Even when he is a shade queasy, Steven Spielberg has no trouble with self-reflection. He has the bearing of a man who has come in for his annual physical knowing he's in good shape. He is queasy just now only because his jet is taking off, bound for New York from Los Angeles, and Spielberg is rather afraid of flying. So, cradling a mug of cinnamon-stick tea, he concentrates on the question at hand - a question concerning the nature of his character - and responds by cheerfully reciting the moral code he learned long ago: 'A Boy Scout,' he says, 'is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.'
And how does Spielberg measure up today?
'Let's see,' he says. 'I'm trustworthy, I'm loyal, I'm sometimes helpful, I'm sometimes friendly, I'm always courteous, not always kind, not always obedient, not always cheerful, mostly thrifty as a producer, not brave at all, always clean and very reverent.'
Reverent indeed, and in all the right directions: toward God, country, family and entertainment for entertainment's sake. It is hardly surprising that Spielberg owns 25 works of art by that other master of reverence, Norman Rockwell. 'Aside from being an astonishingly good storyteller,' Spielberg says, 'Rockwell spoke volumes about a certain kind of American morality.'
He might well have been describing himself, of course. For more than 25 years, Spielberg has been an astonishingly good storyteller, and his films have come to represent a morality that it seems churlish to argue against, a morality of populism and patriotism, derived more from intuition than intellect, and one that yearns for goodness to trump evil.
In the process, Spielberg has become, for better or worse, a sort of public oracle. With his 1993 film Schindler's List, he single-handedly brought the Holocaust to the attention of Middle America. Amistad, released in 1997, reopened the wounds of the slave trade, while last summer's Saving Private Ryan reminded a forgetful citizenry just how bad the Good War truly was.
'I've never made a movie that I consider immoral,' Spielberg says. 'I've never made a film of which I could say, "You know, I wish I hadn't made that picture because it led people astray." And I'm real proud of that.'
Spielberg is also proud of his motivation for making movies. 'The majority of my films,' he says, 'I have made to please people.'
He is, in a sense, an anti-auteur; it is hard to imagine Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola or even the Coen brothers saying such a thing. But Steven Spielberg is driven by a need for approval - from his family, his peers and especially from his ticket buyers. When I ask him who he thinks his core audience is, he says, 'At this point, it's pretty much everybody, which I think is great, because every comic wants to fill up the house with laughing, stomping people, and I'm a whore like any other stand-up who wants big laughs.'
This is the kind of talk that makes his friends smile and his critics cringe. Spielberg's desire for approval, the critics say, is what breathes sentimentality into his films, or inspires him to substitute moral simplicity for nuance. They chafe at his do-good instincts and argue that his cinema has taught the entire world to view history as he sees it: in black and white, with musical accompaniment.
But Spielberg's grip on the consciousness of his audience is too firm for such criticism to have had much effect. Freely oscillating between history-based dramas and his 'popcorn movies', he is the most popular film-maker in the world and the king of an entertainment empire with an aesthetic - a sort of right-minded, irony-free, thrill-seeking aesthetic - that has permeated the cultural landscape. His creations live on not only in classroom discussions but also in theme parks, on lunch boxes, in TV commercials. His reach is so great and his power so boundless that, when people in Hollywood talk about him, it sounds as if they are talking about God, with one difference: people are not afraid to bad-mouth God. 'I don't think it's politically correct to stand up and say anything against him,' says Sid Sheinberg, former president of MCA and a longtime mentor of Spielberg.
His reverence has been repaid with interest. Even his detractors, who assault his films off the record, acknowledge that Spielberg is a ferocious multi-tasker, an idea machine and a canny businessman who has also managed to become a devout family man. 'The thing about Steven,' says his friend Tom Cruise, 'is that he hasn't let go of a decency I've seen so many others lose.'
Spielberg fully understands the height of his pedestal.
'I do think I have a personal responsibility as a family man to use my film-making opportunities to put out there stories that have some sort of redeeming social value,' he says at one point, his brow serious. But when asked if movies really need to have a moral imperative, he says, 'I think even movies that are pure escape give people a chance to look at someone up on the screen and say, "Man, I wish that was my mousse in Cameron Diaz's hair."'
These are the two sides of Steven Spielberg: the reverent grown-up who knows when to say the right thing and the exuberant kid who loves a good laugh. Both sides are are sincere and both are necessary, for Spielberg knows he can't feel good about himself unless everyone else feels the same way. For an artist, this is a tricky formulation, since what is good for the heart isn't necessarily good for the art.
Spielberg's flight to New York - to visit Max, his 13-year-old son from his first marriage, to Amy Irving - took place on a Friday in early December. I had spent the previous three days with him in Los Angeles, watching him do business and trying to learn just what kind of a good guy he really is.
