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When shooting The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg would reportedly wonder out loud “is this $40m worth of therapy?” The semi-autobiographical film, which he has been threatening to make for the last twenty years, has finally been released, and offers a fascinating insight into Spielberg’s childhood, and the surprising events that shaped his later career and influenced many of his most famous and well-loved stories. It remains to be seen whether the film’s budget can be justified as a therapeutic expense for Steven, but the critical response has been unanimously positive; The Fabelmans is a compelling film, as well as a highly revealing one. 

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AN EARLY DISASTER MOVIE

Steven was born in 1946 in Cincinnati, the child of Jewish parents who seemed quite dissimilar. Arnold was an electrical engineer, while Leah was a concert pianist, and this mixture of artistic and scientific influence has sometimes been credited with shaping Steven’s future career in the director’s chair. The Spielbergs moved to New Jersey in 1952, and it was here that the more direct parental influences depicted in The Fabelmans would be brought to bear on young Steven. 

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The most important of these was Arnold’s video camera. Steven made his first home movie aged 12, a three minute long film of trains crashing, using his own model trains as subjects. The inspiration for this early work came from his first trip to the cinema with his father, to see Cecil B. DeMille’s ambitious movie about circus performers (and train crashes), The Greatest Show On Earth. Steven gradually became more ambitious himself, and in 1958 went all out when working towards his Boy Scout photography merit badge, submitting a 9 minute long silent film called The Last Gunfight. He was hooked, and his father’s video camera became an integral part of Steven’s childhood. Just as in The Fabelmans, this proved to be both a blessing and a curse.

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STEVEN VERSUS THE BULLIES

The Spielbergs had moved from Ohio to New Jersey in 1956 to pursue a job opportunity for Arnold with RCA, and in this new, unfamiliar environment Steven found himself an outsider. Antisemitic bullying in his school was a common event, and the scene in The Fabelmans where Sammy Fabelman is punched in the face by a bully is based directly on Spielberg’s own experiences, as is the response. Both Sammy and Steven cast their assailants in movies, although they provoke different responses; we won’t spoil the movie’s narrative here, but Steven’s bully became “a changed person. He said the movie had made him laugh and that he wished he’d gotten to know me better.”  

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The antisemitic abuse Steven faced was not restricted to the schoolyard. The Spielbergs were also frequently racially abused by their neighbors, with locals chanting “The Spielbergs are dirty Jews” outside the family home. This prompted Steven into a more direct response, sneaking out of the house at night to smear peanut butter on the windows of his abusers. While this retort must surely have been cathartic for the young boy, there were also troubles within the home that would be just as trying, and prove harder to resolve. 

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A FAMILY AFFAIR

The Spielbergs took a camping trip when Steven was 16, accompanied by Arnold’s Spielberg’s best friend, Bernie Adler. As always, Steven brought his camera to film the family in this idyllic vacation setting, but when he reviewed the footage he shot he noticed something troubling; loving glances between his mother and Bernie that made it clear they were having an affair. Steven kept this information secret for three years, until his parents eventually separated; Arnold told the family that the divorce was his idea, and Steven never connected his parents' separation to the affair, taking his father at his word and blaming him for the breakup of the marriage. The two barely spoke for 15 years afterwards.  

These events are depicted in The Fabelmans, but the aftershock of them can also be seen in much of Spielberg’s earlier work, which is filled with depictions of broken homes and struggling parents. Steven’s own parents resolved their differences amicably; Leah and Bernie married, and Arnold was reconciled with both Steven and Leah, even appearing in interviews alongside Leah in later life where they talk openly about the affair and subsequent divorce, and the impact it had on their son. Despite this, Steven waited until all three of his protagonists had passed away (a long wait, as Arnold lived to be 103) before making The Fabelmans.

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DOUBLE GENESIS

These harrowing but formative experiences cemented Spielberg’s ambitions to become a filmmaker, but there were many struggles in his early career that do not form part of The Fabelmans’ narrative. Steven’s obsession with filmmaking meant that his academic grades were so poor he struggled to get into a film school, and was rejected three times by the University of South Carolina. His tenacity eventually saw him accepted elsewhere, and also gave rise to legendary tales of the student filmmaker breaking into the lot of Universal Studios and impersonating staff members until he himself was hired. The reality was a little less dramatic, as Spielberg admitted in a 2022 interview with the BBC: he had met a Universal executive on a bus, who had given him a three day visitor pass to the Studios lot. Once the pass expired Steven just kept turning up, and the inattentive security guards would wave him through assuming he was part of the staff, leading to an “unofficial” internship. He grasped the opportunity with both hands, and before long found himself directing Joan Crawford in a 1969 TV movie made for NBC. Crawford, at that time one of the most well known stars in Hollywood, was appalled at being made to work with a 23 year old rookie director, but later claimed she was immediately taken by Spielberg’s obvious talent, writing: “When I began to work with Steven, I understood everything. It was immediately obvious to me, and probably everyone else, that here was a young genius… I knew then that Steven Spielberg had a brilliant future ahead of him.”

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Crawford was correct, and before long Spielberg’s talents moved from TV movies to the big screen. His cinematic career has been so successful that outlining it here in any length would be redundant, but it would also be remiss to overlook his work as an activist and philanthropist. Spielberg has used the tremendous influence he’s earned throughout his career to make some vital interventions in support of disadvantaged communities, and he’s supported many important causes financially. In 2021 he was awarded the Genesis Prize, awarded annually to notable Jewish figures, but chose to donate the proceeds to a selection of ten nonprofits that focus on racial and economic justice in the U.S., and that matched that donation with a million dollars of his own. It’s a typical gesture from a Secret Superhero who has strived to make the world a better place, both through his films and his wider contributions to society.

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