

• 36:17David Senra?

  from, and that was remarkable." How, you know, they're obviously very driven, big egos, but they didn't have big egos with each other, right? They're like, "Listen, we're competing, but I'm also being inspired from you." And they were able to maintain like a friendship, right? And they had the maturity to realize, "Hey, we're gonna get a lot farther if we can help each other than if we just like, 'Oh, I hate that guy because he's doing the same thing I'm doing.'" Well, this is not a zero-sum game. Like, people can like your movies, George, and they can like my movies as well. Like, there doesn't have to be just one filmmaker. The fact that they were able to do that at such a young age is very, very admirable. So here's another fantastic little story from the book. And how yes for Chuck Silvers is what I wrote here.

• 37:01David Senra?

  On my note on this page, because if we ever have the opportunity to stick up for a young, talented person, like, we should do it. And this is an example of that. Because Steven's dad, who is now divorced and living in a, uh, Steven's living with his dad, but basically gone all the time because he's obsessed with, uh, with movies. Steven's dad realizes, hey, he's spending a lot of time at Universal, spending a lot of time with this, this guy named Chuck. I'm gonna call this guy Chuck and tell him, hey, my son needs to be focused on college. Steven didn't want to go to college. He winds up placating his, his, I think mainly his dad. Uh, he goes to like Long Beach College or Long Beach University, something like that. But he doesn't give a shit about that. Like, he's spending all his time at Universal, winds up dropping out. And the reason I say

• 37:44David Senra?

  hell yes for Chuck Silvers is because look at the conversation that he has. He's like, your dad doesn't understand the opportunity and how gifted you are. And this is not an opportunity that waits around, right? For you to finish school. Shortly before Steven started college, Arnold made a phone call to Chuck Silvers, Steven's mentor at Universal, who described their conversation, the only substantial one he and Arnold ever had, as spirited. "He's going to Long Beach State. I'd appreciate it if you would do what you can to make sure that he goes to school." Silvers said he couldn't do that. "Look, there's something you've got to understand about the motion picture business," he told Steven's father. "For Steven to realize his ambitions, he's gonna need a hell of a big break. Somebody's going to have to put a lot of faith and a lot of money up so the

• 38:27David Senra?

  rest of us can see if Steven is who he appears to be. I'm his friend. If it comes to a choice of Steven having the opportunity to direct something that he could use as a showcase, I will advise Steven to do it. School be damned. Lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place in this industry, so you'd better be ready for it. They don't care whether you've got a degree or not. What they are interested in is what he can put up on the screen." And so his dad's like, well, okay, that's fine. I still want him to go to school. His, Silver's reaction is, with talent like Steven Spielberg, you don't get, you don't set that kind of goal. What the hell good is a degree that wasn't Steven?

• 39:06David Senra?

  And this is such an important part of this whole thing about this. Like, I'm not trying to direct him what to do. I'm trying to be there for him. So Silver says, "My idea of encouragement was to be there. Basically, that's the only function I really served. Somehow, I always became a listening board every time he got a story idea, every time he shot some film. Asked why he went so far out of his way to help Steven, Silver replied simply, 'I liked him. I admired this lump of raw material.'" Just think about, oh, just pause and think about what is happening in the story. How important. There is an alternate future where Steven does not have the help of Chuck Silver's,

• 39:48David Senra?

  somebody that is a film historian, somebody that's been with Universal, somebody that can help guide him, somebody that's a few decades older than him. And we don't know the name of Steven Spielberg, because that opportunity didn't present itself. He didn't actually stand up for this person. He's like, "Hey, this guy is talented. The work he's putting out to the world is important. I'm going to be there to encourage that." That is just so, so important if we're given the opportunity to do that for people. And Steven winds up playing that same role in the future for young filmmakers and young writers and young producers. It's so, so important. And it's another idea that he got from Chuck, which I'll talk to you about later. But I just want to pull out this thing, what his father's telling him to do, right?

• 40:30David Senra?