We first met up early Tuesday morning at the offices of Dreamworks Interactive, which designs computer games for Dreamworks SKG, the five-year-old entertainment company founded by Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. When I arrived, Spielberg was in full-throttle consultation with four designers working on a science-fiction game involving a hero who must vanquish a band of bad guys. These bad guys, Spielberg explains, 'want to race-purify the universe - kind of like, you know, those guys'.
Dressed in beige jeans and a maroon sweater, he is still sporting the soldierish haircut he got in honour of Saving Private Ryan. Under his sweater, he wears a set of fake dogtags, another memento. As the designers show him their progress, he peppers them with suggestions. He is relentlessly upbeat. He lavishes praise on a new dinosaur game, spun off from his blockbusters Jurassic Park and The Lost World, but sucks in his breath when the designers boast about the 20 varieties of 'dino damage' that haven't yet been inflicted. 'Ooh - just don't make it too bloody,' he says, 'because then parents won't let the kids play with it.'
The designers look crestfallen; Spielberg quickly finds something to compliment: the intricate animation of the velociraptor's tail. 'Oh, that's fantastic! We didn't do that in either of the movies - we should have.'
Now he asks about the sales figures for another spin-off game, Small Soldiers. The numbers, he's told, are very good. Although the film didn't do well at the box office, video rentals and sales of Small Soldiers toys and games are so strong that Dreamworks is making a sequel, mostly to broaden the ancillary franchise.
Among other things, Spielberg is very good at making money. While he is considered to be courtly in creative matters, his reputation as a negotiator is far less benign. 'It's as tough to make a deal with him as anyone in history,' says Peter Bart, editor in chief of the US trade magazine Variety.
As a director, Spielberg has the sweetest of sweetheart deals, forgoing a salary in exchange for a share of the gross that reportedly reaches 50 per cent once a film hits a certain box-office level. As a producer - Spielberg has produced or executive-produced more than 40 films in the past 15 years, including Back to the Future, The Flintstones and Men in Black - he reportedly receives at least 10 per cent of the gross. Then there are television rights, ancillary sales and video rentals - again, Spielberg's cut is among the highest in the business. From Jurassic Park alone, which grossed $951 million, Spielberg took home a reported $294 million.
The movies are only the engine of Spielberg's entertainment machine. There are the television shows and cartoons he has produced, a joint venture to build futuristic video arcades and, opening in May, a Universal Studios theme park in Orlando for which he is a creative consultant. All told, he is worth an estimated $2 billion, which has led to many whispers that his taste for money exceeds his taste for art.
'Like most very successful, very creative human beings, he likes the idea of getting paid a lot of money,' says David Geffen. 'But I wouldn't say it's the focus of his interests.' As evidence, Geffen points to Spielberg's rampant philanthropy and to his investment strategy. 'He has an enormous bond portfolio,' Geffen says, 'which is to say he has no appetite for risk.'
Now Spielberg climbs into his green Ford Explorer and sets out for the Universal Studios lot, which has been his home for more than 30 years. His next meeting is with James Acheson, the costume designer for a film Spielberg will direct next year, Memoirs of a Geisha, based on Arthur Golden's best-selling novel.
Acheson and his assistant leap up when Spielberg enters, but within a few minutes, he has put them at ease. He has that effect on people. Acheson walks Spielberg through dozens of kimono sketches, many of which, practically dripping with dragons, are too garish for Spielberg's taste.
'I think we need to make it less Disney, more Degas,' he says.
Geisha, because it is owned by Columbia Pictures, has presented a bit of a complication for Spielberg. As a partner in Dreamworks, he is supposed to be its movie fundraiser. But as a director, he has always freelanced among different studios, and Dreamworks was formed with his partners' understanding that he would continue to do so. Saving Private Ryan, for instance, was a co-production with Paramount, which owned the script, and Spielberg has just agreed to direct two films in co-production with 20th Century Fox. 'Having half of something Steven is excited about,' Katzenberg says, 'is better than having none.'
Still, such deals have led to sniping within Hollywood that Spielberg is more concerned with his own directing career than the future of Dreamworks or, conversely, that he is more robber baron than fundraiser, plucking other studios' plum pictures for himself and his fledgling studio.
But in the case of Geisha, Spielberg's partners didn't want the film. 'I tried to talk him out of it,' says Geffen. 'I don't think it's good enough for him.'
So next year, the star of Dreamworks will direct Memoirs of a Geisha for Columbia Pictures. Spielberg, Geffen and Katzenberg say they're fine with this, but Spielberg cannot hide his disappointment at his partners' lack of desire for Geisha. He knows, however, that the only Dreamworks film to have lost serious money was one that he directed, Amistad.
