“That was a real traumatic thing”: the “torturous” movie that turned Steven Spielberg’s pubes grey
There are some things everyone is better off not knowing, and Steven Spielberg watching his pubes turn grey in real-time is definitely among them, but he decided to share it with the world anyway.
Nobody really wants to imagine the highest-grossing director in cinema history recoiling in horror at the realisation that his short and curlies are losing their lustre before the hair on his face and head, but that’s how he decided to encapsulate one of his career’s most nightmarish shoots.
Now, for the sake of what’s a subject most people wouldn’t rather think about, let’s think about it. You’re Steven Spielberg, and you’re making a film that you subsequently describe as having left you traumatised both physically and mentally, so there could only realistically be a few contenders for the pube-greying.
Schindler’s List would be one, since it was an intensely personal picture that carried huge emotional, psychological, and historical weight, while Saving Private Ryan would be another, with the filmmaker delivering his most gut-punching, grisly, and blood-splattered contribution to the medium yet.
You can’t imagine his bawhairs losing their vigour when Harrison Ford is running away from a boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and you don’t really want to envision anything happening in or around Spielberg’s nether regions when dinosaurs are running amok and looking for their next meal in Jurassic Park.
And yet, for whatever reason, ET the Extra-Terrestrial was when his pubes lost their pigment. Using a sci-fi adventure as the backdrop to a “personal statement about the effects of divorce on children,” the director seemed to get lost along the way, and not only for the damage it caused to his undercarriage.
“Other times, I thought I was making a kiddie show that would be unreleasable in motion-picture theatres, and would have to be released on Saturday morning television,” he explained, before offering far too much information on the emotional vacillation of the trials and tribulations of the titular alien, who himself looked not unlike a bollock, and the damage it caused.
“Oh, torturous! Torturous!” he wailed. “You should see how wrinkled my insides are from all that stuff. My pubic hairs turned grey! That was a real traumatic thing.” Equally traumatic information to share with the general public, to be fair, but what’s a few grey pubes when ET the Extra-Terrestrial went on to become the single biggest hit that Hollywood had ever seen?
Was it worth it? A question nobody decided to ask him, thank fuck. Knowing about Spielberg’s grey pubes was not required or necessary knowledge for anyone to absorb, but he went ahead and did it anyway.
