DRIVING SASHA SPIELBERG

Dear Editor:

Before I tell you what I know, please let me just say this: I love Mr. Spielberg. I have always loved him. Even after everything I've discovered over the past few months, Mr. Spielberg remains my idol. The way I view life is a direct consequence of a childhood obsessed by watching his kinetic yet subtextual camera blocking and whimsical yet naïve narratives. Mr. Spielberg is who I wanted to be when I grew up. Unfortunately, I now realize that this will not be my destiny. Instead, fate has forced me into becoming his Judas.

Prior to publishing this story, it's crucial that you realize the stakes of what I'm about to tell you. I need you to understand that I'm not just some craven Millennial looking to cancel a celebrity in order to make myself famous. Because what I'm doing now, divulging what I discovered, is a simultaneous sui/dei- cide. I know that sounds dramatic, but it's true: I'm betraying my lifelong hero, while putting my own life and possibly the life of my family in jeopardy by doing so. And the only way I would ever do something like that is if what I found out – what I'm now compelled to share with the public - was a matter of life and death. For our country. For humanity. For the entire planet.

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IN THE LATE WINTER OF 2020 I was attending the graduate film program at New Jersey University (not my real school) when I was called to a virtual meeting in the Dean's Zoom room office. She told me that she'd received a call that morning from an old friend who is an executive at Amblin Entertainment. The Dean reminded me that she worked as an agent at the William Morris Agency (not her real agency) in Hollywood before retiring to education.

"You're writing your thesis on Spielberg, right?" she asked.

"I know everything about him," I replied.

"Great," she said. "Well, looks like Steve's making a new movie and needs a production assistant. As your Dean, I advise that you quit film school immediately and take the job."

I arrived in Los Angeles two weeks later. Luckily, my nephew (not his real gender), Jordan, was studying chemical engineering at CalTech in Pasadena, so I was able to crash on his couch. The first time I approached the Universal Studios lot, in my rented Ford Mustang, the security guard at the studio gate, Clive (his real name), asked for my name, found it in his log, and printed out a "drive on", directing me down a long, winding road which ran deep into the backlot. When I approached the Amblin campus, I discovered a sanctum sanctorum. Behind a second, massive wooden gate, the height of which could easily contain a velociraptor, was a small compound of Santa Fe style adobe buildings which gave the impression of walking onto the set of the Marrakesh market sequence in Raiders of The Lost Ark.

The Dean's friend Tom Levy personally welcomed me "to the family" and I soon discovered that he too had attended NJU Film School (not our real school), but in the mid '90s, "when it still meant something." Tom quickly handed me off to another P.A. (production assistant) with this cryptic admonition: Quoting the creator of the British 1960s social science TV show The Prisoner, he whispered, "Remember, questions are a burden to others; answers are a prison for oneself."

At the time, I just smiled stupidly and thanked him for the sage advice. I was so overwhelmed by being under the same roof of the man who directed Jaws and Jurassic Park that Tom's warning passed through me as unabsorbed as an audiobook. Ironically, what I was unable (or unwilling) to hear that day now haunts every waking moment of my life.

The other P.A. soon walked me across the hall into a tiny, windowless room. An original miniature of E.T.'s spaceship - actually used in the movie! - stood on a pedestal in the corner distracting me from the five different non-disclosure agreements that I signed without reading. And that's when Alejandra (not her real gender or ethnicity) told me what we'd be working on. What has since become public knowledge.