When he's between films, as he is now, Spielberg spends his days at Amblin Entertainment, the production company he founded in 1982. He will remain here until - or if - Dreamworks finally builds its own studio complex. Efforts to do so have long been stymied by environmental concerns and bureaucratic wrangling. 'I will not believe it,' Spielberg says, 'until I see a shovel go into the ground.'
Amblin is a low-slung south-western compound designed by Spielberg himself and built on the former site of the Leave It to Beaver house. Spielberg's office is comfortable, pretty pricey but hardly ostentatious: mission furniture, Tiffany lamps, Rockwell paintings, a huge flat-screen television, an overflowing trophy shelf and framed photographs of Spielberg with, well, everyone.
The only faces I don't recognise are those of his children. He has seven all told: Jessica Capshaw, the 22-year-old daughter of his wife, the actress Kate Capshaw; his son Max; three children born to him and Kate (daughters Sasha, 8, and Destry, 2, and a son, Sawyer, 6); and two adopted children, Theo, 10, and Mikaela, 2, both of whom are African-American. 'We wanted Theo not to be the only black child in the family,' he says when I ask why he and Capshaw adopted again once they started having children.
Spielberg is, by all accounts, an exemplary father and husband. His love for Capshaw borders on infatuation, and he is preternaturally jealous. Capshaw has just starred in and co-produced a Dreamworks film, The Love Letter, that called for a fair amount of lovemaking. Whenever Capshaw showed Spielberg the dailies, she surreptitiously excised her sex scenes. But one day he accidentally saw the unexpurgated version - which made him, in Capshaw's words, 'extremely wiggy'.
After showing me around his office, Spielberg pops in one videotape, a director's reel, and then another, of a comedian. He likes the first reel; the second is too low-tech to make a call. Didn't the comedian's agent know the reel was going to Spielberg? 'Oh no,' he says, 'we never use my name, because if I specify I want to see something, the prices go up right away.'
The weight of his very name, he admits, can be a burden. That is why, when Spielberg recently saw a play that he hated, he wouldn't leave at intermission, worried about the signal it would send. That is why Spielberg asks me not to name the cinematographer he recently fired from a Dreamworks film, for fear of tainting his career.
Now Tom Stoppard drops in. He and Spielberg have been friends for some time. Stoppard wrote the screenplay for Empire of the Sun, and doctored Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, for which he received about $120,000. Once it took off, Spielberg sent Stoppard a $1 million thank-you bonus.
After Stoppard comes lunch, delivered from the Amblin kitchen. Spielberg is having broccoli, a tall glass of carrot-spinach juice and some vitamin E. He is on an anti-cancer, weight-losing kick, prescribed by Goldie Hawn. He has recently taken up cigars but has always been caffeine-free (except for the occasional chocolate bar), and has never done drugs of any sort. His college roommates, he explains, were ardent drugs users. It was Spielberg's job to cart them - and their cat, Daytripper, who leapt from a fourth-storey window after being fed LSD - to the emergency room whenever they overdosed. 'That really helped keep me off drugs,' he says. 'I'm also a control freak, and I was afraid if I took any marijuana and got really stoned, I would lose control of my life. It's as simple as that.'
His mother, Leah, backs up his story. 'He's very Boy Scout-minded, you know,' she says with a sort of bewildered chuckle. 'He's really a throwback to my generation.'
Over lunch, we talk movies. Spielberg sees more than 100 new films a year and seems to recall them frame for frame (he has a notoriously acute visual memory). He waxes on any number of his old favourites: It's a Wonderful Life, Lawrence of Arabia and The Godfather, which he considers the best film by a living director. 'I've never made a movie anywhere near as good as The Godfather,' he says, 'and
I don't have the ambition to, either. If it happens, it happens.'
This is a surprising confession. It is partly self-deprecation, but Spielberg also seems to be admitting that he has more of an appetite for uplift than a certain kind of artistry can accommodate. The Godfather, after all, is a film with a violence that never wanes; it crescendos with Michael Corleone ordering the murder of his own brother-in-law and leaves the audience with the uneasy feeling that evil leads simply to more evil. Both Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, meanwhile, end not in the killing fields but many years later, in the cemeteries, with survivors paying respects to their rescuers - the cinematic equivalent, some critics felt, of putting ketchup on a perfectly good steak.
A strange thing happens when Spielberg discusses his own work. His degree of self-criticism seems a direct reflection of each film's box-office performance. You will not catch him complaining that the audience 'didn't get' a film; if it didn't do well, it generally didn't deserve to. Of Empire of the Sun, he says, 'I was a visual opportunist - I just feel there's a patent lack of story and relationship.' With Amistad, he says, 'I kind of dried it out, and it became too much of a history lesson.'