  He's going to school, he's gonna drop out, but this is just a reflection of how disjointed school can be from real life. And this is something that Phil Knight, founder of Nike, and Fred Smith, founder of FedEx, dealt with too. They both wrote papers about exactly what they were going to do. The idea for Nike, the idea for FedEx, and I think they both got a C. Same thing happens to Spielberg. This is so silly. Nothing sums up the frustrations of Spielberg's academic experience at Long Beach State better than his record in the TV productions course. He received a C. Moving on. Reminder, shoot your shot. Shoot your shot. Goes up, this is a young kid, and he just goes up and again, he's not like an arrogant kid, goes up with asking for help

• 41:13David Senra?

  and saying why he wants help. He often would walk up to stars and directors and producers on the studio streets and invited them to lunch. Cary Grant and Rock Hudson were among those who accepted. This is the same thing that a young Steve Jobs did. He called up Bill Hewley, if I remember correctly. I think it was Bill and not David. Either one, the partners, calls him up, asks for parts, says, I'm a 14, 12-year-old kid. Winds up getting a summer job. Later on, when he's like 18, 19, he calls up all the people, Bob Noyce, founder of Intel, the guy that did microsystems, I can't remember his name, the guy that did AMD, can't remember his name at the moment, sorry. All these people, he's just like, listen, I didn't know how to build a company. I greatly admired the people that knew. So I called them up, I asked if I could talk to them,

• 41:58David Senra?

  if I could have lunch, coffee with them. Yeah, some people are going to ignore you. Some people are going to not be able to do it, whatever the case is, but some people will say yes. Just shoot your shot. Few pages later, look at this. This is repeated over and over again. It's so important. Professional research, personal curriculum. We've got to develop that. Spielberg asked a million questions to the editors. It was a process of absolute technical application. He worked out his own curriculum. I am not making up these words. This is the author using this sentence, this statement that you and I have talked about over and over again, multiple times in this biography. He worked out his own curriculum. It was the real world. There's no school you can really go to learn to be a filmmaker. That's not what they teach.

• 42:43David Senra?

  And then later on, we have Silver's talking about this. He's like, listen, I helped them, but like my impact, I tried to open as many doors as I could, give them advice from an older, wiser perspective. But you can't, like, who's going to teach Da Vinci? Right? This is a very, very interesting, just quick paragraph for you. I don't want to cast myself in any way as his teacher. I wish to hell I had been. How the hell do you teach Maria Callas how to sing? Who taught Da Vinci? You can expose people to things, but they have to have it in themselves. As far as I'm concerned, he's the most gifted person in motion pictures.

• 43:21David Senra?

  And so with the fact that Spielberg, obviously, was extremely, he calls himself a self-starter. He had a piece of work, which I have to repeat is very important. You have to have something you can point to. It's not just like, oh, I'm just somebody you don't even know. Come help me. They see that this kid's out here hustling. He's out here working. He's actually doing this. He's really interested in this industry that I'm in, right? And he's got something to point to. So because he had a calling card, he was able to get signed. And then he's just so grateful because he feels Chuck Silver's is the one that opened all the doors for him at Universal. He's like, be my manager. And listen, Chuck is so wise here. And he just has one request. He's like, listen, I'm just doing this because I want

• 44:01David Senra?

  to help you. But you have to pay this forward. After your success, his one request, Chuck's one request to Steven Spielberg is the same thing. It's why Ingvar Kamprad said over and over again, founder of IKEA, why am I writing this book? People told me I didn't want to write an autobiography. I resisted the idea. He says explicitly, the argument that convinced me from his co-writer was that you know stuff that'll help future entrepreneurs and you love entrepreneurs. And so that's why he wrote the IKEA story. Because I'm going to, now he's passed on. It's a good thing he did because we wouldn't have had access to his ideas. Sam Walton, same thing. I'm writing this book because I wanted to help you. Phil Knight. There's some kind of instinct. These people are older. I think in that case, in

• 44:45David Senra?

  those three examples I just gave you, I think they were all in their 70s by the time they wrote it. And in Sam Walton's case, he knows he's dying. He's super, super sick. He talks about in the book. He's got cancer everywhere, right? But it was very important for them. Bob Noyce, same thing in Intel. They're like, what the hell, Bob? You're wealthy. You could be doing anything in the world. Why are you spending time having 19-year-old, 20-year-old Steve Jobs at your house? Why are you going to give these talks? Why are you doing all these investments? He's like, I need to restock the stream I fished from. It's that natural human instinct to be like, okay, I benefited greatly from this knowledge, from this industry, from this mentorship. I'm going to go and turn it around and do it for the next generation, too. It's amazing. So Spielberg then asked me if I'd be as a manager.

