The Fabelmans and Steven Spielberg's autobiographical filmmaking

Share this Article:

In the run-up to the release of Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical The Fabelmans, we look at other times he’s brought his life to the screen.

OUR BEST EVER SUBSCRIPTION OFFER!

Try three issues of Film Stories magazine – for just £1!: right here!

There’s an element of autobiography in most Steven Spielberg films, but some projects hit closer to home than others. E.T., for example, wraps his parents’ divorce within a sci-fi fairy tale, while Catch Me If You Can merges the same subject with the story of Frank Abagnale Jr, a real-life conman who posed as a lawyer, pilot and doctor during the 1960s and 70s.

Both films suggest Spielberg wasn’t quite ready to tell a more literal story based around his actual childhood experiences before getting around to his new movie The Fabelmans, but they’re not the only times he’s approached the issue. At least two separate projects about his childhood existed at different times in his career. He eventually backed away from both, but they’re part of a compelling journey that got the director to this point.

The first is the one that probably had the biggest impact on The Fabelmans. Talk of I’ll Be Home emerged at the end of the 90s and continued through to the early years of the following decade.

In a New York Times article written by Stephen J. Dubner and published in February 1999, the author writes:

“I ask Spielberg if he might 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 I’ll Be Home 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 point of view about what it was like to grow up with them.'”

It makes sense that the past would have been on Spielberg’s mind in the first months of 1999. At the time, he was vying for awards with Saving Private Ryan, going on to win his second Best Director Oscar at that year’s ceremony in March. He made the film to honour his father, a veteran of the Pacific campaign, and dedicated his victory to him.

The rift that had been the backbone of so many Spielberg films was healed and Spielberg was clearly ready to explore his past in more detail. This desire continued through to at least 2002, when Empire magazine asked if he’d ever get around to making I’ll Be Home. “Someday,” Spielberg said. “I don’t know when, but someday. It’s very personal, that’s what scares me the most… I’m not ready to go public yet.”

Catch Me If You Can

Perhaps Spielberg scratched the autobiographical itch with Catch Me If You Can, which was released later that year. Blending deep melancholy with candy-coloured capering, the film portrays a more balanced father-son dynamic than we’d previously seen, with Christopher Walken beautifully playing Frank Sr as a forlorn figure whose death devastates his son.

Either way, talk of I’ll Be Home dried up and it’s only resurfaced recently thanks to The Fabelmans. A few critics have raised the project with Spielberg and his co-writer Tony Kushner, looking to understand the connection between the two. And it seems that while both are direct chronicles of Spielberg’s youthful experiences, they approach the subject in unique ways. “That was much more a metaphor than actual events,” Spielberg told Vanity Fair recently. “It was a different kind of a story. It wasn’t this.”

Indeed, Kushner wasn’t even aware that I’ll Be Home existed when he started working on The Fabelmans. “I didn’t know until we were close to production that Anne had written a script about this,” he told The Film Stage’s Nick Newman “Steven didn’t tell me that, and I think he probably didn’t want me to read it. I think he offered it to me, maybe, at that point but I didn’t want to read it at that point.”

So I’ll Be Home and The Fabelmans are certainly different approaches to the same essential story, but there’s another take on Spielberg’s early years that deserves a mention too. As far back as the late 70s, Spielberg was considering a personal project that’s been variously called Growing Up and After School.

Little has been reported about the film, but Spielberg discussed it in a January 1980 edition of Rolling Stone magazine. Published as promotion for Spielberg’s unpopular wartime farce 1941, the article notes that “a couple of years ago, seeking a change of pace, [Spielberg] planned a picture about children, his own suburbs-of-Phoenix Our Gang comedy.”

Of the project, Spielberg said: “Problem was, I hadn’t grown up enough to make Growing Up. Hopefully, 1941 is the last movie I make that celebrates the boy in me. And then hopefully I can go on from here and do something more adultlike and perhaps more boring.”

Judging by these descriptions, it sounds like a slightly different project to either I’ll Be Home or The Fabelmans, perhaps something more about Spielberg and his friends than Spielberg and his family, but little else is said in the article. Instead, we can turn to Joseph McBride’s indispensable ‘Steven Spielberg: A Biography’ for more information.

The Fabelmans

In the chapter focusing on 1941, McBride notes that Spielberg “planned to take a few weeks from pre-production on [the film] to knock off a low-budget comedy about children.” Like 1941, the project was written by soon-to-be Back To The Future creators Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, who were – McBride reports – given a simple brief: “I want you guys to write a movie I’m really passionate about – about kids.”

With so little to work from, Zemeckis and Gale went in their own direction. “Zemeckis and I being the renegades we are – certainly we were more so then – we thought that to make it really interesting, it should be rated R, and we wrote it that way,” Gale explained. “We swore like truck drivers when we were twelve. A lot of kids do that, and we thought that would be the way to go. It was the classic nerds-against-jocks story.” Spielberg liked the idea in these early stages. “I don’t want to make a movie about children that’s dimples or cuteness,” McBride reports him as saying. “It’s my first vendetta film: I’m going to get back at about twenty people I’ve always wanted to get back at.”

Spielberg hoped to cast unknowns between the ages of eight and 14 and to take a somewhat improvisational approach, with the kids contributing their own experiences. A May 1978 start date was lined up for the shoot, a $1.5m budget set, and Caleb Deschanel approached to be cinematographer.

But things quickly fell apart. Deschanel didn’t like the script and Spielberg himself started backing away. “I think it was a little too much for Steven,” Gale told McBride. “Steven didn’t really have a focus on what After School was going to be. The movie that he really wanted to make about kids turned out to be E.T.“

Gale is right. It’s very likely E.T. satisfied the urge to make a movie about his childhood in the same way Catch Me If You Can did the job I’ll Be Home was going to do in the early 00s. Now though, things seem to be different. With Spielberg finally making his long-hoped-for musical in West Side Story and continuing to talk of getting a Western into production, he seems to be ticking off projects that have been on the back-burner for some time.

It’s taken over four decades, but with The Fabelmans Spielberg is now, finally, ready to go public.