When talk turns to Schindler's List, he visibly brightens. Schindler's List, after all, changed everything. Until then, Spielberg was seen as a phenomenally talented Peter Pan, growing up just long enough to try a Color Purple or an Empire of the Sun before dashing back to the safety of his popcorn movies. His motivation for making those earlier serious movies was simple: to be taken seriously. But Schindler's List, he says, 'is the most personal film I've ever made, because it was something I was so ashamed of.'
The 'it', of course, was being Jewish. As a scrawny kid in gentile suburbia, he couldn't stand being disliked for something he had no control over. 'It wasn't so much that I wanted to be popular or wanted to meet girls,' Spielberg says. 'I just didn't want to get hit in the mouth.'
Well into adulthood, he was happy to ignore his Jewish identity. But Kate Capshaw converted to Judaism before their marriage, in 1991, and they became, as Spielberg puts it, 'time-permitting practitioners of Judaism'. They decided to raise their children as Jews, including Theo and Mikaela. And when Spielberg began to see Judaism as more blessing than curse, he was finally ready to make Schindler's List, which he had been flirting with for nearly a decade.
He was convinced the film would lose money, even though it cost only $22 million. A three-hour, black-and-white movie about the Holocaust would hardly seem to warrant a broad constituency. In an interview a few years earlier, he had addressed the difficulty of making a film about the Holocaust: 'It has to be accurate and it has to be fair and it cannot in the least come across as entertainment.'
Spielberg may have intended Schindler's List as the opposite of entertainment, but the film grossed $321 million and engaged audiences as only entertainment can, coaxing them to cry and shudder, leaving their hearts more heavy than broken. Yet the film so reflected Spielberg's intensity for the subject that it nearly stunned his critics; seemingly over night, he was reborn: Oscar winner, public Jew, a film-maker who could, for the most part, balance his competing passions for rigorous storytelling and moral uplift.
After Schindler, Spielberg took a three-year break from directing to spend more time with his family. 'I got extremely antsy,' he says, 'probably contributing, in small part, to my agreeing to form Dreamworks.' Then he shot three films within 12 months. Each of them was designed, in part, to please someone in particular. He made The Lost World to fulfil his promise to Universal for a Jurassic Park sequel, but also to satisfy his young fans who wanted an ET sequel. 'I'm not going to risk the memory of the first one to give people what they think they want,' he says. 'I just said, "Lost World will be kind of giving them what they want without having to give them ET II."'
The Lost World was followed by Amistad. 'Well, we were talking to Theo about slavery and where he came from and who his great-great-grandparents might have been,' he says. 'So when I heard the story, I immediately thought that this was something that I would be pretty proud to make, simply to say to my son, "Look, this is about you."'
Saving Private Ryan was also aimed at strengthening a family tie. 'That movie was for my dad,' he says. 'When I first read the script, I said, "My dad is going to love this movie."' For most of his life, Spielberg had a rocky relationship with his father, Arnold, a computer engineer in the industry's earliest days. Steven, the oldest of four and the only son, was always much closer to his free-spirited mother than to his workaholic father. He blamed Arnold outright for his parents' divorce, when Steven was in his late teens. But they have grown close of late, and Steven offers a commensurately more generous view of their shared past. He acknowledges that it was Arnold who jump-started him as a pre-teen film-maker, and that it was Arnold, a radio operator on a B-25 during the Second World War, who was responsible for Steven's lifelong infatuation with the War.
Saving Private Ryan began, Spielberg says, 'simply as a badass Second World War movie'. But talking to veterans during research 'sobered me up', and he decided to push the film towards the grimmest realities: fear, boredom, killing.
The harshest killing by far befalls Private Mellish, a tough Jewish soldier who is knifed through the heart, slowly, by a German soldier who hushes Mellish like a baby as he leans on the blade. 'I made that up on the spot,' Spielberg says when I ask about it.
But why did he choose the Jewish soldier?
'Believe it or not,' he says, 'I chose the Jewish soldier because all the other squad members were accounted for, and I'd already shot their whereabouts.' Tom Hanks, the star of Saving Private Ryan, recalls watching Spielberg shoot the scene. 'The blood drained out of my body,' Hanks says. 'I could not believe what he had done.'
Spielberg says his alter-ego in the film is Corporal Upham, the cowardly pacifist. Hanks disagrees. 'I think who Steven fantasises himself being is Mellish,' he says, 'who pulls out his Star of David, and says, "Juden, Juden", as the German POWs are going by. I think Steven, for his Jewishness, wants to be that guy who, when the time comes, can pop a guy in the mouth with the butt of his M1.'
At 9am the next day, Spielberg is at his desk trying out a new computer game, European Air War. It is a gift from Robin Williams, whom Spielberg calls 'my software pimp'. The impeachment hearings are on television. Spielberg is a friend and supporter of President Clinton, and he is thoroughly disgusted with Kenneth Starr and the rest.