• 45:28David Senra?

  Silver said, I said, Steven, you could need someone who knows a hell of a lot more about the business than I do. I'm not the right person. He asked me what I wanted for helping him. I said, well, Steven, by the time you really make it big, I'll probably be too goddamn old for you to do me any good. In effect, what I told him was, when you can, pass it on. When you make it big, you could be nice to young people. I learned from people I had no way of thinking. Oh, excuse me. I learned from people I had no way of thinking. You can pass that on. Steve made me a promise, and he kept it. You look at the list of first time directors and new writers and first time producers he has made an opportunity for.

• 46:11David Senra?

  He puts his money and he puts his business personality on the line. Okay, so he's already signed as a director. Again, I've repeated this over and over again. I'm going to repeat it one more time because it's a note I left to myself on this page. There's two notes for myself. Number one, have a piece of work that you can point to, right? He set up a screening of Amblin. It was an incredible piece of work. This is how he gets signed. This guy named Sid Scheinberg, so think of this as mentor number two in Steven's life. And they're still friends to this day, which again, like, this is something I always look for, like if, like when you meet new people, it's like, it's very important that they have, they've been able to develop relationships for a long time. Because like you can fool, like you can fake being a good person for, you know, a couple of months, maybe a year, maybe even a few years.

• 46:54David Senra?

  But, you know, if somebody's known you for 20 years, like you can't fake being a scumbag for that long, right? And Steven, something that he talks about, actually, I wasn't going to talk about this now, but I might as well because it passed my mind. It's like something that I think is an idea that we can take from Spielberg. He talks about the reason he's able to work so quickly now. It's because he's worked with the same people for decades, right? His editors, his visual effects people, the people like when he's on a new project, he winds up hiring a lot of the same people over again because he says like, we just have a way, like all the knowledge we have working with each other, it compounds and that compounding makes it easier for us to communicate and work faster. He's like, if I had to hire brand new people every few years to do a project, he's like, I couldn't do this.

• 47:38David Senra?

  This is very similar if you, I did a three part series on Larry Ellison. He said the same thing. He's like, the reason, he's like, the core programming team at Oracle for the first, I forgot it was like 10 years, whatever the time period was, like it didn't change. It was like the same 30 people, whatever the number was, right? I can't, these numbers might be wrong, but the, the, the main point I'm telling you is definitely, I remember correctly. But the idea is like, you don't want all this turnover where you see these people jumping from project to project, working with constantly new people. Yeah, you might want to do that, maybe want to get some fresh idea and new blood in there. But the idea is like, well, just like money compounds, time compounds, knowledge compounds too. And now you've been working together, you have a way of a fundamental understanding that has taken years to develop and that if you keep switching, like you're interrupting the compounding. And so Steven applies that to not only the people he works with, but his professional

• 48:22David Senra?

  relationships up and down, like not only the people he hires, but the people that hired him. It's very fascinating. So he has this piece of work, Sid winds up hiring him, gives him a contract, he makes him do TV first. Steven does not want to do TV, right? So the second thing is you may not like your first opportunity, but you gotta do your level best. So the script was terrible, Spielberg said later. I really didn't want to do the show. I told Sid, Jesus, can I do something else? He said, I'd take this opportunity if I were you. And of course I took it. I would have done anything. And so he talks about the very beginning, something also that might surprise you. To this day, from the, from the first time he makes a movie till now, he's constantly throwing up.

• 49:03David Senra?

