Steven Spielberg on the red carpetImage via DDP/INSTARimages
By
Thomas Butt
Published 9 minutes ago
Thomas Butt is a senior writer. An avid film connoisseur, Thomas actively logs his film consumption on Letterboxd and vows to connect with many more cinephiles through the platform. He is immensely passionate about the work of Martin Scorsese, John Ford, and Albert Brooks. His work can be read on Collider and Taste of Cinema. He also writes for his own blog, The Empty Theater, on Substack. He is also a big fan of courtroom dramas and DVD commentary tracks. For Thomas, movie theaters are a second home. A native of Wakefield, MA, he is often found scrolling through the scheduled programming on Turner Classic Movies and making more room for his physical media collection. Thomas habitually increases his watchlist and jumps down a YouTube rabbit hole of archived interviews with directors and actors. He is inspired to write about film to uphold the medium's artistic value and to express his undying love for the art form. Thomas looks to cinema as an outlet to better understand the world, human emotions, and himself.
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How does one become the most gifted and universally adored filmmaker of their generation? For Steven Spielberg, directing groundbreaking blockbusters and Oscar-winning dramas seems to have come naturally. Although his work ethic, intelligence, and leadership panache can't be overlooked, one memory from his childhood was perhaps the most responsible for Jaws, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Jurassic Park, and especially Spielberg's semi-autobiographical drama, The Fabelmans, which depicts the precise moment where the movie-obsessed Spielberg was born.
The Greatest Show on Earth is often cited as one of the worst Best Picture winners in the history of the Academy Awards, but how bad could it be if it inspired a young Steven Spielberg to pick up a camera and capture the world around him? As a child, he was taken by his parents to see Cecil B. DeMille's carnival extravaganza on the big screen. The 1952 film's signature scene, a mesmerizing train crash, left Spielberg in a daze, and he couldn't rest until he re-created it himself.
Watching 'The Greatest Show on Earth' Was a Formative Experience for Steven Spielberg
In The Fabelmans, a tender but deeply poignant reflection of the director's coming-of-age and conflicted relationship with the arts as a creator of dreams and nightmares, a young Spielberg is taken to the movie theater by his parents, Burt (Paul Dano) and Mitzi (Michelle Williams). His father explains the concept of movies from a technical perspective—giving him a lesson on film projection 101; his mother translates it through a flowery, sentimental perspective—outright describing movies as dreams. From the opening minutes of this 2022 film, Spielberg demonstrated the dichotomy of his entire body of work, technical precision crossed with childlike wonder.
Inside this cinema palace on this cold and snowy night, Spielberg witnessed a formative scene that appealed to both sensibilities. The Greatest Show on Earth, a sprawling epic moving from one set piece to a grander set piece, sees its pivotal moment during a train robbery. After halting one locomotive, two thieves see a second oncoming locomotive. Unable to warn the conductor with enough time to brake, the train first collides with a parked car, which fails to stop its momentum, and it barrels its way through the track and hits the stopped train in its path, leading to a loud and dazzling sequence where train cars fly off the rails, and projectiles crash through the passenger quarters. This one scene was likely responsible for its Best Picture honor, as it reminded the world of the awe-inspiring movie magic of Golden Age Hollywood, ushered in by Cecil B. DeMille.
How 'The Greatest Show on Earth' Defined Steven Spielberg's Creative Process
Recalling his first movie-going experience with CBS Sunday Morning, Spielberg shared the seismic aftershocks of witnessing this scene from The Greatest Show on Earth. This night was especially formative, considering that Spielberg "didn’t know what a movie was." Getting involved in this story about a troupe of competing circus performers, all these overwhelming feelings culminated during the train sequence. "It was the scariest thing I’d ever experienced in my entire life," the director claimed. While the film is thematically slight and uninspiring as a narrative, The Greatest Show on Earth is designed to be transfixing for younger audiences due to its unadulterated spectacle and collection of ostentatious characters, signified by Jimmy Stewart's turn as Buttons the Clown.
As shown in The Fabelmans and in real life, Spielberg was so entranced by this train crash that he would spend the following days re-creating the scene with his toy train set. This activity, documented by his Super 8 film camera, was Spielberg's debut as an amateur filmmaker. His parents were convinced that The Greatest Show on Earth traumatized him on the ride back, but the moment actually ignited little Steven's creative brain. There was an ineffable, gob-smacking imprint that the crash left in his mind, and the only way he could manage this bizarre feeling was with his camera. Based on the dramatized account in The Fabelmans, Spielberg was immediately a natural at composing and blocking shots. 70 years later, he would still be renowned for his preternatural ability to walk into a set and know immediately where to position the camera.
The virtuosic train collision, which can also be seen on a television screen in War of the Worlds, unlocked Steven Spielberg's approach to storytelling, in what has to be the greatest real-life origin story in modern American history. As beautifully examined in The Fabelmans, filmmaking was not a hobby, but rather a therapeutic exercise for Spielberg. Like he later would with processing the trauma of his parents' divorce throughout his career, re-creating the train crash helped him comprehend the awe-inspiring power of cinema. These feelings are not always innately positive or negative—operating in some purgatorial state. During this screening of The Greatest Show on Earth, Destiny called upon Spielberg to use the art form to express ideas and sentiments eating away at his mind.
The Greatest Show on Earth is available to stream on Kanopy in the U.S.
The Greatest Show on Earth
Like NR Drama Romance Release Date February 16, 1952 Runtime 152 minutes Director Cecil B. DeMille Writers Barré Lyndon, Fredric M. FrankCast
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Betty Hutton
Holly
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Cornel Wilde
The Great Sebastian
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Steven Spielberg
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The Fabelmans
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