He asks his assistant, Kristie Macosko, to bring in some cigars. We're not due anywhere for a half-hour, so he lights up a Davidoff and plops down on the couch. In rapid succession, we cover Bill Clinton, the coming Oscars and the state of Dreamworks. Spielberg says he has forgiven Clinton for the Lewinsky mess and still considers him a moral leader. 'Morality is defined not just by a sexual dalliance,' he says. 'What hurt me is what hurt a lot of his friends, which is that he didn't confide in any of us. But I never came out and asked him if it was true, so he never had to lie to me.'
Spielberg laughingly denies the rumour that Dreamworks will some day hire Clinton. 'I think he should maybe run a great university or be in charge of a foundation.' What about the 2000 election? 'Right now I'm favouring Gore,' he says, 'because I think Gore has the ambition and the energy, and he's got a great big heart, which I hope doesn't bite him in the butt, because he does lead with his heart.'
Now I ask him about Saving Private Ryan and the Oscars. No comment. Before winning two awards for Schindler, Spielberg had been spurned by the Academy. He was the comic-book kid who tried too hard to be serious - and made far too much money to garner a single underdog vote. In 1976, Spielberg was so confident about Jaws that he invited a news crew to record his glee as the Oscar nominations were announced - and then his name wasn't called. He has since trained himself to ignore the din. 'My two best sports,' he says, 'are clay-pigeon shooting, and blocking anticipation.'
As for Dreamworks, Spielberg disagrees that the young studio has not lived up to its promise. The past year was a good one, he points out, and expectations were too high to begin with. What people forget, Spielberg says, is that when Dreamworks was formed, he had production deals in play with several other studios. 'I couldn't suddenly say, "Thanks, guys, for supporting me for 15 years as a producer, but I'm starting my own studio, and good luck on these projects."'
He also brushes off the idea that he started Dreamworks to aid Jeffrey Katzenberg's revenge against Michael Eisner, who fired Katzenberg from Disney. 'I didn't throw myself over the barbed wire so Jeffrey could have what he wanted,' Spielberg says. 'I threw myself over the barbed wire with Jeffrey and David so we could have what we wanted.'
What Spielberg wanted was a proprietary stake in his own business. That is the upside of Dreamworks; the downside, he says, is that after a lifetime of working for father figures at other studios, he now has to be his own father figure. When I ask him about the headaches of being a mogul, he grimaces. 'God, I hate that word,' he says. 'It almost reminds me of mongrel, some kind of a debaucher.'
Anyway, he explains, Dreamworks is essentially Amblin writ large. (His two top production executives from Amblin, Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald-Parkes, are still in place at Dreamworks.) As an executive at another studio puts it, 'Steven is still the idea man, and though no one ever quite says it, Jeffrey's doing all the grunt work, while Geffen sort of lurks in the wings and lobs in a ball or two when he is inspired to do so.'
Spielberg's assistant Kristie pops into the office: time to leave. He is taking me on a tour of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. It is three minutes away by golf cart - the only Holocaust Studies centre, it seems safe to say, ever situated on a Hollywood studio lot.
The Shoah Foundation is one of two cornerstones of Spielberg's philanthropy, the other being the Righteous Persons Foundation. 'Among all the things I've done professionally,' he says, 'these are the two things I'm most proud of.' He began the Righteous Persons Foundation with the profits of Schindler's List. 'I was unwilling to keep it because it was blood money' - and it has since dispensed $37 million to Holocaust and Jewish-continuity projects.
In the past, Spielberg was an out-and-out philanthropist, and he was eager to have his name prominently attached to his gifts. These days, he is far more circumspect. 'A rabbi sat me down,' he explains, 'and told me, "You know, if you put your name on everything, it goes unrecognised by God." I said, "Really?" So over the past 10 years, 80 per cent of what I give is anonymous and the other 20 percent is only where my name can help attract other money.'
Our three-minute ride turns into 10, then 20. The road to the Shoah Foundation has been diverted, so Spielberg backtracks again and again. He finally finds his way on to the Shoah lot - seven trailers surrounded by chain-link fencing. The operation has the feel of a displaced-persons camp, which is accidental but perhaps not inappropriate. Michael Berenbaum, the foundation's president, walks us into the first trailer and halts Spielberg in front of a tote board listing the number of Holocaust survivors and witnesses from around the world who have told their life stories on videotape (nearly 50,000 so far).
Some testimonies are being used to teach schoolchildren; others have been turned into documentaries: The Last Days, a film about five survivors from Hungary, has just been released. For the most part, though, the testimonies will be painstakingly indexed and then disseminated by fibre-optic cables to Holocaust museums and archives. The chief consultant on the fibre-optic network is Arnold Spielberg.
As we weave through a battery of employees working at computers and video stations, Berenbaum mentions that Spielberg's father just landed a big donation from Unisys. 'Oh, that's great,' Spielberg says. 'I'm always looking for something to congratulate my dad on.'