  Nervous. Every time I start a new scene, I'm nervous. Talks about vomiting over and over again. He's a 65-year-old man when he's talking about this, right? And the same thing that was happening to him when he was younger. Like, we just don't, and I'm glad he shares this because from now on, it's like, oh, this guy obviously knows everything. He's got, I don't even know what, four of the, I don't know what the number is now, but I think when this book ends, he has four of the top 10 highest grossing movies of all time. Like, just outsized remarkable success. This guy clearly knows what he's doing, and yet you don't see before the camera turns on, he's in the corner throwing up. I was so frightened that even the whole period is a bit of a blank for me. I was walking on eggs. I didn't know if I'd ever, I don't know if you've never been to bed for four days in a row. It's like taking drugs. I don't take drugs. I never have.

• 49:48David Senra?

  Or I would have used every drug under and over the counter at the time. The show put me through dire straits. It was a good discipline, but a very bad experience. So you have, he goes from the euphoria, right, of being signed, the youngest director ever, to the terror of not liking the work and being very bad at it. He has a breakdown, and he winds up having to take a, really, the high from getting signed and then the fall of being despondent. He has to take a break. Not only had he failed to interest Universal in letting him bring to life all the stories I had in my head, but no one was even offering him TV episodes to direct. I was in a despondent, comatose state, and I told Sid I wanted a leave of absence, and I got it. And there's one more sentence about this point in his life, because I think it's extremely

• 50:32David Senra?

  important to remember. Success is not a straight line. He didn't just go from Night Gallery, the show he didn't like, to Jaws. His career stalled at a number of occasions. Okay, so there's an idea that popped up in the book and in my notes multiple times for the documentary, and it's this idea that he thinks visually. And really, the way to think about this is like, you've got to find the perfect medium or the perfect format for your skill set. And there's another way to put it. Somebody else later on in the documentary says that Spielberg speaks cinema as his native language.

• 51:08David Senra?

  And Spielberg, in the documentary, also gives advice. He says, like, "You have this idea of what you want to do, and it's only in your head." And he says, "No one can help you holding the entire idea in your head." That that is your job. That's something that you have to figure out how to do. And I think that's his approach to movie making. So, let's go back to the book. He thinks visually. He's in the perfect format for his skillset. And he says, "He seemed to be able to see more than other people saw." "He didn't seem to waste any time." "He didn't seem to get caught up in what directors often do." Eating up camera time, eating up miles and miles of film. This is back before there was digital film. There was literally, with the physical film. There was, they produced, literally, that's true, miles of film on a movie. "He seemed to cut on the floor."

• 51:53David Senra?

  "We knew that this boy knew about the camera." And then he combined this, the way he thought visually, which is perfect for, obviously, being a filmmaker, with the fact that it's just, try not to be a dick. Just try to be, you're gonna get farther if you can avoid that. And a lot of people would interact with Steven, like, okay, like, he's not, he's got, he says, "He has a nice manner." "This gets you a long way." When a director has the attitude, "I don't know everything about this, but would you like to try something?" Which is how Steven interacts with his coworkers. "You're willing to knock yourself out for that director."

• 52:28David Senra?

  And so I think, at this point in his career, where he's really struggling, it was very helpful to have all these other filmmakers around him, these young filmmakers. Because he's suffering internally, but this is the note I left myself. Positive forward motion regardless of internal suffering, which is just a really smart idea. They're all not really getting what they, their talent and their drive is currently not being, like, there's no evidence of actual accomplishments. Like, they're not getting as far as they think they could, based on the talent they already have and the drive they have. So it says, "We were all ambitious and wanting to work, and none of us were getting the kind of work that we wanted to do." "Steven knew, Steven knew he wanted to do features, meaning movies." "When Steven was very discouraged trying to sell a script and break in,

• 53:11David Senra?

  he always had a positive forward motion, whatever he may have been suffering inside." So, positive forward motion regardless of external circumstances.

• 53:23David Senra?

