Why Did Steven Spielberg Leave California After 62 Years?
The director became a New York State resident on January 1, 2026.
Steven Spielberg, famously, had a remarkable run from 1972’s Duel through 2002’s Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can. Since then he hasn’t made many all-time classics, but has still made a lot of not bad movies with consistently excellent blocking and camera angles.
Spielberg has a UFO movie Disclosure Day coming out next weekend, so he’s doing a lot of interviews.
From the New York Times:
What Steven Spielberg Taught Me About Fear, Catharsis, and Being Human
Hollywood is struggling, but Spielberg insists that the big screen is still the best place to work out our collective dreams, joys and sorrows.
By Wesley Morris
Wesley Morris won a Pulitzer in 2012 for being a gay film critic and then won a Pulitzer in 2021 for being a black film critic. If he ever goes blind, he’ll win a third Pulitzer for being a blind film critic.
June 7, 2026
On Jan. 1, something amazing happened. Steven Spielberg, a longtime Angeleno and most people’s dictionary definition of “Hollywood director,” became a New York City resident.
What flabbergasting reason could Spielberg possibly have had for registering as a resident of New York State on January 1, 2026?
Was there something special about 1/1/2026?
Here are the NYT’s quasi-explanations:
On the one hand, this is a significant event. What classic Spielberg location requires a 212 or 718 or 646 to phone home? On the other hand, he has made five of his last six movies in New York State, including his exuberant, ominous reconsideration of “West Side Story.” Plus, for decades, Spielberg has kept a place on the Upper West Side. Five of his seven children live here, and all six of his grandchildren.
This is a mildly interesting statistical factoid. If you are trust funders born with a famous name and raised in Pacific Palisades, the most paradisiacal part of Los Angeles up through January 6, 2025, do you stay in L.A. or move to N.Y.?
For awhile in the second half of the 20th Century, everybody thought you were thought crazy to move to NYC from LA.
For example, in the mid-1990s, a fellow I distantly knew signed a big one-year contract with the New York Yankees. He and his bride talked it over and came to the conclusion: We’re newlyweds without kids yet, we’re suddenly rich, we can afford the taxes and rent, so let’s try living in Manhattan for a year!
But he was the only Yankee out of 25 that year to reside within New York City.
Now, with lower crime rates in New York City, it’s much more common among Yankees.
Although it’s still not for everyone — for example, when slugger Giancarlo Stanton signed with the Yankees, he got off to a notoriously slow start in home games that first season. Stanton is another Valley Boy who went to my high school, Notre Dame of Sherman Oaks. His dad, a postman from Panorama City, who was helping him move in to his Manhattan apartment, admitted to the press that they were both kind of freaked out trying to adjust to the bright lights big city.
So yeah: no big whoop. It was simply time. But to a New Yorker, this is a meaningful move: as if Magic Johnson had spent the rest of his career playing at the Garden.
And Spielberg is still playing. He turns 80 in December. The signs of wear and tear of a half-century of moviemaking are discreet. He uses a barely-there hearing aid, and his gait is a tad slower than maybe he’d like. He has become an insole guy. (“I’m on my feet as a director my whole life. My feet have gotten as flat as a pancake.”) The mellower pace of Los Angeles suits his temperament.
But Spielberg still officially stopped being a resident of California on January 1, 2026.
How come?
Well, the NYT isn’t going to be so impolite as mention two reasons the deep-pocketed Democrat donor would find politically embarrassing:
Paywall here.