And there, in the next trailer, is the man in question. 'Dad! We were just talking about you!'
Arnold Spielberg is 82, stocky and hale, wearing a plaid shirt and khakis. He and his son chat for a minute, then Berenbaum resumes the tour. 'If I wanted to,' Spielberg tells me, 'I could easily write one cheque to cover this project, but...'
Berenbaum cuts him off: 'But then it would be Spielberg's foundation, and Spielberg is associated with many, many great things, but all of them fantasies.' Spielberg explains: 'What we're trying to do here is to recreate social studies in America. We're also available to anyone who wants to rubber-stamp our technology - to spearhead the search for the genealogy of African-Americans as former slaves, who would like to create a social-studies curriculum having to do with the genocide of the American Indian, anything having to do with racial intolerance or just plain intolerance.'
In serious conversation with Spielberg, tolerance and intolerance are among the most common words to crop up. Despite his success, he says, he still feels like an outsider, indelibly stamped by his childhood. Indeed, his movies add up to one long argument for tolerance, a plea to accept the outsider. ET the Extra-Terrestrial has Elliott, a young loner, recognising that ET is more kindred spirit than alien. Close Encounters of the Third Kind was, above all, a quest for peace among men (and, again, aliens). More recently, Saving Private Ryan was rewritten, at Spielberg's insistence, from a swaggering Second World War movie into a melting-pot ensemble drama: the Jewish soldier, the Italian soldier, the scripture-quoting sharpshooter.
It is this morality of tolerance, his critics say, that turns his characters into stereotypes or leads Spielberg to crown the wrong heroes. Why, he was asked after Schindler's List, did he make a Holocaust film with a redeemed Nazi as its hero? Even David Geffen feels that Amistad was less about slavery than 'about white people saving black people'.
These are, in effect, new twists on an old line of criticism. It used to be said that Spielberg and his best friend, George Lucas, infantilised the movies with their cartoonish, thrill-seeking, sequel-generating mentality. That charge stuck, particularly since half of Hollywood immediately began imitating them. But the latest wave of Spielberg criticism - that he massages history in order to get his tolerance fix - hasn't yet found its legs, in large part because his vision has not become a trend. Why is it that no one else is making films like Steven Spielberg's? It could be that it's simply too soon for imitators. Or it could be that no one else is able to.
Back at Amblin, Spielberg walks into a roomful of people and stone-age gadgetry: the production meeting for a Flintstones sequel. The director, Brian Levant, marches Spielberg through a parade of drawings and models. 'Oh, that's so great, that's so clever!' Spielberg says. 'Now I have a question. Is Steve Wynn-Rock in the script a nice character?'
'No,' Levant says, 'he's our bad guy.'
'Then you can't call him Steve Wynn-Rock,' Spielberg says, 'because Steve's a very good friend of mine.'
No problem, Levant says. Spielberg proclaims: 'Um, great! Gee. When do you start?'
'When do we start?' Levant says with an awkward laugh. 'That's a very good question. We don't have a green light.'
A pregnant moment. The film is being produced by Universal - Spielberg is just 'a neighbourly advisor', as he puts it - and Universal has been in upheaval since its chairman, Casey Silver, was fired a week earlier.
'Well,' Spielberg says, 'Stacey's making all the decisions with Ronnie Meyer right now, since Casey left, so you're going to have to get them down here.' Spielberg hollers into the next room: 'Kristie - is Ronnie Meyer in town? If he is, ask if he'd come down this afternoon with Stacey and look at this Flintstones stuff.'
Levant grins. Spielberg grins back, asks Levant to slip him a copy of the budget and heads out. Kristie is already dialling Ron Meyer.
A quick lunch and then downstairs for a meeting with Gore Verbinski, who directed Mousehunt for Dreamworks. Verbinski, in a black turtleneck and creeping sideburns, has come to Spielberg with a pitch for a new film: a remake of a 1950s drama about German POWs returning home.
Spielberg listens, nods. He, of course, remembers the original, in great detail. They talk at some length about the plot and the characters. 'Frankly, the one thing that scares me here is my politics' - that is, lionising the German soldiers. 'Let me give you a crazy idea,' he says suddenly. 'Would you ever think of making this picture all in German with American subtitles?'
'Yeah,' says Verbinski, somewhat unenthusiastically, 'like a Das Boot.'
'Because then you could make this film for really low-end, get a really great German cast.'
'No, I think there's an integrity to that,' Verbinski says.
'And you'd make all your money back in your first weekend in Germany alone. Would you be willing to really go short strings on this?'
'Absolutely.'
Back upstairs, the Flintstones props are still spread out. And now, lo and behold, Ron Meyer and Stacey Snider have stopped by. They look things over, then convene in Spielberg's office.