  So eventually, he does get the opportunity to direct a movie. It's called Sugar Land. It flops. And it's very dangerous. As much as like the film industry talks about, oh, yeah, it's an art and everything else. It's like, yeah, you have a couple flops and you're out of the industry real quick. Right? And so he was in a very precarious position because he was being pushed into do a shark movie. And he's like, what the hell? I don't want to do this shark movie. And the real, the lesson here is that his biggest win, Jaws is by far the most important thing to ever happen to the career of Spielberg. And he says it, right? His biggest win is going to come right after what he thought at the time it was his biggest failure. When he received the bad news about Sugar Land in April of 1974, Spielberg did not

• 54:08David Senra?

  have much time to sit around engaging in second guessing or nursing his wounds. He was on the Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard, immersed in preparations to make another film. It was a modestly budgeted thriller called, called Jaws. So we're going to get into Jaws. I want to take a slight tangent first. I do have to tell you, I'll just tell you upfront, Jaws is, was his, Spielberg calls Jaws his free pass, pass into his future. And that's completely due to his, its financial success. At the time it was released, it was the most profitable movie ever made. And he's like, once I had that, I got final cut on every single project I ever did moving forward in my career. I got to choose which projects I did. I got to choose what they look like. It bought me my freedom. And again, finances buy you freedom.

• 54:53David Senra?

  I want to, before Jaws, they're, they're shopping this, this idea of a, of a, of a science fiction film that is going to eventually become Close Encounters of a Third Kind, which is also successful. But I want to pull something out here because I think it's important, something we talked about on this autobiography of Sid Meier. Sid Meier is the computer programmer, the game designer that made Civilization. The main idea in that book was so important is the fact that like you, you discover that if you question, that questioning conventional wisdom can be very profitable. Sid wanted to make a strategy game. Everybody said, nope, strategy games can't make any money doing that. He does it anyways, releases Civilization. It sells 51 million copies. Right? And so we see the exact same thing here.

• 55:37David Senra?

  Lucas and Spielberg, they're trying to shop this, this, this project. It says in two decades since Star Wars and the Close Encounters were released, science fiction films have accounted for half. Of the top 20 box office hits. But before George Lucas and Spielberg revived the genre, there was no real appetite at the studios for science fiction. The conventional wisdom was, science fiction films never make money. So questioning conventional wisdom can be profitable. Let's get to the making of Jaws, because it was a just constantly in flux. They're rewriting the script the night before. Not sure if they'll have it done before the next day, if they can actually shoot anything. It went over budget and over schedule, I think, like, three times.

• 56:22David Senra?

  Like, it was supposed to take like 57 days. I think it took like 150 days, something like that. But it says, and then they wind up, the shark winds up, like, the main character winds up disappearing. So it's just amazing, like, how resourceful he had to be. So he says, "I hired a man named Carl Gottlieb, who was an old friend of mine, and he came with me to Martha's Vineyard to essentially polish the script as the actors sat with me every night, often only 24 hours before the shot, and improvised. To facilitate their work on the script, Gottlieb and Spielberg shared a house on location, and Gottlieb would continue to work on the revisions after Spielberg went to sleep. Each morning, Gottlieb would give new pages to the company typist, and by 8:30 in the morning, they would be approved and ready for filming. It was incredibly tense." And so halfway through, Spielberg wants to quit. And this is just a reminder, your mind will play tricks on you.

• 57:07David Senra?

  Lucas thought Star Wars was gonna flop, if you remember that. Spielberg says the same thing, he's like, "I'm going to be out of the movie business. This movie's not going to do well. I had two failures in a row, and I'm done." Sid had words with Spielberg over Jaws. It was one of the few disagreements that Steven and I had. I literally forced him to do it. I think he was upset for a while, and he turned to me and said, "Why are you making me do this B-movie?" He was scared. He felt overwhelmed. He wasn't sure he was the right guy for it. The picture was important to him, vitally important. There was such huge professional stakes. Nothing was ready. It was at that stage, completely out of control, and it was as it was during most of the shooting. Jaws ran into so many production problems that exacerbated crew members began referring to the movie as "flaws."

