That Time I Didn’t Meet Steven Spielberg

How a surreal thirty-minute lunch with the legendary director brought me and my father closer together

Steven Spielberg. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

While 5AM StoryTalk is primarily focused on the arts, I will sometimes share personal essays told through the lens of the arts and/or pop culture. This is one of those occasions.

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It’s fair to say that Steven Spielberg’s films transformed the lives of multiple generations of kids who grew up around the world between the late seventies and the early nineties. These kids were molded and warped and inspired by his imagination and craft and propensity for wonder — by films such as the first three Indiana Jones, ET: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL (1982), and JURASSIC PARK (1994) — and grew up wanting to become storytellers themselves because of these experiences.

This legion includes me.

I have watched and rewatched and rewatched again almost every Spielberg film from this two-decade period. In some cases, such as RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1980), more than a hundred times. Some scarred me, such as JAWS (1975); I still feel uncomfortable swimming in the ocean. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977) played a direct role in interrupting any relationship I had with deities; I would still be wasting my time trying to find God if not for this film. And the Indiana Jones films instilled in me a sense of adventure I have never come close to satisfying despite visiting some thirty countries now and moving away from the United States in 2017.

L. JAWS; R. Spielberg directing Harrison Ford in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. Credit: Universal and Paramount

My mother always understood and encouraged my relationship with cinema, which quickly evolved beyond Spielberg by the time I was a teenager, but my father…well, we had what you might call a complicated relationship. He had specific ideas about what a teenaged boy should be getting up to. Spending hours and hours holed up in a bedroom — reading screenplays and magazines about filmmaking, or rewatching films he knew I’d seen probably too many times, or discovering films I’d read Spielberg and his seventies filmmaker friends loved (films my father roundly dismissed as too old or too artsy or too foreign) — was definitely not it. He and I never really found something to bond over as a result, considering my general disinterest in cars and carpentry and firearms, a divide that continued until he died two years ago.

For me, what was especially confusing, even frustrating, was how my father put no effort into trying to understand what was going on inside me that compelled me to pursue an artist’s life or, like my mother, attempt to engage with any of what I was trying to create — even as he otherwise supported me, which he always did in practical ways. He was endlessly generous in terms of his time, for example, but, in every way that might truly matter to me, he was utterly disinterested in what he was helping me with. I suspect the arts confused him, which meant I confused him, and, like many people of his generation, the easiest thing was to just not talk about his feelings on these matters. As if not talking about it would somehow make the problem go away.

The problem did not go away.

E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL. Credit: Universal

Moving to Los Angeles in 2005, to chase my dream of becoming the next Steven Spielberg, certainly didn’t bring my father and I any closer. LA was a bastion of everything he disagreed with in the world, so it was just better to not talk about that either. All he cared about was if I was “doing okay” and could pay my bills, which, for the most part, was the case in those early years of artistic struggle.

In 2009, things improved. I sold my first screenplay (which I’ve written about here). It was also the year I found myself sitting across from Steven Spielberg for lunch.

My friend and I had decided to grab lunch at the Malibu Country Mart. As we got into line at John’s Garden, a sandwich joint I still love, I saw him standing there. The man. Spielberg himself, along with two of his teenage children. As a former journalist, I’d already interviewed many filmmakers and musicians I admired, but this was spectacularly different. I actually froze. My friend had to nudge me out of my daze so I could stammer through my order.

Once our sandwiches arrived, we discovered the seating area outside had become overrun with lunchtime diners, most of them fabulously beautiful people because, well, Malibu. There was half a picnic table left…at which Spielberg’s two children were seated.

I now had a choice: knowingly sit at the same table as my idol (which felt more than a little stalker-ish), or make my friend accept an empty spot of grass to eat our food.

For my friend’s sake, I chose the picnic table and, a few minutes later, Spielberg sat down across from me.

For the next thirty minutes, I attempted to concentrate on the conversation my friend and I were allegedly having. But all I could think about was the fact that Steven Spielberg — Steven Spielberg! — was right there.

Right.

There.

Across from me.

Steven Spielberg. Image: Wikimedia Commons

I contemplated all the ways this could go. Maybe if I introduced myself, Spielberg would detect talent radiating from me, sense a fellow artist in his midst, and ask me in some fatherly way what I was working on. Next year, I would be Hollywood’s new It Screenwriter, on his way to his first Academy Award nomination. And if I won, I’d thank Spielberg first — not for the big break, but setting me on this path to begin with.

But everything about this approach seemed mercenary. Maybe it was better to just interrupt him briefly as I left, to thank him for what he had meant to my life. His kids were probably used to such intrusions by now, I told myself.

Or maybe, just maybe it was better to scribble a note on a napkin and push it his way as I left, to avoid interrupting his lunch with his kids with my pathetic fanboying.

“I wouldn’t be who I am without your work — thanks!”

In the end, my friend and I finished our sandwiches and we just got up and left.

On the car ride home, my phone rang. It was my father, calling to check in. We chatted for a few minutes, about nothing important as was typical of most of our conversations, but then, for reasons I can’t recall, I said some version of, “Something weird happened to me today, Dad.”

Then, I recounted the lunch that had just transpired, especially how confusing but wonderful this brief encounter with Spielberg was. Maybe I was still trying to make sense of it myself.

My father didn’t seem especially interested, or rather that’s how I interpreted his silence. I decided to let him off the hook. “Sorry, I know none of that probably made any sense to you.”

“Of course it does, Son,” he said. “That man raised you as much as your mom and I did.”

I think about this conversation with my father more than almost any other we ever had, except maybe the last one before he died. It has come to mean so much to me because I wasn’t as unseen by my father as I thought I was.

“That man raised you as much as your mom and I did.”

Incidentally, I’ve yet to properly meet Spielberg since our Malibu picnic table non-encounter…though he has personally passed on two of my projects in the past six years. Thirty-five years ago, I was sitting in my bedroom, dreaming of one day working with him. Today, he’s passing on my projects. I think even my father would agree if he were still here  -  that’s progress.

My father and me, at my wedding

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