Steven Spielberg

Ok, so after telling a friend of mine in Cinema Studies the story about George Lucas and my letter to my department chair (David Irving), she turns to me and says, "Well, you know about David Irving and Steven Spielberg, right?"

No, I didn't know about Irving and Spielberg. But tiny processing units in the back of my head had an immediate reaction to those two names being in the same sentence. "Amy Irving is David Irving's sister. Amy Irving was married to Steven Spielberg."

Click.

I had thought they divorced. They did divorce. "Yeah, Steven Spielberg cheated on her and David Irving punched him in the face." This is apparently the story that's been circulating around NYU for years now.

So I sent David Irving a follow up e-mail saying that I had heard he was, to put it mildly, not on good speaking terms with Spielberg, so he can scratch that name off my list. Well, the next day, David sent me an e-mail stating, simply: "Steve and I are good friends, so put him back on your list."

I don't doubt that that was a genuine statement, because he called him "Steve." So I thought that was very cool. But in the process of trying desperately to verify the story of David punching Steven, I came across a legal battle between Steven Spielberg and another David Irving, an author whom Spielberg accused of anti-semitism. So apparently, Spielberg has issues with David Irvings, but no longer with NYU's Film Department Chair David Irving. It's a small world, after all.