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This article contains The Fabelmans spoilers.
Do you want to meet the greatest film director who ever lived? That would be a loaded question in any context, but it has extra weight in Steven Spielberg’s new release, The Fabelmans. With the film being a semi-autobiographical portrait of the legendary filmmaker’s own adolescent years, the picture feels in many ways like a rare window into meeting the real Spielberg—or at least the Spielberg as imagined in the director’s own head.
While the film has a thin layer of artistic license (the main character is named Sammy Fabelman instead of Steven Spielberg, after all), anyone can see it’s a rumination by an auteur of a certain age in his early halcyon days. And for many audience members, Spielberg is the greatest film director who ever lived. Jaws, E.T. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Jurassic Park—to name but a few—are considered touchstones for most children and adults to this day. We’ve grown up with these movies. But Spielberg? He grew up idolizing other masters, and in a genuinely giddy sequence, Spielberg highlights this fact with one of the instantly great cameos in cinema history.
During the final minutes of The Fabelmans, college-age Sam Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle) comes face-to-face with one of his idols, the irrepressible and cantankerous John Ford. And for film lovers who squint, you might recognize behind the eyepatch and gnashed cigar the faint visage of another all-time great film director, David Lynch! That’s right, the director of The Elephant Man and Mulholland Drive is playing the guy who made The Searchers in a Steven Spielberg movie. Now there’s an unlikely triumvirate!
The scene occurs after Sammy’s dropped out of college to pursue a career in the film...