Memory GlimpseSarah Boxer asked Steven Spielberg to recall his earliest visual experience. He found one from the age of 3.
"My parents put me into a fluoroscope, a big, horizontal X-ray machine. My parents were very friendly with the doctor, and he tested his fluoroscope on me." They laid their toddler down "in the machine, a kind of coffin, and closed the lid on me. It was all green in there, a white-green light. That was one of my earliest and most scary memories. I guess they were looking at my bones. But my point of view was that they put me in a box, and it was all green. And I couldn't get out. I think that might have been the beginning of 'Poltergeist' and 'Jaws.'" The connection between the light and "Poltergeist" was clear. But how do you get "Jaws" from green light? Spielberg didn't miss a beat. "Just being abandoned, you know, set adrift, in the middle of the ocean, my ocean of green light."
Before the green light came another light. "The first thing I remember was the eternal light." He was only 6 months old at the time and was in a synagogue in Cincinnati, the city where he was born in 1946. "I didn't know at the time that that's what it was. I remember seeing people with long beards, handing me crackers. And a red light." The crackers were called Tamtams, and "the red light was the eternal light, the Ner Tamid," the light that never goes out. Given all these extraordinary encounters with light -- green, red and eternal -- it's no wonder that Spielberg became obsessed with alien abductions. "I've been dealing with abduction ever since 'Close Encounters,'" he said.
Gainesville Sun, December 7, 2002.