The Raider of a Lost Art

Bilge Ebiri orchestrates this oral history of Steven Spielberg for Vulture. Some thirty collaborators deep, it’s at its best on the failures. The mechanical shark that wouldn’t work; the house built for 1941 and then pushed off a cliff. Scorsese’s line that if the shark had worked, Jaws wouldn’t have been Jaws, is the whole New Hollywood story in miniature. What lingers is how much of it turns on things that couldn’t happen today: a friend covering the overage on Raiders, a studio taking a chance on a 20-something with a bestseller. The craft, as Kathleen Kennedy notes, doesn’t really exist anymore.