The crime that connects Steven Spielberg to one of his best movies: “They never caught me”
If anyone were the de facto president of Hollywood, it’s Steven Spielberg, the wunderkind-turned-grandaddy of modern blockbusters who also happens to be a very nice man by all accounts. Spielberg got his start in movies in the early 1970s and made a splash with his second theatrical release, a little action thriller called Jaws. That set the blueprint for the summer blockbuster genre and set him on a path of industry domination at the tender age of 29.
That might seem ridiculously young, but by the time Spielberg released his first box office hit, he was already an old hand at filmmaking. He started messing around with cameras before he was a teenager, recreating scenes from movies he watched in the theatre. He became determined to pursue the medium as a career, but that was a pretty unlikely career path, especially for a kid growing up in Arizona in the 1950s.
However, Spielberg was so passionate about filmmaking and so intent on becoming a director that he was willing to break laws to make it happen. One summer, when he was 15, his parents took him on a bus tour of Universal Studios. The young Spielberg struck up a conversation with an executive and managed to wrangle a three-day pass to the studio. Thrilled by the opportunity, he visited every day. When the three days ran out, he went again anyway, dressed in a suit and tie as if he were a junior executive. The security guards let him in without question for the duration of the summer.
When film critic Roger Ebert asked him about this escapade in 2012, Spielberg acknowledged the illicitness of it but downplayed the risk. “I was trespassing,” he conceded. “There were a number of books they could have thrown at me if they had caught me but they never caught me.” As a result, he got to spend the whole summer on the Universal lot as if he were an intern. It was a transformative experience and helped solidify his conviction that he was on the right path.
It also foreshadowed the plot of a film that he would make four decades later. 2002’s Catch Me If You Can stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank Abagnale, a teenager who passes himself off as a pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer, stealing a fortune in forged cheques along the way. Spielberg was quick to differentiate himself from the infamous conman, explaining that his motives were entirely different.
“I just had such a desire to make movies,” he said. “I had been making movies as a high school student, you know, and so I thought the best way to do it was watch how the professionals did it, so when I went on the Universal lot I was chasing my dreams.” In contrast, he pointed out, Abagnale’s actions were purely for financial gain and were harming others. Eventually, the conman spent most of his time running from the Feds.
“He’s being pursued,” Spielberg explained. “And I was the pursuer – of a career. That’s why I did what I did.” Another key difference? Abagnale spent nearly a decade in prison while Spielberg rapidly ascended the Hollywood ladder.
