Spielberg the Serious.

• Author: SHARRETT, CHRISTOPHER
• Position: Steven, overview of director's work

FOR MANY FILM FANS, Steven Spielberg is to the commercial motion picture industry what Bill Gates is to computers. The analogy may seem cruel and exaggerated, but it's not without foundation. Spielberg's name is becoming synonymous with the contemporary cinema, at least as much because of his numerous enterprises and business affiliations as his actual filmmaking. His name seems to be everywhere. On the DVD reissue of David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia," an interview with Spielberg replaces one with director Martin Scorsese that accompanied its 1993 rerelease on VHS home video. Spielberg is looked to for an imprimatur to all sorts of film endeavors, indeed to tell moviegoers if a particular work is worth their time or deserving of a place in motion picture history.

With his latest effort, "A.I.," a science fiction project he inherited from the late Stanley Kubrick, one of the few remaining symbols of high seriousness of the American cinema, Spielberg is enhancing further his furrowed-brow bona fides. Of course, all of this is a fairly new wrinkle to Spielberg's career, but the trajectory of his work tells us much about the new Hollywood.

Spielberg's beginnings were fairly respectable. The TV movie "Duel" and his first feature "Sugarland Express" introduced the director as an important, if not formidable, representative of the Movie Brat generation. His early work was steeped in genre conventions, but prepared to push the envelope a little--"Sugarland Express" was among the first pictures to offer a critique of the media. All this would change within a couple of years. His breakthrough "Jaws," together with George Lucas' "Star Wars," established the modern Hollywood blockbuster--films based on special effects and a few easy emotions that would guarantee a big draw, many spin-offs, and lots of merchandise. The idea was a real boon to the industry, as the old studio system crumbled and was gradually absorbed by transnational corporations. It caught on to the extent that little Hollywood fare today is produced outside of the blockbuster ethic. Indeed, "theme park movies" is the common adage associated with what goes on at the multiplex.

Spielberg films like "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and especially "E.T." solidified the formula, as the director pilfered old matinee serials, pumping up tried-and-true formulas with state-of-the-art movie technology, and, above all, going for the emotional jugular with the goal of leaving not a dry eye in the house...