Spielberg at the Golden Globes

If you happened to watch his Cecil B. DeMille "lifetime achievement award" acceptance speech...I did too, and found it, in a word, inspiring, which was the theme of his speech, inspiration.  He talked about his dad's toy train set and how he used to like to destroy it...after his dad got frustrated with having to buy new train sets all the time, he suggested young Steve film it with the family's Brownie movie camera, and...a love of filmmaking was born.  Watching Steven, I realize why he's so successful:  He has this voracious appetite for devouring everything and everyone around him (like his shark in Jaws) and he's able to communicate his ideas to others, externalizing his internal fantasy world.  He's a lovely man who has this slightly unpleasant quality about him, a penchant for violence if you will, that translates into some of the more evil characters and violent situations in his films, yet has a huge heart and great sense of humanity, a drive for love, the common good and making the world a better place. A kind of pecking order in the arts and business, about how people need a mentor to get them to the next level in anything in life, led me to believe how important the value and power of relationships is.  "Who you know" has always been important, but particularly in Hollywood, where, by necessity, very close relationships are formed, because people are working on projects that are extremely complex and have to be delivered in a finite amount of time to stay on budget, because, of course, making movies ain't cheap and has to yield a return.  In Spielberg's case, the mentor was executive at Universal Sid Scheinberg, who gave the fledgling, then almost 21-year-old upstart his shot at directing episodic television, which was unheard of at any age under 50 at the time.  Without Sid, Spielberg would've thrown in the towel and come home to his parents with tail between his legs to pursue psychology or something in college.  Hearing Spielberg immediately defer to fellow director Marty Scorcese, his presenter, as one of the people who inspired him, touched me deeply, because I realized just how much of an influence Marty's black-and-white and gory boxing tale, Raging Bull, was on Spielberg's black-and-white and equally gory tale about the Holocaust in WWII, Schindler's List.  And then I realized how many of the other masters Spielberg "stole" from...David Lean, D.W. Griffith, Orson Welles, John Ford, and, yes, Cecil B. DeMille.  While some might argue that this makes our great filmmaker merely a derivitive, talentless hack, no--Spielberg manages to infuse his own personality, passion, values and visual style into his works to create something truly unique and original, yet paying homage to those who came before him, pushing the art of cinema every time he steps behind a camera.   Ahh, to be connected with the likes of some of these talented people in L.A....gets my own directing juices flowing again, when I made movies as a kid in the '70s.  Spielberg's films were certainly a huge influence:  I clamped my eyes and ears shut whenever I saw an underwater shark POV and heard John Williams' telltale thump thump shark arrival music when I was a 10-year-old kid in 1975...I realized that, anything that had that kind of power over me was a power I wanted to harness.  I made my own little "creature features", trying to create that same kind of suspense and terror, and, while my works elicited more laughs than screams from family members, it still ignited my desire to fashion stories that entertain and affect people.  Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind really impressed me as far as his use of models and miniatures, not only of the Douglas Trumbull UFO spaceships, which are still to this day quite awe-striking, but little Barry Guiler's toys coming to life on his bedroom floor.  Getting the big Panavision camera in that almost macro-close, in almost no light, to follow focus on a little tank as it comes up about 2 inches from the camera lense, swivels its little gun turret, and drives by, is still a marvel (how did he do that?  Lots of takes I guess!).  And the low-light scene in Indianapolis Air Traffic Control, with fast film and extremely shallow focus on the controllers' faces, still enthralls me to this day, because I know just how difficult it is to get quality images under that kind of light and those tight quarters.   Even if there's no market for directing movies where I live, and I don't have the money or connections with these people to move out to L.A. to struggle for years while I build up a reputation, as Rocky says "I gotta be around it".  Moviemaking is far from a dead dream for me, and I infuse it into every wedding or corporate video I photograph (my penchant is probably more for cinematography than directing).  Without artists, the world would be a rusty assembly line.  Thank God for artists!