• 57:51David Senra?

  Spielberg later admitted, "I thought it would be a turkey." This is more about the terror part of Euphorian Terror, right? Imagine having to shoot a shark movie without the shark. He thought he was doomed, and this winds up being his greatest achievement. It's just wild. For weeks after shooting started, Bruce simply refused to work. That's the name of the shark. That night, Richard Dreyfuss declared, "If any of us had any sense, we'd all bail out now." Spielberg anxiously shot around the star of the movie. Out of desperation, he began shooting barrels instead of the shark. In the movie, the barrels are affixed to a shark by the harpoon, and they cruise the ocean's surface as a standard for the submerged creature. "We were very scared. I didn't know whether any of us could do it. We thought we're making a picture called Jaws, and we don't have the fucking shark. Today, with computers, you could just put the shark in.

• 58:36David Senra?

  In those days, it was a strictly mechanical thing. The pressure on the 27-year-old director was enormous. I thought my career as a filmmaker was over. I heard rumors from back in Hollywood that I would never work again because no one had ever taken a film 100 days over schedule, let alone a director whose first picture had failed at the box office. There were moments of solitude, sitting on the boat, thinking, 'This can't be done. It was stupid to begin with. We'll never finish it. No one is ever going to see this picture, and I'm never going to work in this town again.'" Think about the mind games that he had to deal with when making the movie. The movie is finished, the movie is released, this is what happens. Jaws surpassed Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather to become the most successful film in motion picture history to that date.

• 59:18David Senra?

  Jaws held that distinction until November 77, when it was dethroned by George Lucas's Star Wars. Spielberg took out an ad in the Hollywood trade papers showing a little robot from Star Wars, R2-D2, catching Bruce the shark in his jaws with a fishing hook. Congratulating Lucas for capturing the box office title, Spielberg wrote, "Wear it well. Your pal, Steven." And again, just remarkable that all these guys were friends. So after Jaws, he has a... Jaws is a hit. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a hit. He's like, "Oh, I can do anything." Real high on his own supply. So he tries to do this comedy called 1941. And this, really, the point, the reason I'm bringing this to your attention is because sometimes you learn more from failure. And 1941 winds up being a failure.

• 1:00:02David Senra?

  He has a reputation that, you know, yeah, Jaws is successful, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is successful, but he's always over budget, he's always, like, he's not disciplined. And so he learns from George Lucas that you have to watch your costs. You have to be disciplined about this. And so, again, it's where Lucas plays a huge influence in his life. But first it says Spielberg used to say that he was born again after 1941. That's the big gigantic failure, the mistake. Working as a hired hand for Lucas, a conservative and highly disciplined producer, Spielberg used Raiders of the Lost Ark as a form of professional rehab. So after 1941, Lucas is like, hey, I have this idea. I'm going to be a producer for Raiders of the Lost Ark, one of the most successful film franchises in film history. They don't know it at that time, obviously. And he's like, will you direct this for me?

• 1:00:47David Senra?

  And so Spielberg, Lucas and Spielberg are now on set. It's Spielberg, the director, Lucas lets him be as a director, but he's the one putting up the money, making sure everything runs on time. And so that's where he's just learning. And from here on in, he becomes, you know, he had a bad reputation. Lucas goes around selling, trying to sell the movie. And they're like, well, who's going to direct? Like Spielberg, like now we're out. Like, how could you be out? He just did Jaws and Close the Counters the Third Kind. And like, talked about, you know, the guy, they're not lying about the budget, but saying, yeah, we can do it for 20 million. It comes in at 60 million. Like, that's going to piss these people off, right? So it says, "The Lucas Spielberg proposal was presented to the studios. The proposal dared to assault..." Oh, I'm bringing this to your attention because it's a quote from George Lucas's biography that's fantastic.

• 1:01:31David Senra?

