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For Oscar-winning director Steven Spielberg’s 40th birthday, his then-wife and friends got together to make a short film for him called “Citizen Steve,” a parody of Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” that gave actors Dan Aykroyd and John Candy the opportunity to play fictional reporters trying to get to the bottom of Spielberg’s story.
The short also served as a platform for Spielberg’s family and friends to reminisce about amusing interactions they’d had with the young cinephile. Childhood pals remembered Spielberg’s room being cluttered and dirty, with an ever-present parakeet and bird crap above the curtains. His neighbor’s parents told the tale of him mutilating their daughter’s Barbie doll and throwing it into a canal. One of his sisters recounted a game in which a young Steven, armed with an artillery of rotten oranges, would stand on the roof of the family’s home and hurl the oranges at each of his sisters as they ran from tree to tree in their yard.
But buried amid this stylish “Kane” homage and these familial observations is a treasure that hardcore Spielberg fanatics will be very interested to see. As far as I can tell, “Citizen Steve” is the only place on the internet for viewers to catch a glimpse of a Spielberg film called “Slipstream,” which was ultimately abandoned and never completed.
There’s only one way to see footage from Steven Spielberg’s abandoned film, Slipstream
YouTube
According to “Steven Spielberg,” a biography by Joseph McBride, in the late 1960s, when Spielberg was just 20 years old, he set out to make his first professional short film — a movie that could be his calling card for Hollywood. The project that eventually ended up serving that purpose was “Amblin’,” the short film that gave Spielberg’s production company its name. But before that, he wrangled a few thousand dollars to try to make “Slipstream,” a film about bicycle racing. Here’s how the biography describes the plot:
“‘Slipstream’ was to feature a bravura action sequence of bicyclists racing down a steep hill. The hero, riding in the slipstream of a truck, is pursued by his rival, a dirty-trickster who wants to knock him off the road. But when the hero swerves around the truck, the other racer’s momentum pulls him headlong into the back of the truck, knocking him bloody and throwing him off the road.”
This was the project on which Spielberg first met cinematographer Allen Daviau, who would later go on to shoot several of his feature films, including “E.T.,” “The Color Purple,” and “Empire of the Sun.” But the production hit a brick wall in its final weekend: Spielberg had banked on having good weather as the backdrop for their final two days of shooting, but instead, they were rained out. That wrinkle was enough for the whole project to come crumbling down, and the abandoned film negatives reportedly sat on a shelf at a lab for decades until Spielberg finally bought them back. But as far as I know, a quick montage at the 15:14 mark of “Citizen Steve” is the only way for anyone outside of Spielberg’s personal archives to see any footage from the movie. Check it out below:
If you’re interested in other projects Spielberg didn’t end up making, check out this episode of our podcast, where we run through several across his long career:
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