The minute they leave, Spielberg calls Levant. 'Brian, you got a green light, pal,' he says. 'But you've got to make me a promise, because I don't want the green light to turn yellow. Try to get one million dollars out of the overall budget below the line. All right? Congratulations.'
Spielberg loves to say yes, especially to younger film-makers. He says he will never forget the opportunity that Sid Sheinberg gave him in 1969, signing Spielberg to a seven-year contract at a time when Hollywood did not consider youth a good thing. He is particularly supportive of women. Two of his former secretaries are now producers, and Spielberg has hired any number of female directors for Amblin and Dreamworks movies. 'Steven is the single most active mentoring director in Hollywood,' says the director Robert Zemeckis. 'He has taken responsibility for the power he's been given, which I guess you could suggest is the very definition of humility.'
Now Spielberg is pawing through his in-box as Kristie awaits orders. A pair of charity requests. (Yes to both.)
A request for an interview from a journalist who panned Amistad. (He'll do it, because he thought the criticism was smart.) The guest list for a coming VIP screening of Close Encounters. (Julia Phillips, one of the film's producers, hasn't been invited. Spielberg hasn't seen her in years, and in 1991, she assaulted him in her infamous Hollywood diatribe You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again. But Spielberg tells Kristie to invite her; he likes to keep his friends close and his enemies closer.) And then he turns to me and says, 'By the way, Tom Cruise and I are officially now going to make a movie together.'
The deal was finalised last night. This makes Spielberg very happy. He and Cruise are long-time friends and neighbours but have never worked together. The film, Minority Report, is based on a story by the science-fiction writer Philip K Dick. It will be set in the year 2080, in an America so anarchic that the government, forearmed with the knowledge of murders yet to happen, takes it upon itself to murder the murderers. Spielberg calls Minority Report the most cynical film he will have made - but yes, it has a happy ending, he says, and yes, it's a popcorn movie, 'but a gourmet popcorn movie'. He'll shoot it this autumn in Los Angeles so he can be near his family; Geisha will follow in the spring.
Later, I ask Spielberg what happened to the film about Charles Lindbergh that he had planned to direct. He replies by explaining how Schindler's List and the Shoah Foundation have reshaped his thinking. 'They've given me more of a moral responsibility to make sure I'm not putting someone else's agenda in front of the most important agenda, which is trying to create tolerance,' he says. 'We'll probably make Lindbergh, but one of the reasons I've considered not being the director is that I didn't know very much about him until I read Scott Berg's book and I read it only after I purchased it. I think it's one of the greatest biographies I've ever read but his "America First" and his anti-Semitism bothers me to my core, and I don't want to celebrate an anti-Semite unless I can create an understanding of why he felt that way. Because sometimes the best way to prevent discrimination is to understand the discriminator.'
The long day ends at the Dreamworks animation complex, where the consuls-general from 50 countries have been invited for a preview screening of The Prince of Egypt. Spielberg pulls up in his Explorer, a big green shark in a sea of diplomatic sedans. Pete Wilson, the outgoing governor of California, is escorted to him.
'Hey, Governor,' Spielberg says. 'How you doing?'
'Good to see you,' says the governor. 'You're very kind to do this.'
'Listen, thank you for coming,' Spielberg says. 'It's great that we have the whole world here tonight, in one room.
I wonder if I should start soliciting for Shoah donations.'
The two men share a laugh, and then they head inside. The governor is approached by the stray diplomat; Spielberg, meanwhile, is immediately encased in a circle of flesh, five deep - the consuls-general from Croatia and Gambia, Guatemala and France. They are all exceedingly well dressed; Spielberg is wearing scruffy corduroys and a suede jacket, a dead cigar cupped in his hand. They
tell him that they love his movies, that he should shoot his next one in their countries, that he should dramatise the lives of their repressed people.
These men and women, powerful in their own circles, clearly recognise that Spielberg's power dwarfs theirs by a frightening multiple. His power, after all, is unlimited by reality. The stories he tells have come to represent not just escape from an imperfect world but a facsimile of a more perfect world - where the lamb lies down with the lion, the discriminator with the discriminated. And in that world, they know, Steven Spielberg is the king.
After driving his children to school on Thursday morning, Spielberg heads for the set of ER. Djimon Hounsou, who played the leader of the slave revolt in Amistad, has just landed a recurring role, and Spielberg wants to wish him well. Here, too, Spielberg is treated like royalty, for he was a founding producer of the show.
On the drive back to Amblin, I ask Spielberg if his need for approval, his pressing desire to say yes, ever gets him in trouble. One of his frequent collaborators, after telling me of Spielberg's ability to do three or five things at once, all of them well, wondered aloud if his own films might benefit if he shoved a few things off his plate. Even now, when he's not directing, he is developing dozens of films and television shows and computer games; he is making a European fund-raising tour for the Shoah Foundation; he is still a producer of record on three Saturday morning cartoon shows; he is co-producer of a millennial extravaganza for the White House and he is also helping to shape the new Universal theme park. All this must fit around his family obligations, since Kate Capshaw's prime insistence when he formed Dreamworks was that he not become an absentee father.
Every project, Spielberg says now, a bit testily, fulfils a certain desire, satisfies a certain constituency. The films are what he lives for. The Shoah Foundation is a vital outlet for his altruism. The White House was not an organisation he could turn down. The cartoons and games
and theme park 'make my kids really proud of me', he says. 'They couldn't give a rat's ass about Schindler's List or Saving Private Ryan - but they care volumes that my name precedes Tiny Toons and Animaniacs.'
The rest of Spielberg's day is spent shuttling between meeting rooms and his office. He's on the telephone much of the time, first with his son Max, then with Christie's in New York, which is conducting an auction of Tiffany lamps. On the first one, he drops out at $62,000. He bids the next lamp up to $660,000 but again drops out. He finally gets the third one, for $140,000. There's one more lamp he's interested in. The bidding quickly moves to $1.3 million, which scares him off. 'God, that's more than I'll pay for a script,' he tells the Christie's clerk.
During one afternoon meeting, Spielberg suddenly excuses himself, dashes upstairs, shuts his door. President Clinton is on the telephone. Today, his lawyers are making their final arguments before the House Judiciary Committee. Spielberg's door remains closed for 15 minutes. When he emerges, he seems rather subdued.
Was Clinton asking a favour? Seeking advice? Looking for encouragement? Spielberg won't breathe a word, but whatever the President wanted, it's a good bet Spielberg gave it to him.
The next day, on the flight to New York, Spielberg tries to persuade me that his view of the world is not as starry as it once was. Fatherhood, he says, has made him grow up, and the impeachment of the President has embittered him. 'America will have to yet again wait for good work to be done in our names,' he says, his language almost Clintonian.
Concerning the President, he is plainly sincere. But his talk of cynicism is, frankly, not very convincing. If I have learned anything about Spielberg, it is that he, like the President, is a congenital optimist. Spielberg and Clinton, in fact, would seem to have much in common (beyond the fact that they are the same age, 52, and both dodged the draft). They are each driven by their need for approval, and they are very much men of their generation, tolerant to a fault and reverent toward the most righteous causes. They are self-styled outsiders who, by force of talent and personality and ambition, crashed the establishment but still summon the discomfort of the outsider when it serves to motivate them. They are, in short, the leaders America has asked for, and doesn't know quite what to make of.
The airplane is climbing. The sky is cloudless this morning, the hills of Los Angeles piney and calm. 'Out there is Sunland,' Spielberg says, pointing. 'That's where I shot ET. Out there and in Northridge, which is that way.'
Of his own films, ET is a clear favourite. It is also the closest Spielberg has come to autobiography: a boy who is good but lonely, his parents divorced, who discovers true happiness in the realm outside of reality.
I ask if he will ever make a film that's truly about himself. Yes, he says, somewhat wistfully. It's called I'll Be Home. It's about his family, written by his sister Anne, who was a co-writer of Big. Spielberg has considered making it for years. 'My big fear,' he explains, 'is that my mom and dad won't like it and will think it's an insult and won't share my loving yet critical view about what it was like to grow up with them.'
There is a poignant friction at work here: the artist who wants to tell a story, the man who is unwilling to offend.
It is a friction that Steven Spielberg may never resolve, but it that may keep him exactly what he is - one of the best American entertainers in history.
Stephen J Dubner, an editor at the magazine, is the author of "Turbulent Souls: A Catholic Son's Return to His Jewish Family."
Spielberg's list
(Worldwide box office takings)
Saving Private Ryan (1998) - $460m. Oscars announced tonight
Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) - $615m
Amistad (1997) - $65m
Schindler's List (1993) - $312m. Seven Oscars, including Best Director
Jurassic Park (1993) - $913m. Three Oscars (Technical Merit)
Hook (1991) - $263m
Always (1989) - $77m
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) - $495m. Oscar for Sound Effects Editing
Empire of the Sun (1987) - $67m
The Color Purple (1985) - $143m
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) - $333m. Oscar for Best Visual Effects
ET the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) - $701m. Four Oscars (Technical Merit)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) - $363m. Five Oscars (Technical Merit)
1941 (1979) - $90m worldwide
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) - $270m. Two Oscars (Technical Merit)
Jaws (1975) - $458m. Three Oscars (Technical and Sound)
The Sugarland Express (1974) - $12m
Duel (1971, TV movie) - $8m
Total: $5.6bn
Estimated worldwide revenue: $8bn