  And he says, "Some of the bravest and most reckless acts that we did were not aesthetic, but financial." Again, highly recommend, all founders, I think, should read George Lucas's biography. How many people do you know that founded multiple billion dollar businesses and did it like? He just has this like a, not aggression, but just like this, damn it, I'll do it myself attitude that you just can't, you just love, you absolutely love. So it says, they're going around shopping this and now they're saying, okay, this is after Star Wars. This is after Jaws. This is, we're playing a different game here. So it says, "The proposal dared to assault the standard Hollywood financial practices on several especially sensitive points. Chief among them was that while the distributor would be expected to put up the movie's budget at $20 million..."

• 1:02:15David Senra?

  It would receive no distribution fee and take no overhead charge. That's like these Hollywood accounting. It's a term for like the shenanigans, this financial shenanigans that was known in the industry at the time. Those items usually accounted for more than 50% of the gross film rentals. Besides demanding large sums of money upfront, Lucas and Spielberg also wanted enormous shares of the gross, a demand that was especially unusual for a director in that era. And while the distributor would be allowed to recover their entire costs of Raiders from gross film rentals, before Lucas and Spielberg started to receive their shares of the gross, Lucas would eventually have full ownership of the movie. Studios were taken aback by such chutzpah.

• 1:02:57David Senra?

  And so with Lucas's help, he becomes this disciplined, watch your costs director. So it says, we knew we had to, now they're talking about shooting the movie. We knew how to compromise. There were some moments where it would go to take two or three and take, and take four. And something wasn't working, so you know, multiple takes. Steven would say, that's it, let's move on. We'll figure out another way to do it. He was very, very good in that respect. Raiders was the first picture he bought in on budget. I heard Steven say that his friends were doing smaller pictures than him, less expensive pictures than him, coming in on budget and they were able to see money on the back end. Steven rarely had that opportunity, so he was bound and determined to bring a picture in on budget

• 1:03:41David Senra?

  so he could see the back end. So really what Lucas taught him is like, you gotta watch, that's nice that you're, you make a lot of money at the box office, but you'll make a lot more money personally if you watch your costs. And so he takes what he learned from Lucas and on the Raider, the Indiana Jones movies, right? And he applies it to ET. And check this out, this is now we're in the euphoria part of his career. ET prints money. So he winds up, he's like, all right, I'm doing this movie for $10 million. ET was so tough because Steven had made a bet with Universal that he could do this thing for $10 million. Completing ET within that budget enabled him to satisfy his obligation for the final remaining film from his 1975 contract with Universal.

• 1:04:24David Senra?

  In the first weeks, and he winds up coming in on budget and on time, right? In the first weeks, check this out, this is gonna blow your mind. In the first weeks after the film's release on June 11th, 1982, we're talking $1982, which is even crazier than what I'm about to tell you. Spielberg personally was earning as much as half a million dollars per day as his share of the profits.

• 1:04:45David Senra?

  And so as his movies become more financially successful, he's able to demand better and better deals. He also is learning from his third mentor, Steven Ross. So it says, Steve, and I don't know if myself, is you don't make $3 or $4 billion by accident. Referring to Spielberg. Spielberg's as good as a businessman as he is a director. Spielberg is renowned and sometimes deployed in Hollywood for driving hard bargains with everyone from technicians to actors to studio chiefs. In recent years, his standard deal has been a remarkable 50% of the distributors' gross on his pictures. And they said, you compare that with 5 or 15% of gross that even major stars command. So he's making a lot more money, right?

• 1:05:28David Senra?

  The studios also fully finance Spielberg's films, even though that he owns it, that he owned, that the movies owned or shared by Amblin, his company. Steven gets the studios to carry the risk and he takes in the money. And so he winds up becoming really good friends with the head of Time, the head of, is this Warner Brothers or Time Warner at the time? I'm not sure. Time Warner. So he says, his connection came through his close friendship with Steve Ross, the chairman of the board of Time Warner. Ross was the most colorful and controversial of the film industry mentors to whom Spielberg had attached himself. Assuming the roles of Spielberg's best friend and idealized father figure, as well as business

• 1:06:10David Senra?

  mentor, Ross began educating Spielberg in the finer aspects of life as a Hollywood mogul. In the documentary, Tom Hanks talks about working with Spielberg is remarkable because how resourceful he is. You could plan something out as best you can, circumstances dictated, it's not going to work out, and he comes up with just, he just makes the most of whatever is there. And we see an example of this when he's on location filming his first movie in China. Says, while preparing for the first day of shooting in Shanghai, assistant director David Tomlin plotted out all the crowd movements and everything, and I planned to keep the road clear so there could be traffic, so there could be traffic movement. I drew it all out and told everyone what to do. Then, 5,000 people suddenly flooded the road. I went crazy.

