Kathleen Kennedy Made Steven Spielberg A Better Director By Yelling At Him For Being A Jerk

The Steven Spielberg that we know and revere today wouldn't exist without Kathleen Kennedy. For over 30 years, she served as a producer on most of his directorial efforts and the many, many hit movies he backed through his Amblin banner, starting with "Poltergeist" and "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" in 1982 and continuing on to "The BFG" in 2016. I probably don't need to explain to you why she stopped around that time, either, given that everyone and their pet cactus appears to have an opinion on Kennedy's time overseeing "Star Wars" and other mega-properties as the head of Lucasfilm after Disney bought the company in 2012.

It's easy for everyday folks to underappreciate Kennedy, though, what with a movie producer being cinema's most confusing job and Steven Spielberg being, you know, Steven frickin' Spielberg. The man himself, however, knows better than that. As he recalled to The Hollywood Reporter while he was promoting "The Post" in 2017 (stick that film's title in your pocket; we'll circle back to it later), Kennedy began as his secretary in 1978. Having come to really trust her by the time they made "E.T." together a few years later, he listened when she took him to task for his unbecoming behavior during that production.

"Basically, I was a little bit of a hothead, impatient, and I would be hard on my crew — loving to my cast but tough on my crew," he explained. So, 15 days into shooting on the now-classic sci-fi flick, Kennedy gave Spielberg "the bollocking of [his] life" in his office, telling him matter-of-factly that his "impatience" and "sharpness" toward the movie's crew was "unacceptable" behavior. "[That] was a big shift in my life. I became mindful because somebody I trusted and respected had called me out," he added.

Kathleen Kennedy didn't produce "The Post," but one could interpret that film as partly being Steven Spielberg's way of saluting her. As scripted by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer, the Spielberg-directed picture dramatizes the Washington Post's struggle to decide whether to publish the Pentagon Papers — a collection of leaked classified documents detailing the sordid truth about the U.S. government's involvement in the Vietnam War — back in 1971. Far from having an easy choice, the Post's owner, Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep), is informed that the publication could face nothing less than criminal charges from Richard Nixon's presidential administration, should they proceed.

Besides the obvious message about the importance of journalistic integrity in the face of a corrupt, tyrannical government (there's a reason Spielberg was in a dead sprint to get "The Post" made), there's some interesting subtext to the film where it concerns Spielberg and the women who've helped make his career. Tellingly, the director's frequent onscreen avatar, Tom Hanks, co-stars in "The Post" as Ben Bradlee, the gruff executive editor of the Post and basically the Spielberg to Graham's Kennedy, i.e. the storyteller who gets all the glory but couldn't do what he does if the latter didn't have his back — and wasn't willing to call him out when he deserves it.

Much like "The Post" acknowledges the way Graham inspired other women around her, Spielberg's longtime producer Kristie Macosko Krieger discussed Kennedy's influence on her in that same THR interview. "Kathy taught me how to work hard. She was always the first person on set, the last person to leave. There was no job beneath her, no job above her," Krieger remarked. It's something to think about the next time you watch a Spielberg movie.