• 1:06:54David Senra?

  I said to Steven, oh, Jesus, it's all gone wrong. He said, looks great. Roll the cameras, action. He was happy with how it looked, and I wasn't going to argue with the 5,000 people. He's very good like that. He's not pedantic. Whatever is there, he makes it work. That's the most important sentence in that entire paragraph. Whatever's there, he makes it work. That's the assistant director talking about something they made in the 80s. Tom Hanks said the exact same thing when they were making Saving Private Ryan. Another thing that Stephen talks about in this book, talks about in the documentary over and over again, is how important family is to him. The fact that he's got like seven kids, something like that. He got divorced for the first time, he felt like a failure, then got remarried, they'd been married for a long time. He says it's extremely important to him because of the traumatic childhood he had.

• 1:07:37David Senra?

  And he's got this scene in Hook that he took to heart, and I think it's fantastic. And so they're going back and forth. It's the character Peter and his wife. And it says, "Your children love you. They want to play with you. How long do you think that lasts? We have a few special years with our children when they're the ones who want us around." "So fast, Peter. It's a few years, then it's over. You are not being careful, and you are missing it." That is the lesson Peter learns in Hook, and it is one Spielberg took to heart in his own life. And I would say that is the major life regret that I've seen in a lot of these biographies and autobiographies. And when they're writing in these books, it's too late.

• 1:08:20David Senra?

  It's the fact that they over-optimized for their work-life at expense of their children. They all tell you not to do it, it's a regret they can't do anything about. The best term I've ever heard about this came from Ingmar Kamprad's autobiography, because he did that. His three boys, if I'm not mistaken, he's like, "I missed their childhood because I was building IKEA, and I messed up. I shouldn't have done that." And it says, "Childhood does not allow itself to be reconquered." There's also a line in the Hook movie with Peter Pan that I think Spielberg took this idea and ran with it as well. And that's the idea to make life the adventure it's supposed to be. "So, Granny, Wendy tells Peter, your adventures are over." "Oh, no," he replies.

• 1:09:04David Senra?

  "To live, to live, will be an awfully big adventure."

• 1:09:10David Senra?

  So when the book ends, he had just finished Schindler's List and Jurassic Park. Finally gets his Academy Award that he'd been dreaming about since he was 12, that he had been snubbed for multiple decades before then, has two of the most successful and well-known movies. And it says, "As he approached his 50th birthday, Spielberg showed no signs of being crushed under the enormous weight of his success. Many a lesser career has collapsed from the burden of escalating expectations. And Spielberg, who still bites his fingernails and throws up before coming to a set in the morning, cannot help feeling the horrendous pressure of having to top himself, of simply having to be Steven Spielberg. But throughout his 28 years as a professional filmmaker, he has maintained a sense of inner

• 1:09:52David Senra?

  balance that so far has enabled him to avoid losing his nerve. He seems comfortable, even if others are not, with his own complexities and contradictions." When his high school friend Chuck Case visited him at the Long Beach Airport during the filming of 1941, Spielberg surveyed his army of uniformed actors and WWII airplanes and said with a childlike smile, "You know, they pay me to do this." And that is where I'll leave it for the full story. Read the book, and I highly recommend watching the documentary as well, it's fantastic. If you want to buy the book using the link that's in the show notes, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. If you want to help out a friend and founders at the same time, I'll leave a link.

• 1:10:36David Senra?

  If you want to buy a gift subscription, you can do that, there'll be a link in the show notes as well. That is 209 books down, 1,000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon.