Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg
John Baxter
First published in 1996 and now available as an ebook. Please note that this edition does not include illustrations.Steven Spielberg dominated the cinema of the nineties. He is one of the screen's greatest enchanters, with a spellbinding capacity – and a box-office record – matched by very few.His power now exceeds that of the greatest moguls of Hollywood's golden era, and films like 'Jaws, ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind' and 'Jurassic Park' have been seen by billions around the world, and have changed forever the way movies are made. How was it that this 'movie brat', from an unhappy and rootless adolescence on the fringes of American society, became one of the most formidable players on the global entertainment scene?.From 'Duel', which suggested the innate 'film sense' Spielberg would bring to movie-making, to the Oscar-winning 'Schindler's List 'and beyond…
The Unauthorised Biography
STEVEN SPIELBERG
JOHN BAXTER
Praise (#ulink_5901847c-74eb-5492-9b19-56ce764ee912)
Further reviews for Steven Spielberg:
‘Diligent, perceptive and with every available anecdote’
SIMON HATTENSTONE, Guardian
‘riveting… retains a healthy objectivity throughout his enthralling account’
PENELOPE DENING, Irish Times
‘… a film-lover’s book, a review of a remarkable era, an exhaustive filmography – a movie about the evolution of Hollywood, with Spielberg as the central character’
JEREMY LESTER, Jewish Chronicle
‘Baxter may have a blockbuster on his hands.’
RICHARD E. GRANT, Sunday Times
‘highly entertaining, packed with interesting information. If you want to know how a Spielberg film was made, what shenanigans went on during the making, or who fell out with whom, it is all here.’
WILLIAM RUSSELL, The Herald (Glasgow)
‘Its usefulness lies in Baxter’s shrewd assessment of Spielberg’s relationship with the wider context of the entertainment industry in general and Hollywood power-politics… the account of Spielberg’s unsettled early years… is illuminating in terms of his later preoccupations.’
HUGO DAVENPORT, Sunday Telegraph
‘Baxter is quietly professional… and makes good use of the copious interviews Spielberg has given throughout his career.’
ANTHONY QUINN, The Observer
‘A very valuable book… the thing that most impresses in his book is the calm, careful and nearly gentle way in which it builds up our disquiet that the movie kingdom and our society as a whole should be so ordered that Steven Spielberg is its Gatsby, its Kane, and such a shining young example… it is Baxter’s most intriguing point that Spielberg not only caters to youthfulness, but extends and preserves it… What is so clever, I think, is Baxter’s sense of a man too narrowly focused to amount to a villain… Baxter’s success is beyond question.’
DAVID THOMSON, Independent on Sunday
‘An impeccably professional film-biographer (he’s already done Buñuel, Fellini, Ford and is now working on Kubrick), Baxter leaves no document unrifled, no fact unchecked, no anecdote untold.’
Sight and Sound
‘… a full, frank and readable account of a man who the public regards as one of the greatest enchanters in the history of film.’
STUART GILLES, Manchester Evening News
Contents
Cover (#uf61d6071-ab09-5ce3-b6a8-4be613686884)
Title Page (#u483b24c5-7c3b-51f3-9ed1-eb25f7640427)
Praise (#ulink_97ee4113-5b0d-5799-bf30-5e0f805f3c95)
1 The Man who Fell to Earth (#ulink_caf441f1-391b-58fd-9b12-313bc28f3e53)
2 The Boy who Swallowed a Transistor (#ulink_db369efe-2578-5f4e-872c-41bf4eddc6d3)
3 Amblin’ Towards Bethlehem (#ulink_9d7fda32-2643-5ea7-964d-372fbd55dd29)
4 Universal Soldier (#ulink_3cd7eafb-f687-56f6-ae94-aad56cf1f51d)
5 Duel (#ulink_6de0c657-8735-574a-9ebe-f1bdc1e73393)
6 The Sugarland Express (#ulink_4229684e-cf2f-539e-9788-18f83ca9c69c)
7 Jaws (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (#litres_trial_promo)
9 1941 (#litres_trial_promo)
10 Raiders of the Lost Ark (#litres_trial_promo)
11 Poltergeist and E.T: The Extraterrestrial (#litres_trial_promo)
12 The Twilight Zone: The Movie (#litres_trial_promo)
13 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (#litres_trial_promo)
14 The Color Purple (#litres_trial_promo)
15 Empire of the Sun (#litres_trial_promo)
16 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (#litres_trial_promo)
17 Always and Hook (#litres_trial_promo)
18 Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List (#litres_trial_promo)
19 The Dream Team
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author
Also by the Author
Pre-Credit Sequence The Sandcastle
Filmography
Copyright
About the Publisher
1 The Man Who Fell to Earth (#ulink_9790af15-4679-5759-8a75-8bb2fe9247c9)
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
I wish that man would go away.
Traditional rhyme
THE FORCE of American popular art lies in its directness, its simplicity, its economy of means and of scale. Analysis may uncover cultural and autobiographical references, sophistications of technique, even profundity of intellect, but the first appeal of a George Gershwin song, a Walt Disney cartoon, a Norman Rockwell painting is, and must be, commonplace delight.
Steven Spielberg embodies this tradition. His films, even the sombre Schindler’s List, are machines for delighting us. Almost always they succeed in doing so. It’s not hard to see why. He traffics in what authors of science fiction, his preferred form, call ‘a sense of wonder’, a heightened apprehension of physical possibilities. It has been said that the universe is not only stranger than we know but stranger than we can know. Spielberg dispels this idea. His vision, like that of the best science fiction writers, is of a welcoming, explicable place.
Writing about Ray Bradbury, whose books like The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked this Way Comes share Spielberg’s simplicity of vision and sureness of technique, the critic Damon Knight, in a passage that could well refer to Spielberg, remarked:
To Bradbury, as to most people, radar and rocket ships and atomic power are big, frightening, meaningless names; a fact which, no doubt, has something to do with his popular success, but which does not touch the root of the matter. Bradbury’s strength lies in the fact that he writes about the things that are really important to us: not the things we pretend we are interested in – science, marriage, sports, politics, crime – but the fundamental pre-rational fears and longings and desires; the rage at being born; the will to be loved; the longing to communicate; the hatred of parents and siblings; the fear of things that are not self…
People who talk about Bradbury’s imagination miss the point. His imagination is mediocre; he borrows nearly all his backgrounds and props, and distorts them badly; wherever he is required to invent anything – a planet, a Martian, a machine – the image is flat and unconvincing. Bradbury’s Mars, where it is not as bare as a Chinese stage setting, is a mass of inconsistencies; his spaceships are a joke; his people have no faces. The vivid images in his work are not imagined; they are remembered.
In 1987, cartoonist Jules Feiffer drew a panel for the magazine Village Voice. A writing professor lauds a student for his ‘Joycean gift of language coupled with a Hemingwayesque spareness’. He goes on to compare him with Fitzgerald, Bellow, Updike, Styron, Mailer, then asks him what he’s working on. ‘A screenplay for Spielberg,’ the boy says airily. The professor is suddenly a beaming enthusiast. ‘Do you know him?’ he demands. ‘What’s he really like?’
The public urge to know what Spielberg is really like has never abated. His personality and appearance are so unremarkable, his public statements so bland, that everyone feels there must be a secret Spielberg hidden under the ramshackle exterior.
If you were to ask Spielberg what he is really like, he would probably reply that he is just like his audience. He is like everyone. But the image of Just Plain Steve is simply one aspect of his public persona. Examine that persona, and it fragments into a jigsaw puzzle where real memories slot into fabricated ones, and where childhood enthusiasms jostle for space with the structures of corporate power.
Spielberg’s indifferent communication skills don’t help to explain him to his public. His voice has never quite lost the self-absorbed gabble and stammer of the teenager drunk on ideas. ‘He has all the virtues – and defects – of a sixteen-year-old,’ one colleague remarks. Over the years he’s learned to smile and to pause occasionally for others to speak, but the interpersonal still daunts him. He communicates best from behind a protective grille of technology. On that level, he radiates competence. Everyone notices it. The novelist Martin Amis almost mistook him for the man who’d come to fix the Coke machine. Someone else described his image as ‘chemistry-student-next-door’. Both Amis and actor Tom Hanks compared him to the high school audio-visual assistant who alone understood 16mm projectors. (Spielberg worked his way through three years of college, in part by projecting classroom films.)
His mastery of cinema technology, what critic Pauline Kael called ‘a film sense’, is innate and effortless, his innocent flair and enjoyment disguising the complexities of what he does. ‘I got the feeling,’ said Julian Glover, who acted for him in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, ‘that, if he wanted to, he could have built the set. He knew as much about lighting as [director of photography] Douglas Slocombe. And he operated the camera himself.’ The worst sin for a Spielberg collaborator is to fail in technique. When that happens, Spielberg can be scathing. ‘There is no, “Nice try, guys – better luck next time,”’ complained one crew member. ‘He says things like, “You didn’t get it right. Think about that when you go to bed.”’
Partly by chance but increasingly by design, Spielberg has immured himself in the prison of his facility. It is the central irony of his life that the more he is driven to employ his skills, the more they destroy the very spontaneity he strives to capture. The audience which follows him, and which he helped create, is perfectly happy, however, with technique. To them, not understanding his systematic methods, his ability to engineer entertainment machines like Jurassic Park can seem almost miraculous, and it’s to a god that many of them compare him. Or an alien. When American Premiere magazine entitled one article about E.T. and its maker ‘Steven Spielberg in his Adventures on Earth’, they articulated a sense shared by many that he does not belong here. With his rodigies of imagination undermined by physical fragility and social clumsiness, he recalled the soft-spoken extra-terrestrial played by Michael Rennie in Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, or David Bowie’s Martian, fragile as a stick insect, in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Spielberg makes a credible alien. He’s most comfortable with those who live in private worlds. When stories of eccentric habits and lifestyle accreted around Michael Jackson, Spielberg, who planned to film Peter Pan with the singer and spent hours playing games with him at his Disneyland-like estate, remarked wistfully, ‘It’s a nice place Michael comes from. I wish we could all spend some time in his world.’
Spielberg’s need for protection and distance has its roots in a genuine fragility. Since he was four years old, he’s bitten his fingernails. Despite his technical ease, he was for most of his early adulthood a white-knuckle flier who had nosebleeds at high altitudes. For many years he so disliked elevators that he’d walk up half a dozen flights of stairs rather than enter one. The man who terrified the world with Jaws also hated and feared the ocean, and the director of that archetypal night-time film Close Encounters of the Third Kind admits, ‘I’m scared of the dark except in a motion picture theatre.’
It is only in the welcoming darkness of the cinema that Spielberg truly feels at home – and only with the myths of the movies that he is intellectually comfortable. Increasingly, it has been through and by myths that he has chosen to define himself. Admirers have been quick to add their own manufactured myths that confirm his role as an Honorary Outsider, and just another misunderstood teenager, like them; a Peter Pan of movies, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, but who invested hugely in preserving himself in artificial adolescence. As early as Jaws in 1974, rumour claimed – erroneously – that Spielberg’s jeans with their multitude of zipped pockets were specially made for him at $250 a pair. Even his pet Cavalier King Charles spaniels were pressed into the fantasy. Some people felt the turnover in dogs was curiously high. As Zalman succeeded Elmer, Chauncey succeeded Zalman and Halloween followed Chauncey, rumours grew that Elmer/Zalman/Chauncey/Halloween wasn’t a dog but a role: when the incumbent lost its puppy cuteness, another replaced it. Friends insist this is untrue. However, Spielberg’s reclusiveness fanned the story, and others like it.
Although Spielberg’s career is entwined with that of George Lucas, the two men are cultural and psychological opposites. Lucas, short, slight, seems habitually curled in on himself, arms often folded across his body. Spielberg, at five feet eight inches and 151 pounds, is fractionally taller, but contrasting body language exaggerates the difference. ‘Some people look at the ground when they walk,’ he says. ‘Others look straight ahead. I always look upward, at the sky.’
Lucas’s expressionless face and low, toneless voice emphasise the mask effect of his beard and moustache. Director John Badham calls him ‘a painfully shy person who hates dealing with people’. Writer Willard Huyck, another student friend, said, ‘George made a few friends at [the University of Southern California Film School], and decided that’s about all he needed for the rest of his life.’
As a director, he communicates even less. ‘George Lucas,’ confided a Star Wars actor, ‘is the worst director in the world. Never takes his nose out of the newspaper.’ The conventional view of film as a collaborative art – or an art of any kind, for that matter – isn’t his.
Lucas’s childhood in Modesto, California, was suffused with Methodism and German Lutheranism. He reacted against it in adulthood by creating a laid-back, feel-good home life. This ‘redwood tub mentality’ amused Spielberg, who joked about ‘LucasLand’. Spielberg himself is a product of the east coast suburbs, the rural midwest and the high desert of Arizona, but culturally he is archetypally Jewish; Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler’s List, talks of his ‘classic Central European map-of-Poland face’. His first memory is of being taken to a synagogue at six months, and he learned numbers from those tattooed on the arm of a relative who survived Auschwitz. Though he’d been bar mitzvahed, he didn’t practise his religion until well into adulthood. Long before that, however, he went out of his way to introduce a Jewish dimension into his films. In both Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, characters written as gentile were redesigned to accommodate Richard Dreyfuss, an actor proudly and obviously Jewish. It wasn’t until Spielberg’s second marriage, to the actress Kate Capshaw, that he integrated his cultural heritage into any system of belief, but since childhood, Judaism exercised a powerful influence of which even he wasn’t fully aware.
Being born Jewish also gave Spielberg an entrée to Hollywood which gentiles – and this included most of the USC group – could never possess. Along with Lucas, the film-makers who came to be known as New Hollywood included Brian De Palma (Carrie, Sisters), John Milius (Big Wednesday), the slightly older Francis Coppola (the Godfather trilogy, Apocalypse Now), husband and wife producers Michael and Julia Phillips (The Sting) and a group of lesser talents like writers Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, composer Basil Poledouris and cameraman/director Carroll Ballard.
Most emerged from that sixties phenomenon, the university film school, and elected to work inside the studio system rather than in the underground. Christened ‘Movie Brats’ by Michael Pye and Lynda Myles in their 1979 book The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took Over Hollywood, they rushed into the vacuum created when the US Justice Department forced the studios to shed their theatre chains and embrace the free market.
Old Hollywood had served the post-war baby boomers, now entering their thirties and looking for a Nice Night’s Entertainment. New Hollywood targeted their children, the teens and pre-teens in Nike and Adidas trainers, stone-washed Levis and New York Yankees caps, who spent homework time reading EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt or watching reruns of the TV series Twilight Zone, and queued every weekend outside multiplex cinemas across the country.
Spielberg’s technique to win this audience was to scavenge Hollywood’s scrapyard, salvaging genres and recycling them in widescreen, colour and stereo sound. His ability to resuscitate moribund material was unique. His approach to the shark of Jaws, to Puck, the ‘Little Green Man’ of E.T., Jurassic Park’s velociraptor dinosaurs and the Nazis of Schindler’s List was identical. In each case, he animated a cliché by showing that even cardboard thinks and feels. Not for nothing was he an admirer of Disney’s Pinocchio, in which a puppet is brought to life.
As an added guarantee that the audience would embrace his work, Spielberg preferred never to instigate an idea. The tendency of Lucas and Scorsese to push ahead with their visions, bulldozing all in their path, could produce successes, but Spielberg fed on consensus, not confrontation. Most of his films would be years in gestation, and would often begin with another director. Jaws had been Dick Richards’s film. Close Encounters of the Third Kind originated with Paul Schrader. Phil Kaufman would start as the director of Raiders, John Milius developed 1941, Tobe Hooper Poltergeist, and Hooper, with John Sayles, did the preliminary work on E.T. Empire of the Sun was intended for David Lean. Even Schindler’s List was at one point a Martin Scorsese project.
Just as Spielberg is anything but the common man, he’s also anything but the common artist. His vision is closer to that of a politician or a corporate CEO than to a film-maker. Newsday critic Jack Matthews articulated the truth that had been dawning for some time on the filmmakers with whom Spielberg had grown up in the industry, but whom he is now leaving further and further behind: ‘His contemporaries in the Hollywood firmament are not Scorsese and Coppola, they’re studio execs Jeffrey Katzenberg, Mark Canton, Peter Guber, Joe Roth and the other fortysomething crowd controlling the power.’ The critic Peter Biskind has pointed out how closely Spielberg’s and Lucas’s business philosophies conformed to those of Ronald Reagan, who served as president from 1981 to 1989, throughout the period of their greatest success. Reagan, says Biskind, ‘was the strong father Lucas and Spielberg didn’t know they were looking for, the ideal president for the age of Star Wars’. In temperament, Spielberg has more in common with the Democrats like John F. Kennedy who saw it as their role to make a world fit for baby boomers to live in. Arthur Schlesinger Jr speaks of Kennedy as ‘a realist and an ironist, a man of sardonic wit and impenetrable reserve who sought to apply reason to the problems of state’. One senses some of the same cool estimate of cause and effect in Spielberg. ‘His direct and unfettered mind,’ Schlesinger continued of Kennedy, ‘freed him to contemplate a diversity of possible courses. At the same time, he was a careful judge of those possibilities and was disinclined to make heavy investments in losing causes… He once described himself to Jacqueline as “an idealist without illusions”.’ Spielberg shares many of these characteristics, albeit in diluted form. He’s even closer, however, to the philanthropic industrialists of a century ago like Carnegie and Frick.
In person, he appears diffident, nervous, unsure, eager to be liked and to have his work approved by the audience, but a frosty stare at moments of threat reveals him as a man who understands power and expects to be obeyed. On the set, he’s fast, focused, saying little to his crew, even less to his cast. He’s animated, however, when talking business. If he is truly an artist, his art is the deal. No Edison or Ford, perhaps – but Federico Fellini was right to say, as he did to Francis Coppola, ‘Spielberg is a tycoon, like Rockefeller.’ When historians assess the 1970s and eighties, during which entertainment and audio-visual media began to dominate large segments of the world economy, Spielberg, along with innovators like Microsoft’s Bill Gates, may well emerge as a major architect of the change.
Millions would be astonished to hear Spielberg called, as he sometimes is, ‘the most hated man in Hollywood’. Admittedly, ‘hate’ is a term so contaminated by self-interest as to be meaningless in show business. The gibe ‘You’ll never work in this town again – unless we need you’ embodies so much conventional wisdom that nobody sees it as a joke. After Spielberg allied with ex-Disney studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg and record producer David Geffen in 1994 as DreamWorks SKG, David Letterman, master of ceremonies of the 1995 Oscar broadcast, joked that the alliance was a time saver; instead of waiting for them to fail separately, Hollywood could now wait for them to fail as a group.
However, even if one replaces ‘hated’ with ‘resented’ or ‘envied’, a residue of genuine dislike remains. Friends and colleagues agree; Steven Spielberg is hard to like. Geffen called him, according to Julia Phillips, ‘selfish, self-centred, egomaniacal, and worst of all – greedy’. Geffen denied the quote, but there are plenty in Hollywood prepared to endorse it, if not for the record. Spielberg can be remote, grasping, sulky, narrow. In his office, he seldom acknowledges anyone except to raise some technical point. He ‘lacked social graces’, one colleague said of his rapport, or lack of it, with his employees. ‘He never asked anybody about their personal lives. His only subject of conversation is the movies.’
But Spielberg shares these characteristics with many – perhaps most – great directors. Fellini, Buñuel and Welles all drew the same criticism. Likewise many of his own contemporaries in New Hollywood. Filmmaking is an art learned in decades alone in the dark with other people’s dreams, and pursued in an environment of inflated egos and expectations, sudden-death deadlines and Brobdingnagian profits and losses. As the matador respects the bull more than the crowd which gathers to see one of them die, directors come to love films more than they love the audience.
During the seventies and eighties, while he was finding his feet, Spielberg was famously approachable. While other directors retired to their trailers between takes and had lunch sent in, he schmoozed with the actors, ate in the commissary and hosted evening screenings of his favourite old movies to which the entire cast and crew were invited. He always entertained his cast at dinner just before shooting, and greeted each of them, ‘Welcome to the family.’ Lucas simply sent a basket of fruit to their rooms.
All this, however, may simply have been more a technique of manipulation than a sign of interest in other people. ‘Directing is 80 per cent communication and 20 per cent know-how,’ Spielberg says. ‘Because if you can communicate to the people who know how to edit, know how to light, and know how to act – if you can communicate what you want… and what you feel, that’s my definition of a good director.’ One of the warmer stories about him describes him winning over ageing star Joan Crawford on his first job by presenting her each day with a rose in a Pepsi-Cola bottle: Crawford was the widow of Pepsi’s chairman. At an American Film Institute seminar, however, Spielberg recollected cynically: ‘I put the day of the week on the Pepsi bottle, and each day I’d give her one. She didn’t know it was a countdown. I couldn’t wait to get off the picture. Oh yeah, I did a lot of that bullshit.’
What sort of man prefers to be seen as a cunning manipulator than a charming collaborator? The same kind who will get up early on a film set to bake matzoh for 150 people? With Spielberg, it is safer to suspect the easy answers. He is stranger than we know – perhaps stranger than we can know.
2 The Boy Who Swallowed a Transistor (#ulink_47cdc90d-53a0-5664-8e8c-54ea3e0031c8)
We belong to the last generation that could relate to adults.
Joan Didion
HE WAS short and thin. His ears stuck out, and his narrow face seemed to elongate towards the chin, making his mouth V-shaped, and pulling the lower lip out and down, so that his mouth would never seem quite closed. He looked like an inquisitive bird, with a beaky nose he found so embarrassing in childhood that he stuck tape to the tip of it and to his forehead, praying it would develop a tilt. The beak was matched by a bird’s gaze, motionless, eerily unblinking. If he disliked something, as adult or child, he just stared it out of existence. A bird’s voice, too, high, fast, uninflected. And he moved in an avian way, darting and stopping, darting and stopping, his actions apparently unmediated by intellect. When teams were chosen for any game, he would always be the last one picked. Nobody wanted jerky little Steven. Adolescence would bring not muscles but acne, freckles and even greater gawkiness. His thin arms so embarrassed him that it wasn’t until the production of Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1976 that he dared take off his shirt in public.
Spielberg’s birth almost coincided with the first sightings of UFOs over the United States. On 24 June 1947, Idaho businessman Kenneth Arnold, flying his two-seater plane over the Yakima Indian Reservation in Washington state, reported nine shallow dish-like objects heading towards the Cascade Range. They looked to him like skipping stones, but he estimated their speed at 1200 m.p.h. Over the next two weeks ‘flying saucers’ were seen in thirty states, after which sightings settled down to fifty a month.
For many years it was believed that Spielberg was born a few months after this, at the Jewish Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio. In fact, his mother Leah Posner Spielberg gave birth to him a year earlier, on 18 December 1946, a date Spielberg systematically obscured during his early adulthood. He was followed within the next few years by three sisters, Anne, Sue and Nancy. Spielberg would complain that he spent his childhood in a house with three screaming younger sisters and a mother who played concert piano with seven other women. Elliott’s little sister Gertie in E.T., inclined to sudden squeals and conversational irrelevancies, was, Spielberg claimed, an amalgamation of his three ‘terrifying’ siblings.
Leah Posner was small, agile and nervous, like her son. She hated to fly, a trait he inherited. She’d trained as a pianist, but given it up as a possible career when she married Arnold Spielberg, another locally-born Cincinnatian whose parents, like hers, had come from Poland and Austria in the century’s first wave of immigrants. Almost immediately after their marriage, Arnold enlisted in the Air Force, flying as a B-25 radio operator in Burma with a squadron nicknamed the ‘Burma Bridgebusters’. Demobilised, he stayed with electronics, which had fascinated him since he was eight or nine. In 1948, Bell Telephone engineers John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley invented the transistor, the tiny germanium diode that would replace vacuum tubes and make miniaturised electronics possible. Arnold found a job with the Burroughs business machine company, working on the beginnings of computers. An obsessive tinkerer, he would bring home bits of equipment, or drag the family off in the middle of the night to observe some natural wonder. His son thought him inflexible and workaholic. Richard Dreyfuss’s character Roy Neary in Close Encounters is a not entirely affectionate portrait of him.
Arnold read the science fiction magazines that proliferated after the war as publishing stumbled on a middle-class audience newly sophisticated in technology and interested in its potential. John W. Campbell built the monthly Astounding Science Fiction into the premiere sf magazine, discreetly alternating fiction with technical articles and the occasional outright piece of charlatanism, like Dianetics: A New Science of the Mind, in which L. Ron Hubbard, one of Campbell’s most successful pre-war fiction writers, expounded his pseudoscientific religion, Scientology. Sensing a shift in his readership towards technology, Campbell changed the title in 1960 to Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact and began publishing more thoughtful material, typified by Frank Herbert’s ecological saga Dune. Arnold Spielberg, an Analog fan, piled copies behind the lavatory cistern in the bathroom where he could read them in comfort and privacy.
Broadcast media permeated Spielberg’s childhood. When he was four or five, his father built him a crystal set. He would lie in his room at night, listening through an earpiece – and sometimes, he insists, through his teeth. ‘I remember one day, without the radio, hearing some music and then hearing this voice I was familiar with from the radio. It was the comedy programme Beulah.’
‘There are certain young directors, like Steven Spielberg,’ says film editor Ralph Rosenblum, ‘who were raised in the age of television and seem to have an intuitive sense of film rhythm and film possibilities.’ Spielberg agreed. ‘I did begin by reading comics. I did see too many movies. I did, still do, watch too much television. I feel the lack of having been raised on good literature and the written word.’ As critic David Denby would say later of him and his generation of directors, ‘Cartoons exert a greater influence than literature on his tastes and assumptions.’ For the rest of his life, Spielberg would apologise for lacking the intellectual discipline to deal with print. ‘I don’t like reading. I’m a very slow reader. I have not read for pleasure in many, many years. And that’s sort of a shame. I think I am really part of the Eisenhower generation of television.’
TV had just begun to pervade America. 1952 saw the debut of the prototypical cop series, Dragnet, the celebrity tribute programme This is Your Life, The Jackie Gleason Show, with Gleason as a New York bus driver with delusions of grandeur and Art Carney as his dutiful sewer-worker friend, and Our Miss Brooks, one of many series to give a new career to a Hollywood character performer, in this case Eve Arden as an acerbic unmarried middle-aged schoolteacher.
It was The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, however, which exerted the greatest influence over Spielberg’s generation. Band leader Ozzie Nelson transferred his situation comedy from radio, and with it his real-life family, including son Eric, known as Ricky, whom the series made into a pop star. TV cloned the Nelsons into a multitude, among them the Cleavers of Leave it to Beaver and the white-bread Andersons of Father Knows Best, led by another Hollywood retread, Robert Young, whom Spielberg would find himself directing. As David Halberstam says, the sitcoms celebrated
a wonderfully antiseptic world, of idealised homes in an idealised, unflawed America. There were no economic crises, no class divisions or resentments, no ethnic tensions… Dads were good dads whose worst sin was that they did not know their way around the house or could not find common household objects or that they were prone to give lectures about how much tougher things had been when they were boys… Moms and dads never raised their voices at each other in anger… This was a peaceable kingdom. There were no drugs. Keeping a family car out late at night seemed to be the height of insubordination… Moms and dads never stopped loving one another. Sibling love was always greater than sibling rivalry. No child was favoured, no child was stunted.
The reality was very different. In 1955 teenage pregnancies reached a level unsurpassed even in the nineties, and one in every three marriages ended in divorce.
It was into this real world that Spielberg descended from TV’s fantasies of domestic perfection. Leah and Arnold Spielberg were no Ozzie and Harriet. Leah was frustrated in her musical ambitions, Arnold harassed by the need to keep up in a competitive new industry. ‘He left home at 7 a.m.,’ Spielberg recalled, ‘and sometimes didn’t get home until 9 or 10 p.m. I missed him to the point of resenting him.’ Their children roved the emotional no man’s land between them. ‘[My mother] would have chamber concerts in the living room with her friends who played the viola and the violin and the harp. While that was happening in another room, my father would be conferring with nine or ten men about computers, graphs and charts and oscilloscopes and transistors.’ Sometimes the conflict degenerated into domestic arguments. When these started, the four children huddled together, listening to the marriage fall apart.
Steven learned to tune out the rage and fear. He’d go into his room, close the door and, stuffing towels under it, immerse himself in building model planes from Airfix hobby kits. ‘For many years I had a real Lost Boy attitude about parents,’ he said. ‘Who needs them?’ He carried his defence mechanism into adult life. When an employee of Spielberg’s told Leah she’d quit Amblin Entertainment, Leah laughed and asked, ‘Have you ceased to exist yet?’
‘She knew the deal,’ said the employee. ‘That’s his childlike personality. If you do something a baby doesn’t like, he just shuts you out.’
Television became at once Steven’s educational medium and security blanket. Leah and Arnold didn’t allow him to watch anything as violent as Dragnet, but he absorbed almost everything else, in particular the old movies which were TV’s cheapest and most reliable fodder. For him, as for many of his contemporaries who became directors in the seventies and eighties, TV was his film school.
It gave him a taste for Hollywood films of the thirties, in particular the A-pictures of MGM, which often featured an actor who, to him, was the epitome of fathers, Spencer Tracy. Tracy’s appearance in MGM’s 1937 adaptation of Kipling’s Captains Courageous, about a spoiled rich kid who, falling overboard from an ocean liner, is rescued by a Portuguese fisherman and educated and civilised by him, profoundly affected Spielberg. It, and Tracy, would provide the key to his version of Empire of the Sun, just as another Tracy film, Adam’s Rib, in which Tracy and Katharine Hepburn play married lawyers who represent opposite sides in a domestic violence case, would inspire scenes in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Harrison Ford coaxing kisses from Karen Allen parallels Tracy doing the same with Hepburn.
Spielberg was drawn even more to the fantasies of the period. His parents barred him from horror films – which, in any event, were not extensively programmed at the time – but he saw most of Hollywood’s imaginative classics, including Lost Horizon. The virtuoso first third of Frank Capra’s 1937 film of James Hilton’s novel, with the small group of refugees carried across the roof of the world in a montage of maps, mountainscapes, bantering dialogue, high-plateau refuelling stops and a final spectacular special effects crash, would be replicated in the Indiana Jones movies.
Mobs interested Capra. Nobody was more skilful at orchestrating crowds in motion, cutting between a few significant cameos as detonators to drive a screen filled with people into surging movement, and Spielberg learned his lesson well. He was influenced in particular by It’s a Wonderful Life. Offered by Capra and James Stewart as an affirmation to post-war America of everything it had fought to preserve, the fantasy of a savings and loan manager in rural Bedford Falls who sacrifices everything for his neighbours, only to lose faith, then regain it when an angel reveals the hell his town would have been without his contribution, the film endorsed everything Spielberg most needed to believe in: family, community, suburbia.
Steven’s first memory was a visual one, of being taken to a Hassidic Jewish temple in Cincinnati by his father. Still in his stroller, he stared in wonder as he was rolled down a dark corridor into a room filled with men wearing long beards and black hats. He only had eyes, however, for the blaze of red light flowing from the sanctuary where, in imitation of the biblical Ark of the Covenant, the rolls of the holy torah were kept. The impression was indelible. ‘I’ve always loved what I call “God Lights”,’ he says, ‘shafts coming out of the sky, or out of a spaceship, or coming through a doorway.’ Asked to define the central image of his work, he nominated the scene from Close Encounters where six-year-old Cary Guffey, about to be kidnapped by aliens, stands in the open kitchen door; ‘the little boy… standing in that beautiful yet awful light, just like fire coming through the doorway. And he’s very small, and it’s a very large door, and there’s a lot of promise or danger outside that door.’
The blank TV screen exercised a similar fascination. When Spielberg’s parents went out, they draped the set with a blanket and booby-trapped it with strategically placed hairs to reveal if Steven was viewing surreptitiously. He learned to note the position of the hairs and replace them. Then he would turn on the set and watch it, even if nothing was being transmitted. He was fascinated by the hissing ‘snow’, and the ghosts of faraway stations. Pressing his face to the tube, he would pursue them as they drifted in and out of range.
Sensory overload became Spielberg’s preferred state of mind, and remained so for decades. He functioned best, he told a journalist, in a soup of received impressions: radio and television blaring, record player going, dogs barking, doorbell ringing – all while he answered a telephone call. Directing Hook in 1990, he would sit on the camera crane between shots, playing with a Game Boy and at the same time eavesdropping with earphones on flight controllers at LA International Airport.
As a child, alone in his room, he induced an aesthetic frenzy by a sort of optical masturbation, throwing hand shadows on the ceiling and scaring himself with them. Seeing himself as both artist and medium encouraged a schizophrenic division of personality. Until he was fourteen, he would stare into the mirror for five minutes at a time, hypnotising himself with his own reflection. As an adult, he would reach for a camera at moments of stress and photograph his tearful face in a mirror, the film-maker dispassionately recording the stranger inside him.
Insecurity bred fantasies of domestic disaster. He imagined creatures living under his bed, monsters lurking in the closet, waiting to suck him in. At night, he would lie shivering under the blankets, fancying that the furniture had feet, and that tables and chairs were scuttling about in the dark. ‘There was a crack in the wall by my bed that I stared at all the time,’ he said, ‘imagining little friendly people living in the crack and coming out to talk to me. One day while I was staring at the crack it suddenly widened. It opened about five inches and little pieces fell out of it. I screamed a silent scream. I couldn’t get anything out. I was frozen… I was afraid of trees, clouds, the wind, the dark… I liked being scared. It was very stimulating.’
In 1952 Arnold introduced Steven to two phenomena that fundamentally affected his life.
My dad woke me in the middle of the night and rushed me into our car in my night clothes. I didn’t know what was happening. It was frightening. My mom wasn’t with me. So I thought, ‘What’s happening here?’ He had a thermos of coffee and had brought blankets and we drove for about half an hour. We finally pulled over to the side of the road, and there were a couple of hundred people, lying on their backs in the middle of the night, looking up at the sky. My dad found a place, and we both lay down. He pointed to the sky, and there was a magnificent meteor shower. All these incredible points of light were criss-crossing the sky. It was a phenomenal display, apparently announced in advance by the weather bureau… Years later we got a telescope and I was into stargazing.
To memorialise this incident, Spielberg has incorporated a shooting star in all his films.
The other event of 1952 was his first experience of a movie theatre. Again it was Arnold who took him, after carefully explaining what they were going to see. Not carefully enough, however, since Steven thought Cecil B. DeMille’s film about a circus, The Greatest Show on Earth, was a real circus and not one on film. The circus interested him, since his mother had told him how an uncle had run away with one as a boy; the same uncle, it seems, who had been in the black market, and had hidden contraband watches under the family bed.
DeMille’s film conflated all the fantasies of circus life: the clown, played by James Stewart, whose permanent make-up hides his tragic past as a surgeon; sadistic animal trainer Lyle Bettger; French trapeze artist Cornel Wilde (‘Ze Great Sebastian’); tough boss Charlton Heston, and all-American love interest in the person of raucous blonde Betty Hutton, all culminating in the collision of two trains where Stewart’s long-suppressed skills are called upon.
Arnold told Steven, ‘It’s going to be bigger than you are, but that’s all right. The people in it are going to be up on the screen and they can’t get out at you.’ (This is a common fantasy of suggestible children. Stephen King shared it, and as an adult persuaded his children not to sit too close to the screen by telling them that people who did so fell into the picture and became the extras visible behind the stars.) Spielberg recalls:
So we stood in line for an hour and a half, and we go into this big cavernous hall and there’s nothing but chairs and they’re all facing up, they’re not bleachers, they’re chairs. I was thinking: something is up, something is fishy. So the curtain is open and I expect to see elephants and there’s nothing but a flat piece of white cardboard, a canvas… I retained three things from the experience: the train wreck, the lions and Jimmy Stewart as the clown.
As soon as he had a train set, Spielberg repeatedly recreated the crash, and shadows of DeMille’s cardboard characters drift through many of his films. Indiana Jones has something of Heston, while Betty Hutton is the model for Willie, the shrill nightclub singer heroine of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Above all, DeMille’s showmanship left an indelible impression. ‘I guess ever since then I’ve wanted to try to involve the audience as much as I can,’ said Spielberg, ‘so they no longer think they’re sitting in an audience.’
He continued to find movies, unlike television, emotionally overwhelming. Especially Disney cartoons. At eight, he said, he ‘came screaming home from Snow White…’ – in some interviews he’s eleven, and the film is Bambi – ‘and tried to hide under the covers. My parents didn’t understand it, because Walt Disney movies are not supposed to scare but to delight and enthral. Between Snow White, Fantasia and Bambi, I was a basket case of neurosis.’ Though he was allowed to watch the Wonderful World of Disney TV shows, with their compilations of cartoons and behind-the-scenes documentaries about Disney films in production, his parents tried to keep him away from the feature cartoons. It gave them a glamorous sense of the forbidden they never lost.
One price of Arnold’s job in a sunrise industry like electronics was the occasional moves in search of work or promotion. In 1950 the Spielbergs had relocated in Haddonfield, New Jersey, when he joined RCA. In 1953 he took a job with General Electric in Scottsdale, Arizona, then a dormitory town east of Phoenix, but now a suburb. They were to spend eleven years there. The move wrenched Steven, and instilled his lifelong sense of dislocation and loneliness. ‘Just as I’d become accustomed to a school and a teacher and a best friend,’ he complained, ‘the FOR SALE sign would dig into the front lawn and we’d be packing. And it would always be that inevitable goodbye scene, in the train station or at the carport, packing up the car to drive somewhere, or at the airport. Where all my friends would be there and we’d say goodbye to each other and I would leave. And the older I got the harder it got.’ Among the first phrases he learned to say was ‘looking forward to’. His grandparents would occasionally come from New Jersey to Ohio to visit, and he loved it when his mother said it was something to look forward to.
His mother had been no less anguished. ‘I was hysterical,’ she recalled. ‘I mean, in 1955 what nice Jewish girl moved to Arizona? I looked in an encyclopedia – it was published in 1920, but I didn’t notice at the time – and it said: “Arizona is a barren wasteland.” I went there kicking and screaming. I had to promise Steve a horse, because he didn’t want to go either. I never made good on that promise, and he still reminds me of it today.’ Phoenix, as Jodie Foster was famously to remark in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More, is ‘weird’. Scottsdale, described by one visitor as ‘suburbia on steroids’, itself mixed mass-produced bungalows of the kind in which the Spielbergs lived with sprawling ranch-type houses set in gardens of sand, rock, spiky yucca and twenty-foot-high saguro cactuses. The desert around Scottsdale attracted more than its fair share of visionaries who exploited its open spaces and frontier manners to experiment. Frank Lloyd Wright started building his winter home Taliesin West just north-east of the town in 1937. Despite the discomfort of the fieldstone building, it became a centre for his students from Wisconsin, and after his death in 1959 metamorphosed into an arts centre and museum. One of Wright’s students, Paolo Soleri, chose another spot outside Scottsdale to build Arcosanti, his ‘arcology’, a community of futuristic shell-like buildings integrated into the desert environment.
Spielberg seems never to have visited either Taliesin West or Arcosanti. The visions offered him nothing. He enrolled in Scottsdale’s Arcadia High School but, whatever school meant to him, it wasn’t higher education. He’s always avoided discussing classes or his academic record, which, in common with most of the Movie Brats, was dismal. A survey of America’s twelve most influential media personalities in the nineties found that more than half never finished college. Three of them, including Ted Turner, were dyslexic. Spielberg has always had to struggle with the written word. There are no extant Spielberg letters, no diaries, and he never brings a script on set, preferring to memorise the shots beforehand. ‘He wasn’t a good student,’ Leah says. ‘He was less than mediocre. He needed tutors in French and math.’ Asked to dissect a frog in biology class, he threw up, an incident recycled in E.T. His sole reference to English class is a memory of turning a copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter into a flip book by drawing cartoon characters on the corner of each page.
More important than anything that happened in class were the friendships and alliances of the playground. Like any sensitive child Spielberg loathed new places and people but, once accepted, he embraced them with jealous fervour. The metaphor of the new school remained with him for life. When he encountered George Lucas’s tight team, he found it like changing schools. He felt, he said, as if he’d moved into Lucas’s eighth-grade class.
At Arcadia High School he signed up with the Boy Scouts, and was admitted to its honour society, the Order of the Arrow. He began to study the clarinet too, and to march in the school band. Leah’s preoccupation with her piano prejudiced him against the classical repertoire, and he would never warm to pop or rock. His ideal was movie music, of which he soon had an encyclopaedic recall. Once he began making his own amateur films, he would noodle tunes on his clarinet, but only for Leah to transcribe for piano and record as soundtracks.
Shorn of friends and relations by the move to Arizona, and hungry for acceptance, Spielberg took refuge increasingly in showmanship. ‘I began wanting to make people happy from the beginning of my life. As a kid, I had puppet shows – I wanted people to like my puppet shows when I was eight years old.’ For the rest of his life, displays of virtuoso invention would alternate with attempts to create the suburban contentment for which he envied others.
Physical awkwardness remained his greatest humiliation. In a school footrace, he once found himself second last, only just ahead of an even slower handicapped boy. It was this boy the crowd cheered on, yelling, ‘C’mon, John, you can beat Spielberg!’ With the compulsion to win but also to satisfy the expectations of an audience that became characteristic of him as an adult, Spielberg contrived to trip so that the other boy could pass him. Then, once the other was well ahead, he threw himself into almost catching up, coming in a close last. John was carried off in triumph, while Spielberg, winner and loser at the same time, stood on the field and cried for five minutes. ‘I’d never felt better and I’d never felt worse in my whole life.’
In adulthood, Spielberg’s ideal social and intellectual level remained that of his life as a suburban schoolboy in the late 1950s. George Lucas was to have Luke Skywalker say of provincial Tatooine in Star Wars, ‘If there is a bright centre to the universe, this is the place it is furthest from.’ But for Spielberg, suburbia would always radiate a prelapsarian glow. He came to revere middle-class virtues. Richard Dreyfuss says Spielberg has ‘a love affair with the suburban middle class. I don’t share his fascination, but Steven could do whole movies about block parties if he wanted to.’ If he’d been making All the President’s Men, Spielberg said, he would have concentrated on the White House typists rather than the reporters. His favourite painter was, and remained, Norman Rockwell, whose covers for the Saturday Evening Post showing scenes of gentle whimsy, often set in churches, soda fountains and domestic interiors, exemplified a sunny vision of America as God’s Country.
A later writer was to sum up Rockwell’s style in terms that make clear Spielberg’s affinity for the artist: ‘At his peak, Rockwell reflected an American dream which did not at the time seem ridiculous or unobtainable — the dream of international power, domestic pleasure and civil tranquillity. Rockwell’s arcadia was peopled by clever kids, indulgent grandparents, bourgeois shopkeepers, shy courting couples and pious schoolteachers – all painted in a style which was a strange blend of fairy-tale, cinematic still and comic strip.’ Another critic wrote: ‘To be feeling good at home is the secret and desire of the world Rockwell narrates. “Home” is also his narrative horizon and his project. Having a comfortable, solid, lived-in home, being confident in oneself and one’s values, are everyday and prosaic values which are obvious, lived and shared. It is art for, and about, Joe Sixpack. It plays very well in Peoria.’ Spielberg’s lifelong fascination with Rockwell culminated in him becoming a collector of his works, and a trustee and major financial contributor to the Rockwell Museum.
Unlike the Haddonfield house, which was surrounded by trees, and in particular a large one just outside his window on which Spielberg focused his scarier fantasies, the house in Scottsdale was part of a modern development sprawling over flat semi-desert. Spielberg loved its sense of community, the way one could look into the kitchen windows of the families on either side. ‘You always knew what your neighbours were cooking because you could see them preparing dinner and you could smell it. There were no fences, no problems.’ In the nineties, ensconced in a mansion in Los Angeles’ luxurious suburb of Pacific Palisades, he still felt the same affection. ‘I live in a different kind of suburbia, but it still is. There are houses next door and across the street, and you can walk, and there are street lamps on the street and sidewalks, and it’s very nice.’
The Spielberg household placed a premium on work and hobbies. Leah would invite her musician friends for musical evenings. Steven was encouraged to have pets. He filled his room with eight free-flying parakeets which perched on the curtain rod and left their droppings underneath. He would continue to keep them as an adult, naming them serially, as he had as a child. In the seventies he still had a pair, called Schmuck I and Schmuck II. On holidays, his parents drove as far as the White Mountains and the Grand Canyon, pitching their tent and, particularly in Leah’s case, throwing themselves into serious hiking and nature study. One of Spielberg’s most vivid memories is of his mother on a mountaintop, whirling in ecstasy, and while shooting Raiders in Tunisia he reminisced of scorpion hunts with his father in the Arizona desert.
His first encounter with a movie camera sprang from these camping trips. Leah gave Arnold an 8mm Kodak for Father’s Day. He hosepiped like any amateur until Steven, sensitised by prolonged viewing of movies on TV, became impatient. After being criticised repeatedly by his son for shaky camera movements and bad exposure, Arnold handed over the camera. After that, holidays were never the same. His mother recalled:
My earliest recollection of Steven with a camera was when my husband and I were leaving on vacation and we told him to take a shot of the camper leaving the driveway. He got down on his belly and was aiming at the hubcap. We were exasperated, yelling at him, ‘Come on! We have to leave. Hurry up.’ But he just kept on doing his thing, and when we saw the finished results, he was able to pull back so that this hubcap spinning around became the whole camper – my first glimpse of the Spielbergian touch, and a hint of things to come.
A hundred yards before they arrived, Steven jumped out and filmed them driving through the campsite gate. After that, every part of the trip was recorded. ‘Father Chopping Wood. Mother Digging Latrine. Young Sister Removing Fishhook From Right Eye – my first horror film. And a scary little picture called Bear in the Bushes.’
1959 was a year of significance for Spielberg. References to it riddle his films. It was the year he was bar mitzvahed, only managing to mumble through his ill-memorised extract from the torah with the help of the old men in the front row, who muttered along with him. This was also the year he began actively to resent his father’s obsession with work, and his insistence on precision and order. His father brought home a transistor, and told him, ‘Son, this is the future.’ Spielberg grabbed it and swallowed it.
Detroit’s disastrous attempt at manipulating the American public by designing cars according to theories of subliminal sexual symbolism reached fruition in 1959 with the Ford Edsel. Spielberg used one of these doomed gas-guzzlers with its calculatedly vaginal front grille in his first film, Amblin’. One of the year’s big hits, Jerome Kern’s ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, revived by the black singing group The Platters, provided the theme of Always.
More important, CBS premiered a new half-hour TV series in October. An anthology of quirky science fiction or fantasy stories, each with an ironic trick ending, it was introduced each week, and often written by, its creator, TV writer Rod Serling, already well-known for original dramas like Requiem for a Heavyweight. In his dark suit and with his crooked smile and off-handedly intellectual comments, Serling, like Arnold Spielberg, was an ex-GI with a revisionist view of the America Fit For Heroes To Live In. Through the window of The Twilight Zone, he invited his audience to spy on a puzzling future with more than a hint of threat.
The Twilight Zone influenced not only Spielberg but a whole generation of film directors-in-waiting. Like them, he came running at the sound of Marius Constant’s theme, which he compared to a bugle call drawing one to the TV set. The tune inspired the five-note alien signature of Close Encounters. Spielberg would also attempt, unsuccessfully, to replicate the series, first in a film version, then on TV in the ill-fated Amazing Stories.
The family camera admitted Spielberg to his first real life of the mind. Here his skill was not in doubt. It gave him absolute control of a world. While other kids were involved in a Little League baseball team or in music, he was watching TV and, his phrase, ‘drowning in little home movies’. Once he exhausted the technical possibilities of the little Kodak’s single lens, flip-up viewfinder and thirty-five-second clockwork motor, he persuaded his father to buy a better model with a three-lens turret. Being able to cut from long shot through medium shot to close-up widened his horizons.
Over the years, his versions of his debut in narrative film have varied. Initially, he went off alone during a camping trip and experimented with shooting something other than the family. ‘The first film I ever made was… about an experience in unseen horror, a walk through the forest. The whole thing was a seven-hundred-foot dolly shot and lasted fourteen minutes.’ Story films quickly followed. ‘My first… I made when I was twelve,’ he says, ‘for the Boy Scouts.’ For the Photo Proficiency badge, he had to tell a story in a series of still photographs. Spielberg went one better with a movie, variously remembered as Gun Smoke or The Last Gun. A 3 1/2-minute western about a showdown between homesteaders and a land baron, it cost $8.50, which he raised by whitewashing the trunks of neighbours’ citrus trees at 75c a tree. Fellow Scouts with plastic revolvers played all the characters, and Spielberg persuaded a man with a cigarette to puff into the barrel of a gun so that the film could end on the sheriff’s smoking pistol shoved back into his holster. The Scouts loved his movie, and Spielberg got his badge. ‘In that moment,’ he said, ‘I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.’
The instant gratification of story film influenced Spielberg against abstraction. ‘I think if I had made a different kind of movie, if that film had been maybe a study of raindrops coming out of a gutter and forming a puddle in your back yard, I think if I had shown that film to the Boy Scouts and they had sat there and said, “Wow, that’s really beautiful, really interesting. Look at the patterns in the water. Look at the interesting camera angle” – I mean, if I had done that, I might have been a different kind of film-maker.’
Until then, his record in the Scouts had been as undistinguished as that in high school. He couldn’t cook, was so hamfisted he never learned to tie knots well, and enlivened a demonstration of sharpening an axe by cutting his finger open in front of five hundred Scouts at a summer jamboree. He avoided weekend camps, which robbed him of his only chance to see a UFO; other Scouts returned from a camp in the desert with stories of a strange glow in the sky. But movies made him, if not popular, then at least accepted. He freely acknowledged that his first films were exercises in ingratiation. They gave him, he said, ‘a reason for living after school hours’. The school bully could also be placated by putting him in a film. He rented Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier and War of the Worlds on 8mm, and showed them at 25c a head in the family den. As well, he sold popcorn and soda – an integral part of the film experience for him. The proceeds went to charity. The point, then as later in his career, wasn’t profit but popularity.
Over the next four years he made about fifteen story films. Old enough now to be allowed to see almost anything at his local cinema, the Kiva, he plundered Hollywood for ideas. Some of the lessons of The Great Locomotive Chase, Disney’s version of the Civil War raid on which Buster Keaton had based his classic 1926 comedy The General, were put into effect in Duel, and parts of Henry Levin’s version of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth would be restaged for Raiders of the Lost Ark. One of the first films he saw which was not straight escapism was The Searchers. John Ford’s story of racist loner John Wayne searching for the niece kidnapped by Indians opened his eyes to the poetic possibilities of landscape. ‘I wasn’t raised in a big city,’ Spielberg says. ‘I lived under the sky all through those formative years, from third grade right through high school. That’s my knowledge of a sort of lifestyle.’ Ford, brought up on the imagery of Catholic paintings and ‘holy pictures’, instinctively employed aspects of the natural world as metaphors for mental and moral states. Dust represented dissolution; rivers a sense of peace and cleansing; silhouettes presaged death. Certain landscapes, like Monument Valley, were for him intellectual universes in miniature. Those weathered towers of limestone rising from the desert against a vast sky became the unalterable precepts by which honourable men must live. Spielberg would make his own pilgrimage to them in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, one of many films to exhibit a Fordian vision of the American west.
Frank Capra also returned to the screen in 1959 after eight years in the wilderness to direct A Hole in the Head, though neither it, nor the film that followed, A Pocketful of Miracles, a remake of his 1933 Lady for a Day, in which sentimental gangsters transform an impoverished street-corner apple seller into a socialite so that her daughter can make an advantageous marriage, rivalled Mr Deeds Goes to Town or Mr Smith Goes to Washington.
While his future colleagues in the New Hollywood like Brian De Palma were surrendering to the moral intricacies and multiple deceptions of Alfred Hitchcock or, in the case of Martin Scorsese, relishing the social disquiet behind Sam Fuller’s tabloid cinema and the pastel melodramas of Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray, Spielberg made Ford and Capra his models. Lacking a strong moral structure of his own, he absorbed theirs, populist, sentimental, reverent and patriotic. Never comfortable talking to actors, he adopted their technique too, employing landscape and weather as symbols of character, and developing a fluid camera style and skill in directing masses of people that swept his audiences past fragile narratives and sketchy characters. ‘Film for me is totally pictorial,’ he says. ‘I’m more attracted to doing things with pictures and atmospheres – the idea of the visual telling the story.’
In this state of mind, Spielberg also dabbled in theatre:
I was probably the only student director at Arcadia High School in Arizona who was allowed to control and put together a show. I did Guys and Dolls and brought the action, especially the brawl in the Hot Box, into the audience. I guess that’s kind of commonplace in today’s theatre, but then it was very strange to have people running up and down the aisles singing and acting. I got killed for it! Every critic in Arizona who could write said, ‘How dare he open up the proscenium and do this drivel in the audience. Guys and Dolls is meant to be on stage.’ I did the standards – Arsenic and Old Lace, I Remember Mama – everything you were allowed to do then.
Like many directors destined to work in sf and fantasy, Spielberg discovered the quirky magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. Edited by Forrest J Ackerman, self-styled ‘Mr Sci Fi’, whose Los Angeles home contained the world’s largest collection of sf movie memorabilia, it celebrated horror film and its techniques with jocular reverence.
The wave of cheap science fiction films that was Hollywood’s response to the sf publishing boom washed through American cinemas throughout 1959 and 1960. Spielberg was banned from seeing the 1958 I Married a Monster from Outer Space, a relatively modest and reticent film despite its gaudy title, but went anyway, and was racked by nightmares. In particular he came to admire the work of Jack Arnold, who directed The Incredible Shrinking Man, It Came from Outer Space, The Space Children and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The catchpenny titles disguised thoughtful exercises in imagination and suspense which made evocative use of natural surroundings and domestic interiors. The shrinking man in Richard Matheson’s story, exposed to fallout from an atomic test, dwindles away in an ordinary suburban home; the film’s menaces are a cat and a spider. In It Came from Outer Space, written by Ray Bradbury, aliens arrive outside a small desert township. The man who first makes contact with them, John Putnam, is an archetypal Spielberg character, an unassuming Jeffersonian natural philosopher and amateur astronomer who muses about the nature of the universe and the desert, to both of which he has a gently mystical attitude.
Spielberg shared the general enthusiasm for The Thing (from Another World), a rare example of a major director, Howard Hawks, dealing with an sf subject. The script also had an important pedigree. It was based on a story called ‘Who Goes There?’ written by John W. Campbell before he became editor of Analog. Like most of Campbell’s work, it is refreshingly iconoclastic. A crashed alien ravages an Arctic research station, smashing down the scientist who tries to befriend it. It’s left to a few tough professional airmen to kill it off and save the world. At the end, a reporter broadcasts the story, warning his listeners, ‘Watch the skies. Keep watching the skies.’
For all the film’s flair, however, Hawks’s right-wing paranoia always jarred. It’s to Arnold’s films (and Bradbury’s script for Outer Space) that much of Spielberg’s later work is traceable. After Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released, Spielberg asked Bradbury, ‘Well, how did you like your film?’ and explained he’d been inspired by It Came from Outer Space. Bradbury and Arnold’s idea, that alien visitors may be benign, and concerned mainly to return home as quickly and quietly as possible, would surface in both Close Encounters and E.T. The fathers of the ‘space children’ who discover an alien in a beachside Californian cave work on a nearby scientific project and share the dislocated life Spielberg knew well, and which he evoked in The Goonies. And while the Black Lagoon may only have been in a corner of the Universal backlot lake, the underwater footage shot in the crystal springs of a Florida park played so effectively on the sense of ‘something’ lurking below us where we swim that the aquaphobic Spielberg paid it homage in the opening scenes of Jaws.
From the start, it wasn’t the atmosphere of fantasy films Spielberg enjoyed so much as their depiction of alternative realities through model work, special effects and elaborate make-up. His sisters, resented because of the attention they drew from his mother, and thus away from him, became victims of his exercises in imagination. He would scare them by building his face into a horror mask with papier mâché made from wet green toilet paper, or would lurk outside the window of Anne, the youngest, and groan ‘I am the moooooon’ until she became hysterical. He convinced them that the bedroom closet hid the decomposing body of a World War II airman, then left it to their curiosity to peek in at the plastic skull he’d hidden there, with goggles over the eyes and a flashlight inside. After they had been terrified by William Cameron Menzies’ Invaders from Mars, which featured the disembodied head of the Martian super-mind, played by an actress with green-painted face, fringed with tentacles, in a glass bubble, he locked them in the closet, this time with an empty fishbowl within which, he said, the head would materialise. All these domestic horrors and more would be recycled in Poltergeist.
War films could be just as interesting as science fiction, providing there were elaborate uniforms, and plenty of buildings were blown up. Firms like Castle Films sold World War II documentaries on 8mm, and Spielberg used some of these as stock footage for a flying story called Fighter Squadron. Arnold persuaded Skyharbor airport in Phoenix to let Steven shoot a friend in the cockpit of a P-51. In 1960, inspired by his father’s purchase of a war-surplus Jeep, Spielberg made the forty-minute Escape to Nowhere, about a World War II American platoon evading a Nazi army in the Libyan desert. He found a few fake German helmets, put them on friends and had them walk slowly past the camera, passing the helmets back down the line so that it looked like an army. Leah drove the Jeep and created uniforms in Wehrmacht grey in which Steven costumed his sisters and friends, who were then machine-gunned and forced repeatedly to roll down a hill in the desert which stood in for North Africa.
‘There was always a camera in his hands,’ Leah says. ‘Once he took a big cardboard carton from the supermarket and cut windows and doors and took it in the back alley and set it on fire to film it. When we saw it, it looked like a real building burning. These are things that in retrospect you try to figure out, but at the time it just seemed normal. He was my first child, and having no prior experience I thought all kids played like that.’
Escape to Nowhere won a prize at the Canyon Film Festival – a 16mm camera. Knowing he couldn’t afford 16mm film processing, Spielberg traded it for a more sophisticated H8 8mm Bolex. At the same time, with a little help from his father, he got a Bolex Sonorizer, with which he could put a soundtrack on his magnetically striped film.
He began to have friends, nerds like himself with over-active imaginations. During the run of the dinosaur film The Lost World in 1960, he and friends mixed white bread, Parmesan cheese, milk, creamed corn and peas in a paper bag and smuggled it into the Kiva. Then they made vomiting sounds and dripped the mixture from the balcony. It started a chain reaction of vomiting. The film was stopped and the lights went up as the malefactors escaped down the fire stairs.
Other attempts at sophistication didn’t work. ‘I’ll never forget the time I discovered girls,’ he says. ‘I was in the fifth grade. My father took me to a drive-in movie with a little girlfriend of mine. This girl had her head on my arm, and the next day my parents lectured me about being promiscuous at an early age. My growing up was like a sitcom ABC buys for a season before they drop it.’ Never passion’s plaything, except where movies were concerned, Spielberg would have a chequered emotional life that headed inexorably towards a marriage Ozzie and Harriet Nelson would have envied.
By the early sixties, Arnold and Leah’s marriage was failing. Spielberg recalled Arnold storming out of the house, shouting, ‘I’m not the head of the family, yet I am the man of the family’ – a line he would recycle in Duel. Steven fled from the cold silences of the house to the cinema’s warmth. In 1962, he saw the film that was to inspire him above all others. David Lean had spent years in the desert making Lawrence of Arabia, a truly epic picture of a larger-than-life historical character whose acts were mirrored and amplified by the landscapes in which they took place. Robert Bolt’s dialogue was minimal – indeed minimalist; aphorisms, orders, insults, seldom more than a sentence long. This was Ford crossed with Capra, but mediated by Lean. For the rest of his life, Spielberg would rate Lawrence as the one true classic of his early film-going. ‘I really kicked into high gear,’ he said of seeing it, ‘and thought, “This I gotta do. I gotta make movies.”’
Single-minded as ever, Spielberg set out to make his first feature, a science fiction adventure called Firelight. He wrote the first draft of the script in a night; the story of scientists who, investigating lights in space, provoke an alien invasion during which the visitors steal an entire city from earth and reassemble it on another planet.
Every weekend for a year, Spielberg worked on the film with anyone he could cajole or bully into helping. No girl, no football games, no summer jobs diverted him. His enthusiasm and persistence were infectious. When he needed someone exploded in the living room, Leah opened cans of cherries and stood by as her son balanced them on one end of a board and had someone jump on the other. She never got the stains off the furniture. Once again the airport closed a runway for him. A local hospital where he had worked as a volunteer in his holidays lent its corridors for a shot, though Spielberg found the experience disconcerting. ‘I saw things that were so horrifying that I had to fantasise that there were lights, props, make-up men, just to avoid vomiting.’
Once he was finished, Spielberg edited the film to 140 minutes. Actors had come and gone over the year, but he persuaded students at the nearby University of Arizona to post-synchronise the speaking parts as he ran the film on a sheet stretched over one end of the den. The Arcadia school band recorded some music for it.
The result, though he now deprecates it as ‘one of the five worst films ever made’, was good enough to screen for an audience. He persuaded his father, who had already invested $300 in the project, to gamble another $400 for the hire of a local cinema. Spielberg rented a limousine to bring him to the theatre with Leah, who had cudgelled enough friends, relatives of the actors, ex-Boy Scouts and local film fans to fill the seats. Most stayed to the end, and Arnold pocketed $100 profit.
Spielberg’s entry into the cinema was also his exit from childhood and Phoenix. Arnold had decided on another move, this time to join IBM at Saratoga, ten miles from San Jose, near San Francisco. Almost immediately, they packed up, and set out for California.
3 Amblin’ Towards Bethlehem (#ulink_bdee857d-7dec-54a7-8a0d-7a103a27d5af)
Show business is high school plus money.
Hollywood saying
AFTER THE parched landscape of Arizona, Spielberg loved the hills and vineyards of Saratoga. But this move finally wrecked the rickety marriage of Leah and Arnold Spielberg. Arnold had barely finished sketching a design for the house he hoped to build when the couple separated. Leah returned to Phoenix and started divorce proceedings. The separation wrenched Steven, who developed insecurities about marriage and a sense of loss that would be reflected in his films, which are filled with sons seeking fathers and children deprived of their families.
Saratoga also exposed him to anti-Semitism for the first time. Unlike her parents, Leah hadn’t kept a devout household. Spielberg called their style of Judaism ‘storefront Kosher’. When the rabbi called, the mezuzah was put on the door frame and the menorah on the mantel, and removed after he left. Spielberg understood vaguely that his mother’s family fled from Odessa to escape pogroms. His first memory of numbers is of a man, one of a group his grandmother was tutoring in English, trying to entertain him by displaying his concentration camp tattoo, and illustrating by turning his arm to show how 6 upside-down became 9.
As a boy, Spielberg was embarrassed by his heritage. ‘My grandfather would come to the porch when I was playing football with my friends and call out my name in Hebrew. “Schmeul! Schmeul! Dinner’s ready.” They would say, “Isn’t that your place? Who’s this Shmoo?” I’d say, “I don’t know. It’s not me he’s calling.”’ To anyone who asked, his name was German. He resisted the pressure from his grandmother to conform to what he called ‘the Orthodox mould’, but at the same time the religion’s emphasis on family values fed his need to belong. As an adult, he became a classic Jewish father – and, sometimes, mother. Though no enthusiast for cooking, he would prepare Leah’s recipes at home, and occasionally get up early on location to make matzoh for 150 people, an almost sacramental act that reaffirmed the production unit as his surrogate family.
The America in which Spielberg grew up accepted racial discrimination as a fact of life. Medical and law schools operated quotas for Jewish students, and colleges had Jewish fraternities. One still occasionally encountered a discreet ‘Christian Only’ in ‘Positions Vacant’ ads. Many golf clubs operated a racial ban. Realtors wouldn’t sell houses in certain districts to Jewish families. ‘Neighbourhoods for [a Jew],’ wrote William Manchester, ‘like his summer camps and winter cruises, would advertise “Dietary rules strictly enforced.”’
In Phoenix, even as one of only five Jewish children in his school, Spielberg hadn’t stood out, but Saratoga was actively anti-Semitic. Pennies were tossed at him in study hall, and he was mocked so much in gym that he gave up sports altogether; admittedly no great sacrifice for him. The Spielberg house, the only one not to display lights at Christmas, was just a walk away from the school, but after he’d been bullied on the way home, Steven insisted Leah pick him up each day. Once, in fury at the slurs of a neighbouring family, he smeared their windows with peanut butter. Explaining his decision to film Alice Walker’s book The Color Purple, rather than choosing a black director, he would say, ‘I felt I was qualified because of my own kind of cultural Armageddon, even though as a child I exaggerated the pain – as all children will do – and I became the only person discriminated against in history as a child.’
Because of this discrimination, but from a lack of academic interest as well, Spielberg’s grades, never high, sagged still further in Saratoga. When he graduated from high school with a dismal C average, it was in the knowledge that no major college would accept him. And not being in college meant that he was eligible for the draft. ‘I would have done anything to stay out of Vietnam,’ he said. But this wish dovetailed so neatly with his ambition to become a film director, ideally before he was twenty-one, that they soon fused in his mind.
The moment the 1963 summer vacation commenced, Steven persuaded Arnold to let him spend it with an uncle in Canoga Park, a suburb of Los Angeles. His uncle lent him his 1957 Plymouth convertible, but only on the understanding he stayed in the slow lane, going no faster than forty-five m.p.h. Since the speed limit in the fast lane in those days was sixty-five, other cars rocketed by, but Spielberg didn’t care. He was in heaven. Disneyland had opened in 1955, and he made the first of many long drives to the suburb of Anaheim where Walt Disney had built his fantasy world.
Los Angeles, a horizontal city defined by freeways, opened Spielberg’s eyes to linear motion. The boy who was uncomfortable with the written word discovered in movement a handwriting he could read and in which he could, he sensed, become fluent. ‘Looking at most modern cities involves seeing a lot of buildings,’ writes the architectural historian Charles Moore. ‘Looking at Los Angeles involves experiencing a lot of rides… Even the strictly architectural sights of Los Angeles are experienced more than seen, often in carefully controlled time… They are theatre as much as architecture.’ The concept of the ride became central to Spielberg’s cinematic vision. He designed rides for Disneyland and the Universal Studios tour, and in 1994 an LA journalist writing of the Dive! ‘total experience’ restaurants he opened with Jeffrey Katzenberg would comment that Spielberg ‘does not so much create movies as he assembles theme-park rides in the shape of movies’.
There are no good years to enter the film industry, but 1963 was worse than many. Hollywood was drastically reorganising. Since just after World War I, it had been dominated by the major studios: MGM, Paramount, Twentieth Century-Fox, Columbia, Universal and United Artists. However, the Federal Justice Department had decided that companies which controlled every step in the production of film, from conception to marketing, were in restraint of free trade, and forced the studios to shed their theatres, and open production to independent film-makers.
Shorn of the power to control production and distribution, the studios re-inserted themselves into the equation in a different role, lending the independents money, renting them office and production space, and organising promotion and distribution. The charges they levied for their help were often extortionate. Spielberg’s fees for Jaws and his percentage of its profits, known in the trade as ‘points’, would give him a personal fortune in the millions, but it was Universal and Columbia who really profited. Of Star Wars’ $200 million US domestic income, George Lucas would complain that he personally received, after taxes, less than $20 million.
Even by milking the film-makers, however, the studios still could not defeat television. Throughout the fifties and early sixties, desperate for novelties to win back their audience, they exhumed and relaunched all the technical improvements which had been developed over the previous half century but abandoned for lack of investment or interest: 70mm, CinemaScope, 3-D, VistaVision, even Aromarama, smellovision, and the tricks popularised by William Castle; seats wired with electric buzzers and plastic skeletons falling from the ceiling.
None slowed the inexorable trend towards home entertainment at the expense of the cinema experience. Many studios saw this as the writing on the wall, and hurried to cut their losses. The accumulated movies of fifty years were sold off to TV. Everywhere, backlots were bulldozed and the land redeveloped for office buildings. By the end of the sixties, MGM and Twentieth Century-Fox, rather than retain large warehouses of costumes and props and the staff to service them, would sell everything at auction: Garbo’s gowns, Judy Garland’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, Charles Foster Kane’s Rosebud sled from Citizen Kane – the patrimony of Spielberg’s dreams, fragments of which he would later pay a fortune to retrieve.
Some of the most attractive real estate in greater Los Angeles belonged to Universal Studios. Its 374-acre studio and backlot was the first thing a visitor saw as he topped the Cahuenga Pass out of Los Angeles and slid onto the wide flat floor of the San Fernando Valley, the dormitory suburb of greater LA. Universal’s chairman, Lew Wasserman, was a cunning and stubborn negotiator with a reputation for seeing further than many. As head of the MCA talent agency he’d pioneered package and profit-sharing deals under which stars deferred salary in favour of a share of income. The first such deal he negotiated, for James Stewart, made the actor a multi-millionaire. MCA had bought Universal Studios to guarantee work to its clients and a supply of television product to the networks and advertising agencies with which it enjoyed production deals. In 1962, however, forced by the Justice Department to decide whether it was an agency or a film producer, MCA shed the former and went into film-making full time.
To mark his territory, Wasserman commissioned an office block from the prestigious Chicago firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, an opaque stub of anodised aluminium and black glass. Inside, according to rumour, the dividing walls were movable. An executive in disfavour might arrive one morning to find his office subtly more cramped than when he left the night before.
From his seventeenth-floor executive suite, Wasserman squinted out over his fiefdom, and wondered how to make money with it. From high on the hill, the half-scale Gothic mansion from Hitchcock’s Psycho looked down on the plaster-and-lath sets where Lon Chaney Snr made his version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and his son Lon Jr The Wolf Man. The Invisible Man, Frankenstein and Dracula sprang from here, as did their multitudes of sequels. Jack Arnold’s films were shot on these sets and stages too. In the sixties, Ernest Borgnine and the crew were making the TV series McHale’s Navy on the black lagoon from which the creature had crawled. Interiors for Wagon Train and The Virginian were being shot on sets where Boris Karloff had once worked. Most of Universal’s income, however, was generated by a few blocks of bland shopfronts that provided a setting for modern cop shows and spy stories. Meanwhile, run-off from the hills was undermining the older sets, some of which were already collapsing.
One cost-cutting option that didn’t exist was firing people. The film production and craft unions, IATSE, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, and NABET, the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, aided by Jimmy Hoffa’s corrupt Teamsters, enjoyed near-omnipotent power. ‘Feather-bedding’ was rife. Once you were in, you were in for life – and beyond, if, like many, you apprenticed your sons. In the same way, a handful of executives circulating from studio to studio dominated management. ‘Affirmative action for family members,’ acknowledged the Los Angeles Times, ‘is an accepted practice in a town where everyone seems to be related to everyone else… A solid education and good grades are not necessarily relevant or even desirable and are considered much less valuable than the kind of insider’s knowledge acquired at the dinner table night after night.’ As Hollywood had joked when David Selznick married the daughter of MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, ‘the son-in-law also rises.’
In the thirties, under its founder Carl Laemmle, Universal had been notorious for nepotism. His son, known simply as ‘Junior’, ran production, and the payroll groaned with cousins. ‘Uncle Carl Laemmle,’ ran the crack, ‘has a very large faemmle.’ In reaction, the company promulgated an anti-nepotism rule in the forties, with jobs allocated by merit and experience. But this soon hardened into a rigid roster system, with pay hikes and other benefits graded according to length of service. Walking off a film meant you lost seniority, so productions at Universal always went ahead, no matter how inept the director or crew. Despite its large complement of staff technicians, most producers preferred to hire contract crews for anything being made to a deadline.
In 1963, the MCA board was pressing Wasserman for a decision about whether or not to follow a consultant’s advice and sell the backlot for hotels and condos, and lawyer Albert Dorskind was put in charge of assessing offers. Dorskind saved the studio. Shopping downtown one day in Farmers’ Market, the ramshackle complex of fruit and vegetable stalls and quick-lunch counters at Fairfax and Third Street, on the fringe of Hollywood, Dorskind noticed a Gray Line bus disgorging tourists. Remembering that Universal’s restaurant was losing $100,000 a year, he rang Gray Line and suggested they put Universal on their itinerary. Visitors could even lunch in the commissary – Eat With the Stars! And it would only cost Gray Line $1 a head, over and above what people ate. Gray Line jumped at it. The restaurant manager upped his prices by 20 per cent, and the commissary was soon in profit.
Spielberg stepped out of the Gray Line bus onto Universal’s hallowed ground in June 1963 with the awe of a zealot entering Jerusalem. He hid until the bus left, then spent the rest of the afternoon poking around, even walking onto sound stages where TV episodes were being shot. He found his way to the cutting rooms, where editor Tony Martinelli was working on episodes of Wagon Train. Spielberg asked questions. Flattered, and glad of a diversion, Martinelli and the other editors were happy to reply. He told them he’d made some movies, and asked if they would take a look at them. One said, ‘Bring ’em in, kid.’ Dazzled, Spielberg found a phone and called his cousin to pick him up. The next day he was back with Firelight and his 8mm films. Almost every day for the rest of his vacation he dressed in his one suit and, carrying an empty briefcase, drove to Universal. At the gate, the guard, assuming he was just another nephew with a summer job at the studio, waved him through.
Elsewhere in Los Angeles, the people who were to become Spielberg’s contemporaries in New Hollywood were gathering. Some almost didn’t make it. In June 1962, George Lucas, having graduated – barely – from high school in Modesto, took his Fiat Bianchina for a drive, and wrapped it round a tree. He nearly died. Others already had movie jobs. Francis Ford Coppola was writing screenplays while working as dogsbody for Hollywood’s cheapest producer, Roger Corman, and moonlighting as a director of soft-core porn. But the majority, like Spielberg, were just out of high school and wondering how to get in. Lucas, once he recovered, tried the accepted way, visiting every film production company on Ventura Boulevard, the ribbon development of low-rent two-storey office buildings and storefronts that wove along the periphery of the San Fernando Valley. He got nowhere.
Entering the business through a film school was still a novel concept. Cinema remained, in Hollywood at least, a business, not an art. Nobody anticipated the flood of film students attracted by the French New Wave, Britain’s Free Cinema documentary movement, or the underground films that were boiling out of New York and San Francisco.
After his accident, Lucas spent two more years in Modesto Junior College improving his grades, and was accepted by the University of Southern California’s film programme, the nation’s oldest. It helped that his father was moderately well-off. USC’s location on the edge of the unfashionable and dangerous downtown area belied the fact that it was a private university with high fees, whereas the plush UCLA, headquartered in well-barbered Westwood, had state funding. Despite its funky appearance, however, USC was, as one writer put it,
a citadel of privilege. Its graduates in public administration governed Los Angeles. Its doctors and technicians governed the medical establishment. The student body – overwhelmingly white and upper-middle-class – was largely immune to the social turmoil of the sixties. The school newspaper admitted that the ‘high cost of a USC education seems to screen out almost all Negroes. The notable exceptions to this rule are athletes admitted on scholarship.’ [in 1967, one of the black juniors on a football scholarship was O.J. Simpson.]
USC’s film programme didn’t rate the attention or investment of its medical or law school, let alone the football team. Its fifty students were mostly kids from second- or third-generation industry families, picking up the rudiments of sound recording or camera operation before they took the place awaiting them in the hierarchical studio system. They studied in classrooms built from World War I surplus lumber, and cut their films side by side on twenty-five ancient Moviolas in a graffiti-spattered room. The university guaranteed each student the funds and equipment to make a fifteen-minute film, but learning how to do it was mostly up to them. The faculty included a few good people, like Verna Fields, who been sound editor for Fritz Lang and taught courses when she wasn’t working on films like Anthony Mann’s El Cid. But she was in the minority.
Spielberg knew none of these people until much later. After the summer of 1963, he returned to Saratoga and high school. In vacations, he made lengthy forays to Los Angeles. Unwittingly, he followed George Lucas’s route along Ventura Boulevard, trying to find someone to look at his films. Everywhere, weary producers of promotional documentaries spurned them like the plague. One did agree to screen some of Firelight. ‘I gave him two of the best reels,’ says Spielberg. ‘I came back a week later and he was fired. Gone! His office was cleared out and now there’s a Toyota dealership where the office used to be… So part of Firelight still exists, but all the exposition is gone.’
In 1964, the decision about his immediate future was made for him. He was waiting in line at a San Jose cinema to see Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb when his sister and father drove up with an envelope. It was his Selective Service notice, confirming that, lacking a student exemption, he had been graded 1-A – prime cannon-fodder. He still went to the film, though he didn’t enjoy it, not knowing whether to laugh or be frightened. ‘I was so consumed with the possibility of going to Vietnam that I had to see it for a second time to really appreciate it.’ Wars came and went, but Kubrick was eternal.
College seemed the only feasible option. USC turned him down, and there was no money to send him through junior college to raise his grades, so the family chose academically indifferent California State College at Long Beach.
A half-hour drive from Hollywood across the industrial and suburban sprawl of Los Angeles, Long Beach hardly seemed Californian. The suburb’s untidy bungalows huddling along a nondescript coastline had a lacklustre, countryfied feel that reminded Spielberg of Arizona. For years, Long Beach hosted the Iowa State Picnic, attracting 150,000 midwesterners eager for a look at the Pacific. In an attempt to attract tourists and raise the tax base, the county allowed oil companies to sink wells on artificial islands just a few yards offshore, hiding the rigs inside fake apartment buildings. Entrepreneurs also moored the superannuated liner Queen Mary as a floating convention centre, and installed next to it Howard Hughes’s gigantic and almost unairworthy ‘Spruce Goose’ flying boat.
Spielberg was as indifferent to the gimcrack atmosphere of Long Beach as he was to his college education. If the draft had ended earlier, he admitted, he probably wouldn’t have gone to college at all. As it was, his three years at Long Beach created scarcely a ripple in his life. Since it had no film courses, the man who had turned The Scarlet Letter into a flip book majored in English. He worked in the cafeteria to earn pocket money, and projected classroom films. If he squeezed all his classes into two days a week, he could spend the rest of the time in Los Angeles.
What film education he gained was in Hollywood’s rerun and repertory cinemas like the NuArt and the Vagabond. ‘Anything not American impressed me,’ he said. ‘I went through a phase of seeing Ingmar Bergman films. I must have seen every Bergman movie ever made, because that’s what they were showing at that theatre. The next week, you’d see Buñuel movies.’ Hurriedly he added, ‘Not very many.’ Buñuel’s ragged technique, quirky plots and rigorous Catholicism baffled him. He preferred Jacques Tati, France’s master of the sight gag, whose films had no dialogue.
When he could scrape up enough money, he hired a 16mm camera and shot a film. He made five during the Long Beach years, a few of which experimented with abstraction. ‘I did a picture about dreams – how disjointed they are. I made one about what happens to rain when it hits dust.’ Another was ‘about a man being chased by someone trying to kill him. But running becomes such a spiritual pleasure for him that he forgets who is after him.’ Shooting these shorts kept his hand in, but the films were arid. He was, he knew already, a ‘concept’ director who made films from the general to the particular. What he needed was a big story, and the resources to deal with it as it deserved.
Spielberg’s contacts at Universal continued to be the most promising route to a career, and he spent as much time at the studio as he could. To raise a little money, Wasserman rented office space to independent producers. Spielberg tracked some of them down in remote corners or in the two-storey cinder-block buildings, mostly ex-warehouses, that huddled like mushrooms outside the studio perimeter. A few were glad to see him. All of them had advice. None offered him a job.
After the profitable public tours had been running for a year, Wasserman, sensing a money-maker, invested $4 million in turning the Universal City Tour into a studio enterprise. Restrooms and concession stands were installed, and special rubber-tyred trams designed. On 4 July 1964 the tour was officially inaugurated. Students acted as guides. Among the earliest was a young man from Encino named Mike Ovitz with a sleepy, catlike smile. Thirty years later, he would be offered the running of the studio.
If only Spielberg had known it, he already possessed an advantage that would give him the inside track in Hollywood. Being Jewish meant he was born into the culture and ethos prevailing in sixties Hollywood. Had he been part of an industry family, he would have found work instantly. Instead, he was forced to prowl Universal, looking for a connection, a sponsor, a patron.
Chuck Silver (whom Spielberg has identified as head of the editing department, but whom Sidney Sheinberg remembers as the film librarian) spotted him in the corridor and asked who he was. As a young man, he stood out: other than the student guides, the only people under forty on the lot were actors, and he obviously couldn’t be one of those. Tickled by Spielberg’s tale of bluffing his way in, Silver wrote him a pass, and tried to introduce him to some executives, but the few that did agree to see him recoiled when he arrived with his little 8mm projector and started taking down their diplomas to make space on the wall for an impromptu screening. He learned quickly that he was competing with UCLA graduates who, thanks to Uncle Irving who ran the camera department at Warner Brothers, could boast 35mm show reels of professional quality.
Bolder now, he wandered onto sets to watch directors at work, and was thrown off Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain and Franklin Schaffner’s The War Lord. He had a revenge of sorts when the studio’s head sound mixer, Ronnie Pierce, let him sit in on the soundtrack recording of Torn Curtain, and of lesser films like the Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedy Send Me No Flowers.
TV directors weren’t as fastidious as Hitchcock about visitors, and Spielberg had no trouble crashing the set of Robert Ellis Miller, who was directing a 1964 episode of Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater with John Cassavetes.
Noticing the pimply boy in the shadows, however, Cassavetes introduced himself. As they chatted, he asked Spielberg, ‘What do you want to do?’
‘I want to be a director.’
Cassavetes chewed this over. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘After every take, you tell me what I’m doing wrong.’
The next time Miller called ‘Cut!’ the actor walked up to Spielberg. ‘What do you think? How can I improve it? What am I doing wrong?’
Spielberg equivocated. ‘Gah, it’s too embarrassing right here, Mr Cassavetes. Don’t ask me in front of everybody; can’t we go round the corner and talk?’
But Cassavetes insisted. He probably enjoyed lighting a fire under Miller, a minor talent even by Universal standards, but Spielberg learned a valuable lesson. As François Truffaut said, ‘a director is someone who answers questions.’ If you came on a movie set, you had better know how to deal with anything that arose. Over the next few years, Spielberg made it his business to become expert in every aspect of film-making technique. Nobody would ever again ask him a question he couldn’t answer.
The years between 1966 and 1969 are among the poorest-documented of Spielberg’s career, and he has made sure they remain so. There is no consistency to the chronology he quotes in interviews. Projects which obviously occupied his time and energy for long periods are passed over in a sentence. The vagueness reflects his disillusion with Hollywood and the sense that he would never achieve his aim of directing before he was twenty-one.
He made few friends while at Long Beach, though one, Carl Gottlieb, would go on to co-write the script of Jaws. Another was a personable young actor named Tony Bill, who’d had a small role in Coppola’s You’re a Big Boy Now and was getting a reputation as a comedy lead. His ambitions, however, lay in production. He and Spielberg started work on a film called ‘Slipstream’, about a cycle race, but it was never finished. The cameraman, Serge Haigner, was assisted by a young man named Allen Daviau, someone else who would figure in Spielberg’s career. John Cassavetes also gave Spielberg a few weeks’ work as gofer on his film Faces.
After bluffing his way into Universal, getting into USC was easy, if not as a student, then simply to crash evening screenings and hang out. At a retrospective of USC graduate films, Spielberg got to know the more social of the film students. Not, however, George Lucas, who, secretly terrified that people might think him gauche and naive, said little or nothing to anybody, and concentrated on making movies.
Spielberg’s first friends there were Hal Barwood and his writing partner Matthew Robbins, from UCLA. They would write The Sugarland Express and go on to directorial careers, while continuing to act as his script doctors; until the early eighties, Spielberg seldom made a film without their input. He met Randal Kleiser, later director of Grease and The Blue Lagoon, Caleb Deschanel, lighting cameraman on The Right Stuff and director of The Escape Artist, Walter Murch, editor of Julia and Apocalypse Now, Howard Kazanjian, destined to be producer on Raiders and many other Lucas films, John Carpenter, director of Halloween and The Fog, composer Basil Poledouris, of Conan the Barbarian and Big Wednesday, and David S. Ward, writer of The Sting and director of Cannery Row.
Most important of all, he became friendly with John Milius. Massive, bearded and irascible, a war lover, surfing buff and gun freak – when he became a director, Milius demanded as part of his deal that the studio buy him a rare firearm of his choice – Milius, Hollywood’s self-styled resident expert on legendary Americans, was the group’s renegade, indispensable to its sense of community. When the college fired him for punching a professor, the others went on strike until he was reinstated. Milius and Robbins became like older cousins to Spielberg; people to whom he could turn in an emergency, and on whom he could rely for useful, if sometimes undiplomatically phrased, advice. Quietly, Spielberg was rebuilding the family he’d lost when his parents broke up.
In the summer of 1967, Spielberg decided to take the law into his own hands. By now he was well known around Universal, so he simply began to act as if he worked there. Quizzed later, Scotty, the studio guard who waved him through every day, admitted he took him for Lew Wasserman’s son.
Independent producers came and went all the time, and there were always vacant offices in the warren at the back of the studio. Spielberg found an empty room, introduced himself to the women at the main switchboard, and told them what extension he was on. With plastic letters from a camera store, the sort used to title home movies, he listed himself on the main directory: Steven Spielberg, starring in his own production of his career.
Spielberg is vague about the amount of time he hung out at Universal. It might have been two years, or six months, or even three months. Sometimes he’s seventeen, at other times twenty-one. The vagueness reflects his disillusion with Hollywood and his sense that he would never achieve his aim of directing before he was twenty-one. When it became obvious that he would not achieve this goal, fantasy took over.
Around this time, it became generally believed that Spielberg was born not in 1946 but in 1947. Undoubtedly he himself was responsible for this error, and its persistence. His driver’s licence bore, and continued to bear, the date of birth 1947, as did his voter registration. In January 1981 a Los Angeles Times journalist noticed the discrepancy, and repeatedly tried to get a reaction from Spielberg’s publicist, but without success. In January 1988, shortly after what had apparently been his fortieth birthday, the New York Times and many other papers would publish articles on ‘Spielberg at Forty’. No attempt was made by Spielberg or Amblin to correct them. Finally confronted with the disparity in 1995, Marvin Levy, Spielberg’s spokesman on publicity, told the Los Angeles Times, ‘I’m sure there’s an answer. Maybe he didn’t care what people said about his age. He cares about one thing: making films.’ The inference is inescapable, however, that Spielberg put back his birthday so as to maintain the illusion that he might still make his first film before he was twenty-one.
As for the usefulness of his time at Universal, Spielberg admits, ‘I never made any deals, but I used the phone a lot (to call up the time) and learned how to play the game. I got fed up with the joint though, and left, and went to Long Beach College and made a short called Amblin’.’
The short-film route to a job in movies was a traditional one in the sixties. Some cinemas still showed a ‘full supporting programme’, and there were plenty of festivals interested in good new work. George Lucas had just made Filmmaker, a thirty-minute documentary about Francis Coppola shooting The Rain People. Noel Black had won his first feature with a short called Skater Dater, a teenage romance with skateboards shot in San Francisco.
Spielberg now understood enough of Hollywood to realise that only a 35mm film carried conviction. Fortunately, he says, ‘I met someone who was as enthusiastic to make movies as I was. The difference was that he was a millionaire, Dennis Hoffman. He had a [special effects] optical company. He saw some of my 8mm and 16mm films and said he’d give me $10,000 – which to me was a bloody fortune – to make a short film, but he wanted the possessory credit. That means the films said “Dennis Hoffman’s Amblin’”. I said, “Fine.” I took the money and made the film in 35mm. 1.85:1 ratio [of wide screen used by all professional cinemas]. The big time for me!’
Later Hoffman, who diversified out of the lab business into a chain called Designer Donuts, the investors in which included Spielberg, would claim that their 1968 contract covered not only Amblin’ but a feature, to be directed for Hoffman during the next ten years. The deal was one that would come back to haunt Spielberg.
Amblin’ is a twenty-four-minute story of a young couple who meet in the Mojave desert and hitchhike to the Californian coast. Amateurs Pamela McMyler and Richard Levin played the lovers. Allen Daviau shot it, delighted to be working in 35mm after long periods of documentaries. The landscape was beautiful, the cars sleek, the lovers – who had no dialogue – affectingly clean-cut and attractive. A brief love scene and a shared joint gave the film a trendy modernism. Spielberg, however, was under no illusions about the worth of Amblin’. It had only one function: to demonstrate his and Daviau’s grasp of cinema technique and their ability to make a slick Hollywood product. He called it ‘a Pepsi commercial’, and joked that it had the empty decorative appeal of a piece of driftwood.
Hoffman was delighted, however, and in 1969 entered Amblin’ in the second Atlanta Film Festival, where it won an award. Convinced that his career as a producer was assured, he threw what Spielberg remembers as ‘an inflated premiere… to all the execs in Los Angeles. Or rather, he invited all the execs, but no one came.’ Fortunately, a few ‘lower-echelon studio people’ saw the film. One was Chuck Silver, who took a copy to show a Universal executive named Sidney Jay Sheinberg.
Sheinberg started his working life as a law instructor at UCLA, but in 1959 Albert Dorskind hired him as an assistant; Sheinberg’s father-in-law was business manager for a number of MCA executives. Courteous, even formal in manner, and intensely discreet, Sheinberg called everybody, even his juniors, ‘sir’, a habit he never lost. He quickly impressed the Universal hierarchy, and Jennings Lang, who ran the television division, put him in charge of long-term production planning, which included keeping an eye out for new talent.
Sheinberg remembers Chuck Silver buttonholing him one night when he’d been previewing a film in one of the studio screening rooms. ‘He said there’s this guy who’s been hanging around the place who’s made a short film,’ said Sheinberg. ‘So I watched it and I thought it was terrific. I liked the way he selected the performers, the relationships, the maturity and the warmth that was in that short. I told Chuck to have the guy come see me.’
Nervous that his moonlighting on the lot had been found out, Spielberg presented himself at Sheinberg’s office in the Black Tower.
‘Sidney is very austere. He said, “Sir, I liked your film. How would you like to go to work professionally? You sign the contract, you start in television. After TV, if you do a few good television shows and other producers on the lot like your work, you go into feature films.” It wasn’t that easy, but it sounded great.’
Spielberg dithered. ‘But I have a year left to go in college.’
‘Do you want to go to college,’ Sheinberg asked, ‘or do you want to direct?’
Spielberg’s formal education ended in that moment. ‘I left so quickly that I never even cleared out my locker,’ he said. Years later, at odd moments, he’d think of the chicken salad sandwich he’d left rotting there.
As Spielberg signed his contract a few weeks later, he murmured, ‘My father will never forgive me for leaving college.’ It was a reaction Sheinberg understood. Like Leah’s parents, his father had emigrated to escape anti-Semitic persecution. He and his attractive young wife, the actress Lorraine Gary, were devoted to each other and to their two boys.
The contract was the standard seven-year pact for ‘personal services’, under which Spielberg sold every working minute to Universal to use as they pleased. The business called it ‘the Death Pact’. Only the desperate – or the desperately ambitious – would sign it, and Spielberg was both. So was his Amblin’ star, Pamela McMyler, whom Universal also put under contract. Coincidentally, John Milius was also offered the same seven-year deal, but as a writer. He turned it down.
How old was Spielberg when Universal signed him? In early versions of what was to become a legend, he claimed unashamedly that he was twenty. ‘One day in 1969, when I was twenty-one…’ he told the Hollywood Reporter in 1971. In another version, he says he told Sheinberg when he signed the contract, ‘I just have one request, and I’d like you to give me not so much a commitment, Mr Sheinberg, as a promise. I want to direct something before I’m twenty-one. That would be very important to me.’ Sheinberg, he said, agreed. Yet for Spielberg to have signed a contract as a minor would have necessitated investigation of his age, which would have brought his true date of birth to light.
The likelihood is that Sheinberg knew that Spielberg had turned twenty-one in December 1967, and was therefore twenty-two when he signed their deal, but that he went along with the illusion for publicity reasons. Already the older man sensed an affinity that would grow over the years. Some people felt the two even looked alike. As his own children failed to show any of his flair for show business, he began to regard Spielberg as a surrogate son.
4 Universal Soldier (#ulink_0019fc4f-26ea-5b0b-be8c-2fe70e0a7f9a)
The people who do well in the system are the people who do films that producers like to produce, not that people want to see.
Orson Welles
STROLLING AROUND the studio where he’d spent so much time as an interloper, Spielberg could hardly believe his luck.
He’d rented a cramped $130 a month apartment on Laurel Canyon and furnished it with an ad hoc mixture of bean bags and movie posters, but he spent little time there. Each evening he caught whatever film was previewing in the studio’s theatres. Next day he was on the phone, complimenting actors on their performances, directors of their direction, producers on their acumen. Producer/writer William Link remembers him as ‘a great politician. Even then, we knew we would all be working for him one day.’
He relished the sense of Universal as another world, sealed off from the city of Los Angeles. Science fiction writer and sometime scenarist Ray Bradbury, who was also, coincidentally, afflicted with some of Spielberg’s phobias, about heights, elevators and flying, shared his love of working on a movie lot, where
everything was clearly defined. Here there were absolutely sharp beginnings, and ends that were neat and irreversible. Outside, beyond the stages, I did not much trust life with its dreadful surprises and ramshackle plots. Here, walking among the alleys just at dawn or twilight, I could imagine I opened the studio and shut it down. It belonged to me because I said it was so.
The studio looked busy. The electric trolleys of the public tours with their pink-and-white candy-striped awnings and rubber wheels seemed to be everywhere. Occasionally a limo cruised by. With the new influx of visitors, security had been tightened. Scotty now rigorously checked everyone at the gate, and people with legitimate business on the backlot had to wait in the shadow of the black tower until a Teamster-driven limo arrived to take them to their meeting – another example of the union excess which was driving producers to Europe.
As the summer approached, Spielberg waited to be given a job, but nothing eventuated. It was ironic. He had an office again at Universal, yet still the phone never rang. They were paying him now, but not much. After taxes, his weekly $130 pay cheque dwindled to less than $100. With leisure to read the fine print of his contract, he found he was less employee than slave. ‘I couldn’t work outside Universal, couldn’t look for independent financing, couldn’t go underground like all my friends were doing. I was trapped in the establishment, but nobody would give me a job in the establishment.’ With his birthday looming, he pressed Sheinberg to find him a directing project. ‘And he twisted someone’s arm – or broke it off – and got someone to give me a shot at one third of the pilot for Night Gallery.’
Night Gallery was a new series being prepared for NBC, and scheduled to begin in November 1969. To write and present it, Universal had hired Rod Serling, in the hope of repeating the success of The Twilight Zone, which he had sold outright to CBS, only to kick himself as it earned a fortune in regional reruns. Serling had grudgingly ceded all creative control to Universal. He was to write and introduce the three segments of Night Gallery, each hingeing on a painting with supernatural powers. In this way he hoped to fill the one-hour slot preferred by networks while conserving the sting-in-the-tail short-story format of Twilight Zone.
Boris Sagal and Barry Shear, both practised directors, were to share the pilot under William Sackheim, a B-movie scriptwriter who became a TV producer in his fifties. Sackheim assigned Spielberg the middle story, Eyes, a characteristic piece of Serling tables-turning about a ruthless blind businesswoman who yearns for a corneal transplant despite warnings by her doctor, Barry Sullivan, that she’ll win at most twelve hours of sight. She plunders the eyes of a desperate Tom Bosley anyway, to find that her half-day coincides with New York’s city-wide 1965 blackout.
Spielberg read the script, and immediately tried to get out of the assignment.
‘Jesus, can’t I do something about young people?’ he begged Sheinberg.
‘I’d take this if I were you,’ Sheinberg said.
It was sound advice. To add class to the pilot, Universal had hired Joan Crawford. The widow of Pepsi-Cola owner Al Steele, and Oscar-winning star of wartime Hollywood’s archetypal melodrama of upward mobility and guilty passion, Mildred Pierce, Crawford had been reduced to playing straight woman to a monster in the British horror film Trog. Even at sixty-three, however, she had never, despite having appeared in game shows, variety and live dramas, made a film specifically for TV. For that particular indignity she demanded, despite her millions, a fee of $50,000, 10 per cent of the pilot’s total budget.
By assigning the waning but still potent Crawford to Spielberg, Sheinberg was showing his confidence in him. Nervously aware that his star had locked horns with great directors like Howard Hawks, Michael Curtiz and George Cukor, Spielberg ran some of her movies and pored over books on her career. Though only five feet four inches tall, she immediately drew the eye, even next to his hero Spencer Tracy. He set up a preliminary meeting at her Hollywood apartment.
Crawford was his introduction to the contradictory power of stars, nondescript in real life, magnetic on screen. Her magnetism, however, wasn’t immediately apparent when, acutely conscious of his gawky appearance, Spielberg was ushered in, since she was standing in the middle of the room with a mask over her eyes.
‘This is how a blind person walks through a room,’ she explained as she groped towards him. ‘I need to practise with the furniture two days before we shoot.’
Then she took off the mask and saw him for the first time.
‘Actually I heard later that she had been promised a director like George Cukor,’ Spielberg said, ‘and had no idea that they were going to assign an acne-ridden, sniffling-nosed, first-time-out director. I only knew years later that she had a temper tantrum when she found out that she had to work with me.’
There was no immediate sign of irritation. Crawford grilled him. What had he made? No features, just a short? Was he perhaps related, she asked drily, to someone in the Black Tower?
‘No, ma’am,’ he quavered. ‘I’m just working my way through Universal.’
Spielberg never described the meal that followed the same way twice. Sometimes he remembers Crawford saying, ‘Steven, you and I both made it on our own. We’re going to get along just fine. C’mon, let’s go out to dinner.’ In other versions, she tells him tersely, ‘I don’t want you sitting with me in a restaurant. People will think you’re my son, not my director.’ Given the course of their relationship, the second version seems more probable.
On the first day of the eight-day shoot, Crawford arrived at 8.45 a.m. precisely, swathed in mink and trailed by her personal hairdresser, make-up man, costume lady, and three men carrying iceboxes of Pepsi, which she handed around among the sixty-man crew. Nobody needed cooling. Crawford’s contract stipulated that the studio was chilled, as it had been in her great days at Warner Brothers, to 55 degrees.
The week before, Spielberg had been given an audience with Serling, daunting for someone who knew him only as the suave black-suited mc of The Twilight Zone. Serling told him that, by contract, not a word of any script could be changed without his approval. (This wasn’t true. Universal had full story approval on all its series, and didn’t hesitate to use it when ratings began to slide.) Feeling himself straitjacketed again, Spielberg fought back, diagramming a series of jump cuts, looming low-angle close-ups and sinuous crane shots reminiscent of those horror/suspense series like Thriller and The Outer Limits, which were lonely islands of German Expressionism in the ocean of Hollywood pap. Some of these devices, like his quick cuts to a series of progressively larger close-ups to build emotional pressure, he would use again and again until they became fixtures of his visual style. But as he tried to explain them during Day One, traditionally spent blocking out camera movements, he found the technicians scornful. Stuff like that was regarded as an unhealthy hangover from live TV drama. The house style called for sets lit with the intensity of an electronic flash, and characters framed in umbilicus-and-up medium shot.
Undeterred, Spielberg lined up his opening, a medium close-up of the back of a large chair that swivelled at the touch of a diamond-ringed finger to reveal Joan. He had plenty more of the same: an unbandaging that owed something to Eisenstein in its swift cutting, and a climax, as Crawford stumbled to her death through a window, that recalled the overt symbolism of 1930s montage expert Slavko Vorkapich. ‘I remember shooting through the baubles on chandeliers,’ says Spielberg, embarrassed – though the shot of Sullivan’s image inverted in distorting glass as he arrives in Crawford’s office is one of the most memorable in Eyes.
He might have got away with it had Crawford been as malleable on set as off. Instead, she exhibited a steely stubbornness, bombarding him with questions about her character. ‘Joan was climbing the walls while they were filming,’ recalled Serling’s wife Carol. ‘She was calling Rod all the time, and he reassured her.’
Under his tan, Spielberg was in a cold sweat. Seeing him pale, Barry Sullivan took him aside and told him something he would never forget: ‘Don’t put yourself through this,’ he said, ‘unless you absolutely have to.’
Spielberg saw he had no choice but to accede to most of Crawford’s demands. When she couldn’t remember her lines, he printed up cue cards, at Sullivan’s suggestion, with print large enough for her to read through her bandages. He agreed as well to the retakes she requested, knowing that to deny her could lead to a catastrophic confrontation in front of the crew.
With her young director under control, Crawford relaxed. She gave him cologne, and a bracelet. He responded by placing each morning, in her dressing room, a single rose in a Pepsi bottle. A loyal Pepsi drinker, Crawford belched every time she finished a bottle – a sign of enjoyment, she explained. When Spielberg told her he’d never learned how to belch, she taught him.
The price of conciliation was delay. At the end of the shoot, two days of script remained unfilmed. Sackheim stepped in and directed the last day. A few days later, Spielberg showed Sackheim his rough cut. The producer sat next to Spielberg in the editing room, groaning faintly at each new visual excess.
‘We’re going to have to perform major surgery on your show,’ Sackheim said at the end.
‘And he went in,’ said Spielberg, ‘and shifted the vision from my choices to his own choices.’
Exhaustion and depression forced extreme decisions. ‘I was in a despondent, comatose state,’ Spielberg recalled. ‘I learned a lot of lessons with that show, but rather than say, “Well, I’ll let that roll off my back and go on to the next show,” I went to Sid Sheinberg and said, “I can’t do TV any more. It’s just too tough. I quit.”’
Wisely, Sheinberg refused his resignation. Instead he offered a year-long leave of absence. ‘So my salary was suspended and I went home and wrote for a year. All I did was write.’
Spielberg’s first thought had been to break into the underground, where some of the USC group were making their reputation. ‘I went to the underground to make films in 16mm – and I couldn’t get in there. I could not raise $100 to make a film.’
Networking had won him a few useful contacts at Universal. One was composer John Williams. Spielberg admired his music for Mark Rydell’s version of William Faulkner’s The Reivers, folksy and ebullient by turns. Its cross-fertilisation of the American tradition with the European – ‘like a combination of Aaron Copland and Debussy’, Spielberg said – marked Williams as someone who shared his taste.
Another new acquaintance was Cliff Robertson. As much a victim of the TV ghetto as Spielberg was, the boyish-looking actor had starred in The Hustler and Days of Wine and Roses on TV, only to see Paul Newman and Jack Lemmon click with them in the cinema. When he appeared in The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon, a teleplay based on Daniel Keyes’s story ‘Flowers for Algernon’, about a mentally handicapped man who becomes a genius through experimental surgery, Robertson recognised a potential hit and bought the film rights himself, adapting it into the screenplay Charly. Seven years later, in 1968, his foresight was rewarded with an Academy Award for Best Actor.
Robertson was Spielberg’s first call after he started his leave. The actor loved World War I aircraft and, after the success of Charly, he wrote a treatment for a flying movie called I Shot Down the Red Baron, I Think, which would use rare original aircraft accumulated by another fanatic in Ireland. Robertson’s agent, David Begelman, sold the idea to Cinerama Corporation for $150,000, but the project bogged down in wrangles over finance, in which, to Robertson’s fury, Begelman sided with Cinerama. Robertson was forced to pay $25,000 to Cinerama, with a further $25,000 if the film was ever made. In sworn depositions, he claimed Begelman ‘sandbagged’ and ‘completely subverted’ him.
Aware of this debacle, and knowing Robertson’s interest in old planes, Spielberg offered him a treatment he’d written with a friend, Claudia Salter, about a World War I flyer and his son barnstorming around America in the early twenties. Robertson liked Ace Eli and Rodger of the Skies. He bought it, hiring Salter to write a screenplay.
After graduation from USC, Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins had tried to sell some screenplays, but without success. Spielberg began feeding them his ideas. George Lucas was staying with the writers while he cast what would become his first studio feature, American Graffiti. The abstracted Lucas seldom spoke to anyone as he wandered in and out, but to him it seemed the dweeby guy with the big nose and the glasses was there almost all the time. Spielberg’s voice filled the house as he leaned over the shoulders of Robbins and Barwood, suggesting lines, laughing at those they’d written, and urging them on.
One of Spielberg’s ideas was a comedy he’d already tried to float at Universal, a modern Snow White, about seven men who run a Chinese food factory in San Francisco. Another was based on a clipping from the Los Angeles Citizen News about a May 1969 Texas incident when Ila Faye Dent, just released after a shoplifting conviction, persuaded her husband Robert to break out of prison to retrieve their two-year-old daughter from court-appointed foster parents. On the way, they kidnapped state patrolman James Crone, which led to a massive car chase across the state.
From this story, Barwood and Robbins, with Spielberg’s collaboration, worked up the tale of Lou Jean and Clovis Poplin’s flight in search of Baby Langston. Police Captain Tanner, hamstrung by the incompetence of his men and the young couple’s sentimental appeal, trails them with a motorcade as they bumble across Texas. Crowds cheer them and high school bands play them through town, while well-wishers offer free gas and chicken dinners, and fill the car with gifts. Even the vigilantes who ambush them on a used-car lot manage only to riddle the cars and do no harm to the fugitives at all. The dream dies at the end, when Clovis is killed, but until then it’s a folk tale straight from Reader’s Digest. The screenplay was called ‘Carte Blanche’, then ‘American Express’, but later it was renamed, in honour of the town towards which the Poplins were fleeing, The Sugarland Express.
Each decade throws up its hot writing teams, and Barwood and Robbins were to be as hot as any during the seventies. Episodic and oriented totally towards action, their work seems mechanical today, a loose stringing together of action sequences, owing more to animators like Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, Frank Tashlin and Walt Disney than to the meticulous plot- and scene-builders of the 1940s. But Spielberg called them ‘geniuses’ and praised their ‘wonderful cartoon imagination’. Once Barwood and Robbins went on to direct their own films, he found and encouraged other partnerships like theirs. Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, his protégés in the eighties, were Barwood and Robbins writ large, not least in their fascination with animation.
As if to underline the comparison with Jones and Avery, Barwood, Robbins and Spielberg put Lou Jean and Clovis into an Indian Chief mobile home on a used-car lot and had them watch Chuck Jones’s Road Runner evade Wile E. Coyote on the screen of a nearby drive-in cinema. Spielberg lavished all his craft on this scene when the film was finally made. Birdus Fleetus and Lupus Persisticus (Jones’s cod-Latin names for his hero and villain) were his boyhood heroes, and he prevailed on Universal to buy from Warners forty seconds of Jones’s cartoon to underline the film’s most poignant moment.
His Universal contract had won Spielberg an agent. He was accepted by the prestigious International Creative Management, founded by David Begelman, a plump middle-aged man, famous as one of Hollywood’s highest-betting poker players, but also well-known, because of arguments like that with his ex-client Cliff Robertson, as chronically unreliable. Spielberg’s first representative at ICM was Mike Medavoy, himself later a studio executive. ‘Spielberg came in with… Amblin’,’ Medavoy recalled. ‘I saw it and I said: “Terrific!”’ Medavoy got him a few commercials, one of which featured a black actress named Margaret Avery, whom Spielberg would remember when he came to direct The Color Purple.
But he and Medavoy disagreed over Universal, to which Spielberg, disconsolate about the lack of work on the outside, was thinking of returning. Medavoy recalled:
I wanted him to get out of that contract. He wanted to stay. He was right, actually, to stay. My feeling was that at Universal at that particular time – this was right before Airport – he’d get boxed into doing garbage. And I had just gotten Phil Kaufman out of his contract. So I said, ‘Listen, you should get another agent, I don’t think your career is going to go anywhere if you stay there.’ So I got him another agent within the same agency.
The new agent was Begelman’s partner, Freddie Fields, who was decisively to launch Spielberg’s career. During his sabbatical, Fields took him round the traditional circuit of all film-makers looking for backing. One stop was at Twentieth Century-Fox, then being run by Richard Zanuck while his father Darryl, who’d founded the company almost forty years before, enjoyed European retirement with a series of darkly dramatic French mistresses like the singer Juliette Greco.
Novelist John Gregory Dunne described Zanuck, then thirty-eight, as ‘a tightly controlled man with the build of a miniaturised half-back, twelve-month tan, receding brown hair and manicured fingernails that are chewed to the quick. He has hesitant blue eyes, a quick embarrassed smile and a prominent jaw whose muscles he reflexively keeps knotting and unknotting.’ The tics hid a violent temper. Around Fox, Zanuck was known as ‘Little Napoleon’, after Nehemiah Persoff’s twitchy gang boss in Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot.
David Brown, twenty years older than Zanuck, a pipe-smoker with a bushy moustache which earned him the nickname ‘The Walrus’, handled story operations from New York and acted as Zanuck’s adviser and lieutenant. He affected a vague manner that belied his long experience as magazine writer, editor and publisher. His politeness and tact made him ideal to act as a buffer between the volatile Zanuck and the world. An odd but effective team, Zanuck and Brown had launched some of Fox’s biggest hits, though their decision in 1970 to abandon the broad entertainment values of their earlier successes like The Sound of Music, Hello Dolly! and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for more challenging, adult films was already eroding their power with the acutely profit-conscious Fox board.
It was this pair that Fields brought Spielberg to meet. As a package, he offered Ace Eli, with Robertson to star and Spielberg to direct. Zanuck suspected Spielberg was a better salesman than director. ‘I found him tremendously gifted, at least from a conversational point of view, but it was a highly physical and complex film, and I didn’t think he had the experience to do stunt flying and all that.’ They did buy the script, however, Spielberg’s only sale during his absence from Universal.
Spielberg later gave the impression that he spent a year away from Universal, but, despondent with his attempt at independence, he actually returned after only four months.
‘Sid,’ he told Sheinberg, ‘I’m ready to eat crow and pay my dues. Assign me something.’
Word of his problems on Eyes had spread, however, and nobody wanted him. ‘I was regarded on the Universal lot as a folly, a novelty item, bric-a-brac for the mantelpiece. Something to joke about at parties.’
Fortunately, Night Gallery got good reviews when it went out on 8 November 1969, and NBC commissioned the rest of the series. With hindsight, Spielberg could see that he had a lot to learn, and that the best way to do so was to work. He could admit now that Eyes was a disaster, and that watching Sackheim eviscerate his work, however humiliating, had been a salutary display of the power of editing.
Sheinberg offered him six directing assignments. For Marcus Welby MD, a plodding but popular series starring Robert Young as a kindly Santa Monica physician, Spielberg directed an episode called The Daredevil Gesture, about a teenage haemophiliac who risks his life on a class field trip to prove his courage. Unable to instil individuality with bravura camerawork, he tried for Significance in performances. ‘I was taking Marcus Welby seriously,’ he said later, self-mockingly. ‘… and a lot of these older actors would look at me… wondering, “Gee, I’m doing three shows this week and this guy is acting like this is Twelve Angry Men with Henry Fonda.” And I’m trying to flush out Marcus Welby and making an ass of myself on the set.’
He had even less success with Make Me Laugh, another segment of Night Gallery. In a variation on the Midas Touch, black comic Godfrey Cambridge is given the magic power to make people laugh – but only to laugh, even at his own death. Towards the end of shooting, in a repeat of the post-production interference of Eyes, Tom Bosley replaced Eddie Mayehoff in the role of Cambridge’s manager, and Jeannot Szwarc, not Spielberg, was called in to direct his scenes. The episode aired on 6 January 1971.
Life as a TV director was exhausting. ‘It’s very, very hard to learn film-making when you’re watching five-day television shows,’ Spielberg said. ‘People are running and shouting, and the pitch is so ear-shattering you become a neurotic before you become a movie-maker.’ Even so, it taught him a lot. ‘You learn to do your homework,’ he said. ‘TV pulled a long train, and I was the last carriage. If you didn’t finish on time and under budget, they would just cut you loose.’
He had also returned at exactly the right moment. Episode drama was dying. Networks were demanding more features. Rather than abandon their popular characters and titles. Universal lengthened episodes to ninety minutes and widened their scope while keeping to the same tight schedule and budget. Despite their length, these films still had to be shot in ten days.
Among the inflated series was The Name of the Game. Set in the world of magazine publishing, it had a rotating roster of three leading men: Gene Barry, Anthony Franciosa and Robert Stack. In the autumn of 1970, Spielberg directed L.A. 2017, an episode written by Philip Wylie which aired on 15 January 1971. Barry crashes his car on the way to an environmental conference and wakes up in 2017 to find that Angelenos have taken refuge underground from smog and gang warfare. After siding with the rebels who want to overthrow big boss Barry Sullivan, he retreats to the surface and is transported back to his own time, converted overnight to clean-air legislation.
L.A. 2017 earned Spielberg minor eminence when he was invited to screen it at the World Science Fiction Convention. Most fans dismissed the long-haired young director in tailored leather jacket and open-necked flowered shirt as another psyched-up fast-talking Hollywood hype, but the experience alerted him to the existence of a growing national market for fantasy and science fiction. Unlike himself at their age, these kids had money to spend and the power to do pretty much what they pleased. They were obsessive about inside and advance information on science fiction films. Spielberg, still young enough to remember what it was like to be a fan, took note. Jeff Walker, a publicist who came to specialise in promoting films, including some of Spielberg’s, to this market, comments that today ‘there’s an entire market segment that thrives on knowing the stuff beforehand, that was created by [Spielberg] practically, and George [Lucas], and [Star Trek producer Gene] Roddenberry.’
Success gave Spielberg some leverage, and Freddie Fields was able to renegotiate his terms of employment. On 28 December 1970 Variety noted that he’d signed a five-year exclusive contract as a producer and a six-year non-exclusive deal as director. It was his first step on the road to total control, and an early recognition that his ambitions lay less in creative film-making than in the building of a production empire. A pecking order operated on the Universal lot. Feature directors looked down on the TV contingent as hacks, just as directors at other studios looked down on Universal’s features and the bright pastel ‘house style’ that extended even to credits, trailers and print advertising. Instantly recognisable, a Universal film was also instantly dismissable. In the fifties, TV had launched Arthur Penn, John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet and Sam Peckinpah, but in the seventies it was more often a graveyard of reputations. Spielberg was the only director under thirty-five at Universal. Most of the colleagues with whom he was to share the chores of Name of the Game and Night Gallery, like Robert Collins, Daryl Duke and Robert Michael Lewis, were ten years older, and saw little in their future but more of the same.
Feature film producer/directors were an elite. The emblem of their standing was a bungalow on the lot. The prosaic word belied the lushness of these buildings. ‘A sort of pseudo-English manor house,’ says screenwriter David Freeman, ‘[they were] a bungalow the way summer houses in Newport are cottages.’ Hitchcock’s, the most lavish, had two levels, with a dining room, screening and editing rooms, and its own art department. Don Siegel rubbed along in something the size of a suburban house. Billy Wilder had two storeys on a hill, past which the tour trams coasted in silence to avoid disturbing him and I.A.L. Diamond, at work on The Front Page.
Spielberg hungered for a bungalow. Instead, he had a corner office in the Black Tower, well below the seventeenth floor where Wasserman and Sheinberg controlled his destiny. From there, he looked out on a future that contained, he was beginning to discover, nothing as solid as the films of Wilder or Hitchcock. He had plenty of ideas for features and, now that he was back on the inside, no shortage of people to pitch them to. But everywhere he met a brick wall. His career may have looked to be up and running, but it became increasingly clear that he was jogging on the spot.
Universal incorporated Night Gallery with McCloud, San Francisco International Airport and The Psychiatrist into an omnibus for NBC, Four-in-One. Writer/director Jerrold Freedman was in charge, and Spielberg joined his team. It was a useful move. ‘He had his own long-haired film society right in the heart of Universal Studios,’ he says of Freedman. ‘He employed a number of writers, directors, people dealing with esoterica, and he hired people from his college and people he knew from the East. I was just a young person, whom he liked at the time, and to whom he said, “Here, do two Psychiatrists for me.”’
The Psychiatrist, written by Richard Levinson and William Link in the school of Ben Casey, Doctor Kildare and other successful doctor shows, featured Roy Thinnes as an idealistic LA shrink and Luther Adler as the obligatory older, more cynical colleague. Spielberg did The Private World of Martin Dalton (10 February 1971) and Par for the Course (10 March 1971). Martin Dalton was cribbed from a famous incident in Robert Lindner’s collection of psychiatric case histories, The Jet Propelled Couch. A disturbed twelve-year-old (Stephen Hudis) invents a fantasy universe from TV and comic books, and begins to retreat into it. Responding to a subject close to home, Spielberg seized the chance to create a surrealist dream world and also to work with young actors, for which he already showed a flair.
It was Par for the Course, however, with golf pro Clu Gulager coming to terms with his imminent death from duodenal cancer, which attracted most attention, and which Spielberg regards as his best TV work. Always most comfortable illustrating an emotion than conveying it in dialogue, he wrote a scene in which two buddies bring Gulager in hospital a gift they know he will relish – the cup from the eighteenth hole at his course, which they’ve dug out of the centre of the green. Gulager breaks down and crushes the dirt and grass over his head.
Levinson and Link were so pleased with Par for the Course that they asked for Spielberg to direct Murder by the Book, the first regular episode, after two feature-length pilots, of the detective series Columbo. The role of the Los Angeles Police Department’s scruffiest, least tidy but most perspicacious detective, who allowed himself in each episode to be patronised by his arrogant quarry before springing a brilliant deductive trap at the end, had been planned for Bing Crosby. He turned it down, however, when it looked as if the series’ success might interfere with his golf. Peter Falk replaced him. The series’ story editor, Stephen Bochco, later the force behind Hill Street Blues and LA Law, wrote Murder by the Book, in which Columbo unmasks crime writer Jack Cassidy as the murderer of his collaborator Martin Milner. It aired on 15 September 1971 to excellent reviews, but allowed Spielberg little room for creativity. He did his best, opening the film not with the conventional theme but the sound of a typewriter, and setting up some sharp angles inside Milner’s high-rise office to exploit its spectacular view of Los Angeles, but in most respects the film is routine.
Spielberg also made an episode of Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law called Eulogy for a Wide Receiver, about a football coach accused of feeding amphetamines to his players. However, any charm that series TV might have held for him was running out. In particular, its casts of B-movie players and studio trainees grated increasingly. ‘At twenty-three, I was already saying, “Life’s too short to worry about the size of someone’s trailer. Or the fact that they don’t like the hairdresser because the hairdresser has coffee breath.” Little petty things used to make me crazy.’
If Spielberg needed a further caution that TV eroded talent, he could find it in the experience of Rod Serling, who as Night Gallery dragged into its second year with diminishing ratings, found most of his stories rejected. As the studio even barred him physically from story conferences and began buying scripts of its own, with the emphasis on action, it became clear to him that he’d been hired mainly as a master of ceremonies. ‘I’ll just be the front man, a short hunk of gristle,’ he told a reporter. ‘[Night Gallery] is not mine at all. [It’s] another species of formula series drama.’
After the autumn of 1971 Spielberg wasn’t to escape such problems, but at least he encountered them on a higher plane, since Universal had by then grudgingly given him his first true feature and first international success. Much was to change for him, and for New Hollywood, with the making of Duel.
5 Duel (#ulink_af25636f-ef1e-5d8c-8edd-16184f3f53d4)
We’re old now, but when we were the New Hollywood…
Steven Spielberg. 1994
THE YEAR 1971 carried a sense of threat for Americans. In February, an earthquake rocked the San Fernando Valley, shaking Universal’s black tower to its foundations and toppling some of the ancient sets. Sixty-two people died when old apartment houses collapsed all over the city, as if they too had been built not to last but to act as movie backgrounds. In September, convicts rioted at Attica prison in upstate New York, took guards prisoner and plunged into a bloodbath. Servicemen were returning home from Vietnam at an increasing rate, but the war remained a running sore. Lieutenant William Calley was sentenced to life imprisonment in March for the My-Lai massacre, only to be released to house arrest by President Nixon pending his appeal.
The automobile, its pleasures and dangers, was, even more than usual, a national preoccupation. GM recalled 6.7 million Chevrolet cars and trucks and Ford 220,000 Pintos to correct design faults. Two Detroit car novels, Arthur Hailey’s Wheels and Harold Robbins’ The Betsy, were the year’s big sellers. They were matched only by William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist and Tom Tryon’s The Other, occult thrillers with suburban or rural settings that probed the unease about daily life bedded as deep in the mouth of America as an abscessed tooth.
Dennis Hoffman, the producer of Amblin’, kept asking what had happened to his film. Spielberg was directing and McMyler had a small role in The Boston Stranger. But he, the man who’d given them their chance, whose name was on Amblin’, who’d put up the money, had zilch. The Universal short subjects department finally offered $90,000 for the rights. ‘But the sex and the joint have gotta go,’ they said. ‘This is a family company.’ Indignantly, Hoffman refused, and Spielberg, while not making an issue of it, backed him up. Amblin’ had served its purpose in getting him into the studio. What happened to it now didn’t matter that much. Retrieving the film from Universal, Hoffman sold it to Paramount, which released it late in 1970 as the support film to what looked like a cheap youth picture. But Love Story, Arthur Hiller’s adaptation of Erich Segal’s best-seller, with its tearful celebration of young love on its deathbed, became the year’s sleeper, making stars of Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw, and grossing more than $100 million. Everywhere, people stopped Spielberg and said, ‘Say, I saw that movie of yours.’ He wasn’t any longer just some nephew or cousin of Sid Sheinberg’s who had almost fucked up the Joan Crawford TV pilot. Something of his had made it to the Big Silver. He was a movie director.
All over Hollywood, young directors had become hot in the wake of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda’s hymn to dope, rock and the road, Easy Rider. Variety’s 1970 Cannes Festival report acclaimed American cinema as ‘the new avant garde’, while 1971’s International Film Guide rated it
more innovative, more directly concerned with issues, and more deeply expressive of individual personal vision. Features like Alice’s Restaurant, The Strawberry Statement, Woodstock… as well as hundreds of lesser known independent films, reject traditional romantic clichés and get very close to the bizarre configurations of contemporary American experience.
Old Hollywood didn’t know what to make of this unexpected new direction in the industry. ‘In those times,’ says Michael Pye, ‘there was just this moment when it was possible for a whole generation of young talent to come in and make very much the films they wanted, because no one was any longer very sure what sort of film a studio product would be.’
Overnight, directors fresh from film school had their fantasies funded by an industry hipped on being hip. ‘Every studio in town was narcotised by Easy Rider’s grosses,’ wrote the novelist Joan Didion, a devoted Hollywood-watcher and occasional screenwriter, ‘and all that was needed to get a picture off the ground was the suggestion of a $750,000 budget, a low-cost NABET or even a non-union crew, and this terrific twenty-two-year-old director.’
The 1970/71 releases included a score of first or early films by directors of Spielberg’s generation: Glenn and Randa (Jim McBride), Getting Straight (Richard Rush), Cover Me, Babe (Noel Black), Watermelon Man (Melvin van Peebles), Up in the Cellar (Theodore J. Flicker). A few of the newcomers were his friends: John Korty (Riverrun) and Brian De Palma (Hi, Mom!).
At Universal, however, the revolution was a long time coming. Never one for quick decisions, Lew Wasserman rode out the first youth wave by ignoring it. As far as he was concerned, Universal was mainly in the TV business. In 1971, however, he appointed Ned Tanen, a producer from the music business with no particular qualifications except his relative youth, to acquire low-budget ‘alternative’ projects. By early 1972 Tanen had bought Monte Hellman’s Two Lane Blacktop, Frank Perry’s Diary of a Mad Housewife and John Cassavetes’ Minnie and Moskowitz.
Everyone Spielberg knew seemed to have a feature deal. As he bounced around Hollywood, from the campus of USC for a screening of student films to a Preston Sturges retrospective in Santa Monica, over a roast beef sandwich at Musso and Frank’s or at a party at Coppola’s place, the stories kept coming. Phone calls from producers who’d unearthed some long-forgotten script and wanted to discuss it, offers from Metro or Fox to ‘come in and talk a deal’.
Milius sent him his latest screenplay. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, which he’d just sold to John Huston. It was an epic western – the sort of script that Howard Hawks or John Ford might have made. When The Godfather opened in March 1972, its baroque, Continental richness drowned him in darkness thick as chocolate sauce. That such films could be made in Hollywood was incredible!
Coppola, with William Friedkin and Peter Bogdanovich, had launched The Directors’ Company. It was a Renaissance gesture, an alliance of princes. They pledged to share in each other’s profits and never to concede final cut to anyone. Old Hollywood smirked. They’d seen these groups before. They came and they went. Sooner or later they’d start bickering. One or another of them would do better than the rest. Someone would screw someone else’s wife… It was an old story.
Spielberg watched these evolutions with alarm. Reputations were being made before his eyes. Fame was being conferred. People were becoming immortal. And he was directing The Psychiatrist! He would have jumped at anything Ned Tanen offered him, but there could be no rapprochement between the eager Spielberg and this moody executive with his permanent sneer, his dour pleasure in the deal, and his belief that Hollywood was characterised by ‘negativity and illusion – especially negativity’. While Tanen was in charge, Spielberg didn’t have a chance. It drove him crazy. ‘The truth is,’ said a friend, ‘Steve would have made anything that got him into features.’
Spielberg says he first came across Richard Matheson’s short story ‘Duel’ when his secretary Nora Tyson, with a blush about even knowing what was inside the world’s most successful men’s magazine, showed him the April 1971 Playboy containing the story, in which a lone motorist is pursued by a homicidal truck driver in a gas tanker. Matheson doesn’t agree. He’d written the film script long before he and Spielberg met. He based it on an incident when a truck driver tried to bump him off the road near his San Fernando Valley home, a common enough event on an increasingly congested system of which the trucker, like the bikers of Easy Rider, regarded himself as a sort of cowboy hero, subject only to his own rules. Its hero, Dave Mann, an archetypal corporate cipher with a house in the suburbs, a wife and two children, sets out on a trip to save an important account. Cutting across country, he overtakes a fume-belching gas tanker, the driver of which regards this as an insult. With mounting violence, he pursues him across the Sierra until they crash together into a quarry. Only Dave, a better Mann for the experience, survives.
In a more probable, if less heart-warming, alternative version of the legend about how Spielberg encountered Duel, a pal in the mailroom, part of his carefully nurtured network, funnelled him an interesting screenplay already going the rounds of producers. However he came across it, Spielberg devoured Duel with the enthusiasm of a fan. Matheson had written a number of Twilight Zone episodes – and the original of The Incredible Shrinking Man.
The script also addressed some of the fears that were to motivate Spielberg for the rest of his career. A few years later, British critic Gavin Millar pressed him to identify the anxieties that drove Duel. Was it the technology of the truck that frightened him?
‘No, not the truck,’ Spielberg mused. ‘Loss of control maybe.’
Since childhood, security for Spielberg had reposed in control, and in adulthood it remained a paramount concern. Control of his environment, his emotions, his work. Twenty-five years later, Oskar Schindler would expound to the Nazi camp commander Amon Goeth, ‘Control is power.’ Spielberg remembered puttering along the freeways in his uncle’s Chrysler as trucks roared past, air horns blaring at this slow-coach. It wasn’t the car he identified with in Duel; it was the truck; its omnipotence, its power.
The Vice President in charge of features programming at ABC TV in 1970 was Barry Diller, an ambitious executive in his early thirties, later to run 20th Century-Fox. Sensing the audience’s greed for movies, he’d launched the ABC Movie of the Week, a Monday-night showcase for new features, and was hungry for product. Universal saw Duel as an ideal Movie of the Week. But Spielberg, itching to escape the TV ghetto, argued that it should be a full cinema feature. And if Sheinberg would OK it, that would bypass Ned Tanen.
‘If you can find a star who’ll do it,’ Sid Sheinberg conceded cannily, ‘we’ll see.’
Spielberg sent the script to one of the few Universal regulars who could project the necessary combination of vulnerability and resolve in Dave Mann, but Gregory Peck, as Sheinberg anticipated, wasn’t interested. The project reverted to Diller, who quickly approved both it and Spielberg.
‘I saw an episode of The Psychiatrist which he’d done,’ Diller recalls. ‘I thought, “What good work.”’
Staff producer George Eckstein was assigned to bring in the production at about $300,000. To star, a disappointed Spielberg was allocated Dennis Weaver. OK, so he’d been the stuttering motel ‘night man’ in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, though most people remembered him as Chester B. Goode in the TV series Gunsmoke, limping after James Arness and calling, ‘Mistuh… er… mistuh Dillon?’ He’d found fame of sorts at Universal as a cowboy cop transplanted to the big city in McCloud, but a character actor was always a character actor.
From the moment he read the script, Weaver begged for more meat, with a scene or two where he confronts and defies the truck before the climax. ‘I just don’t want to be this guy the way he’s written,’ he complained.
But Spielberg, sensing Weaver’s core of weakness, on which so many other directors had traded, insisted he play Mann as a pussy-whipped wage-slave who greets every problem with sweaty-palmed indecision.
Mann fails to rescue a broken-down school bus menaced by the truck. When his car impotently spins its wheels as he tries to start it, the children inside, his surrogate family, jeer. Mann cuts and runs, after which, in the ultimate indignity, the truck not only spares the bus but arrogantly helps it on its way. He’s out-thought at every turn by the truck, which ambushes him at one point near a railway line, and tries to push his car into a freight train.
Too embarrassed to demand help in the lonely gas stations and greasy spoons, Mann finally waves down an old couple, who simply drive off. It’s only when his self-esteem is completely eroded that he finds the grit to oppose and defeat his opponent. To drive home the point, Spielberg recorded Mann’s self-pitying meditations on his life and nursed Weaver through his performance from the back seat, playing the recording of his internal monologue at the point where they would appear in the finished film. Cropped out for TV, but revealed when the film was shown on the big screen, Spielberg can be seen scrunched at the edge of the frame in a car interior.
Talk, often only half-heard, is the obbligato of Duel. For the first seven minutes – a sequence added for cinema release – the only soundtrack is a radio programme, incorporating a conversation between a census helpline and a comedian who sounds like Shelley Berman (but who is actually credited under the improbable name ‘Dick Whittington’). The census form is insufficiently exact, Whittington whines. ‘Head of the house’, for instance. Well, in theory, that’s him, but it’s his wife who really wears the pants. He moans on to the embarrassed, hapless operator.
Mann laughs, but he has the same problem, as we find during a chilly phone conversation with his wife, whom he failed to defend the previous night from the passes of a friend who ‘practically tried to rape me in front of other people’.
‘What did you want me to do?’ Mann grumpily asks. ‘Fight him?’
This scene, written by Eckstein, and two or three others, including the opening drive out of Los Angeles, the attempt to push the car into the train, and Mann’s encounter with the school bus, were done later to bring the film up to theatrical length at the request of Universal’s European sales organisation, CIC. The additions caused many headaches, especially finding another truck sufficiently similar to the one that had gone over the cliff.
For his part, Spielberg repudiates almost all of the additions, despite the fact that, without exception, they amplify those themes in Duel which were to become typical of his work: paternal emasculation, the decline of the father’s role in the family, and the importance of a man’s reclaiming his woman and self-respect in combat with rivals. Also, years later, he would insert a similar scene to the encounter with the school bus into Always. A driver in that film has a heart attack but Brad Johnson resuscitates him, watched by admiring kids, an impressed Holly Hunter, and a ghostly, defeated Richard Dreyfuss. Looking good in front of the kids matters to Spielberg more than anything.
Duel is all about fathers failing, women taking control, men losing it. It’s frankly Oedipal. With it, Spielberg struck out at Arnold’s abandonment of his family and its resultant fragmentation. Though Spielberg always spoke warmly of his sisters – ‘I come from a family of beautiful women,’ he says, comparing Sue, the middle sister, to Sophia Loren – he was ambivalent about Sue’s 1975 decision and that of the youngest, Nancy, to leave the US and work on a kibbutz in Israel. Leah’s recent remarriage, to another computer engineer, Bernie Adler, also distressed him. Superficially his attitude to his stepfather was cordial, though he was not above jokes about his mother’s ‘taste for printed circuitry’.
A truer sense of his betrayal by both parents emerged in a tirade a few years later, where he excoriated David Mann as ‘typical of that lower-middle-class American who’s insulated by suburban modernisation’:
It begins on Sunday; you take your car to be washed. You have to drive it but it’s only a block away. And, as the car’s being washed, you go next door with the kids and buy them ice cream at the Dairy Queen and then you have lunch at the plastic McDonald’s with seven zillion hamburgers sold. And then you go off to the games room and you play the quarter games: Tank and the Pong and Flim-Flam. And by that time you go back and your car’s all dry and ready to go and you get into the car and drive to the Magic Mountain plastic amusement park and you spend the day there eating junk food.
Afterwards you drive home, stopping at all the red lights, and the wife is waiting with dinner on. And you have instant potatoes and eggs without cholesterol – because they’re artificial – and you sit down and turn on the television set, which has become the reality as opposed to the fantasy this man has lived with that entire day. And you watch the prime time, which is pabulum and nothing more than watching a night light. And you see the news at the end of that, which you don’t want to listen to because it doesn’t conform to the reality you’ve just been through prime time with. And at the end of all that you go to sleep and you dream about making enough money to support weekend America. This is the kind of man portrayed in Duel.
This was an astonishing recital for someone who would say later, ‘I never mock suburbia. My life comes from there,’ who admired Norman Rockwell and who would make his own tributes to Formica and frozen pizza in E.T. and Poltergeist. It is more explicable as an attack not on suburban values but on fathers who fail to abide by them.
Duel pioneered a new kind of TV feature by making virtues of its necessities. Second-rate actors? Who cares? Spielberg was, as he remained, indifferent to glamour in his performers, preferring anonymous suburban faces, rumpled clothes, unwashed hair, spotty skin. No sets? Cheap technicians? No matter; he would make the best of what he was given. His cameraman, Jack A. Marta, and composer Billy Goldenberg, a staff composer who’d scored his Columbo episode, were journeymen, a fact Spielberg exploited by taking over as much control as possible of camera and music. The emphatic comic-book framing and the homage to Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho score in the wheep-wheeping violins show his hand.
Fortunately one other technician on the Universal lot was the best in the business. Carey Loftin had begun stunt driving in 1935 as a motor cyclist on a fairground Wheel of Death. He graduated to car and bike stunts in serials, managed the crashes and chases for Abbott and Costello, doubling Abbott in the more hazardous scenes, a fact that delighted Spielberg, a fan of the two forties comics. Loftin also ramrodded the stunts on Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, another Spielberg favourite, and reached the peak of his career in 1968 with the vertiginous car chase around San Francisco for Bullitt.
Another veteran, Dale Van Sickel, drove the car in Duel. Loftin handled the truck himself. He arranged a parade of five gas tankers on the backlot for Spielberg. Four had modern flat-fronted GMC-Mack prime movers with wide windows that revealed the driver down to his knees. Spielberg chose the fifth, an ancient shit-brown Brand X eighteen-wheeler, mud-spattered, rusted and slovenly. Its old-fashioned divided windshield not only gave the vehicle a look of frowning malevolence but, if the glass was dirty, hid the driver completely. It looked as if the truck was driving itself. Sure, Loftin told him in his slow Tennessee drawl, he could rig that truck for anything the script demanded, even crashing the car at the climax and carrying it over a cliff.
Duel was shot on location around Lancaster and Palmdale, sixty or seventy miles outside Los Angeles, on the edge of the Mojave Desert. Between the desert and Los Angeles, Soledad Canyon, on the edge of the Pinnacles National Monument, offered miles of lonely blacktop, much of it twisting and mountainous.
Spielberg mapped out the entire film in storyboards, like a giant comic book, in this case forty yards long. Though they didn’t invent them – Hitchcock, among others, used them all the time – storyboards became a major weapon of the Movie Brats. Men like Spielberg’s regular artists Ed Verreaux and George Jensen were adept at generating hundreds of pages of graphic art, complete with framings and camera movements, from the director’s stick-figure diagrams. Storyboards dictated a two-dimensional style, reducing narrative to a handful of poses. Following style, dialogue was scaled down to the two or three lines needed to fill a talk balloon. Teenagers raised on the same visual conventions loved the result but, applied to a serious subject, it imposed a Classics Comics glibness. Coppola, Scorsese and many others abandoned this crutch as they embraced the multivalent possibilities of film, but Lucas and Spielberg clung to it. Many would credit the failure of Empire of the Sun in part to storyboarding, and the success of Schindler’s List to the fact that Spielberg abandoned it for that film.
Having worked out the action in advance, Spielberg walked the locations for days before shooting, banging stakes into the dirt where stunts would begin and end, and where his three cameras would be placed. Instead of resetting the camera for each new shot, he had the car and truck drive past each camera in turn, capturing three shots in the time it usually took to him one. The weather was perfect, blazingly sunny, the valley baking in the heat, the mountains a brown smudge on the horizon. One can almost smell the softening blacktop, the truck’s oily fumes, the sizzling grease of the roadside café.
Shooting went two days over schedule, in part because Spielberg saw rushes only every three days, and had to drive miles to do so. The budget rose to $425,000, but Eckstein was delighted with the result. Scenes like the truck ploughing through a roadside snake farm to crush the booth where Weaver is making a phone call showed a glee in violence of which more disciplined directors were incapable. To Spielberg, the lessons of junk film and cartoon proved perfectly applicable to live action. ‘The challenge was to turn a lorry into Godzilla,’ he said. ‘It was sort of Godzilla v. Bambi.’
Godzilla nearly won in real life. As a precaution against drivers going to sleep at the wheel, the truck had a ‘Dead Man’s Hand’ which cut the engine if pressure was released. Since Loftin had to jump just before the collision, he tied down the control, but as he prepared to leap, leaving the truck to accelerate over the cliff, the cord slipped. He had no alternative but to ride the vehicle almost to the edge before jumping. ‘My scissors cut at literally the instant Carey’s butt left the cab,’ said Spielberg. But the near-accident left a continuity error. The truck door is open – ‘Leaving room for a sequel,’ Spielberg joked.
With only three weeks between the end of shooting and the air date, Universal allocated four editors to cut the film. Spielberg rollerskated from on cutting room to another. But the effect is seamless. Among the first people to see it was Barry Diller. ‘I saw a rough cut of Duel,’ he said, ‘and I remember thinking, “This guy is going to be out of television so fast because his work is so good.”’ In the event, however, Duel was sold to NBC, who scheduled it for their World Premiere Movie slot.
Before Duel was aired, Universal loaned Spielberg to CBS for another made-for-TV feature, this time a horror film called Something Evil. The producer was Alan Jay Factor, who’d been behind the innovative occult series One Step Beyond. Robert Clouse’s script about a couple who move into a remote Bucks County farmhouse, to find it haunted by a spirit that menaces their son, skilfully conflated The Exorcist’s plot of a child’s demonic possession and The Other’s rural setting. (The fact that films of both were in production but not yet released made it all the more attractive.) Sandy Dennis and Darren McGavin were reliable but undistinguished as the parents. The boy was Johnnie Whittaker, from the saccharine series Family Affair.
Spielberg, however, distilled a sense of uncategorisable menace from his simple materials. In particular, he drew on his delirious adolescent experiences with bright light in the temple and from the TV screen. Abandoning the blue acetate normally taped over windows to render them more natural, he overlit them. Figures moving against their glow were haloed and distorted. The ‘God Light’, a radiance pouring through clouds of smoke or dust, would appear in most of his films.
Duel aired on 13 November 1971. Its virtuosity impressed friends who had been underwhelmed by Spielberg’s previous TV work. George Lucas recalls.
Though I’d crossed paths with Steven at film festivals in the early sixties, it wasn’t until some time in 1971 that I really took note of him. I was at a party at Francis Ford Coppola’s house and Duel was on television. Since I’d met Steven I was curious about the movie and thought I’d sneak upstairs and catch ten or fifteen minutes. Once I started watching, I couldn’t tear myself away… I thought, this guy is really sharp. I’ve got to get to know him better.
Deciding what, if anything, Duel was ‘about’ became an intellectual game. Most American critics saw the film as pop sociology, and ammunition in the fight against their particular bêtes noires: mechanisation, alienation, pollution.
Europeans detected less symbolism and more craft. ‘With almost insolent ease,’ said Tom Milne in the British cinema magazine Sight and Sound, ‘Duel displays the philosopher’s stone which the Existentialists sought so persistently and often so portentously: the perfect acte gratuite, complete, unaccountable and self-sufficient.’ Milne did, however, also note two themes which would later become Spielberg trademarks. One was the film’s roots in medieval chivalry, a preoccupation that would surface again in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. With the truck’s first swerve in front of Mann, ‘the gauntlet is down’, leading to ‘a simple mortal combat between hunter and hunted [with] the huge lumbering lorry as the dragon, and the glitteringly fragile Plymouth sedan as the prancing, pitifully vulnerable knight in armour’. Spielberg later admitted he’d seen it as a man ‘duelling with the knights of the highway’. Another theme was the opponents’ solipsistic isolation from the world. Mann and the driver hardly exist outside their confrontation. Action is their character, as it would be for the shark-hunters of Jaws, Roy Neary in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Indiana Jones.
Duel boosted Spielberg’s stock at Universal, especially among technicians, most of whom were on contract and depended on good word of mouth for their next job. They couldn’t care less about what critics said, but the kid took care of his people and made them look good. Two weeks after Duel aired, renegade producer/director Tom Laughlin signed cameraman Jack Marta to shoot his highly successful Billy Jack films. Editor Frank Morriss found himself being offered more features. Jim Fargo, the assistant director, would be picked up by Clint Eastwood and direct features for him. Some went on with Spielberg. The composer Billy Goldenberg would work on Amazing Stories when Spielberg produced his TV series at Universal in 1985. Many of the people on Something Evil would also figure in Spielberg’s later career, including cameraman Bill Butler and Carl Gottlieb, his old friend from Long Beach who has a small acting role in the film and would later appear in and co-write Jaws.
Universal received a dozen requests from other studios to borrow Spielberg for cinema features. To his frustration, they turned them down. Nor would they agree to let him do a feature for them. Instead, Levinson and Link snagged him for another pilot. Husband and wife Martin Landau and Barbara Bain were being relaunched after Mission: Impossible as investigating reporters Paul Savage and wife. No amount of protest would shift Sheinberg, and although Spielberg’s old friend Barry Sullivan played the Supreme Court justice whose blackmailing the Savages probe, the experience was humiliating. After much tinkering and some changes in title, from Watch Dog to The Savage Report, the film aired in March 1972 as Savage, to generally indifferent reviews. It was, Spielberg said later, the only time he was ever forced to make a film. But even this wasn’t enough for him to recant on his belief in consensus film-making.
After adding nine minutes to Duel, Universal sent it to Cannes in May, a curtain-raiser to its European cinema release. Spielberg went too, his first trip outside America. A friend snapped him on a rainy Paris afternoon scampering across the Place de l’Etoile, the Arc de Triomphe behind him, a lanky kid in flared jeans, square-toed boots, striped skinny-rib shirt and too-tight jacket. He stares around in awe. Paris! In July, in Rome, Spielberg asked the local Universal office to arrange lunch with Federico Fellini. Fellini agreed, and his publicist Mario Longardi went along to translate. To their astonishment, the American-style restaurant they chose in deference to his guest’s palate refused to seat them because Fellini wasn’t wearing a tie. The ‘maestro’ stormed out, shouting over his shoulder, ‘Now we go to an Italian restaurant.’ After lunch, Spielberg handed Longardi his camera and asked to be photographed with Fellini, demanding a number of re-takes, including one with his arm around the waist of a startled director. Spielberg later wrote saying that he had the pictures on display in his office, believing they brought him luck, but neither Fellini nor Longardi was convinced that this gauche kid would make it in the film industry.
The intellectual climate in Europe was just as uncongenial. In Rome, left-wing critics pressed Spielberg to endorse their reading of Duel as socialist parable: working-class truck v. bourgeois sedan. Four of them left noisily when he wouldn’t agree. He was no more ready to enrol in the avant garde. As a consensus film-maker, he couldn’t accept Cahiers du Cinéma’s politique des auteurs, which designated one single person on a film as its driving intellectual force. ‘Those directors who believe in the auteur theory will have coronaries at an early age,’ he told his Cannes press conference. ‘You can’t play all the instruments at once.’
Spielberg accepted all the compliments for Duel, even those absurdly at odds with his beliefs. Yes, it was an ‘indictment of machines’ – despite his passion for video games and electronic gadgets. And sure, Mann was a horrible example of how suburban life rots mind and soul – this from the archetypal enthusiast for suburban America. Talking to him after Jaws, Richard Natale would compare him to ‘a computer, constantly clicking, reeling out facts and figures about the movie industry like a ticker tape. He is already adept at giving the quotable quotes, at circumventing the wrong questions.’ He’d coax columnists, ‘Let’s call each other with gossip,’ and tell San Francisco alternative journalist Mal Karman, ‘If you need more stuff for your article, just make it up. I don’t care.’
Duel opened in London in October 1972, though in a cinema outside the West End, and destined for a fortnight’s run at most. But its reputation had been growing since Cannes. David Lean said, ‘It was obvious that here was a very bright new director.’ British critics, and in particular Dilys Powell, who described Duel in the Sunday Times as ‘spun from the very stuff of cinema’, reviewed it with such enthusiasm that Universal transferred it to the West End and printed a new poster plastered with their praise. It had a respectable, if not spectacular London season, but did better on the Continent. To François Truffaut, Duel exemplified all the qualities he and the other New Wave directors aimed for: ‘grace, lightness, modesty, elegance, speed’, without their shortcomings, ‘frivolity, lack of conscience, naīveté’. The film finally cleared $6 million profit, but, more important, launched Spielberg’s critical reputation, especially in London, a city that, despite his dislike of Europe, would increasingly become his second headquarters. In 1984 he told lain Johnstone, Powell’s successor at the Sunday Times, ‘If it wasn’t for your illustrious predecessor, I wouldn’t be here.’
Back in Hollywood, events were conspiring to free Spielberg from the Universal TV treadmill. By the advent of what Joan Didion called ‘the hangover summer of 1970’, the dismal box-office receipts of youth films had been assessed, and their makers were out. ‘Nobody could get past the gate without a commitment from Barbra Streisand,’ she wrote. Casualties of the collapse littered Hollywood. ‘All the terrific twenty-two-year-old directors went back to shooting television commercials, and all the twenty-four-year-old producers used up the leases on their office space at Warner Brothers by sitting out there in the dull Burbank sunlight smoking dope before lunch and running one another’s unreleased pictures after lunch.’
Fortunately Spielberg wasn’t seen as part of this group. The VillageVoice’s film critic Tom Allen was already nominating him as chief of ‘the post-Coppola generation’ – those directors who, instead of fighting old Hollywood, elected to infiltrate and subvert it from within. It was a mantle he was more than proud to wear. Today, he still defines himself as an independent movie-maker working within the Hollywood establishment’.
Two unexpected losers in the change of direction were Richard Zanuck and David Brown. A Stanford Research Institute report in 1970 had convinced both men that movies were about to undergo a seismic readjustment. With TV flooding the market, it was futile for Hollywood to continue serving a ‘movie habit’ which no longer existed. Instead, Zanuck told the board, Fox ‘must depend heavily on a very small proportion of highly successful films targeted for the youth market’. Those films, he went on, must offer something the audience couldn’t get on TV. Zanuck gambled that the ‘something’ was sex. He commissioned film versions of two notoriously explicit novels and hired soft-porn impresario Russ Meyer to make a sequel to another.
It was these films, Portnoy’s Complaint, Myra Breckinridge and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls which, Brown acknowledged, ‘did us in at Fox’. Amid complaints about the raunchiness of the new slate and, worse, a pre-tax loss of $23 million, Darryl Zanuck arrived back from Europe in August 1970. Deadpan, he recited to the assembled board a digest of the verbal obscenities in Portnoy’s Complaint (‘“Beat my meat” – one. “Blow me” – two. “Boffed” – one. “Boner” – one. “Cock” – sixteen’), then announced that, ‘As long as I am Chairman and Chief Executive of Twentieth Century-Fox, Portnoy’s Complaint or any other film with the same degree of obscenity will not be produced.’ The project was sold to Warner Brothers. After this vote of no confidence, Richard Zanuck and Brown couldn’t last long. In January 1971 Darryl Zanuck reclaimed the studio he created. His axe-man Dennis Stanfill ensured that his son’s dismissal took place with maximum humiliation. ‘There’s a ritual to severance,’ he told an astonished Richard. When Louis B. Mayer had been ousted from MGM, his complimentary Chrysler was reclaimed even before he reached the parking lot. Now, in order to get into his car, Zanuck had to step over a painter effacing his name from the tarmac.
Zanuck and Brown went to Warners with a five-film contract as independent producers. The irony of their dismissal was that they had read the market correctly. Cinema did need to capitalise on its differences from TV rather than imitate the rival form. Films had to become national events, blanketing the media, dominating conversation, relegating TV to its domestic role. Assessing Richard Zanuck and David Brown’s administration, Hollywood historian Stephen M. Silverman has described how Hollywood in the seventies followed their lead, ‘marketing total escapist fare during the summer, and [developing] the “blockbuster or bust” mentality that quickly afflicted movie-making… If a picture did not pull in at least $100 million, it was considered a wasteful exercise.’ The film-maker who would put Zanuck’s and Brown’s theories into practice and prove their validity was Steven Spielberg.
6 The Sugarland Express (#ulink_7f87fc26-2aa7-5cb8-8e25-6ae78d3a3105)
I have more of a bubble-gum outlook on life than I think Welles did when he made Citizen Kane.
Spielberg, of making his first feature
WITH HIPPY Hollywood discredited, the yuppie producers who were to dominate the 1970s found themselves suddenly in favour. Michael and Julia Phillips, East Coast Jewish, with a background in publishing rather than movies, exemplified them. From the moment they arrived in 1971, Michael in his conservative New York tailoring, the shapely Julia in hot pants, they were Hollywood’s hippest couple. Michael had read Law and worked on Wall Street as a securities analyst, and Julia was a protégée of David Begelman, but they talked like liberals, smoked dope, played touch football, liked surfing and lived at the beach. They were cool. They didn’t mind John Milius turning up at parties with a .357 Magnum and firing it out to sea as the sun came up.
The timing of their arrival was impeccable. Journalists already talked about the USC group as ‘an invisible studio’, but while it included plenty of directors and writers, it had no producers. The Phillipses filled that niche. Julia knew they could become the vital link between Old Hollywood and New. ‘I think we perform the peculiar function of putting together the Marty Scorseses and the Robert Redfords,’ she drawled. ‘We are equally intimate with both these kinds of people and we can put the old glove in touch with the new glove, you know?’
In his search for a feature, Spielberg saw less of the USC gang. On his way back from Europe, he’d stopped over in New York, where he’d met a man who was to become one of his closest friends. Burly, bearded, seven years older than Spielberg, Brian De Palma was the son of a Philadelphia surgeon. His childhood was tormented by rivalry with his brothers, an obsession with his mother and the infidelities of his father. At one point, he made midnight raids in black commando gear to sneak compromising photographs of him with his nurse. A science buff, early computer freak and maniac for Hitchcock, whose fascination with voyeurism and the erotic manipulation of women he shared, De Palma came to movies through underground theatre and film. His friends were actors like Robert de Niro, whose career he launched. In 1971 he’d just finished Hi Mom! with de Niro. When a friend of Spielberg’s brought De Palma to his hotel, he brushed past Spielberg and walked around the room, examining the furniture. Spielberg was impressed. Here was someone who, unlike him, didn’t give a flying fuck what people thought. When De Palma won a Warners contract and moved to Hollywood, they became friends, and remained close.
Another new friend was Sydney Pollack, who directed twenty Ben Casey, Frontier Circus and Kraft Suspense Theater episodes a year for Universal in the sixties before making highly-regarded features like This Property is Condemned and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? In 1972 he was just finishing Jeremiah Johnson with Robert Redford, from a script written in part by Milius.
Pollack, an ex-actor, grave and dignified, with something in common physically with Sid Sheinberg, increasingly occupied the role in Spielberg’s life as older brother and counsellor. He and Freddie Fields introduced Spielberg to more influential people, including Guy McElwaine, an ICM agent, and Alan Ladd Jr, then production head of Twentieth Century-Fox. Spielberg knew Ladd through George Lucas, who liked Ladd’s self-effacing style.
Two other members of the group, David Giler and Joey Walsh, were writers. Giler, later to contribute to the script of Alien, was developing a contemporary comedy based on The Maltese Falcon, The Black Bird. Walsh, an ex-child actor and recovering gambling addict who kept his hand in playing poker with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, had collected some of his experiences into a screenplay called ‘Slide’, about Charlie and Bill, two amateur gamblers with otherwise dead-end lives who become friends, get involved with a couple of call girls, share some laughs and a few losses.
Later, Julia Phillips would paint Spielberg as someone out of his depth in this society,
hanging around with men who were too old for him. Who bet and drank and watched football games on Sunday. Who ran studios and agencies. The group centred around Guy [McElwaine] and Alan Ladd Jr. otherwise known as Laddy, and included such disparate types as Joey Walsh and David Giler, the former more for the betting than the football, the latter more for the drinking than the football.
Pollack too would incur her displeasure when he took over the Japanese gangster screenplay The Yakuza, written by Paul Schrader, one of the beach group, and had Robert Towne add an element of international romance. But few people shared her perceptions of Spielberg’s new friends. Most admired Pollack as a director who expertly balanced box office and art. Ladd was also respected as the most thoughtful of studio bosses, the model of Hollywood’s next wave of producers. The New York Times’s Aljean Harmetz, while conceding Ladd was ‘taciturn and emotionally reserved’, also rated him as ‘perhaps more than any other current top executive in love with movies’.
All this time, Spielberg had hoped Universal would finance The Sugarland Express, but in the end they blew cool, deciding that, despite the success of Duel, the new film was too much like Fox’s unsuccessful Vanishing Point. The script went into turnaround – for sale to anyone who would refund its development costs. Spielberg also negotiated for a while with agent Allan Carr, who planned a version of Bronte Woodard’s novel Meet Me at the Melba, about life in the thirties South, but producer Joe Levine wouldn’t OK him as director.
Grudgingly, Universal offered Spielberg a cinema feature from the studio’s roster of stock projects, and for ten weeks in the spring of 1972 he worked unenthusiastically with writer William Norton on a Burt Reynolds vehicle. Norton was to make his name with a succession of violent rural thrillers, and White Lightning set the tone with its story of ex-con ‘Gator’ McClusky who returns to the swamps of the South to avenge his younger brother, slaughtered by crooked sheriff Ned Beatty. Spielberg was wary of Reynolds, as he was of all stars. The actor had just broken into the list of the top ten box-office earners at number three, beneath Clint Eastwood and Ryan O’Neal, and, like Eastwood, had firm ideas about what worked for him on screen. Most producers encouraged him to forget dialogue and even character, and to concentrate on sexual magnetism and good-ol’-boy humour. Also like Eastwood, Reynolds trailed a team of buddy/collaborators, notably his stunt coordinator Hal Needham, who enjoyed a degree of trust and control which any director would have to harness. Sensing he lacked the skill or the interest to deal with these problems, Spielberg, in Variety-speak, ‘ankled’.
Of all the projects in play among his new friends, Spielberg preferred Joey Walsh’s ‘Slide’. He feared being pigeonholed as an action director and would often confide that he ‘basically wanted to make romantic films’, or ‘women’s films’, or was ‘really a director of comedies’. This last perception would survive until, during the making of 1941 in 1979, he confessed, ‘Comedy is not my forte.’ More important, however, was Slide’s buddy theme. Spielberg’s fascination with the male friendship he’d never achieved in childhood and the way in which men supported one another and formed effective teams would dominate Jaws, the Indiana Jones films, Always, even Schindler’s List.
He and Walsh worked on Slide throughout 1972. His method, the guided joint improvisation he’d used with Robbins and Barwood on Sugarland, was to become standard for him, the response of a natural film-maker to the hostile world of the written word. ‘I don’t know if Steven ever told me what to do – ever,’ Walsh says, ‘but when he didn’t giggle like a little boy eating a cookie, saying “This is great,” I knew something was wrong, and I always took that as a gauge and somehow I looked deeper into the scene.’ Walsh wanted to produce the film, so as to prevent studio interference. Both Spielberg and McElwaine backed him up, and MGM seemed happy with the package. Spielberg, delighted, told journalists that ‘Slide’ would be his next film.
At Universal, business was picking up. The avatar of a new attitude to features was George Lucas’s American Graffiti, which officially started production on 26 June 1972. Though he was technically working for Universal, Lucas shot most of the film well away from Hollywood, within driving distance of his Marin County home. Ned Tanen watched the daily budget, but otherwise left the thorny Lucas to himself. It was becoming clear to all the studios that these new film-makers, raised in a college environment and with little concept of normal employment practices, responded ill to being treated as employees. ‘We are the pigs,’ Lucas said of his generation of directors. ‘We are the ones who sniff out the truffles. You can put us on a leash, keep us under control. But we are the guys who dig out the gold.’ He compared a studio editor cutting his work, a practice taken for granted in Hollywood, to someone amputating his children’s fingers. Old Hollywood was astonished and offended at the comparison, but soon John Milius would be able to say, ‘Nobody in a studio challenges the final cut of a film now. I think they realise the film-makers are likely to be around a lot longer than the studio executives.’
The conflict between New and Old Hollywood came to a head for the first time when Lucas showed his final cut of American Graffiti to an audience that included Tanen and Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola was seen as the godfather of New Hollywood, able to deploy the same omnipotent octopoid power as Don Vito Corleone. When Tanen closed his deal with Lucas on American Graffiti he’d imposed two conditions. One was a reduction in the budget to $600,000. The other was that Coppola must act as the project’s moral, if not financial, guarantor. Magisterially, Coppola agreed. Now, at the preview screening, he took it on himself to defend the film, and Lucas, when Tanen dared to criticise it. ‘You should be getting down on your knees and thanking George for saving your job!’ he blustered. Reaching for his chequebook, he offered to buy the film there and then from Universal. (Fortunately, Tanen didn’t call his bluff, Coppola was, as usual, broke.) ‘This film is going to be a hit!’ he shouted – which it was, grossing $112 million. Though he didn’t know it yet, Ned Tanen had already lost Lucas. Lucas had tried to interest him in a version of Flash Gordon, but been turned down. Even before American Graffiti finished shooting, Lucas smuggled a copy to Alan Ladd Jr, along with his script for another space opera. It convinced Ladd to back him in the new film, Star Wars, and so deprive Universal of $250 million.
If Old Hollywood thought it could depend on the loyalty of these newcomers, it was badly mistaken. They would be satisfied with nothing less than total independence. The Brats shared a conviction that their generation must remake Hollywood in its own image. Otherwise they risked the fate of their hero and archetypal Hollywood renegade, Orson Welles. The director of Citizen Kane had deteriorated into a bloated has-been living off TV commercials for Nashua photocopiers and Gallo wine When Joe Dante, a Spielberg protégé, was in the early eighties asked to work on National Lampoon magazine’s projected film parody of Jaws, called Jaws 3 People 0, his suggestion that Welles take a role horrified everyone. ‘We’d have to put his name on the poster,’ said one executive, aghast. The decline and fall of Welles was a lesson to New Hollywood of the dangers of fighting the system. So palpable was the curse which seemed to follow him that even Spielberg, given the opportunity to back the last film of Welles’s life, The Cradle will Rock, would refuse to do so, despite Welles offering to cast Spielberg’s then wife, Amy Irving.
It was one thing to vow that you wouldn’t end up like Orson Welles, and quite another to see how you could win independence while continuing to live in a community where, for better or worse, art was organised on business lines. In her 1974 essay On the Future of the Movies, the New Yorker’s influential film critic Pauline Kael wrote of a ‘natural war in Hollywood between the businessmen and the artists… based on drives that may go deeper than politics and religion; on the need for status, and warring dreams’.
Studios executives in the seventies were mostly ex-lawyers or agents, more comfortable in the gloom of the boardroom and the hush of the golf course. They seldom read a book or saw any movies but the latest productions. Martin Scorsese dismissed them generically as ‘Youpeople’, while Spielberg, like many of his friends, called them ‘The Suits’.
None of the young directors had any quarrel with making money; it was the only way one measured success in a business where personal satisfaction with what appeared on the screen meant less and less. Nor were they entirely opposed to Old Hollywood, which had nurtured them and furnished the fantasies which drove them to make films. But all of them hated the compromises forced on them by the corporate caution of the agents and accountants. Spielberg lamented:
The tragedy of Hollywood today [is that] great gamblers are dead… In the old days the Thalbergs and the Zanucks and the Mayers came out of nickelodeons, vaudeville, they came out of the Borscht Belt theatre, and they came with a great deal of showmanship and esprit de corps to a little citrus grove in California. They were brave. They were gamblers. They were high rollers. There is a paranoia today. People are afraid. People in high positions are unable to say ‘OK’ or ‘not OK’. They’re afraid to take the big gamble. And that’s very very hard when you’re making movies. All motion pictures are a gamble.
By the seventies, Hollywood had largely turned its back on the old virtues, as Spielberg saw them, of showmanship and mass appeal which had drawn audiences back to the cinema every Saturday night for the latest ‘big picture’. Talky films with ageing actors had alienated teenage filmgoers, whose billions in disposable income were flowing into the pockets of record producers and clothing manufacturers.
Spielberg was one of the few newcomers to sense the path American movies must take in order to survive in the last quarter of the twentieth century. He knew instinctively that issues were Out and entertainment In. He became instrumental in transforming a cinema of stories and characters into one of sensation. Jaws would be one of the first films since Gone With the Wind to exploit a movie as a national event. ‘Up until The Godfather,’ says Julia Phillips, ‘every time you had a picture you thought was going to have reviews and audience appeal, you let it out slowly in a handful of chichi theatres in the major cities, and let it build. Then you went in ever widening waves.’ But Spielberg sensed that the twelve- to twenty-year-olds who, though they made up only 22 per cent of the population, represented 47 per cent of filmgoers, wanted the week’s hot movie now. TV promotion and TV reviewers had made the measured opinions of Time, Newsweek and even the venerable New York Times redundant. Within a decade, studio bean-counters would be able judge whether a film was a hit or flop simply by the takings of the first weekend of its release. By the time the print-media critics caught up, their judgement was irrelevant.
Spielberg also saw that overseas markets would transform the selling of cinema. Action and special effects needed no translation, so his films were perfect for foreign audiences. Long before the American economist Theodore Levitt propounded the theory of ‘globalisation’ in 1983, Spielberg was making the kind of universally appealing product which Levitt foresaw would dominate world markets in the future. Coca-Cola, Volkswagen, McDonald’s and rock stars like Madonna were sold in the same form and with the same trademark all over the world; so was Raiders of the Lost Ark, the emphatic comic-book logo of which, with its lettering of crimson and gold, would become as widely recognisable as the Coca-Cola wave. Increasingly throughout the seventies and eighties, Asia and Europe would almost equal Spielberg’s domestic audience.
At Warners, Zanuck and Brown’s five-film deal was winding down in mutual boredom. Ace Eli, from Spielberg’s story, with Cliff Robertson as the pilot, still hadn’t gone into production, and the administration was showing cold feet about most of the duo’s projects. They had accepted only one ‘youth’ package, Steelyard Blues, assembled by Michael and Julia Phillips with actor-turned-producer Tony Bill. The script was by David S. Ward, and Alan Myerson would direct Jane Fonda and the then-hot Donald Sutherland.
In midsummer, word got around of an imminent move by the partners. Lew Wasserman had decided that he wanted Universal in the feature business. Rather than promote Sheinberg or Tanen, however, he offered Zanuck and Brown a bungalow on the lot and a role as, in effect, its feature division, developing projects with studio funding, and releasing only through Universal. They leapt at the opportunity. In July they left Warners to form Zanuck/Brown Productions, and six weeks later they announced the Universal deal. In the weeks before they left and in the month immediately following, agents were asked to come in and pitch. Fields and Spielberg joined the queue.
Anxious to be seen as creative film-makers rather than loose-cannon executives, Zanuck and Brown boxed the compass with their purchases: black exploitation and horror, comedies and thrillers, prestige pictures and women’s stories. Some were trivial, but their choices showed they knew what the market wanted: not sex, but sensation and humour. Having succeeded with Patton at Fox by giving the story of an American military hero to a radical young screenwriter, Francis Coppola, they decided to have George C. Scott repeat the feat, this time playing Douglas MacArthur, and commissioned a screenplay from Barwood and Robbins. Would Spielberg be interested in directing? He said ‘Probably,’ though in truth he hated the idea of ‘two years working in ten different countries and getting dysentery in each one of them’.
He remained keener on comedy, of which Zanuck and Brown had a number of films in development. From American Graffiti’s writers Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, they’d bought Lucky Lady, a thirties farce about booze running. Paul Newman, another client of Freddie Fields, showed some interest in it, and in Spielberg, for First Artists, the consortium he’d just formed with Barbra Streisand, Steve McQueen and Sidney Poitier to take more control of their films.
Mike Medavoy, representing Michael and Julia Phillips, sold Zanuck and Brown a period script, The Sting, about a con trick perpetrated on a gangster in Depression Chicago. The brainchild of David S. Ward, it had attracted Tony Bill. Ward, however, wanted to direct it, and was leery of letting it be shown around as a script. Bill persuaded him to recount the plot into a tape recorder, and the Phillipses, impressed, financed the screenplay.
One casualty of Zanuck and Brown’s move to Universal was Ace Eli. Lacking their protection, it was botched by Fox, who decided the ending, where Robertson commits suicide, was depressing. They reshot it, and producer, director and screenwriter all removed their names: Erman became ‘Bill Sampson’, Robert Fryer ‘Boris Wilson’ and writer Claudia Salter ‘Chips Rosen’. Spielberg probably had some part in the choice of these noms du cinema, since ‘Chips Rosen’ resembles ‘Josh Rogan’, a pseudonym he assigned to Melissa Mathison when she wrote part of his Twilight Zone: The Movie episode in 1983. Spielberg himself, however, kept his screen credit for Ace Eli’s original story. Savagely reviewed in Variety, the film was dumped in sixteen cinemas, mostly in regional centres like Washington DC and Baltimore, earning a paltry $13,400 in its first week.
With no decision in sight from Newman on Lucky Lady, Zanuck and Brown put The Sugarland Express into their schedule, burying it under a black exploitation film, Willy Dynamite, Clint Eastwood’s The Eiger Sanction, a reptilian horror film called Sssssss, and The Sting.
Wasserman wasn’t fooled when Zanuck and Brown visited his home to outline their first year’s production plans.
‘We think Steve has a great future,’ Wasserman told them, ‘but I have to tell you we do not have faith in this project.’
They pressed, and the studio chief relented, though with ill grace. ‘Make the film, fellows, but you may not be playing to full theatres.’ Had Zanuck and Brown known Wasserman better, they would have realised that such predictions tended to become self-fulfilling.
Encouraged by the Phillipses, Schrader was writing Taxi Driver for Scorsese. Hoping to win over Spielberg permanently to their side, the Phillipses encouraged their conversations about a project on UFOs.
Spielberg grew up watching films about alien contact and invasion. Trying to get his vision on paper in 1970, he wrote a short story called ‘Experiences’, about UFOs over a midwestern town which are seen only by the kids parked in the local lovers’ lane. It echoed his Boy Scout troop’s experience in the Arizona desert and his own memories of the New Jersey hillside where hundreds of people watched a meteorite shower. The Phillipses could see the idea had promise, though they urged a stronger political message, suggesting that the failure to investigate might be a kind of Watergate cover-up.
Schrader, arguably the most original mind of New Hollywood, had never seen the films that influenced Spielberg. Raised by Calvinist fundamentalists, he skipped junk film entirely: his heroes were ascetics like Robert Bresson, Yasujiro Ozu and Carl Dreyer. However, once Spielberg began describing the international network of UFOlogists and their struggle to convince officialdom, Schrader’s fascination with morally driven characters was engaged.
One of the leading investigators, J. Allen Hynek, had begun investigating UFOs for the US Air Force. After discounting 80 per cent of sightings, he was left with a residue of genuinely inexplicable phenomena. Inspired by Hynek, Schrader drafted a script, called variously ‘Pilgrim’ and ‘Kingdom Come’, about Paul VanOwen, a sceptical federal agent converted by what Hynek called a ‘close encounter of the third kind’ – physical contact with aliens, as opposed to lights in the sky or signs of a landing. He persuades the government to fund a fifteen-year investigation of the phenomenon, only to find, in Schrader’s words, ‘that the key to making contact isn’t out there in the universe, but implanted inside him’.
After one Sunday at the Phillipses’, Spielberg stopped his car in the middle of the night on Mulholland Drive, the road that weaves sinuously along the ridge between Los Angeles and the Valley. Climbing out, he flopped on his back across the bonnet to gape at the night sky. Tilting his head, he saw the Valley’s net of light inverted, spread out above his head, as if the constellations had suddenly arranged themselves in orderly lines of red, green and diamond white. He was no longer looking down on a city but up at… something else: a space ship so huge that it filled the sky?
Now at least he knew what the UFO film would look like. He was less sure what it was about.
In October 1972, Goldie Hawn had signed a three-film deal with Universal. Her career, which soared after she left TV’s comedy Laugh In to win a 1969 Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her first film, Cactus Flower, had slumped with a Warren Beatty thriller, enigmatically called $s, and the comedy Butterflies are Free. Zanuck suggested her as Lou Jean Poplin in Sugarland Express. Hawn wanted to ditch her ditzy image, and Spielberg was happy to agree. She signed in December.
Julia Phillips in her autobiography harps on Hawn’s scruffy style and dirty hair, but to Spielberg these were her charm. She became the model for the tousled, untidy women of all his films: Close Encounters’s Melinda Dillon, sleepy in T-shirt and cut-offs; tomboyish Karen Allen and Kate Capshaw in two Indiana Jones films; Holly Hunter in Always; harassed mum Dee Wallace in E.T.; Laura Dern in Jurassic Park; Julia Roberts’s Tinkerbell in Hook. All fit the ‘younger sister/older brother’ model with which Spielberg characterised his romantic relationships. Mostly sexless, these women in his films live for and through their children or boyish men. Femininity is a reward conferred by their lovers, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Color Purple, Always and Hook, women don ‘girl clothes’ as a sign of desirability. ‘It’s not the clothes,’ sighs Holly Hunter deliriously in Always when Richard Dreyfuss presents her with a cocktail dress and high heels, ‘it’s the way you see me.’
For Spielberg, as for many directors, the erotic gratification of shooting films transcended sex. ‘When I’m making a movie I become celibate,’ he has said. ‘I get into the routine of fucking my movie.’ (He also avoided seeing other films at such times, fearful, he says, of his work being impregnated by the ideas of others.) He deprecated those film-makers preoccupied with ‘sport fucking’. ‘Location shooting is the Rites of Spring to most film crews,’ he said. ‘Holiday Inns across America are probably host to more sprung beds and screaming orgasms when a movie company comes to town than at any other time.’
Spielberg lost his virginity at seventeen in a Holiday Inn motel – ‘With a creature,’ he joked, in the wake of E.T., ‘that was anything but extraterrestrial.’ During his days at Universal, he dated regularly, encouraged by the more aggressive De Palma, who made the pick-ups and set the pace. When Spielberg finagled one of the first portable phones out of the studio, he and De Palma enjoyed calling girls from their driveways to ask for a date, then ringing the doorbell half a minute later. De Palma, an enthusiast for voyeurism and porn, both of which are recurring themes in his films, shot all their excursions on the 16mm camera he always carried. Their conquests were mostly starlets as low in the pecking order as themselves. Spielberg briefly tangled with Sarah Miles, and with striking Hispanic Victoria Principal, but neither relationship was exactly serious. Miles was no stranger to romance, and the later star of Dallas was so nakedly ambitious that she founded her own talent agency and blitzed casting directors with head shots and resumes of its favourite client: herself. Spielberg later ruefully rated her ‘a great mind trapped in a great body’.
‘Spielberg has always surrounded himself with women,’ Martin Amis observed. ‘Surrogate aunts, mothers, kid sisters.’ But he recoiled from relationships which might have forced him to assume responsibility for another’s emotional well-being. Actresses never posed that problem. They were too self-absorbed for more than a passing involvement. But that cut both ways. An actress offered no reassurance or consolation when Hollywood turned and savaged you. ‘You can’t cry on a shoulder that’s wearing a shoulder pad,’ Spielberg told one friend revealingly.
On 14 December 1972, just a few days before Spielberg’s twenty-fifth birthday, Universal printed out the red-covered Final Screenplay of The Sugarland Express. Shooting would begin on 8 January 1973 near San Antonio. Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins took sole writing credit, from Spielberg’s original story, but because of his intensive observation and discussion of the script during writing, Spielberg’s signature was on almost every scene.
Scarfing up the remains of the youth boom, Warners and United Artists had also put films into pre-production about young outlaw lovers. Badlands, directed by another newcomer, Terrence Malick, a Rhodes Scholar and Harvard graduate with a convincing line of intellectual chat, was based on the 1958 plains states murders committed by Charlie Starkweather and his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, while Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us retold a Bonnie and Clyde story against a rural Depression background. Though both promised to be radically different in tone to Sugarland, Universal was nervous about so much competition. Spielberg didn’t care. Scouting locations, he was already thinking about ‘Watch the Skies’, as the UFO film was now called. Visiting Texas with Mike Fenton and Shari Rhodes to cast small roles for Sugarland, he’d earmarked some isolated airfields for what he told columnist Archer Winsten would be ‘an Air Force picture shrouded in science fiction’.
During this trip, Spielberg experienced a close encounter of his own that was to have far-reaching effects on his work. He found himself in a remote, old-fashioned hotel in Jefferson, Texas, with Diane Bucker, head of the Texas Film Commission, and Elliot Schick, the film’s production manager (and later producer of The Deer Hunter). Around midnight, as he undressed, he kept glimpsing a figure from the comer of his eye, though it disappeared as he tried to focus on it. A moment later, the entire room went cold, especially around the four-poster bed. Panicked, Spielberg roused the others and, pausing only to snap some flash pictures, fled. Bucker’s new Mercedes refused to start, so a mechanic was called. Once he had it going at 1.30 a.m., they drove sixty miles to the comforting anonymity of a Holiday Inn. Spielberg disavows any belief in the supernatural, putting such phenomena down to the power of suggestion. What the incident most resembles, in his retelling, is a movie, and in particular a favourite of his, Robert Wise’s 1963 version of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, which he called The Haunting. True to form, Spielberg recycled the experience in Poltergeist, another demonstration that in his universe everything, even the incorporeal, aspires to the condition of film.
As shooting loomed on Sugarland, he began choosing his team. He persuaded Verna Fields to take leave from USC to edit. Carey Loftin again planned the stunts, using one of the Corvettes he and Max Balchowski rebuilt as camera cars for Bullitt. Finding a cameraman was harder. Since he’d be shooting in winter, and on the open road, often in bad light, Spielberg needed the best. ‘Visually wooed,’ he said, ‘by the thought of all those cars,’ he wanted, as on Duel, to put his audience into them, like kids on a fairground ride. To do that, a cameraman had to be intimate with Robert Gottschalk’s spherical-lens Panavision cameras which, although they had only a shallow depth of field, allowed one to shoot on a wide-angle lens without distortion. In particular, he wanted to use the Panaflex, its lightweight and noiseless version, inside the cars.
He chose Vilmos Zsigmond, whom he’d met through McElwaine and Altman. A Hungarian with a massive ego, Zsigmond had bribed his way to the West with watches in 1956, bringing with him footage of the Soviet invasion. Within a decade he’d become one of Hollywood’s best cinematographers, with a reputation, earned on films like John Boorman’s Deliverance and Altman’s chilly Western McCabe and Mrs Miller, which Spielberg admired, for shooting in bad light and worse weather.
A few weeks before he began shooting, Spielberg found himself judging a student film competition with Douglas Trumbull, largely responsible for the special effects on 2001: A Space Odyssey, and composers Marvin Hamlisch and Jerry Goldsmith. The young director’s name didn’t register with Goldsmith, but Spielberg was so familiar with Goldsmith’s themes for series like Thriller and The Twilight Zone, and for Planet of the Apes and Patton, that he could hum long stretches of the music. He flirted with asking him to write the score for Sugarland, but opted instead for John Williams, who, though less inventive than Goldsmith, could be relied on to turn in a score squarely in the Hollywood vernacular.
Williams’s Sugarland music would indeed be consensus composing by a master pasticheur. ‘I wanted John to do a real symphony for this film,’ says Spielberg, ‘but he said, “If you want me to do The Red Pony or Appalachian Spring, you’re going to ruin your movie. It’s a very simple story, and the music should be picking and soft, with just a few violins and a small orchestra; cradle-like.”’ He used Dutch harmonica virtuoso ‘Toots’ Thielmans to enliven fragmentary music of a folksy simplicity. Working with Goldsmith, however, became an ambition for Spielberg. ‘I heard,’ says Goldsmith, ‘that Steve and Zanuck tossed a coin to decide between me and Williams to score Jaws.’ Coincidentally, Goldsmith also did the music for Ace Eli and Rodger of the Shies, but still didn’t associate its author with his fellow panellist.
From the start, the logistics of Sugarland promised the most problems. Universal’s technical departments helped Spielberg visualise the action by building models of locations like the used-car lot so he could plan his shooting with military precision. An artist sketched every scene in storyboards which he took to Texas and taped around his motel room – ‘so I could see exactly what the film would look like from a bird’s eye view… I always had a visual overview in terms of day-to-day shooting.’
A hundred cars participated in the original chase. Universal’s publicity claimed the film used 250, failing to mention that this included the crew’s private cars and support vehicles. In fact only forty appeared on camera, and even that number threatened to be unwieldy. Richard Zanuck arrived on location the first day with trepidation.
I was thinking, well, let’s take it easy. Let’s get the kid acclimated to this big-time stuff. But when I got out there the first day he was about ready to get this first shot, and it was the most elaborate fucking thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I mean tricky; all-in-one shots, the camera going and stopping, people going in and out. But he had such confidence in the way he was handling it. Here he was, a young little punk kid, with a lot of seasoned crew around, a major actress on hand, and instead of starting with something easy, he picked a very complicated thing that required all sorts of intricate timing.
And it worked incredibly well – and not only from a technical standpoint, but the performances were very good. I knew right then and there, without any doubt, that this guy knew more at that age about the mechanics of working out a shot than anybody alive at that time, no matter how many pictures they’d made. He took to it like – you know, like he was born with a knowledge of cinema. And he never ceased to amaze me from that day on.
Zanuck was right about the shooting, but charitable about the performances. Then, as later, nobody got much direction from Spielberg, who simply outlined the action and let them provide the characterisation. ‘The most I ever heard him say before a take,’ recalls one actor in his later films, ‘was, “Lots of energy” – which is what directors always say when they don’t know what they want. And afterwards he said, “A nice sense of reality.”’
Paul Freeman remarks diplomatically, ‘Steven is one of those people who do their direction of actors in the casting. They trust the performer to know his or her business, and to get on with it. On Raiders, he knew Karen Allen and I were from the stage and were used to rehearsing, so he sent us off to improvise. When we came back and showed him, he said, “Fine.” All that stuff in the tent between Karen and me was made up like that.’
Casting was, and is, agony for Spielberg. He often chooses actors from tests shot on his behalf, and almost never talks to the performers until they arrive on the set. ‘Steven goes with his nose,’ says Julian Glover, the villain of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He looks for performers who physically resemble his conception of the character and who have enough experience not to need direction. Wayne Knight arrived in Hawaii to play the fat computer hacker and embryo thief Nedry in Jurassic Park without having met him.
I got out of the van, walked up to him, and said, ‘I hope I’m the guy you wanted.’ He said, ‘Yeah, you are.’… So I get in the Jeep, and Steven gets in the Jeep, and here we are, me and Steven Spielberg sitting in this Jeep. I had never had so much as a conversation with him, and it was like, ‘So how about those Mets?’ I had no idea what to say.
If Spielberg auditions someone in person, it is seldom with a scene from the film. Usually he asks for some trivial physical action. On Raiders he held casting sessions in the Lucasfilm kitchen, asking nonplussed actors to mix and bake cookies, in an attempt to throw them back on their natural reactions. Emily Richard, the hero’s mother in Empire of the Sun, was requested simply to put her hair up for a moment. ‘He actually blushed when he asked me,’ says Richard, ‘and I blushed when I did it.’
William Atherton’s physical appearance rather than his acting recommended him for Clovis in Sugarland. ‘He’s a very soft-spoken individual with wild eyes,’ Spielberg said. ‘He could be so easily misunderstood by somebody with a pair of binoculars. One look at Bill [in Looking for Mr Goodbar] and you think, “My God, he’s going to kill Diane Keaton.”’ Michael Sacks was chosen for ‘Slide’ because Spielberg wanted the cop and Clovis to look as much alike as possible. ‘It’s two men who really began in the same small town, and went in two different directions.’
Casting as he prefers, exactly to type, paid off best in his choice of John Ford veteran Ben Johnson as Chief Tanner. With an actor whose screen persona was so firmly established, direction was superfluous. As Sacks remarked admiringly, ‘he has an extraordinary quality – he can say any cliché to you and make it seem profound.’ So effective was Johnson, however, that Spielberg came to regret his subsidiary role, feeling he should have spent more time on Tanner, explaining the compassion both for his quarry and his men that leads him to chase the fugitives rather than force a shoot-out.
The Poplins’ flight, trailed by scores of police cars, was again structured like a carnival ride, with incidents of random violence – an ambush by vigilante deputies, a chance pile-up at an intersection, the ‘potty stop’ scene, with Clovis flushing a gunman hiding in a Portaloo – breaking the exhilaration of sheer movement. Film historian Diane Jacobs rightly called Spielberg and his coevals ‘excruciatingly conscious of their medium and its history’. Hollywood had nursed them through adolescence and handed them a means of expressing themselves. As a result, they revered its past to a degree that baffled the Suits. The studios’ response to the credit squeeze of the sixties had been to sell backlots for office buildings and auction off their props. In June 1982, however, Spielberg would pay $60,500 at Sotheby-Parke Bernet for one of the surviving ‘Rosebud’ sleds from the last scene of Citizen Kane – a sequence which inspired the last shot of Raiders, where the Ark is sequestered in a giant warehouse choked with anonymous crates.
All Spielberg’s films are ‘about’ cinema before they are about anything else. ‘It’s very clear his references are to film rather than literature,’ says Tom Stoppard, who wrote the script for Spielberg’s version of J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun and acted for more than a year as his informal dramaturg. ‘If one was talking about Captains Courageous, one was talking about Spencer Tracy and the movie, rather than the book.’ Julian Glover says:
It’s not that he ever said, ‘This shot is a copy of one in Stagecoach; the remake, not the original,’ or, ‘Here’s my Lawrence of Arabia shot. But you just had a sense… He asked me to do one shot [on Indiana Jones and the Lost Crusade], and I said, ‘Steven, I don’t know why I’m making this move.’ And he said, ‘Well, in Adam’s Rib, Spencer Tracy…’ And I just held up my hands and said, ‘That’s fine.’ Obviously he knew exactly what he was doing.
Kevork Malikyan, who played Kazim in The Last Crusade, had a similar experience. Spielberg spent hours staging his death. He was to collapse into Alison Doody’s arms and slide down her body. After grabbing him, she pulls her hands back to find them covered in blood. The shot refused to gel, and Spielberg dropped it, never mentioning he’d been trying to recreate the death of a disguised Daniel Gelin in the arms of James Stewart in Hitchcock’s remake of The Man who Knew too Much.
One can multiply such stories by the dozen. TV exposed the Brats to more movies than most Hollywood professionals saw in a lifetime. They wore their knowledge self-consciously, even arrogantly, and while Spielberg didn’t carry it to the extremes of Schrader or De Palma, he prepared his first cinema feature with a sense that he was not so much creating something new as building on what had gone before. ‘Once,’ recalls John Milius, ‘Steve and I were talking about how easily we could recreate the atmosphere of a Ford or Hitchcock film. He said, “But how is it we’re able to do that?” and I said, “Simple. We stole it.”’
Older heads despaired of the Brats’ fascination with movie lore. The newcomers, too young to have worked on the films they admired, saw old films not, as their makers did, in terms of personal experience, but as collections of themes, catchphrases, stylistic tricks. Recycling a gibe of Oscar Wilde, British critic Philip French accused them of knowing ‘the credits of everything but the value of nothing’. John Gregory Dunne agreed.
It always struck me that of all the people who were at the Phillipses that summer, there were very few who actually work… the social and cultural mines. [They were] basically gadgeteers. More interested in things… People graduate from Michigan State or wherever, take their book bags, come here to film school, and have no other basis in life except the movies they’ve seen. That’s why they’re making movies about Superman and poltergeists, and about psychic phenomena… Their problem is that they have never done anything.
‘You get the feeling,’ wrote Pauline Kael in an influential review that did much to put Spielberg on the map, ‘that the director grew up with TV and wheels (My Mother the Car?), and that he has a new temperament. Maybe Spielberg loves action and comedy and speed so much that he doesn’t really care if the movie has nothing else in it.’
The model for The Sugarland Express was, inevitably, another movie. In 1951, Austrian-born Billy Wilder paid an acid tribute to the affection of his adoptive country for bread and circuses with Ace in the Hole. A reporter named Chuck Tatum, played by Kirk Douglas at his most misanthropic, happens on the story of a lifetime, a man trapped in a mine under a New Mexico mountain. Rescuers expect to dig him out in a day or two, but Tatum, spinning out the story, persuades them to sink a shaft from the top. A ghoulish carnival gathers around the stricken man, with the reporter as its arrogant ringmaster. Tatum becomes famous, but the man dies.
To nobody’s surprise, least of all Wilder’s, Ace in the Hole flopped. ‘Americans expected a cocktail,’ he said, unperturbed, ‘and felt I was giving them a shot of vinegar instead.’ But Spielberg never concealed its affinities with The Sugarland Express: ‘I loved the Ace in the Hole similarity. I liked the idea of people rallying behind a media event, not knowing who the characters are or what they’re about, but just supporting them because they are on an errand of mercy to get their baby back – and that sparks a good deal of good old American sentimentality.’ It was a theme he would return to in 1941: the power of the media to convince people of almost anything, and the readiness of those people not only to believe what they hear but to act on it, often catastrophically. Sight and Sound saw the connection between Wilder and the anarchic hymns to road violence to which The Sugarland Express superficially belonged by summing it up as ‘Ace in the Hole meets Vanishing Point’. Few people grasped that Spielberg, as he been on the side of the truck rather than the car in Duel, wasn’t deploring mob rule in Sugarland Express but relishing it.
Once he started shooting, Spielberg had his hands full controlling his first major feature crew, and in particular Zsigmond, who had ambitions to direct and wasn’t backward in suggesting how he would have planned a scene. These problems were exacerbated when Spielberg insisted on operating the camera himself for many sequences. Lighting cameramen traditionally work with an operator who runs the camera while they concentrate on placing lights and mapping out movements. Spielberg, however, still had the amateur’s love of shooting, and would continue to handle the camera on many scenes throughout his career, to the irritation of directors of photography.
‘Vilmos is a very interesting man,’ Spielberg said diplomatically, ‘And when you employ his great camera eye, you also get gratis his thoughts. He would offer ideas beyond the definition of the American cinematographer.’ Arguments were common, but Spielberg won most of them. ‘When a cameraman [has] free rein,’ he said, ‘he becomes the director and the director becomes the apprentice.’ And he felt he’d gone through his apprenticeship at Universal already. However it was Zsigmond who persuaded him that the camera, rather than occupying the position of a detached directorial Eye of God, should always represent the point of view of a character. Thereafter, Spielberg’s films became more concerned with people and a little less like cartoons.
‘Several crew members said they’d never been on a happier location,’ Goldie Hawn remarked. ‘Four of them ended up marrying local girls from San Antonio, which was our base of operations. One was a waitress, another took reservations at the Holiday Inn. Hollywood meets Texas. It was a happy company.’ Spielberg was unaffected, even amused by the nocturnal sighs and moans, which, characteristically, he noted in relation to a movie. ‘Walking along the hall at one in the morning at those Holiday Inns sometimes sounds like Gyorgy Ligeti’s Atmospheres from 2001.’ Sex helped alleviate the tensions of working in a district fed up with film units. Sam Peckinpah was shooting The Getaway in the area, and his piratical crew had looted CB radios from their hired police cars. As a result, Zanuck/Brown had to buy twenty-five junked black-and-whites at auction. After the shoot, Spielberg bought the Poplins’ car, with dozens of bullet holes still visible where the special effects technicians had drilled them, and drove it for years.
In February, he had cause to be glad he turned down White Lightning. Scandal erupted on location for Reynolds’s The Man who Loved Cat Dancing, shooting in Gila Bend, Arizona, with his one-time playmate Sarah Miles. Miles’s ‘personal assistant’ David Whiting was found dead after a Quaalude overdose, and evidence at the inquest suggested he and Reynolds had been sharing Miles’s bed. In different circumstances, it might have been Spielberg, not Vanishing Point’s Richard Sarafian, who had to handle this production and public-relations nightmare.
In May 1973, just as shooting on Sugarland ended, literary agent Roberta Pryor delivered to Zanuck in the California office and to Brown in New York typescripts of a new novel by an unknown writer. Both men read it overnight. Richer producers, once they got around to looking at it, were ready to buy the book, but by then Zanuck and Brown, often telephoning from public phones and restaurants to disguise their interest in the property, had snatched Peter Benchley’s Jaws for $175,000, with a further $75,000 for writing the first-draft screenplay, plus 10 per cent of net profits.
A few days later, Spielberg spotted the manuscript on Zanuck’s desk and took it home for the weekend. After reading until late, he tried to sleep, but woke from disturbed dreams. At 3 a.m. he picked up the book again, gripped by the story of a monster ravaging an East Coast resort until killed by a coalition of the local police chief, an Ivy League scientist and an old shark-hunter.
By Sunday night, he knew he had to film Jaws. All his life he’d feared the sea and its creatures. When he bought a house at Malibu in the eighties, he had nightmares of the waves undermining the foundations, and dreamed of piling up sandbags to protect it. He felt personally attacked by the shark, and wanted to strike back. This was reflex thinking, punch/counterpunch, the sort that video games sharpened. On Monday he walked into Zanuck and Brown’s office and said, ‘Let me direct this film.’
‘We’ve got a director,’ Brown told him.
He was Dick Richards, a competent technician but, more importantly, a client of Mike Medavoy, who also represented Benchley and had attached Richards to the project at its inception.
‘Well, if anything falls out,’ Spielberg told Brown, ‘I love this project.’
He didn’t have long to wait. Two days later, Zanuck and Brown lunched with Richards, Benchley and Medavoy. To Benchley’s mounting irritation, Richards kept referring to ‘the whale’. Finally Benchley blew his top; nobody who was unable to tell a shark from a whale was going to film his book. Richards said he’d rather make Raymond Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely anyway, and the fragile coalition collapsed.
Four days after Spielberg expressed interest, Zanuck and Brown offered him the film – and found, to their dismay, that he’d changed his mind.
‘I don’t know,’ he told Zanuck. ‘After all, it’s only a shark story.’ Wouldn’t it be perceived as another Duel: Everyman v. The Beast? At other times he compared it to just an inflated episode of Sea Hunt, the popular 1950s TV scuba series with Lloyd Bridges.
He was also finding the UFO project ‘Watch the Skies’ both more interesting and more challenging.
When pressed, Spielberg always professed scepticism about UFOs. He never mentioned his teenage UFO feature Firelight, nor the phenomenon seen by other members of his Scout troop in the Arizona desert. Later he would claim to have been converted by the US government’s objections to him making ‘Watch the Skies’. ‘I really found my faith,’ he said, ‘when I heard that the government was opposed to the film. If NASA took the time to write me a twenty-page letter, then I knew there must be something happening.’
What he really believed is unimportant. Not for the first time, he was adopting the beliefs of his audience, sensing what polls later made clear: that many Americans, without having particularly strong convictions, felt there ‘might be something to’ flying saucers. For a consensus film-maker, that was enough. Five years before John Naisbitt’s Megatrends became the fashionable read, Spielberg and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as ‘Watch the Skies’ was renamed, exemplified its propositions: that the best way to beguile America’s slow-reacting public is not to be original but to spot a trend and exploit it; that such trends seldom emerge in Washington or New York but are more apparent in a few heartland states, and in California; and that Americans had lost interest in travelling to outer space. What they now wanted was for outer space to come to them.
It was for the ability to chart the Zeitgeist, to articulate the mood of the crowd before they knew it themselves, and then to exploit it, that Spielberg most admired Orson Welles, whose radio version of War of the Worlds in 1938 convinced thousands that Martians had landed at Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. Welles, he said, ‘was not so much writing a radio program about Martians invading New Jersey as about America’s fear of invasion from Europe. War was just a few months away, but Welles’s invasion was not the Stuka, it was the Martian; it preyed on the vulnerability of the time.’ Spielberg, both in this film and in Jaws, would do the same For the record he repudiated Welles’s broadcast, but later he bought the original script for the programme and displayed it under glass at his home.
In Schrader’s script for what would become Close Encounters, VanOwen bargains with the Air Force. He’ll keep quiet, providing they give him the money to keep investigating. They agree, and he spends his life searching, a counterpart of the protagonists in films which Schrader later directed or wrote: Yukio Mishima, Hank Williams, Patty Hearst, John Latour of Light Sleeper and, archetypally, Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, visionaries drawn to self-destruction as their only means of redemption. At the end of his life VanOwen finds the aliens and, as Schrader put it, is ‘taken off the planet, like Elijah. He had fought the good fight and he was transcended.’
But Spielberg wasn’t happy with this approach.
‘Steve took violent objection,’ Schrader says. ‘He wanted the lead character of this drama to be an ordinary guy, a Joe Blow.’
‘I refuse,’ Schrader said, ‘to send off to another world, as the first example of earth’s intelligence, a man who wants to go and set up a McDonald’s franchise.’
Spielberg said, ‘That’s exactly the guy I want to send.’
After a series of increasingly recriminatory meetings, Schrader abandoned the project.
Throughout his discussions with Schrader, Spielberg had kept his options open on Jaws. He even came into the Zanuck/Brown office and handed out T-shirts printed with Doubleday’s inspired cover design of a phallic shark rising from an inky ocean towards a swimming girl. But in the long nights, he fretted that the narrative expired after the first hundred pages, and didn’t revive until the last hundred. Where was the drive for which he’d been praised in the reviews of Duel?
‘I don’t want to make a film,’ he explained to his eventual star Richard Dreyfuss. ‘I want to make a movie.’
Increasingly he visualised Jaws in far simpler terms than Benchley, as ‘an experiment in terror… the behemoth against Everyman… There is nothing subtle about Jaws. There are underpinnings that are subtle, but what it’s about is pretty slam-bang.’ He told journalist Monte Stettin, ‘Jaws isn’t a big movie. It’s a very small picture. It deals with one social issue [i.e.] There is no place in the world to stay unprotected. Which is what this film is all about.’
Benchley’s story had a journalistic simplicity. The town of Amity, an East Coast summer resort based on Martha’s Vineyard, is terrorised by a rogue Great White Shark which snaps up unwary bathers. The police chief, Brody, a newcomer from New York, bows to pressure from local businessmen to hush up the deaths, but when the shark begins taking children from the shallows and wrecking the boats sent out to hunt it, he finds his courage again and hunts down the fish. He’s helped by Hooper, a wealthy shark expert, and Quint, a local eccentric who shows them the brutal techniques necessary to kill the giant. In their final confrontation, Quint and Hooper are killed, but the shark spares Brody, sinking back into the depths with the body of Quint in its jaws.
Writing in the shadow of Watergate, Benchley drew the people of Amity as products of Nixonian moral blight. Quint is a ruthless environmental despoiler. (In case we miss this, he baits a hook with the body of an unborn baby dolphin.) The town’s Chief Selectman has sold out to the Mafia in a land deal. Brody frets about losing his job, while his wife Ellen itches for sex and attention, which Hooper, the conceited Ivy League ichthyologist, provides. Spielberg disliked them all. ‘The only likeable character was the shark,’ he said, ‘who was a garbage-eating machine and ate all the trashy characters.’ In particular, the Spielberg of the broken home, the one man in the house of women, found Hooper distasteful. He saw him as emasculating and cuckolding the sheriff, and making the sheriff as vainglorious as he was. Benchley, already writing the screenplay, didn’t agree.
Zanuck and Brown were so depressed by these conflicts that they contemplated ditching Jaws entirely. During a meeting with Peter Gimbel, the documentary producer whose Blue Water, White Death had shown in graphic detail the dangers of filming sharks, Gimbel offered to direct the film, and Zanuck and Brown, in a moment of frustration, invited him to buy them out. Fortunately for the team, Gimbel declined.
The partners finally convened a make-or-break conference with Spielberg, to which they pointedly wore their Jaws T-shirts, a reminder of his earlier commitment. Sidney Sheinberg also urged him to make the film and, with ‘Watch the Skies’ still lacking a script, Spielberg accepted at last. His deal gave him, on top of his salary, a meagre 2.5 per cent of net profits, against Zanuck/Brown’s 40 per cent and Benchley’s 10 per cent. Almost in passing, the trade papers of 21 June 1973 announced that Jaws had a director.
Spielberg was unaware that he had enlisted for the duration. The bane of Zanuck and Brown’s days at Fox had been Darryl Zanuck’s veto, exercised in its most extreme form when he fired them. Going into business on their own, they had agreed privately never to reverse a firm decision. As Bob Woodward put it, ‘Loyalty was their vice.’ They even refused to give interviews separately. If one spoke to the press, the other was always present, even if only on a telephone line. Like an old married couple, they often finished one another’s sentences.
Meanwhile, the board of an ailing Columbia, Hollywood’s most underfunded and troubled studio, had installed, at the urging of the town’s most reclusive and Machiavellian power broker, Ray Stark, a new president, David Begelman. The ex-agent, one of Hollywood’s great gamblers, took over in the summer of 1973. Within three years, he would have turned Columbia’s loss into a huge profit. Begelman’s first act was to sign a number of old friends and clients to lucrative production deals. Michael and Julia Phillips were given a contract for two pictures, both written by Schrader. Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and ‘Watch the Skies’. With Jaws still lacking a script, Spielberg signed that deal too.
All summer, editing on Sugarland had continued. Satisfied with finishing only five days over its fifty-five-day schedule and near enough to the $2.5 million budget, Spielberg initially spoke warmly of the film. ‘I guess if I had Sugarland to do over again, I wouldn’t change anything,’ he said at the time. But within a few years he all but disowned it as mechanistic and heartless, unconcerned with its characters.
Universal had promised that, if he had a release print before 10 September, the film could open on the November Thanksgiving weekend. Spielberg delivered, but from the moment the studio viewed the rough cut, they decided they had a loser. Richard Zanuck drove down to Palm Springs and showed it to his parents. Darryl didn’t think much of it either. Nor did Goldie Hawn, who found it ‘too serious, too unrelenting and too uptight’.
It contrasted starkly with their period comedy thriller The Sting, which had worked out far better than Zanuck and Brown had dared hope. After ousting scriptwriter David Ward as director, they replaced him with the bankable George Roy Hill, who had a deal at Universal but also, more important, inspired confidence in Robert Redford and Paul Newman, who starred as the two swindlers of gang boss Robert Shaw. Hill realised the film brilliantly. With its Depression setting, lovingly recreated on the Universal backlot, its ragtime score skimmed from Scott Joplin and the inspired joint performance of Redford and Newman, it exuded the heady perfume of a hit.
Rather than damage The Sting’s Christmas release, Zanuck persuaded Spielberg to withhold Sugarland Express until the following April. As their Universal deal guaranteed control of advertising, he argued that this would give them time for some intelligent promotion. Spielberg reluctantly agreed.
‘Our early ads were our own,’ said Zanuck. ‘Spielberg himself shot one of them.’ They featured the image of a road leading to an empty horizon which he would use again for Close Encounters. In the middle distance was a police car. In the foreground, scattered over the centre line, were broken glass, handcuffs, a policeman’s Stetson, a handgun, a rifle and a teddy bear. The advertising copy was ambivalent: ‘It’s Not Every Day You Take a Ride Like This!’
These ads barely survived the press and trade screenings in the first weeks of March. ‘Our campaigns didn’t work,’ Zanuck admitted. ‘We learned that any ad with a gun is anathema to the East Side public on Third Avenue in New York City. On Broadway, however, show lots of guns. We learned a great deal.’
Zanuck and Brown took Sugarland, and Spielberg, to Cannes. Benchley was also in Europe to promote his novel, so the four men met in a cabana at the Hôtel Cap d’Antibes to chew over Benchley’s screenplay, which Spielberg was due to start shooting almost immediately. After Benchley left, the film-makers gloomily contemplated the chasm between their perception of Jaws
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John Baxter
First published in 1996 and now available as an ebook. Please note that this edition does not include illustrations.Steven Spielberg dominated the cinema of the nineties. He is one of the screen's greatest enchanters, with a spellbinding capacity – and a box-office record – matched by very few.His power now exceeds that of the greatest moguls of Hollywood's golden era, and films like 'Jaws, ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind' and 'Jurassic Park' have been seen by billions around the world, and have changed forever the way movies are made. How was it that this 'movie brat', from an unhappy and rootless adolescence on the fringes of American society, became one of the most formidable players on the global entertainment scene?.From 'Duel', which suggested the innate 'film sense' Spielberg would bring to movie-making, to the Oscar-winning 'Schindler's List 'and beyond…
The Unauthorised Biography
STEVEN SPIELBERG
JOHN BAXTER
Praise (#ulink_5901847c-74eb-5492-9b19-56ce764ee912)
Further reviews for Steven Spielberg:
‘Diligent, perceptive and with every available anecdote’
SIMON HATTENSTONE, Guardian
‘riveting… retains a healthy objectivity throughout his enthralling account’
PENELOPE DENING, Irish Times
‘… a film-lover’s book, a review of a remarkable era, an exhaustive filmography – a movie about the evolution of Hollywood, with Spielberg as the central character’
JEREMY LESTER, Jewish Chronicle
‘Baxter may have a blockbuster on his hands.’
RICHARD E. GRANT, Sunday Times
‘highly entertaining, packed with interesting information. If you want to know how a Spielberg film was made, what shenanigans went on during the making, or who fell out with whom, it is all here.’
WILLIAM RUSSELL, The Herald (Glasgow)
‘Its usefulness lies in Baxter’s shrewd assessment of Spielberg’s relationship with the wider context of the entertainment industry in general and Hollywood power-politics… the account of Spielberg’s unsettled early years… is illuminating in terms of his later preoccupations.’
HUGO DAVENPORT, Sunday Telegraph
‘Baxter is quietly professional… and makes good use of the copious interviews Spielberg has given throughout his career.’
ANTHONY QUINN, The Observer
‘A very valuable book… the thing that most impresses in his book is the calm, careful and nearly gentle way in which it builds up our disquiet that the movie kingdom and our society as a whole should be so ordered that Steven Spielberg is its Gatsby, its Kane, and such a shining young example… it is Baxter’s most intriguing point that Spielberg not only caters to youthfulness, but extends and preserves it… What is so clever, I think, is Baxter’s sense of a man too narrowly focused to amount to a villain… Baxter’s success is beyond question.’
DAVID THOMSON, Independent on Sunday
‘An impeccably professional film-biographer (he’s already done Buñuel, Fellini, Ford and is now working on Kubrick), Baxter leaves no document unrifled, no fact unchecked, no anecdote untold.’
Sight and Sound
‘… a full, frank and readable account of a man who the public regards as one of the greatest enchanters in the history of film.’
STUART GILLES, Manchester Evening News
Contents
Cover (#uf61d6071-ab09-5ce3-b6a8-4be613686884)
Title Page (#u483b24c5-7c3b-51f3-9ed1-eb25f7640427)
Praise (#ulink_97ee4113-5b0d-5799-bf30-5e0f805f3c95)
1 The Man who Fell to Earth (#ulink_caf441f1-391b-58fd-9b12-313bc28f3e53)
2 The Boy who Swallowed a Transistor (#ulink_db369efe-2578-5f4e-872c-41bf4eddc6d3)
3 Amblin’ Towards Bethlehem (#ulink_9d7fda32-2643-5ea7-964d-372fbd55dd29)
4 Universal Soldier (#ulink_3cd7eafb-f687-56f6-ae94-aad56cf1f51d)
5 Duel (#ulink_6de0c657-8735-574a-9ebe-f1bdc1e73393)
6 The Sugarland Express (#ulink_4229684e-cf2f-539e-9788-18f83ca9c69c)
7 Jaws (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (#litres_trial_promo)
9 1941 (#litres_trial_promo)
10 Raiders of the Lost Ark (#litres_trial_promo)
11 Poltergeist and E.T: The Extraterrestrial (#litres_trial_promo)
12 The Twilight Zone: The Movie (#litres_trial_promo)
13 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (#litres_trial_promo)
14 The Color Purple (#litres_trial_promo)
15 Empire of the Sun (#litres_trial_promo)
16 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (#litres_trial_promo)
17 Always and Hook (#litres_trial_promo)
18 Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List (#litres_trial_promo)
19 The Dream Team
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author
Also by the Author
Pre-Credit Sequence The Sandcastle
Filmography
Copyright
About the Publisher
1 The Man Who Fell to Earth (#ulink_9790af15-4679-5759-8a75-8bb2fe9247c9)
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
I wish that man would go away.
Traditional rhyme
THE FORCE of American popular art lies in its directness, its simplicity, its economy of means and of scale. Analysis may uncover cultural and autobiographical references, sophistications of technique, even profundity of intellect, but the first appeal of a George Gershwin song, a Walt Disney cartoon, a Norman Rockwell painting is, and must be, commonplace delight.
Steven Spielberg embodies this tradition. His films, even the sombre Schindler’s List, are machines for delighting us. Almost always they succeed in doing so. It’s not hard to see why. He traffics in what authors of science fiction, his preferred form, call ‘a sense of wonder’, a heightened apprehension of physical possibilities. It has been said that the universe is not only stranger than we know but stranger than we can know. Spielberg dispels this idea. His vision, like that of the best science fiction writers, is of a welcoming, explicable place.
Writing about Ray Bradbury, whose books like The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked this Way Comes share Spielberg’s simplicity of vision and sureness of technique, the critic Damon Knight, in a passage that could well refer to Spielberg, remarked:
To Bradbury, as to most people, radar and rocket ships and atomic power are big, frightening, meaningless names; a fact which, no doubt, has something to do with his popular success, but which does not touch the root of the matter. Bradbury’s strength lies in the fact that he writes about the things that are really important to us: not the things we pretend we are interested in – science, marriage, sports, politics, crime – but the fundamental pre-rational fears and longings and desires; the rage at being born; the will to be loved; the longing to communicate; the hatred of parents and siblings; the fear of things that are not self…
People who talk about Bradbury’s imagination miss the point. His imagination is mediocre; he borrows nearly all his backgrounds and props, and distorts them badly; wherever he is required to invent anything – a planet, a Martian, a machine – the image is flat and unconvincing. Bradbury’s Mars, where it is not as bare as a Chinese stage setting, is a mass of inconsistencies; his spaceships are a joke; his people have no faces. The vivid images in his work are not imagined; they are remembered.
In 1987, cartoonist Jules Feiffer drew a panel for the magazine Village Voice. A writing professor lauds a student for his ‘Joycean gift of language coupled with a Hemingwayesque spareness’. He goes on to compare him with Fitzgerald, Bellow, Updike, Styron, Mailer, then asks him what he’s working on. ‘A screenplay for Spielberg,’ the boy says airily. The professor is suddenly a beaming enthusiast. ‘Do you know him?’ he demands. ‘What’s he really like?’
The public urge to know what Spielberg is really like has never abated. His personality and appearance are so unremarkable, his public statements so bland, that everyone feels there must be a secret Spielberg hidden under the ramshackle exterior.
If you were to ask Spielberg what he is really like, he would probably reply that he is just like his audience. He is like everyone. But the image of Just Plain Steve is simply one aspect of his public persona. Examine that persona, and it fragments into a jigsaw puzzle where real memories slot into fabricated ones, and where childhood enthusiasms jostle for space with the structures of corporate power.
Spielberg’s indifferent communication skills don’t help to explain him to his public. His voice has never quite lost the self-absorbed gabble and stammer of the teenager drunk on ideas. ‘He has all the virtues – and defects – of a sixteen-year-old,’ one colleague remarks. Over the years he’s learned to smile and to pause occasionally for others to speak, but the interpersonal still daunts him. He communicates best from behind a protective grille of technology. On that level, he radiates competence. Everyone notices it. The novelist Martin Amis almost mistook him for the man who’d come to fix the Coke machine. Someone else described his image as ‘chemistry-student-next-door’. Both Amis and actor Tom Hanks compared him to the high school audio-visual assistant who alone understood 16mm projectors. (Spielberg worked his way through three years of college, in part by projecting classroom films.)
His mastery of cinema technology, what critic Pauline Kael called ‘a film sense’, is innate and effortless, his innocent flair and enjoyment disguising the complexities of what he does. ‘I got the feeling,’ said Julian Glover, who acted for him in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, ‘that, if he wanted to, he could have built the set. He knew as much about lighting as [director of photography] Douglas Slocombe. And he operated the camera himself.’ The worst sin for a Spielberg collaborator is to fail in technique. When that happens, Spielberg can be scathing. ‘There is no, “Nice try, guys – better luck next time,”’ complained one crew member. ‘He says things like, “You didn’t get it right. Think about that when you go to bed.”’
Partly by chance but increasingly by design, Spielberg has immured himself in the prison of his facility. It is the central irony of his life that the more he is driven to employ his skills, the more they destroy the very spontaneity he strives to capture. The audience which follows him, and which he helped create, is perfectly happy, however, with technique. To them, not understanding his systematic methods, his ability to engineer entertainment machines like Jurassic Park can seem almost miraculous, and it’s to a god that many of them compare him. Or an alien. When American Premiere magazine entitled one article about E.T. and its maker ‘Steven Spielberg in his Adventures on Earth’, they articulated a sense shared by many that he does not belong here. With his rodigies of imagination undermined by physical fragility and social clumsiness, he recalled the soft-spoken extra-terrestrial played by Michael Rennie in Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, or David Bowie’s Martian, fragile as a stick insect, in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Spielberg makes a credible alien. He’s most comfortable with those who live in private worlds. When stories of eccentric habits and lifestyle accreted around Michael Jackson, Spielberg, who planned to film Peter Pan with the singer and spent hours playing games with him at his Disneyland-like estate, remarked wistfully, ‘It’s a nice place Michael comes from. I wish we could all spend some time in his world.’
Spielberg’s need for protection and distance has its roots in a genuine fragility. Since he was four years old, he’s bitten his fingernails. Despite his technical ease, he was for most of his early adulthood a white-knuckle flier who had nosebleeds at high altitudes. For many years he so disliked elevators that he’d walk up half a dozen flights of stairs rather than enter one. The man who terrified the world with Jaws also hated and feared the ocean, and the director of that archetypal night-time film Close Encounters of the Third Kind admits, ‘I’m scared of the dark except in a motion picture theatre.’
It is only in the welcoming darkness of the cinema that Spielberg truly feels at home – and only with the myths of the movies that he is intellectually comfortable. Increasingly, it has been through and by myths that he has chosen to define himself. Admirers have been quick to add their own manufactured myths that confirm his role as an Honorary Outsider, and just another misunderstood teenager, like them; a Peter Pan of movies, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, but who invested hugely in preserving himself in artificial adolescence. As early as Jaws in 1974, rumour claimed – erroneously – that Spielberg’s jeans with their multitude of zipped pockets were specially made for him at $250 a pair. Even his pet Cavalier King Charles spaniels were pressed into the fantasy. Some people felt the turnover in dogs was curiously high. As Zalman succeeded Elmer, Chauncey succeeded Zalman and Halloween followed Chauncey, rumours grew that Elmer/Zalman/Chauncey/Halloween wasn’t a dog but a role: when the incumbent lost its puppy cuteness, another replaced it. Friends insist this is untrue. However, Spielberg’s reclusiveness fanned the story, and others like it.
Although Spielberg’s career is entwined with that of George Lucas, the two men are cultural and psychological opposites. Lucas, short, slight, seems habitually curled in on himself, arms often folded across his body. Spielberg, at five feet eight inches and 151 pounds, is fractionally taller, but contrasting body language exaggerates the difference. ‘Some people look at the ground when they walk,’ he says. ‘Others look straight ahead. I always look upward, at the sky.’
Lucas’s expressionless face and low, toneless voice emphasise the mask effect of his beard and moustache. Director John Badham calls him ‘a painfully shy person who hates dealing with people’. Writer Willard Huyck, another student friend, said, ‘George made a few friends at [the University of Southern California Film School], and decided that’s about all he needed for the rest of his life.’
As a director, he communicates even less. ‘George Lucas,’ confided a Star Wars actor, ‘is the worst director in the world. Never takes his nose out of the newspaper.’ The conventional view of film as a collaborative art – or an art of any kind, for that matter – isn’t his.
Lucas’s childhood in Modesto, California, was suffused with Methodism and German Lutheranism. He reacted against it in adulthood by creating a laid-back, feel-good home life. This ‘redwood tub mentality’ amused Spielberg, who joked about ‘LucasLand’. Spielberg himself is a product of the east coast suburbs, the rural midwest and the high desert of Arizona, but culturally he is archetypally Jewish; Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler’s List, talks of his ‘classic Central European map-of-Poland face’. His first memory is of being taken to a synagogue at six months, and he learned numbers from those tattooed on the arm of a relative who survived Auschwitz. Though he’d been bar mitzvahed, he didn’t practise his religion until well into adulthood. Long before that, however, he went out of his way to introduce a Jewish dimension into his films. In both Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, characters written as gentile were redesigned to accommodate Richard Dreyfuss, an actor proudly and obviously Jewish. It wasn’t until Spielberg’s second marriage, to the actress Kate Capshaw, that he integrated his cultural heritage into any system of belief, but since childhood, Judaism exercised a powerful influence of which even he wasn’t fully aware.
Being born Jewish also gave Spielberg an entrée to Hollywood which gentiles – and this included most of the USC group – could never possess. Along with Lucas, the film-makers who came to be known as New Hollywood included Brian De Palma (Carrie, Sisters), John Milius (Big Wednesday), the slightly older Francis Coppola (the Godfather trilogy, Apocalypse Now), husband and wife producers Michael and Julia Phillips (The Sting) and a group of lesser talents like writers Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, composer Basil Poledouris and cameraman/director Carroll Ballard.
Most emerged from that sixties phenomenon, the university film school, and elected to work inside the studio system rather than in the underground. Christened ‘Movie Brats’ by Michael Pye and Lynda Myles in their 1979 book The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took Over Hollywood, they rushed into the vacuum created when the US Justice Department forced the studios to shed their theatre chains and embrace the free market.
Old Hollywood had served the post-war baby boomers, now entering their thirties and looking for a Nice Night’s Entertainment. New Hollywood targeted their children, the teens and pre-teens in Nike and Adidas trainers, stone-washed Levis and New York Yankees caps, who spent homework time reading EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt or watching reruns of the TV series Twilight Zone, and queued every weekend outside multiplex cinemas across the country.
Spielberg’s technique to win this audience was to scavenge Hollywood’s scrapyard, salvaging genres and recycling them in widescreen, colour and stereo sound. His ability to resuscitate moribund material was unique. His approach to the shark of Jaws, to Puck, the ‘Little Green Man’ of E.T., Jurassic Park’s velociraptor dinosaurs and the Nazis of Schindler’s List was identical. In each case, he animated a cliché by showing that even cardboard thinks and feels. Not for nothing was he an admirer of Disney’s Pinocchio, in which a puppet is brought to life.
As an added guarantee that the audience would embrace his work, Spielberg preferred never to instigate an idea. The tendency of Lucas and Scorsese to push ahead with their visions, bulldozing all in their path, could produce successes, but Spielberg fed on consensus, not confrontation. Most of his films would be years in gestation, and would often begin with another director. Jaws had been Dick Richards’s film. Close Encounters of the Third Kind originated with Paul Schrader. Phil Kaufman would start as the director of Raiders, John Milius developed 1941, Tobe Hooper Poltergeist, and Hooper, with John Sayles, did the preliminary work on E.T. Empire of the Sun was intended for David Lean. Even Schindler’s List was at one point a Martin Scorsese project.
Just as Spielberg is anything but the common man, he’s also anything but the common artist. His vision is closer to that of a politician or a corporate CEO than to a film-maker. Newsday critic Jack Matthews articulated the truth that had been dawning for some time on the filmmakers with whom Spielberg had grown up in the industry, but whom he is now leaving further and further behind: ‘His contemporaries in the Hollywood firmament are not Scorsese and Coppola, they’re studio execs Jeffrey Katzenberg, Mark Canton, Peter Guber, Joe Roth and the other fortysomething crowd controlling the power.’ The critic Peter Biskind has pointed out how closely Spielberg’s and Lucas’s business philosophies conformed to those of Ronald Reagan, who served as president from 1981 to 1989, throughout the period of their greatest success. Reagan, says Biskind, ‘was the strong father Lucas and Spielberg didn’t know they were looking for, the ideal president for the age of Star Wars’. In temperament, Spielberg has more in common with the Democrats like John F. Kennedy who saw it as their role to make a world fit for baby boomers to live in. Arthur Schlesinger Jr speaks of Kennedy as ‘a realist and an ironist, a man of sardonic wit and impenetrable reserve who sought to apply reason to the problems of state’. One senses some of the same cool estimate of cause and effect in Spielberg. ‘His direct and unfettered mind,’ Schlesinger continued of Kennedy, ‘freed him to contemplate a diversity of possible courses. At the same time, he was a careful judge of those possibilities and was disinclined to make heavy investments in losing causes… He once described himself to Jacqueline as “an idealist without illusions”.’ Spielberg shares many of these characteristics, albeit in diluted form. He’s even closer, however, to the philanthropic industrialists of a century ago like Carnegie and Frick.
In person, he appears diffident, nervous, unsure, eager to be liked and to have his work approved by the audience, but a frosty stare at moments of threat reveals him as a man who understands power and expects to be obeyed. On the set, he’s fast, focused, saying little to his crew, even less to his cast. He’s animated, however, when talking business. If he is truly an artist, his art is the deal. No Edison or Ford, perhaps – but Federico Fellini was right to say, as he did to Francis Coppola, ‘Spielberg is a tycoon, like Rockefeller.’ When historians assess the 1970s and eighties, during which entertainment and audio-visual media began to dominate large segments of the world economy, Spielberg, along with innovators like Microsoft’s Bill Gates, may well emerge as a major architect of the change.
Millions would be astonished to hear Spielberg called, as he sometimes is, ‘the most hated man in Hollywood’. Admittedly, ‘hate’ is a term so contaminated by self-interest as to be meaningless in show business. The gibe ‘You’ll never work in this town again – unless we need you’ embodies so much conventional wisdom that nobody sees it as a joke. After Spielberg allied with ex-Disney studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg and record producer David Geffen in 1994 as DreamWorks SKG, David Letterman, master of ceremonies of the 1995 Oscar broadcast, joked that the alliance was a time saver; instead of waiting for them to fail separately, Hollywood could now wait for them to fail as a group.
However, even if one replaces ‘hated’ with ‘resented’ or ‘envied’, a residue of genuine dislike remains. Friends and colleagues agree; Steven Spielberg is hard to like. Geffen called him, according to Julia Phillips, ‘selfish, self-centred, egomaniacal, and worst of all – greedy’. Geffen denied the quote, but there are plenty in Hollywood prepared to endorse it, if not for the record. Spielberg can be remote, grasping, sulky, narrow. In his office, he seldom acknowledges anyone except to raise some technical point. He ‘lacked social graces’, one colleague said of his rapport, or lack of it, with his employees. ‘He never asked anybody about their personal lives. His only subject of conversation is the movies.’
But Spielberg shares these characteristics with many – perhaps most – great directors. Fellini, Buñuel and Welles all drew the same criticism. Likewise many of his own contemporaries in New Hollywood. Filmmaking is an art learned in decades alone in the dark with other people’s dreams, and pursued in an environment of inflated egos and expectations, sudden-death deadlines and Brobdingnagian profits and losses. As the matador respects the bull more than the crowd which gathers to see one of them die, directors come to love films more than they love the audience.
During the seventies and eighties, while he was finding his feet, Spielberg was famously approachable. While other directors retired to their trailers between takes and had lunch sent in, he schmoozed with the actors, ate in the commissary and hosted evening screenings of his favourite old movies to which the entire cast and crew were invited. He always entertained his cast at dinner just before shooting, and greeted each of them, ‘Welcome to the family.’ Lucas simply sent a basket of fruit to their rooms.
All this, however, may simply have been more a technique of manipulation than a sign of interest in other people. ‘Directing is 80 per cent communication and 20 per cent know-how,’ Spielberg says. ‘Because if you can communicate to the people who know how to edit, know how to light, and know how to act – if you can communicate what you want… and what you feel, that’s my definition of a good director.’ One of the warmer stories about him describes him winning over ageing star Joan Crawford on his first job by presenting her each day with a rose in a Pepsi-Cola bottle: Crawford was the widow of Pepsi’s chairman. At an American Film Institute seminar, however, Spielberg recollected cynically: ‘I put the day of the week on the Pepsi bottle, and each day I’d give her one. She didn’t know it was a countdown. I couldn’t wait to get off the picture. Oh yeah, I did a lot of that bullshit.’
What sort of man prefers to be seen as a cunning manipulator than a charming collaborator? The same kind who will get up early on a film set to bake matzoh for 150 people? With Spielberg, it is safer to suspect the easy answers. He is stranger than we know – perhaps stranger than we can know.
2 The Boy Who Swallowed a Transistor (#ulink_47cdc90d-53a0-5664-8e8c-54ea3e0031c8)
We belong to the last generation that could relate to adults.
Joan Didion
HE WAS short and thin. His ears stuck out, and his narrow face seemed to elongate towards the chin, making his mouth V-shaped, and pulling the lower lip out and down, so that his mouth would never seem quite closed. He looked like an inquisitive bird, with a beaky nose he found so embarrassing in childhood that he stuck tape to the tip of it and to his forehead, praying it would develop a tilt. The beak was matched by a bird’s gaze, motionless, eerily unblinking. If he disliked something, as adult or child, he just stared it out of existence. A bird’s voice, too, high, fast, uninflected. And he moved in an avian way, darting and stopping, darting and stopping, his actions apparently unmediated by intellect. When teams were chosen for any game, he would always be the last one picked. Nobody wanted jerky little Steven. Adolescence would bring not muscles but acne, freckles and even greater gawkiness. His thin arms so embarrassed him that it wasn’t until the production of Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1976 that he dared take off his shirt in public.
Spielberg’s birth almost coincided with the first sightings of UFOs over the United States. On 24 June 1947, Idaho businessman Kenneth Arnold, flying his two-seater plane over the Yakima Indian Reservation in Washington state, reported nine shallow dish-like objects heading towards the Cascade Range. They looked to him like skipping stones, but he estimated their speed at 1200 m.p.h. Over the next two weeks ‘flying saucers’ were seen in thirty states, after which sightings settled down to fifty a month.
For many years it was believed that Spielberg was born a few months after this, at the Jewish Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio. In fact, his mother Leah Posner Spielberg gave birth to him a year earlier, on 18 December 1946, a date Spielberg systematically obscured during his early adulthood. He was followed within the next few years by three sisters, Anne, Sue and Nancy. Spielberg would complain that he spent his childhood in a house with three screaming younger sisters and a mother who played concert piano with seven other women. Elliott’s little sister Gertie in E.T., inclined to sudden squeals and conversational irrelevancies, was, Spielberg claimed, an amalgamation of his three ‘terrifying’ siblings.
Leah Posner was small, agile and nervous, like her son. She hated to fly, a trait he inherited. She’d trained as a pianist, but given it up as a possible career when she married Arnold Spielberg, another locally-born Cincinnatian whose parents, like hers, had come from Poland and Austria in the century’s first wave of immigrants. Almost immediately after their marriage, Arnold enlisted in the Air Force, flying as a B-25 radio operator in Burma with a squadron nicknamed the ‘Burma Bridgebusters’. Demobilised, he stayed with electronics, which had fascinated him since he was eight or nine. In 1948, Bell Telephone engineers John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley invented the transistor, the tiny germanium diode that would replace vacuum tubes and make miniaturised electronics possible. Arnold found a job with the Burroughs business machine company, working on the beginnings of computers. An obsessive tinkerer, he would bring home bits of equipment, or drag the family off in the middle of the night to observe some natural wonder. His son thought him inflexible and workaholic. Richard Dreyfuss’s character Roy Neary in Close Encounters is a not entirely affectionate portrait of him.
Arnold read the science fiction magazines that proliferated after the war as publishing stumbled on a middle-class audience newly sophisticated in technology and interested in its potential. John W. Campbell built the monthly Astounding Science Fiction into the premiere sf magazine, discreetly alternating fiction with technical articles and the occasional outright piece of charlatanism, like Dianetics: A New Science of the Mind, in which L. Ron Hubbard, one of Campbell’s most successful pre-war fiction writers, expounded his pseudoscientific religion, Scientology. Sensing a shift in his readership towards technology, Campbell changed the title in 1960 to Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact and began publishing more thoughtful material, typified by Frank Herbert’s ecological saga Dune. Arnold Spielberg, an Analog fan, piled copies behind the lavatory cistern in the bathroom where he could read them in comfort and privacy.
Broadcast media permeated Spielberg’s childhood. When he was four or five, his father built him a crystal set. He would lie in his room at night, listening through an earpiece – and sometimes, he insists, through his teeth. ‘I remember one day, without the radio, hearing some music and then hearing this voice I was familiar with from the radio. It was the comedy programme Beulah.’
‘There are certain young directors, like Steven Spielberg,’ says film editor Ralph Rosenblum, ‘who were raised in the age of television and seem to have an intuitive sense of film rhythm and film possibilities.’ Spielberg agreed. ‘I did begin by reading comics. I did see too many movies. I did, still do, watch too much television. I feel the lack of having been raised on good literature and the written word.’ As critic David Denby would say later of him and his generation of directors, ‘Cartoons exert a greater influence than literature on his tastes and assumptions.’ For the rest of his life, Spielberg would apologise for lacking the intellectual discipline to deal with print. ‘I don’t like reading. I’m a very slow reader. I have not read for pleasure in many, many years. And that’s sort of a shame. I think I am really part of the Eisenhower generation of television.’
TV had just begun to pervade America. 1952 saw the debut of the prototypical cop series, Dragnet, the celebrity tribute programme This is Your Life, The Jackie Gleason Show, with Gleason as a New York bus driver with delusions of grandeur and Art Carney as his dutiful sewer-worker friend, and Our Miss Brooks, one of many series to give a new career to a Hollywood character performer, in this case Eve Arden as an acerbic unmarried middle-aged schoolteacher.
It was The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, however, which exerted the greatest influence over Spielberg’s generation. Band leader Ozzie Nelson transferred his situation comedy from radio, and with it his real-life family, including son Eric, known as Ricky, whom the series made into a pop star. TV cloned the Nelsons into a multitude, among them the Cleavers of Leave it to Beaver and the white-bread Andersons of Father Knows Best, led by another Hollywood retread, Robert Young, whom Spielberg would find himself directing. As David Halberstam says, the sitcoms celebrated
a wonderfully antiseptic world, of idealised homes in an idealised, unflawed America. There were no economic crises, no class divisions or resentments, no ethnic tensions… Dads were good dads whose worst sin was that they did not know their way around the house or could not find common household objects or that they were prone to give lectures about how much tougher things had been when they were boys… Moms and dads never raised their voices at each other in anger… This was a peaceable kingdom. There were no drugs. Keeping a family car out late at night seemed to be the height of insubordination… Moms and dads never stopped loving one another. Sibling love was always greater than sibling rivalry. No child was favoured, no child was stunted.
The reality was very different. In 1955 teenage pregnancies reached a level unsurpassed even in the nineties, and one in every three marriages ended in divorce.
It was into this real world that Spielberg descended from TV’s fantasies of domestic perfection. Leah and Arnold Spielberg were no Ozzie and Harriet. Leah was frustrated in her musical ambitions, Arnold harassed by the need to keep up in a competitive new industry. ‘He left home at 7 a.m.,’ Spielberg recalled, ‘and sometimes didn’t get home until 9 or 10 p.m. I missed him to the point of resenting him.’ Their children roved the emotional no man’s land between them. ‘[My mother] would have chamber concerts in the living room with her friends who played the viola and the violin and the harp. While that was happening in another room, my father would be conferring with nine or ten men about computers, graphs and charts and oscilloscopes and transistors.’ Sometimes the conflict degenerated into domestic arguments. When these started, the four children huddled together, listening to the marriage fall apart.
Steven learned to tune out the rage and fear. He’d go into his room, close the door and, stuffing towels under it, immerse himself in building model planes from Airfix hobby kits. ‘For many years I had a real Lost Boy attitude about parents,’ he said. ‘Who needs them?’ He carried his defence mechanism into adult life. When an employee of Spielberg’s told Leah she’d quit Amblin Entertainment, Leah laughed and asked, ‘Have you ceased to exist yet?’
‘She knew the deal,’ said the employee. ‘That’s his childlike personality. If you do something a baby doesn’t like, he just shuts you out.’
Television became at once Steven’s educational medium and security blanket. Leah and Arnold didn’t allow him to watch anything as violent as Dragnet, but he absorbed almost everything else, in particular the old movies which were TV’s cheapest and most reliable fodder. For him, as for many of his contemporaries who became directors in the seventies and eighties, TV was his film school.
It gave him a taste for Hollywood films of the thirties, in particular the A-pictures of MGM, which often featured an actor who, to him, was the epitome of fathers, Spencer Tracy. Tracy’s appearance in MGM’s 1937 adaptation of Kipling’s Captains Courageous, about a spoiled rich kid who, falling overboard from an ocean liner, is rescued by a Portuguese fisherman and educated and civilised by him, profoundly affected Spielberg. It, and Tracy, would provide the key to his version of Empire of the Sun, just as another Tracy film, Adam’s Rib, in which Tracy and Katharine Hepburn play married lawyers who represent opposite sides in a domestic violence case, would inspire scenes in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Harrison Ford coaxing kisses from Karen Allen parallels Tracy doing the same with Hepburn.
Spielberg was drawn even more to the fantasies of the period. His parents barred him from horror films – which, in any event, were not extensively programmed at the time – but he saw most of Hollywood’s imaginative classics, including Lost Horizon. The virtuoso first third of Frank Capra’s 1937 film of James Hilton’s novel, with the small group of refugees carried across the roof of the world in a montage of maps, mountainscapes, bantering dialogue, high-plateau refuelling stops and a final spectacular special effects crash, would be replicated in the Indiana Jones movies.
Mobs interested Capra. Nobody was more skilful at orchestrating crowds in motion, cutting between a few significant cameos as detonators to drive a screen filled with people into surging movement, and Spielberg learned his lesson well. He was influenced in particular by It’s a Wonderful Life. Offered by Capra and James Stewart as an affirmation to post-war America of everything it had fought to preserve, the fantasy of a savings and loan manager in rural Bedford Falls who sacrifices everything for his neighbours, only to lose faith, then regain it when an angel reveals the hell his town would have been without his contribution, the film endorsed everything Spielberg most needed to believe in: family, community, suburbia.
Steven’s first memory was a visual one, of being taken to a Hassidic Jewish temple in Cincinnati by his father. Still in his stroller, he stared in wonder as he was rolled down a dark corridor into a room filled with men wearing long beards and black hats. He only had eyes, however, for the blaze of red light flowing from the sanctuary where, in imitation of the biblical Ark of the Covenant, the rolls of the holy torah were kept. The impression was indelible. ‘I’ve always loved what I call “God Lights”,’ he says, ‘shafts coming out of the sky, or out of a spaceship, or coming through a doorway.’ Asked to define the central image of his work, he nominated the scene from Close Encounters where six-year-old Cary Guffey, about to be kidnapped by aliens, stands in the open kitchen door; ‘the little boy… standing in that beautiful yet awful light, just like fire coming through the doorway. And he’s very small, and it’s a very large door, and there’s a lot of promise or danger outside that door.’
The blank TV screen exercised a similar fascination. When Spielberg’s parents went out, they draped the set with a blanket and booby-trapped it with strategically placed hairs to reveal if Steven was viewing surreptitiously. He learned to note the position of the hairs and replace them. Then he would turn on the set and watch it, even if nothing was being transmitted. He was fascinated by the hissing ‘snow’, and the ghosts of faraway stations. Pressing his face to the tube, he would pursue them as they drifted in and out of range.
Sensory overload became Spielberg’s preferred state of mind, and remained so for decades. He functioned best, he told a journalist, in a soup of received impressions: radio and television blaring, record player going, dogs barking, doorbell ringing – all while he answered a telephone call. Directing Hook in 1990, he would sit on the camera crane between shots, playing with a Game Boy and at the same time eavesdropping with earphones on flight controllers at LA International Airport.
As a child, alone in his room, he induced an aesthetic frenzy by a sort of optical masturbation, throwing hand shadows on the ceiling and scaring himself with them. Seeing himself as both artist and medium encouraged a schizophrenic division of personality. Until he was fourteen, he would stare into the mirror for five minutes at a time, hypnotising himself with his own reflection. As an adult, he would reach for a camera at moments of stress and photograph his tearful face in a mirror, the film-maker dispassionately recording the stranger inside him.
Insecurity bred fantasies of domestic disaster. He imagined creatures living under his bed, monsters lurking in the closet, waiting to suck him in. At night, he would lie shivering under the blankets, fancying that the furniture had feet, and that tables and chairs were scuttling about in the dark. ‘There was a crack in the wall by my bed that I stared at all the time,’ he said, ‘imagining little friendly people living in the crack and coming out to talk to me. One day while I was staring at the crack it suddenly widened. It opened about five inches and little pieces fell out of it. I screamed a silent scream. I couldn’t get anything out. I was frozen… I was afraid of trees, clouds, the wind, the dark… I liked being scared. It was very stimulating.’
In 1952 Arnold introduced Steven to two phenomena that fundamentally affected his life.
My dad woke me in the middle of the night and rushed me into our car in my night clothes. I didn’t know what was happening. It was frightening. My mom wasn’t with me. So I thought, ‘What’s happening here?’ He had a thermos of coffee and had brought blankets and we drove for about half an hour. We finally pulled over to the side of the road, and there were a couple of hundred people, lying on their backs in the middle of the night, looking up at the sky. My dad found a place, and we both lay down. He pointed to the sky, and there was a magnificent meteor shower. All these incredible points of light were criss-crossing the sky. It was a phenomenal display, apparently announced in advance by the weather bureau… Years later we got a telescope and I was into stargazing.
To memorialise this incident, Spielberg has incorporated a shooting star in all his films.
The other event of 1952 was his first experience of a movie theatre. Again it was Arnold who took him, after carefully explaining what they were going to see. Not carefully enough, however, since Steven thought Cecil B. DeMille’s film about a circus, The Greatest Show on Earth, was a real circus and not one on film. The circus interested him, since his mother had told him how an uncle had run away with one as a boy; the same uncle, it seems, who had been in the black market, and had hidden contraband watches under the family bed.
DeMille’s film conflated all the fantasies of circus life: the clown, played by James Stewart, whose permanent make-up hides his tragic past as a surgeon; sadistic animal trainer Lyle Bettger; French trapeze artist Cornel Wilde (‘Ze Great Sebastian’); tough boss Charlton Heston, and all-American love interest in the person of raucous blonde Betty Hutton, all culminating in the collision of two trains where Stewart’s long-suppressed skills are called upon.
Arnold told Steven, ‘It’s going to be bigger than you are, but that’s all right. The people in it are going to be up on the screen and they can’t get out at you.’ (This is a common fantasy of suggestible children. Stephen King shared it, and as an adult persuaded his children not to sit too close to the screen by telling them that people who did so fell into the picture and became the extras visible behind the stars.) Spielberg recalls:
So we stood in line for an hour and a half, and we go into this big cavernous hall and there’s nothing but chairs and they’re all facing up, they’re not bleachers, they’re chairs. I was thinking: something is up, something is fishy. So the curtain is open and I expect to see elephants and there’s nothing but a flat piece of white cardboard, a canvas… I retained three things from the experience: the train wreck, the lions and Jimmy Stewart as the clown.
As soon as he had a train set, Spielberg repeatedly recreated the crash, and shadows of DeMille’s cardboard characters drift through many of his films. Indiana Jones has something of Heston, while Betty Hutton is the model for Willie, the shrill nightclub singer heroine of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Above all, DeMille’s showmanship left an indelible impression. ‘I guess ever since then I’ve wanted to try to involve the audience as much as I can,’ said Spielberg, ‘so they no longer think they’re sitting in an audience.’
He continued to find movies, unlike television, emotionally overwhelming. Especially Disney cartoons. At eight, he said, he ‘came screaming home from Snow White…’ – in some interviews he’s eleven, and the film is Bambi – ‘and tried to hide under the covers. My parents didn’t understand it, because Walt Disney movies are not supposed to scare but to delight and enthral. Between Snow White, Fantasia and Bambi, I was a basket case of neurosis.’ Though he was allowed to watch the Wonderful World of Disney TV shows, with their compilations of cartoons and behind-the-scenes documentaries about Disney films in production, his parents tried to keep him away from the feature cartoons. It gave them a glamorous sense of the forbidden they never lost.
One price of Arnold’s job in a sunrise industry like electronics was the occasional moves in search of work or promotion. In 1950 the Spielbergs had relocated in Haddonfield, New Jersey, when he joined RCA. In 1953 he took a job with General Electric in Scottsdale, Arizona, then a dormitory town east of Phoenix, but now a suburb. They were to spend eleven years there. The move wrenched Steven, and instilled his lifelong sense of dislocation and loneliness. ‘Just as I’d become accustomed to a school and a teacher and a best friend,’ he complained, ‘the FOR SALE sign would dig into the front lawn and we’d be packing. And it would always be that inevitable goodbye scene, in the train station or at the carport, packing up the car to drive somewhere, or at the airport. Where all my friends would be there and we’d say goodbye to each other and I would leave. And the older I got the harder it got.’ Among the first phrases he learned to say was ‘looking forward to’. His grandparents would occasionally come from New Jersey to Ohio to visit, and he loved it when his mother said it was something to look forward to.
His mother had been no less anguished. ‘I was hysterical,’ she recalled. ‘I mean, in 1955 what nice Jewish girl moved to Arizona? I looked in an encyclopedia – it was published in 1920, but I didn’t notice at the time – and it said: “Arizona is a barren wasteland.” I went there kicking and screaming. I had to promise Steve a horse, because he didn’t want to go either. I never made good on that promise, and he still reminds me of it today.’ Phoenix, as Jodie Foster was famously to remark in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More, is ‘weird’. Scottsdale, described by one visitor as ‘suburbia on steroids’, itself mixed mass-produced bungalows of the kind in which the Spielbergs lived with sprawling ranch-type houses set in gardens of sand, rock, spiky yucca and twenty-foot-high saguro cactuses. The desert around Scottsdale attracted more than its fair share of visionaries who exploited its open spaces and frontier manners to experiment. Frank Lloyd Wright started building his winter home Taliesin West just north-east of the town in 1937. Despite the discomfort of the fieldstone building, it became a centre for his students from Wisconsin, and after his death in 1959 metamorphosed into an arts centre and museum. One of Wright’s students, Paolo Soleri, chose another spot outside Scottsdale to build Arcosanti, his ‘arcology’, a community of futuristic shell-like buildings integrated into the desert environment.
Spielberg seems never to have visited either Taliesin West or Arcosanti. The visions offered him nothing. He enrolled in Scottsdale’s Arcadia High School but, whatever school meant to him, it wasn’t higher education. He’s always avoided discussing classes or his academic record, which, in common with most of the Movie Brats, was dismal. A survey of America’s twelve most influential media personalities in the nineties found that more than half never finished college. Three of them, including Ted Turner, were dyslexic. Spielberg has always had to struggle with the written word. There are no extant Spielberg letters, no diaries, and he never brings a script on set, preferring to memorise the shots beforehand. ‘He wasn’t a good student,’ Leah says. ‘He was less than mediocre. He needed tutors in French and math.’ Asked to dissect a frog in biology class, he threw up, an incident recycled in E.T. His sole reference to English class is a memory of turning a copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter into a flip book by drawing cartoon characters on the corner of each page.
More important than anything that happened in class were the friendships and alliances of the playground. Like any sensitive child Spielberg loathed new places and people but, once accepted, he embraced them with jealous fervour. The metaphor of the new school remained with him for life. When he encountered George Lucas’s tight team, he found it like changing schools. He felt, he said, as if he’d moved into Lucas’s eighth-grade class.
At Arcadia High School he signed up with the Boy Scouts, and was admitted to its honour society, the Order of the Arrow. He began to study the clarinet too, and to march in the school band. Leah’s preoccupation with her piano prejudiced him against the classical repertoire, and he would never warm to pop or rock. His ideal was movie music, of which he soon had an encyclopaedic recall. Once he began making his own amateur films, he would noodle tunes on his clarinet, but only for Leah to transcribe for piano and record as soundtracks.
Shorn of friends and relations by the move to Arizona, and hungry for acceptance, Spielberg took refuge increasingly in showmanship. ‘I began wanting to make people happy from the beginning of my life. As a kid, I had puppet shows – I wanted people to like my puppet shows when I was eight years old.’ For the rest of his life, displays of virtuoso invention would alternate with attempts to create the suburban contentment for which he envied others.
Physical awkwardness remained his greatest humiliation. In a school footrace, he once found himself second last, only just ahead of an even slower handicapped boy. It was this boy the crowd cheered on, yelling, ‘C’mon, John, you can beat Spielberg!’ With the compulsion to win but also to satisfy the expectations of an audience that became characteristic of him as an adult, Spielberg contrived to trip so that the other boy could pass him. Then, once the other was well ahead, he threw himself into almost catching up, coming in a close last. John was carried off in triumph, while Spielberg, winner and loser at the same time, stood on the field and cried for five minutes. ‘I’d never felt better and I’d never felt worse in my whole life.’
In adulthood, Spielberg’s ideal social and intellectual level remained that of his life as a suburban schoolboy in the late 1950s. George Lucas was to have Luke Skywalker say of provincial Tatooine in Star Wars, ‘If there is a bright centre to the universe, this is the place it is furthest from.’ But for Spielberg, suburbia would always radiate a prelapsarian glow. He came to revere middle-class virtues. Richard Dreyfuss says Spielberg has ‘a love affair with the suburban middle class. I don’t share his fascination, but Steven could do whole movies about block parties if he wanted to.’ If he’d been making All the President’s Men, Spielberg said, he would have concentrated on the White House typists rather than the reporters. His favourite painter was, and remained, Norman Rockwell, whose covers for the Saturday Evening Post showing scenes of gentle whimsy, often set in churches, soda fountains and domestic interiors, exemplified a sunny vision of America as God’s Country.
A later writer was to sum up Rockwell’s style in terms that make clear Spielberg’s affinity for the artist: ‘At his peak, Rockwell reflected an American dream which did not at the time seem ridiculous or unobtainable — the dream of international power, domestic pleasure and civil tranquillity. Rockwell’s arcadia was peopled by clever kids, indulgent grandparents, bourgeois shopkeepers, shy courting couples and pious schoolteachers – all painted in a style which was a strange blend of fairy-tale, cinematic still and comic strip.’ Another critic wrote: ‘To be feeling good at home is the secret and desire of the world Rockwell narrates. “Home” is also his narrative horizon and his project. Having a comfortable, solid, lived-in home, being confident in oneself and one’s values, are everyday and prosaic values which are obvious, lived and shared. It is art for, and about, Joe Sixpack. It plays very well in Peoria.’ Spielberg’s lifelong fascination with Rockwell culminated in him becoming a collector of his works, and a trustee and major financial contributor to the Rockwell Museum.
Unlike the Haddonfield house, which was surrounded by trees, and in particular a large one just outside his window on which Spielberg focused his scarier fantasies, the house in Scottsdale was part of a modern development sprawling over flat semi-desert. Spielberg loved its sense of community, the way one could look into the kitchen windows of the families on either side. ‘You always knew what your neighbours were cooking because you could see them preparing dinner and you could smell it. There were no fences, no problems.’ In the nineties, ensconced in a mansion in Los Angeles’ luxurious suburb of Pacific Palisades, he still felt the same affection. ‘I live in a different kind of suburbia, but it still is. There are houses next door and across the street, and you can walk, and there are street lamps on the street and sidewalks, and it’s very nice.’
The Spielberg household placed a premium on work and hobbies. Leah would invite her musician friends for musical evenings. Steven was encouraged to have pets. He filled his room with eight free-flying parakeets which perched on the curtain rod and left their droppings underneath. He would continue to keep them as an adult, naming them serially, as he had as a child. In the seventies he still had a pair, called Schmuck I and Schmuck II. On holidays, his parents drove as far as the White Mountains and the Grand Canyon, pitching their tent and, particularly in Leah’s case, throwing themselves into serious hiking and nature study. One of Spielberg’s most vivid memories is of his mother on a mountaintop, whirling in ecstasy, and while shooting Raiders in Tunisia he reminisced of scorpion hunts with his father in the Arizona desert.
His first encounter with a movie camera sprang from these camping trips. Leah gave Arnold an 8mm Kodak for Father’s Day. He hosepiped like any amateur until Steven, sensitised by prolonged viewing of movies on TV, became impatient. After being criticised repeatedly by his son for shaky camera movements and bad exposure, Arnold handed over the camera. After that, holidays were never the same. His mother recalled:
My earliest recollection of Steven with a camera was when my husband and I were leaving on vacation and we told him to take a shot of the camper leaving the driveway. He got down on his belly and was aiming at the hubcap. We were exasperated, yelling at him, ‘Come on! We have to leave. Hurry up.’ But he just kept on doing his thing, and when we saw the finished results, he was able to pull back so that this hubcap spinning around became the whole camper – my first glimpse of the Spielbergian touch, and a hint of things to come.
A hundred yards before they arrived, Steven jumped out and filmed them driving through the campsite gate. After that, every part of the trip was recorded. ‘Father Chopping Wood. Mother Digging Latrine. Young Sister Removing Fishhook From Right Eye – my first horror film. And a scary little picture called Bear in the Bushes.’
1959 was a year of significance for Spielberg. References to it riddle his films. It was the year he was bar mitzvahed, only managing to mumble through his ill-memorised extract from the torah with the help of the old men in the front row, who muttered along with him. This was also the year he began actively to resent his father’s obsession with work, and his insistence on precision and order. His father brought home a transistor, and told him, ‘Son, this is the future.’ Spielberg grabbed it and swallowed it.
Detroit’s disastrous attempt at manipulating the American public by designing cars according to theories of subliminal sexual symbolism reached fruition in 1959 with the Ford Edsel. Spielberg used one of these doomed gas-guzzlers with its calculatedly vaginal front grille in his first film, Amblin’. One of the year’s big hits, Jerome Kern’s ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, revived by the black singing group The Platters, provided the theme of Always.
More important, CBS premiered a new half-hour TV series in October. An anthology of quirky science fiction or fantasy stories, each with an ironic trick ending, it was introduced each week, and often written by, its creator, TV writer Rod Serling, already well-known for original dramas like Requiem for a Heavyweight. In his dark suit and with his crooked smile and off-handedly intellectual comments, Serling, like Arnold Spielberg, was an ex-GI with a revisionist view of the America Fit For Heroes To Live In. Through the window of The Twilight Zone, he invited his audience to spy on a puzzling future with more than a hint of threat.
The Twilight Zone influenced not only Spielberg but a whole generation of film directors-in-waiting. Like them, he came running at the sound of Marius Constant’s theme, which he compared to a bugle call drawing one to the TV set. The tune inspired the five-note alien signature of Close Encounters. Spielberg would also attempt, unsuccessfully, to replicate the series, first in a film version, then on TV in the ill-fated Amazing Stories.
The family camera admitted Spielberg to his first real life of the mind. Here his skill was not in doubt. It gave him absolute control of a world. While other kids were involved in a Little League baseball team or in music, he was watching TV and, his phrase, ‘drowning in little home movies’. Once he exhausted the technical possibilities of the little Kodak’s single lens, flip-up viewfinder and thirty-five-second clockwork motor, he persuaded his father to buy a better model with a three-lens turret. Being able to cut from long shot through medium shot to close-up widened his horizons.
Over the years, his versions of his debut in narrative film have varied. Initially, he went off alone during a camping trip and experimented with shooting something other than the family. ‘The first film I ever made was… about an experience in unseen horror, a walk through the forest. The whole thing was a seven-hundred-foot dolly shot and lasted fourteen minutes.’ Story films quickly followed. ‘My first… I made when I was twelve,’ he says, ‘for the Boy Scouts.’ For the Photo Proficiency badge, he had to tell a story in a series of still photographs. Spielberg went one better with a movie, variously remembered as Gun Smoke or The Last Gun. A 3 1/2-minute western about a showdown between homesteaders and a land baron, it cost $8.50, which he raised by whitewashing the trunks of neighbours’ citrus trees at 75c a tree. Fellow Scouts with plastic revolvers played all the characters, and Spielberg persuaded a man with a cigarette to puff into the barrel of a gun so that the film could end on the sheriff’s smoking pistol shoved back into his holster. The Scouts loved his movie, and Spielberg got his badge. ‘In that moment,’ he said, ‘I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.’
The instant gratification of story film influenced Spielberg against abstraction. ‘I think if I had made a different kind of movie, if that film had been maybe a study of raindrops coming out of a gutter and forming a puddle in your back yard, I think if I had shown that film to the Boy Scouts and they had sat there and said, “Wow, that’s really beautiful, really interesting. Look at the patterns in the water. Look at the interesting camera angle” – I mean, if I had done that, I might have been a different kind of film-maker.’
Until then, his record in the Scouts had been as undistinguished as that in high school. He couldn’t cook, was so hamfisted he never learned to tie knots well, and enlivened a demonstration of sharpening an axe by cutting his finger open in front of five hundred Scouts at a summer jamboree. He avoided weekend camps, which robbed him of his only chance to see a UFO; other Scouts returned from a camp in the desert with stories of a strange glow in the sky. But movies made him, if not popular, then at least accepted. He freely acknowledged that his first films were exercises in ingratiation. They gave him, he said, ‘a reason for living after school hours’. The school bully could also be placated by putting him in a film. He rented Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier and War of the Worlds on 8mm, and showed them at 25c a head in the family den. As well, he sold popcorn and soda – an integral part of the film experience for him. The proceeds went to charity. The point, then as later in his career, wasn’t profit but popularity.
Over the next four years he made about fifteen story films. Old enough now to be allowed to see almost anything at his local cinema, the Kiva, he plundered Hollywood for ideas. Some of the lessons of The Great Locomotive Chase, Disney’s version of the Civil War raid on which Buster Keaton had based his classic 1926 comedy The General, were put into effect in Duel, and parts of Henry Levin’s version of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth would be restaged for Raiders of the Lost Ark. One of the first films he saw which was not straight escapism was The Searchers. John Ford’s story of racist loner John Wayne searching for the niece kidnapped by Indians opened his eyes to the poetic possibilities of landscape. ‘I wasn’t raised in a big city,’ Spielberg says. ‘I lived under the sky all through those formative years, from third grade right through high school. That’s my knowledge of a sort of lifestyle.’ Ford, brought up on the imagery of Catholic paintings and ‘holy pictures’, instinctively employed aspects of the natural world as metaphors for mental and moral states. Dust represented dissolution; rivers a sense of peace and cleansing; silhouettes presaged death. Certain landscapes, like Monument Valley, were for him intellectual universes in miniature. Those weathered towers of limestone rising from the desert against a vast sky became the unalterable precepts by which honourable men must live. Spielberg would make his own pilgrimage to them in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, one of many films to exhibit a Fordian vision of the American west.
Frank Capra also returned to the screen in 1959 after eight years in the wilderness to direct A Hole in the Head, though neither it, nor the film that followed, A Pocketful of Miracles, a remake of his 1933 Lady for a Day, in which sentimental gangsters transform an impoverished street-corner apple seller into a socialite so that her daughter can make an advantageous marriage, rivalled Mr Deeds Goes to Town or Mr Smith Goes to Washington.
While his future colleagues in the New Hollywood like Brian De Palma were surrendering to the moral intricacies and multiple deceptions of Alfred Hitchcock or, in the case of Martin Scorsese, relishing the social disquiet behind Sam Fuller’s tabloid cinema and the pastel melodramas of Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray, Spielberg made Ford and Capra his models. Lacking a strong moral structure of his own, he absorbed theirs, populist, sentimental, reverent and patriotic. Never comfortable talking to actors, he adopted their technique too, employing landscape and weather as symbols of character, and developing a fluid camera style and skill in directing masses of people that swept his audiences past fragile narratives and sketchy characters. ‘Film for me is totally pictorial,’ he says. ‘I’m more attracted to doing things with pictures and atmospheres – the idea of the visual telling the story.’
In this state of mind, Spielberg also dabbled in theatre:
I was probably the only student director at Arcadia High School in Arizona who was allowed to control and put together a show. I did Guys and Dolls and brought the action, especially the brawl in the Hot Box, into the audience. I guess that’s kind of commonplace in today’s theatre, but then it was very strange to have people running up and down the aisles singing and acting. I got killed for it! Every critic in Arizona who could write said, ‘How dare he open up the proscenium and do this drivel in the audience. Guys and Dolls is meant to be on stage.’ I did the standards – Arsenic and Old Lace, I Remember Mama – everything you were allowed to do then.
Like many directors destined to work in sf and fantasy, Spielberg discovered the quirky magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. Edited by Forrest J Ackerman, self-styled ‘Mr Sci Fi’, whose Los Angeles home contained the world’s largest collection of sf movie memorabilia, it celebrated horror film and its techniques with jocular reverence.
The wave of cheap science fiction films that was Hollywood’s response to the sf publishing boom washed through American cinemas throughout 1959 and 1960. Spielberg was banned from seeing the 1958 I Married a Monster from Outer Space, a relatively modest and reticent film despite its gaudy title, but went anyway, and was racked by nightmares. In particular he came to admire the work of Jack Arnold, who directed The Incredible Shrinking Man, It Came from Outer Space, The Space Children and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The catchpenny titles disguised thoughtful exercises in imagination and suspense which made evocative use of natural surroundings and domestic interiors. The shrinking man in Richard Matheson’s story, exposed to fallout from an atomic test, dwindles away in an ordinary suburban home; the film’s menaces are a cat and a spider. In It Came from Outer Space, written by Ray Bradbury, aliens arrive outside a small desert township. The man who first makes contact with them, John Putnam, is an archetypal Spielberg character, an unassuming Jeffersonian natural philosopher and amateur astronomer who muses about the nature of the universe and the desert, to both of which he has a gently mystical attitude.
Spielberg shared the general enthusiasm for The Thing (from Another World), a rare example of a major director, Howard Hawks, dealing with an sf subject. The script also had an important pedigree. It was based on a story called ‘Who Goes There?’ written by John W. Campbell before he became editor of Analog. Like most of Campbell’s work, it is refreshingly iconoclastic. A crashed alien ravages an Arctic research station, smashing down the scientist who tries to befriend it. It’s left to a few tough professional airmen to kill it off and save the world. At the end, a reporter broadcasts the story, warning his listeners, ‘Watch the skies. Keep watching the skies.’
For all the film’s flair, however, Hawks’s right-wing paranoia always jarred. It’s to Arnold’s films (and Bradbury’s script for Outer Space) that much of Spielberg’s later work is traceable. After Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released, Spielberg asked Bradbury, ‘Well, how did you like your film?’ and explained he’d been inspired by It Came from Outer Space. Bradbury and Arnold’s idea, that alien visitors may be benign, and concerned mainly to return home as quickly and quietly as possible, would surface in both Close Encounters and E.T. The fathers of the ‘space children’ who discover an alien in a beachside Californian cave work on a nearby scientific project and share the dislocated life Spielberg knew well, and which he evoked in The Goonies. And while the Black Lagoon may only have been in a corner of the Universal backlot lake, the underwater footage shot in the crystal springs of a Florida park played so effectively on the sense of ‘something’ lurking below us where we swim that the aquaphobic Spielberg paid it homage in the opening scenes of Jaws.
From the start, it wasn’t the atmosphere of fantasy films Spielberg enjoyed so much as their depiction of alternative realities through model work, special effects and elaborate make-up. His sisters, resented because of the attention they drew from his mother, and thus away from him, became victims of his exercises in imagination. He would scare them by building his face into a horror mask with papier mâché made from wet green toilet paper, or would lurk outside the window of Anne, the youngest, and groan ‘I am the moooooon’ until she became hysterical. He convinced them that the bedroom closet hid the decomposing body of a World War II airman, then left it to their curiosity to peek in at the plastic skull he’d hidden there, with goggles over the eyes and a flashlight inside. After they had been terrified by William Cameron Menzies’ Invaders from Mars, which featured the disembodied head of the Martian super-mind, played by an actress with green-painted face, fringed with tentacles, in a glass bubble, he locked them in the closet, this time with an empty fishbowl within which, he said, the head would materialise. All these domestic horrors and more would be recycled in Poltergeist.
War films could be just as interesting as science fiction, providing there were elaborate uniforms, and plenty of buildings were blown up. Firms like Castle Films sold World War II documentaries on 8mm, and Spielberg used some of these as stock footage for a flying story called Fighter Squadron. Arnold persuaded Skyharbor airport in Phoenix to let Steven shoot a friend in the cockpit of a P-51. In 1960, inspired by his father’s purchase of a war-surplus Jeep, Spielberg made the forty-minute Escape to Nowhere, about a World War II American platoon evading a Nazi army in the Libyan desert. He found a few fake German helmets, put them on friends and had them walk slowly past the camera, passing the helmets back down the line so that it looked like an army. Leah drove the Jeep and created uniforms in Wehrmacht grey in which Steven costumed his sisters and friends, who were then machine-gunned and forced repeatedly to roll down a hill in the desert which stood in for North Africa.
‘There was always a camera in his hands,’ Leah says. ‘Once he took a big cardboard carton from the supermarket and cut windows and doors and took it in the back alley and set it on fire to film it. When we saw it, it looked like a real building burning. These are things that in retrospect you try to figure out, but at the time it just seemed normal. He was my first child, and having no prior experience I thought all kids played like that.’
Escape to Nowhere won a prize at the Canyon Film Festival – a 16mm camera. Knowing he couldn’t afford 16mm film processing, Spielberg traded it for a more sophisticated H8 8mm Bolex. At the same time, with a little help from his father, he got a Bolex Sonorizer, with which he could put a soundtrack on his magnetically striped film.
He began to have friends, nerds like himself with over-active imaginations. During the run of the dinosaur film The Lost World in 1960, he and friends mixed white bread, Parmesan cheese, milk, creamed corn and peas in a paper bag and smuggled it into the Kiva. Then they made vomiting sounds and dripped the mixture from the balcony. It started a chain reaction of vomiting. The film was stopped and the lights went up as the malefactors escaped down the fire stairs.
Other attempts at sophistication didn’t work. ‘I’ll never forget the time I discovered girls,’ he says. ‘I was in the fifth grade. My father took me to a drive-in movie with a little girlfriend of mine. This girl had her head on my arm, and the next day my parents lectured me about being promiscuous at an early age. My growing up was like a sitcom ABC buys for a season before they drop it.’ Never passion’s plaything, except where movies were concerned, Spielberg would have a chequered emotional life that headed inexorably towards a marriage Ozzie and Harriet Nelson would have envied.
By the early sixties, Arnold and Leah’s marriage was failing. Spielberg recalled Arnold storming out of the house, shouting, ‘I’m not the head of the family, yet I am the man of the family’ – a line he would recycle in Duel. Steven fled from the cold silences of the house to the cinema’s warmth. In 1962, he saw the film that was to inspire him above all others. David Lean had spent years in the desert making Lawrence of Arabia, a truly epic picture of a larger-than-life historical character whose acts were mirrored and amplified by the landscapes in which they took place. Robert Bolt’s dialogue was minimal – indeed minimalist; aphorisms, orders, insults, seldom more than a sentence long. This was Ford crossed with Capra, but mediated by Lean. For the rest of his life, Spielberg would rate Lawrence as the one true classic of his early film-going. ‘I really kicked into high gear,’ he said of seeing it, ‘and thought, “This I gotta do. I gotta make movies.”’
Single-minded as ever, Spielberg set out to make his first feature, a science fiction adventure called Firelight. He wrote the first draft of the script in a night; the story of scientists who, investigating lights in space, provoke an alien invasion during which the visitors steal an entire city from earth and reassemble it on another planet.
Every weekend for a year, Spielberg worked on the film with anyone he could cajole or bully into helping. No girl, no football games, no summer jobs diverted him. His enthusiasm and persistence were infectious. When he needed someone exploded in the living room, Leah opened cans of cherries and stood by as her son balanced them on one end of a board and had someone jump on the other. She never got the stains off the furniture. Once again the airport closed a runway for him. A local hospital where he had worked as a volunteer in his holidays lent its corridors for a shot, though Spielberg found the experience disconcerting. ‘I saw things that were so horrifying that I had to fantasise that there were lights, props, make-up men, just to avoid vomiting.’
Once he was finished, Spielberg edited the film to 140 minutes. Actors had come and gone over the year, but he persuaded students at the nearby University of Arizona to post-synchronise the speaking parts as he ran the film on a sheet stretched over one end of the den. The Arcadia school band recorded some music for it.
The result, though he now deprecates it as ‘one of the five worst films ever made’, was good enough to screen for an audience. He persuaded his father, who had already invested $300 in the project, to gamble another $400 for the hire of a local cinema. Spielberg rented a limousine to bring him to the theatre with Leah, who had cudgelled enough friends, relatives of the actors, ex-Boy Scouts and local film fans to fill the seats. Most stayed to the end, and Arnold pocketed $100 profit.
Spielberg’s entry into the cinema was also his exit from childhood and Phoenix. Arnold had decided on another move, this time to join IBM at Saratoga, ten miles from San Jose, near San Francisco. Almost immediately, they packed up, and set out for California.
3 Amblin’ Towards Bethlehem (#ulink_bdee857d-7dec-54a7-8a0d-7a103a27d5af)
Show business is high school plus money.
Hollywood saying
AFTER THE parched landscape of Arizona, Spielberg loved the hills and vineyards of Saratoga. But this move finally wrecked the rickety marriage of Leah and Arnold Spielberg. Arnold had barely finished sketching a design for the house he hoped to build when the couple separated. Leah returned to Phoenix and started divorce proceedings. The separation wrenched Steven, who developed insecurities about marriage and a sense of loss that would be reflected in his films, which are filled with sons seeking fathers and children deprived of their families.
Saratoga also exposed him to anti-Semitism for the first time. Unlike her parents, Leah hadn’t kept a devout household. Spielberg called their style of Judaism ‘storefront Kosher’. When the rabbi called, the mezuzah was put on the door frame and the menorah on the mantel, and removed after he left. Spielberg understood vaguely that his mother’s family fled from Odessa to escape pogroms. His first memory of numbers is of a man, one of a group his grandmother was tutoring in English, trying to entertain him by displaying his concentration camp tattoo, and illustrating by turning his arm to show how 6 upside-down became 9.
As a boy, Spielberg was embarrassed by his heritage. ‘My grandfather would come to the porch when I was playing football with my friends and call out my name in Hebrew. “Schmeul! Schmeul! Dinner’s ready.” They would say, “Isn’t that your place? Who’s this Shmoo?” I’d say, “I don’t know. It’s not me he’s calling.”’ To anyone who asked, his name was German. He resisted the pressure from his grandmother to conform to what he called ‘the Orthodox mould’, but at the same time the religion’s emphasis on family values fed his need to belong. As an adult, he became a classic Jewish father – and, sometimes, mother. Though no enthusiast for cooking, he would prepare Leah’s recipes at home, and occasionally get up early on location to make matzoh for 150 people, an almost sacramental act that reaffirmed the production unit as his surrogate family.
The America in which Spielberg grew up accepted racial discrimination as a fact of life. Medical and law schools operated quotas for Jewish students, and colleges had Jewish fraternities. One still occasionally encountered a discreet ‘Christian Only’ in ‘Positions Vacant’ ads. Many golf clubs operated a racial ban. Realtors wouldn’t sell houses in certain districts to Jewish families. ‘Neighbourhoods for [a Jew],’ wrote William Manchester, ‘like his summer camps and winter cruises, would advertise “Dietary rules strictly enforced.”’
In Phoenix, even as one of only five Jewish children in his school, Spielberg hadn’t stood out, but Saratoga was actively anti-Semitic. Pennies were tossed at him in study hall, and he was mocked so much in gym that he gave up sports altogether; admittedly no great sacrifice for him. The Spielberg house, the only one not to display lights at Christmas, was just a walk away from the school, but after he’d been bullied on the way home, Steven insisted Leah pick him up each day. Once, in fury at the slurs of a neighbouring family, he smeared their windows with peanut butter. Explaining his decision to film Alice Walker’s book The Color Purple, rather than choosing a black director, he would say, ‘I felt I was qualified because of my own kind of cultural Armageddon, even though as a child I exaggerated the pain – as all children will do – and I became the only person discriminated against in history as a child.’
Because of this discrimination, but from a lack of academic interest as well, Spielberg’s grades, never high, sagged still further in Saratoga. When he graduated from high school with a dismal C average, it was in the knowledge that no major college would accept him. And not being in college meant that he was eligible for the draft. ‘I would have done anything to stay out of Vietnam,’ he said. But this wish dovetailed so neatly with his ambition to become a film director, ideally before he was twenty-one, that they soon fused in his mind.
The moment the 1963 summer vacation commenced, Steven persuaded Arnold to let him spend it with an uncle in Canoga Park, a suburb of Los Angeles. His uncle lent him his 1957 Plymouth convertible, but only on the understanding he stayed in the slow lane, going no faster than forty-five m.p.h. Since the speed limit in the fast lane in those days was sixty-five, other cars rocketed by, but Spielberg didn’t care. He was in heaven. Disneyland had opened in 1955, and he made the first of many long drives to the suburb of Anaheim where Walt Disney had built his fantasy world.
Los Angeles, a horizontal city defined by freeways, opened Spielberg’s eyes to linear motion. The boy who was uncomfortable with the written word discovered in movement a handwriting he could read and in which he could, he sensed, become fluent. ‘Looking at most modern cities involves seeing a lot of buildings,’ writes the architectural historian Charles Moore. ‘Looking at Los Angeles involves experiencing a lot of rides… Even the strictly architectural sights of Los Angeles are experienced more than seen, often in carefully controlled time… They are theatre as much as architecture.’ The concept of the ride became central to Spielberg’s cinematic vision. He designed rides for Disneyland and the Universal Studios tour, and in 1994 an LA journalist writing of the Dive! ‘total experience’ restaurants he opened with Jeffrey Katzenberg would comment that Spielberg ‘does not so much create movies as he assembles theme-park rides in the shape of movies’.
There are no good years to enter the film industry, but 1963 was worse than many. Hollywood was drastically reorganising. Since just after World War I, it had been dominated by the major studios: MGM, Paramount, Twentieth Century-Fox, Columbia, Universal and United Artists. However, the Federal Justice Department had decided that companies which controlled every step in the production of film, from conception to marketing, were in restraint of free trade, and forced the studios to shed their theatres, and open production to independent film-makers.
Shorn of the power to control production and distribution, the studios re-inserted themselves into the equation in a different role, lending the independents money, renting them office and production space, and organising promotion and distribution. The charges they levied for their help were often extortionate. Spielberg’s fees for Jaws and his percentage of its profits, known in the trade as ‘points’, would give him a personal fortune in the millions, but it was Universal and Columbia who really profited. Of Star Wars’ $200 million US domestic income, George Lucas would complain that he personally received, after taxes, less than $20 million.
Even by milking the film-makers, however, the studios still could not defeat television. Throughout the fifties and early sixties, desperate for novelties to win back their audience, they exhumed and relaunched all the technical improvements which had been developed over the previous half century but abandoned for lack of investment or interest: 70mm, CinemaScope, 3-D, VistaVision, even Aromarama, smellovision, and the tricks popularised by William Castle; seats wired with electric buzzers and plastic skeletons falling from the ceiling.
None slowed the inexorable trend towards home entertainment at the expense of the cinema experience. Many studios saw this as the writing on the wall, and hurried to cut their losses. The accumulated movies of fifty years were sold off to TV. Everywhere, backlots were bulldozed and the land redeveloped for office buildings. By the end of the sixties, MGM and Twentieth Century-Fox, rather than retain large warehouses of costumes and props and the staff to service them, would sell everything at auction: Garbo’s gowns, Judy Garland’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, Charles Foster Kane’s Rosebud sled from Citizen Kane – the patrimony of Spielberg’s dreams, fragments of which he would later pay a fortune to retrieve.
Some of the most attractive real estate in greater Los Angeles belonged to Universal Studios. Its 374-acre studio and backlot was the first thing a visitor saw as he topped the Cahuenga Pass out of Los Angeles and slid onto the wide flat floor of the San Fernando Valley, the dormitory suburb of greater LA. Universal’s chairman, Lew Wasserman, was a cunning and stubborn negotiator with a reputation for seeing further than many. As head of the MCA talent agency he’d pioneered package and profit-sharing deals under which stars deferred salary in favour of a share of income. The first such deal he negotiated, for James Stewart, made the actor a multi-millionaire. MCA had bought Universal Studios to guarantee work to its clients and a supply of television product to the networks and advertising agencies with which it enjoyed production deals. In 1962, however, forced by the Justice Department to decide whether it was an agency or a film producer, MCA shed the former and went into film-making full time.
To mark his territory, Wasserman commissioned an office block from the prestigious Chicago firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, an opaque stub of anodised aluminium and black glass. Inside, according to rumour, the dividing walls were movable. An executive in disfavour might arrive one morning to find his office subtly more cramped than when he left the night before.
From his seventeenth-floor executive suite, Wasserman squinted out over his fiefdom, and wondered how to make money with it. From high on the hill, the half-scale Gothic mansion from Hitchcock’s Psycho looked down on the plaster-and-lath sets where Lon Chaney Snr made his version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and his son Lon Jr The Wolf Man. The Invisible Man, Frankenstein and Dracula sprang from here, as did their multitudes of sequels. Jack Arnold’s films were shot on these sets and stages too. In the sixties, Ernest Borgnine and the crew were making the TV series McHale’s Navy on the black lagoon from which the creature had crawled. Interiors for Wagon Train and The Virginian were being shot on sets where Boris Karloff had once worked. Most of Universal’s income, however, was generated by a few blocks of bland shopfronts that provided a setting for modern cop shows and spy stories. Meanwhile, run-off from the hills was undermining the older sets, some of which were already collapsing.
One cost-cutting option that didn’t exist was firing people. The film production and craft unions, IATSE, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, and NABET, the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, aided by Jimmy Hoffa’s corrupt Teamsters, enjoyed near-omnipotent power. ‘Feather-bedding’ was rife. Once you were in, you were in for life – and beyond, if, like many, you apprenticed your sons. In the same way, a handful of executives circulating from studio to studio dominated management. ‘Affirmative action for family members,’ acknowledged the Los Angeles Times, ‘is an accepted practice in a town where everyone seems to be related to everyone else… A solid education and good grades are not necessarily relevant or even desirable and are considered much less valuable than the kind of insider’s knowledge acquired at the dinner table night after night.’ As Hollywood had joked when David Selznick married the daughter of MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, ‘the son-in-law also rises.’
In the thirties, under its founder Carl Laemmle, Universal had been notorious for nepotism. His son, known simply as ‘Junior’, ran production, and the payroll groaned with cousins. ‘Uncle Carl Laemmle,’ ran the crack, ‘has a very large faemmle.’ In reaction, the company promulgated an anti-nepotism rule in the forties, with jobs allocated by merit and experience. But this soon hardened into a rigid roster system, with pay hikes and other benefits graded according to length of service. Walking off a film meant you lost seniority, so productions at Universal always went ahead, no matter how inept the director or crew. Despite its large complement of staff technicians, most producers preferred to hire contract crews for anything being made to a deadline.
In 1963, the MCA board was pressing Wasserman for a decision about whether or not to follow a consultant’s advice and sell the backlot for hotels and condos, and lawyer Albert Dorskind was put in charge of assessing offers. Dorskind saved the studio. Shopping downtown one day in Farmers’ Market, the ramshackle complex of fruit and vegetable stalls and quick-lunch counters at Fairfax and Third Street, on the fringe of Hollywood, Dorskind noticed a Gray Line bus disgorging tourists. Remembering that Universal’s restaurant was losing $100,000 a year, he rang Gray Line and suggested they put Universal on their itinerary. Visitors could even lunch in the commissary – Eat With the Stars! And it would only cost Gray Line $1 a head, over and above what people ate. Gray Line jumped at it. The restaurant manager upped his prices by 20 per cent, and the commissary was soon in profit.
Spielberg stepped out of the Gray Line bus onto Universal’s hallowed ground in June 1963 with the awe of a zealot entering Jerusalem. He hid until the bus left, then spent the rest of the afternoon poking around, even walking onto sound stages where TV episodes were being shot. He found his way to the cutting rooms, where editor Tony Martinelli was working on episodes of Wagon Train. Spielberg asked questions. Flattered, and glad of a diversion, Martinelli and the other editors were happy to reply. He told them he’d made some movies, and asked if they would take a look at them. One said, ‘Bring ’em in, kid.’ Dazzled, Spielberg found a phone and called his cousin to pick him up. The next day he was back with Firelight and his 8mm films. Almost every day for the rest of his vacation he dressed in his one suit and, carrying an empty briefcase, drove to Universal. At the gate, the guard, assuming he was just another nephew with a summer job at the studio, waved him through.
Elsewhere in Los Angeles, the people who were to become Spielberg’s contemporaries in New Hollywood were gathering. Some almost didn’t make it. In June 1962, George Lucas, having graduated – barely – from high school in Modesto, took his Fiat Bianchina for a drive, and wrapped it round a tree. He nearly died. Others already had movie jobs. Francis Ford Coppola was writing screenplays while working as dogsbody for Hollywood’s cheapest producer, Roger Corman, and moonlighting as a director of soft-core porn. But the majority, like Spielberg, were just out of high school and wondering how to get in. Lucas, once he recovered, tried the accepted way, visiting every film production company on Ventura Boulevard, the ribbon development of low-rent two-storey office buildings and storefronts that wove along the periphery of the San Fernando Valley. He got nowhere.
Entering the business through a film school was still a novel concept. Cinema remained, in Hollywood at least, a business, not an art. Nobody anticipated the flood of film students attracted by the French New Wave, Britain’s Free Cinema documentary movement, or the underground films that were boiling out of New York and San Francisco.
After his accident, Lucas spent two more years in Modesto Junior College improving his grades, and was accepted by the University of Southern California’s film programme, the nation’s oldest. It helped that his father was moderately well-off. USC’s location on the edge of the unfashionable and dangerous downtown area belied the fact that it was a private university with high fees, whereas the plush UCLA, headquartered in well-barbered Westwood, had state funding. Despite its funky appearance, however, USC was, as one writer put it,
a citadel of privilege. Its graduates in public administration governed Los Angeles. Its doctors and technicians governed the medical establishment. The student body – overwhelmingly white and upper-middle-class – was largely immune to the social turmoil of the sixties. The school newspaper admitted that the ‘high cost of a USC education seems to screen out almost all Negroes. The notable exceptions to this rule are athletes admitted on scholarship.’ [in 1967, one of the black juniors on a football scholarship was O.J. Simpson.]
USC’s film programme didn’t rate the attention or investment of its medical or law school, let alone the football team. Its fifty students were mostly kids from second- or third-generation industry families, picking up the rudiments of sound recording or camera operation before they took the place awaiting them in the hierarchical studio system. They studied in classrooms built from World War I surplus lumber, and cut their films side by side on twenty-five ancient Moviolas in a graffiti-spattered room. The university guaranteed each student the funds and equipment to make a fifteen-minute film, but learning how to do it was mostly up to them. The faculty included a few good people, like Verna Fields, who been sound editor for Fritz Lang and taught courses when she wasn’t working on films like Anthony Mann’s El Cid. But she was in the minority.
Spielberg knew none of these people until much later. After the summer of 1963, he returned to Saratoga and high school. In vacations, he made lengthy forays to Los Angeles. Unwittingly, he followed George Lucas’s route along Ventura Boulevard, trying to find someone to look at his films. Everywhere, weary producers of promotional documentaries spurned them like the plague. One did agree to screen some of Firelight. ‘I gave him two of the best reels,’ says Spielberg. ‘I came back a week later and he was fired. Gone! His office was cleared out and now there’s a Toyota dealership where the office used to be… So part of Firelight still exists, but all the exposition is gone.’
In 1964, the decision about his immediate future was made for him. He was waiting in line at a San Jose cinema to see Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb when his sister and father drove up with an envelope. It was his Selective Service notice, confirming that, lacking a student exemption, he had been graded 1-A – prime cannon-fodder. He still went to the film, though he didn’t enjoy it, not knowing whether to laugh or be frightened. ‘I was so consumed with the possibility of going to Vietnam that I had to see it for a second time to really appreciate it.’ Wars came and went, but Kubrick was eternal.
College seemed the only feasible option. USC turned him down, and there was no money to send him through junior college to raise his grades, so the family chose academically indifferent California State College at Long Beach.
A half-hour drive from Hollywood across the industrial and suburban sprawl of Los Angeles, Long Beach hardly seemed Californian. The suburb’s untidy bungalows huddling along a nondescript coastline had a lacklustre, countryfied feel that reminded Spielberg of Arizona. For years, Long Beach hosted the Iowa State Picnic, attracting 150,000 midwesterners eager for a look at the Pacific. In an attempt to attract tourists and raise the tax base, the county allowed oil companies to sink wells on artificial islands just a few yards offshore, hiding the rigs inside fake apartment buildings. Entrepreneurs also moored the superannuated liner Queen Mary as a floating convention centre, and installed next to it Howard Hughes’s gigantic and almost unairworthy ‘Spruce Goose’ flying boat.
Spielberg was as indifferent to the gimcrack atmosphere of Long Beach as he was to his college education. If the draft had ended earlier, he admitted, he probably wouldn’t have gone to college at all. As it was, his three years at Long Beach created scarcely a ripple in his life. Since it had no film courses, the man who had turned The Scarlet Letter into a flip book majored in English. He worked in the cafeteria to earn pocket money, and projected classroom films. If he squeezed all his classes into two days a week, he could spend the rest of the time in Los Angeles.
What film education he gained was in Hollywood’s rerun and repertory cinemas like the NuArt and the Vagabond. ‘Anything not American impressed me,’ he said. ‘I went through a phase of seeing Ingmar Bergman films. I must have seen every Bergman movie ever made, because that’s what they were showing at that theatre. The next week, you’d see Buñuel movies.’ Hurriedly he added, ‘Not very many.’ Buñuel’s ragged technique, quirky plots and rigorous Catholicism baffled him. He preferred Jacques Tati, France’s master of the sight gag, whose films had no dialogue.
When he could scrape up enough money, he hired a 16mm camera and shot a film. He made five during the Long Beach years, a few of which experimented with abstraction. ‘I did a picture about dreams – how disjointed they are. I made one about what happens to rain when it hits dust.’ Another was ‘about a man being chased by someone trying to kill him. But running becomes such a spiritual pleasure for him that he forgets who is after him.’ Shooting these shorts kept his hand in, but the films were arid. He was, he knew already, a ‘concept’ director who made films from the general to the particular. What he needed was a big story, and the resources to deal with it as it deserved.
Spielberg’s contacts at Universal continued to be the most promising route to a career, and he spent as much time at the studio as he could. To raise a little money, Wasserman rented office space to independent producers. Spielberg tracked some of them down in remote corners or in the two-storey cinder-block buildings, mostly ex-warehouses, that huddled like mushrooms outside the studio perimeter. A few were glad to see him. All of them had advice. None offered him a job.
After the profitable public tours had been running for a year, Wasserman, sensing a money-maker, invested $4 million in turning the Universal City Tour into a studio enterprise. Restrooms and concession stands were installed, and special rubber-tyred trams designed. On 4 July 1964 the tour was officially inaugurated. Students acted as guides. Among the earliest was a young man from Encino named Mike Ovitz with a sleepy, catlike smile. Thirty years later, he would be offered the running of the studio.
If only Spielberg had known it, he already possessed an advantage that would give him the inside track in Hollywood. Being Jewish meant he was born into the culture and ethos prevailing in sixties Hollywood. Had he been part of an industry family, he would have found work instantly. Instead, he was forced to prowl Universal, looking for a connection, a sponsor, a patron.
Chuck Silver (whom Spielberg has identified as head of the editing department, but whom Sidney Sheinberg remembers as the film librarian) spotted him in the corridor and asked who he was. As a young man, he stood out: other than the student guides, the only people under forty on the lot were actors, and he obviously couldn’t be one of those. Tickled by Spielberg’s tale of bluffing his way in, Silver wrote him a pass, and tried to introduce him to some executives, but the few that did agree to see him recoiled when he arrived with his little 8mm projector and started taking down their diplomas to make space on the wall for an impromptu screening. He learned quickly that he was competing with UCLA graduates who, thanks to Uncle Irving who ran the camera department at Warner Brothers, could boast 35mm show reels of professional quality.
Bolder now, he wandered onto sets to watch directors at work, and was thrown off Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain and Franklin Schaffner’s The War Lord. He had a revenge of sorts when the studio’s head sound mixer, Ronnie Pierce, let him sit in on the soundtrack recording of Torn Curtain, and of lesser films like the Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedy Send Me No Flowers.
TV directors weren’t as fastidious as Hitchcock about visitors, and Spielberg had no trouble crashing the set of Robert Ellis Miller, who was directing a 1964 episode of Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater with John Cassavetes.
Noticing the pimply boy in the shadows, however, Cassavetes introduced himself. As they chatted, he asked Spielberg, ‘What do you want to do?’
‘I want to be a director.’
Cassavetes chewed this over. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘After every take, you tell me what I’m doing wrong.’
The next time Miller called ‘Cut!’ the actor walked up to Spielberg. ‘What do you think? How can I improve it? What am I doing wrong?’
Spielberg equivocated. ‘Gah, it’s too embarrassing right here, Mr Cassavetes. Don’t ask me in front of everybody; can’t we go round the corner and talk?’
But Cassavetes insisted. He probably enjoyed lighting a fire under Miller, a minor talent even by Universal standards, but Spielberg learned a valuable lesson. As François Truffaut said, ‘a director is someone who answers questions.’ If you came on a movie set, you had better know how to deal with anything that arose. Over the next few years, Spielberg made it his business to become expert in every aspect of film-making technique. Nobody would ever again ask him a question he couldn’t answer.
The years between 1966 and 1969 are among the poorest-documented of Spielberg’s career, and he has made sure they remain so. There is no consistency to the chronology he quotes in interviews. Projects which obviously occupied his time and energy for long periods are passed over in a sentence. The vagueness reflects his disillusion with Hollywood and the sense that he would never achieve his aim of directing before he was twenty-one.
He made few friends while at Long Beach, though one, Carl Gottlieb, would go on to co-write the script of Jaws. Another was a personable young actor named Tony Bill, who’d had a small role in Coppola’s You’re a Big Boy Now and was getting a reputation as a comedy lead. His ambitions, however, lay in production. He and Spielberg started work on a film called ‘Slipstream’, about a cycle race, but it was never finished. The cameraman, Serge Haigner, was assisted by a young man named Allen Daviau, someone else who would figure in Spielberg’s career. John Cassavetes also gave Spielberg a few weeks’ work as gofer on his film Faces.
After bluffing his way into Universal, getting into USC was easy, if not as a student, then simply to crash evening screenings and hang out. At a retrospective of USC graduate films, Spielberg got to know the more social of the film students. Not, however, George Lucas, who, secretly terrified that people might think him gauche and naive, said little or nothing to anybody, and concentrated on making movies.
Spielberg’s first friends there were Hal Barwood and his writing partner Matthew Robbins, from UCLA. They would write The Sugarland Express and go on to directorial careers, while continuing to act as his script doctors; until the early eighties, Spielberg seldom made a film without their input. He met Randal Kleiser, later director of Grease and The Blue Lagoon, Caleb Deschanel, lighting cameraman on The Right Stuff and director of The Escape Artist, Walter Murch, editor of Julia and Apocalypse Now, Howard Kazanjian, destined to be producer on Raiders and many other Lucas films, John Carpenter, director of Halloween and The Fog, composer Basil Poledouris, of Conan the Barbarian and Big Wednesday, and David S. Ward, writer of The Sting and director of Cannery Row.
Most important of all, he became friendly with John Milius. Massive, bearded and irascible, a war lover, surfing buff and gun freak – when he became a director, Milius demanded as part of his deal that the studio buy him a rare firearm of his choice – Milius, Hollywood’s self-styled resident expert on legendary Americans, was the group’s renegade, indispensable to its sense of community. When the college fired him for punching a professor, the others went on strike until he was reinstated. Milius and Robbins became like older cousins to Spielberg; people to whom he could turn in an emergency, and on whom he could rely for useful, if sometimes undiplomatically phrased, advice. Quietly, Spielberg was rebuilding the family he’d lost when his parents broke up.
In the summer of 1967, Spielberg decided to take the law into his own hands. By now he was well known around Universal, so he simply began to act as if he worked there. Quizzed later, Scotty, the studio guard who waved him through every day, admitted he took him for Lew Wasserman’s son.
Independent producers came and went all the time, and there were always vacant offices in the warren at the back of the studio. Spielberg found an empty room, introduced himself to the women at the main switchboard, and told them what extension he was on. With plastic letters from a camera store, the sort used to title home movies, he listed himself on the main directory: Steven Spielberg, starring in his own production of his career.
Spielberg is vague about the amount of time he hung out at Universal. It might have been two years, or six months, or even three months. Sometimes he’s seventeen, at other times twenty-one. The vagueness reflects his disillusion with Hollywood and his sense that he would never achieve his aim of directing before he was twenty-one. When it became obvious that he would not achieve this goal, fantasy took over.
Around this time, it became generally believed that Spielberg was born not in 1946 but in 1947. Undoubtedly he himself was responsible for this error, and its persistence. His driver’s licence bore, and continued to bear, the date of birth 1947, as did his voter registration. In January 1981 a Los Angeles Times journalist noticed the discrepancy, and repeatedly tried to get a reaction from Spielberg’s publicist, but without success. In January 1988, shortly after what had apparently been his fortieth birthday, the New York Times and many other papers would publish articles on ‘Spielberg at Forty’. No attempt was made by Spielberg or Amblin to correct them. Finally confronted with the disparity in 1995, Marvin Levy, Spielberg’s spokesman on publicity, told the Los Angeles Times, ‘I’m sure there’s an answer. Maybe he didn’t care what people said about his age. He cares about one thing: making films.’ The inference is inescapable, however, that Spielberg put back his birthday so as to maintain the illusion that he might still make his first film before he was twenty-one.
As for the usefulness of his time at Universal, Spielberg admits, ‘I never made any deals, but I used the phone a lot (to call up the time) and learned how to play the game. I got fed up with the joint though, and left, and went to Long Beach College and made a short called Amblin’.’
The short-film route to a job in movies was a traditional one in the sixties. Some cinemas still showed a ‘full supporting programme’, and there were plenty of festivals interested in good new work. George Lucas had just made Filmmaker, a thirty-minute documentary about Francis Coppola shooting The Rain People. Noel Black had won his first feature with a short called Skater Dater, a teenage romance with skateboards shot in San Francisco.
Spielberg now understood enough of Hollywood to realise that only a 35mm film carried conviction. Fortunately, he says, ‘I met someone who was as enthusiastic to make movies as I was. The difference was that he was a millionaire, Dennis Hoffman. He had a [special effects] optical company. He saw some of my 8mm and 16mm films and said he’d give me $10,000 – which to me was a bloody fortune – to make a short film, but he wanted the possessory credit. That means the films said “Dennis Hoffman’s Amblin’”. I said, “Fine.” I took the money and made the film in 35mm. 1.85:1 ratio [of wide screen used by all professional cinemas]. The big time for me!’
Later Hoffman, who diversified out of the lab business into a chain called Designer Donuts, the investors in which included Spielberg, would claim that their 1968 contract covered not only Amblin’ but a feature, to be directed for Hoffman during the next ten years. The deal was one that would come back to haunt Spielberg.
Amblin’ is a twenty-four-minute story of a young couple who meet in the Mojave desert and hitchhike to the Californian coast. Amateurs Pamela McMyler and Richard Levin played the lovers. Allen Daviau shot it, delighted to be working in 35mm after long periods of documentaries. The landscape was beautiful, the cars sleek, the lovers – who had no dialogue – affectingly clean-cut and attractive. A brief love scene and a shared joint gave the film a trendy modernism. Spielberg, however, was under no illusions about the worth of Amblin’. It had only one function: to demonstrate his and Daviau’s grasp of cinema technique and their ability to make a slick Hollywood product. He called it ‘a Pepsi commercial’, and joked that it had the empty decorative appeal of a piece of driftwood.
Hoffman was delighted, however, and in 1969 entered Amblin’ in the second Atlanta Film Festival, where it won an award. Convinced that his career as a producer was assured, he threw what Spielberg remembers as ‘an inflated premiere… to all the execs in Los Angeles. Or rather, he invited all the execs, but no one came.’ Fortunately, a few ‘lower-echelon studio people’ saw the film. One was Chuck Silver, who took a copy to show a Universal executive named Sidney Jay Sheinberg.
Sheinberg started his working life as a law instructor at UCLA, but in 1959 Albert Dorskind hired him as an assistant; Sheinberg’s father-in-law was business manager for a number of MCA executives. Courteous, even formal in manner, and intensely discreet, Sheinberg called everybody, even his juniors, ‘sir’, a habit he never lost. He quickly impressed the Universal hierarchy, and Jennings Lang, who ran the television division, put him in charge of long-term production planning, which included keeping an eye out for new talent.
Sheinberg remembers Chuck Silver buttonholing him one night when he’d been previewing a film in one of the studio screening rooms. ‘He said there’s this guy who’s been hanging around the place who’s made a short film,’ said Sheinberg. ‘So I watched it and I thought it was terrific. I liked the way he selected the performers, the relationships, the maturity and the warmth that was in that short. I told Chuck to have the guy come see me.’
Nervous that his moonlighting on the lot had been found out, Spielberg presented himself at Sheinberg’s office in the Black Tower.
‘Sidney is very austere. He said, “Sir, I liked your film. How would you like to go to work professionally? You sign the contract, you start in television. After TV, if you do a few good television shows and other producers on the lot like your work, you go into feature films.” It wasn’t that easy, but it sounded great.’
Spielberg dithered. ‘But I have a year left to go in college.’
‘Do you want to go to college,’ Sheinberg asked, ‘or do you want to direct?’
Spielberg’s formal education ended in that moment. ‘I left so quickly that I never even cleared out my locker,’ he said. Years later, at odd moments, he’d think of the chicken salad sandwich he’d left rotting there.
As Spielberg signed his contract a few weeks later, he murmured, ‘My father will never forgive me for leaving college.’ It was a reaction Sheinberg understood. Like Leah’s parents, his father had emigrated to escape anti-Semitic persecution. He and his attractive young wife, the actress Lorraine Gary, were devoted to each other and to their two boys.
The contract was the standard seven-year pact for ‘personal services’, under which Spielberg sold every working minute to Universal to use as they pleased. The business called it ‘the Death Pact’. Only the desperate – or the desperately ambitious – would sign it, and Spielberg was both. So was his Amblin’ star, Pamela McMyler, whom Universal also put under contract. Coincidentally, John Milius was also offered the same seven-year deal, but as a writer. He turned it down.
How old was Spielberg when Universal signed him? In early versions of what was to become a legend, he claimed unashamedly that he was twenty. ‘One day in 1969, when I was twenty-one…’ he told the Hollywood Reporter in 1971. In another version, he says he told Sheinberg when he signed the contract, ‘I just have one request, and I’d like you to give me not so much a commitment, Mr Sheinberg, as a promise. I want to direct something before I’m twenty-one. That would be very important to me.’ Sheinberg, he said, agreed. Yet for Spielberg to have signed a contract as a minor would have necessitated investigation of his age, which would have brought his true date of birth to light.
The likelihood is that Sheinberg knew that Spielberg had turned twenty-one in December 1967, and was therefore twenty-two when he signed their deal, but that he went along with the illusion for publicity reasons. Already the older man sensed an affinity that would grow over the years. Some people felt the two even looked alike. As his own children failed to show any of his flair for show business, he began to regard Spielberg as a surrogate son.
4 Universal Soldier (#ulink_0019fc4f-26ea-5b0b-be8c-2fe70e0a7f9a)
The people who do well in the system are the people who do films that producers like to produce, not that people want to see.
Orson Welles
STROLLING AROUND the studio where he’d spent so much time as an interloper, Spielberg could hardly believe his luck.
He’d rented a cramped $130 a month apartment on Laurel Canyon and furnished it with an ad hoc mixture of bean bags and movie posters, but he spent little time there. Each evening he caught whatever film was previewing in the studio’s theatres. Next day he was on the phone, complimenting actors on their performances, directors of their direction, producers on their acumen. Producer/writer William Link remembers him as ‘a great politician. Even then, we knew we would all be working for him one day.’
He relished the sense of Universal as another world, sealed off from the city of Los Angeles. Science fiction writer and sometime scenarist Ray Bradbury, who was also, coincidentally, afflicted with some of Spielberg’s phobias, about heights, elevators and flying, shared his love of working on a movie lot, where
everything was clearly defined. Here there were absolutely sharp beginnings, and ends that were neat and irreversible. Outside, beyond the stages, I did not much trust life with its dreadful surprises and ramshackle plots. Here, walking among the alleys just at dawn or twilight, I could imagine I opened the studio and shut it down. It belonged to me because I said it was so.
The studio looked busy. The electric trolleys of the public tours with their pink-and-white candy-striped awnings and rubber wheels seemed to be everywhere. Occasionally a limo cruised by. With the new influx of visitors, security had been tightened. Scotty now rigorously checked everyone at the gate, and people with legitimate business on the backlot had to wait in the shadow of the black tower until a Teamster-driven limo arrived to take them to their meeting – another example of the union excess which was driving producers to Europe.
As the summer approached, Spielberg waited to be given a job, but nothing eventuated. It was ironic. He had an office again at Universal, yet still the phone never rang. They were paying him now, but not much. After taxes, his weekly $130 pay cheque dwindled to less than $100. With leisure to read the fine print of his contract, he found he was less employee than slave. ‘I couldn’t work outside Universal, couldn’t look for independent financing, couldn’t go underground like all my friends were doing. I was trapped in the establishment, but nobody would give me a job in the establishment.’ With his birthday looming, he pressed Sheinberg to find him a directing project. ‘And he twisted someone’s arm – or broke it off – and got someone to give me a shot at one third of the pilot for Night Gallery.’
Night Gallery was a new series being prepared for NBC, and scheduled to begin in November 1969. To write and present it, Universal had hired Rod Serling, in the hope of repeating the success of The Twilight Zone, which he had sold outright to CBS, only to kick himself as it earned a fortune in regional reruns. Serling had grudgingly ceded all creative control to Universal. He was to write and introduce the three segments of Night Gallery, each hingeing on a painting with supernatural powers. In this way he hoped to fill the one-hour slot preferred by networks while conserving the sting-in-the-tail short-story format of Twilight Zone.
Boris Sagal and Barry Shear, both practised directors, were to share the pilot under William Sackheim, a B-movie scriptwriter who became a TV producer in his fifties. Sackheim assigned Spielberg the middle story, Eyes, a characteristic piece of Serling tables-turning about a ruthless blind businesswoman who yearns for a corneal transplant despite warnings by her doctor, Barry Sullivan, that she’ll win at most twelve hours of sight. She plunders the eyes of a desperate Tom Bosley anyway, to find that her half-day coincides with New York’s city-wide 1965 blackout.
Spielberg read the script, and immediately tried to get out of the assignment.
‘Jesus, can’t I do something about young people?’ he begged Sheinberg.
‘I’d take this if I were you,’ Sheinberg said.
It was sound advice. To add class to the pilot, Universal had hired Joan Crawford. The widow of Pepsi-Cola owner Al Steele, and Oscar-winning star of wartime Hollywood’s archetypal melodrama of upward mobility and guilty passion, Mildred Pierce, Crawford had been reduced to playing straight woman to a monster in the British horror film Trog. Even at sixty-three, however, she had never, despite having appeared in game shows, variety and live dramas, made a film specifically for TV. For that particular indignity she demanded, despite her millions, a fee of $50,000, 10 per cent of the pilot’s total budget.
By assigning the waning but still potent Crawford to Spielberg, Sheinberg was showing his confidence in him. Nervously aware that his star had locked horns with great directors like Howard Hawks, Michael Curtiz and George Cukor, Spielberg ran some of her movies and pored over books on her career. Though only five feet four inches tall, she immediately drew the eye, even next to his hero Spencer Tracy. He set up a preliminary meeting at her Hollywood apartment.
Crawford was his introduction to the contradictory power of stars, nondescript in real life, magnetic on screen. Her magnetism, however, wasn’t immediately apparent when, acutely conscious of his gawky appearance, Spielberg was ushered in, since she was standing in the middle of the room with a mask over her eyes.
‘This is how a blind person walks through a room,’ she explained as she groped towards him. ‘I need to practise with the furniture two days before we shoot.’
Then she took off the mask and saw him for the first time.
‘Actually I heard later that she had been promised a director like George Cukor,’ Spielberg said, ‘and had no idea that they were going to assign an acne-ridden, sniffling-nosed, first-time-out director. I only knew years later that she had a temper tantrum when she found out that she had to work with me.’
There was no immediate sign of irritation. Crawford grilled him. What had he made? No features, just a short? Was he perhaps related, she asked drily, to someone in the Black Tower?
‘No, ma’am,’ he quavered. ‘I’m just working my way through Universal.’
Spielberg never described the meal that followed the same way twice. Sometimes he remembers Crawford saying, ‘Steven, you and I both made it on our own. We’re going to get along just fine. C’mon, let’s go out to dinner.’ In other versions, she tells him tersely, ‘I don’t want you sitting with me in a restaurant. People will think you’re my son, not my director.’ Given the course of their relationship, the second version seems more probable.
On the first day of the eight-day shoot, Crawford arrived at 8.45 a.m. precisely, swathed in mink and trailed by her personal hairdresser, make-up man, costume lady, and three men carrying iceboxes of Pepsi, which she handed around among the sixty-man crew. Nobody needed cooling. Crawford’s contract stipulated that the studio was chilled, as it had been in her great days at Warner Brothers, to 55 degrees.
The week before, Spielberg had been given an audience with Serling, daunting for someone who knew him only as the suave black-suited mc of The Twilight Zone. Serling told him that, by contract, not a word of any script could be changed without his approval. (This wasn’t true. Universal had full story approval on all its series, and didn’t hesitate to use it when ratings began to slide.) Feeling himself straitjacketed again, Spielberg fought back, diagramming a series of jump cuts, looming low-angle close-ups and sinuous crane shots reminiscent of those horror/suspense series like Thriller and The Outer Limits, which were lonely islands of German Expressionism in the ocean of Hollywood pap. Some of these devices, like his quick cuts to a series of progressively larger close-ups to build emotional pressure, he would use again and again until they became fixtures of his visual style. But as he tried to explain them during Day One, traditionally spent blocking out camera movements, he found the technicians scornful. Stuff like that was regarded as an unhealthy hangover from live TV drama. The house style called for sets lit with the intensity of an electronic flash, and characters framed in umbilicus-and-up medium shot.
Undeterred, Spielberg lined up his opening, a medium close-up of the back of a large chair that swivelled at the touch of a diamond-ringed finger to reveal Joan. He had plenty more of the same: an unbandaging that owed something to Eisenstein in its swift cutting, and a climax, as Crawford stumbled to her death through a window, that recalled the overt symbolism of 1930s montage expert Slavko Vorkapich. ‘I remember shooting through the baubles on chandeliers,’ says Spielberg, embarrassed – though the shot of Sullivan’s image inverted in distorting glass as he arrives in Crawford’s office is one of the most memorable in Eyes.
He might have got away with it had Crawford been as malleable on set as off. Instead, she exhibited a steely stubbornness, bombarding him with questions about her character. ‘Joan was climbing the walls while they were filming,’ recalled Serling’s wife Carol. ‘She was calling Rod all the time, and he reassured her.’
Under his tan, Spielberg was in a cold sweat. Seeing him pale, Barry Sullivan took him aside and told him something he would never forget: ‘Don’t put yourself through this,’ he said, ‘unless you absolutely have to.’
Spielberg saw he had no choice but to accede to most of Crawford’s demands. When she couldn’t remember her lines, he printed up cue cards, at Sullivan’s suggestion, with print large enough for her to read through her bandages. He agreed as well to the retakes she requested, knowing that to deny her could lead to a catastrophic confrontation in front of the crew.
With her young director under control, Crawford relaxed. She gave him cologne, and a bracelet. He responded by placing each morning, in her dressing room, a single rose in a Pepsi bottle. A loyal Pepsi drinker, Crawford belched every time she finished a bottle – a sign of enjoyment, she explained. When Spielberg told her he’d never learned how to belch, she taught him.
The price of conciliation was delay. At the end of the shoot, two days of script remained unfilmed. Sackheim stepped in and directed the last day. A few days later, Spielberg showed Sackheim his rough cut. The producer sat next to Spielberg in the editing room, groaning faintly at each new visual excess.
‘We’re going to have to perform major surgery on your show,’ Sackheim said at the end.
‘And he went in,’ said Spielberg, ‘and shifted the vision from my choices to his own choices.’
Exhaustion and depression forced extreme decisions. ‘I was in a despondent, comatose state,’ Spielberg recalled. ‘I learned a lot of lessons with that show, but rather than say, “Well, I’ll let that roll off my back and go on to the next show,” I went to Sid Sheinberg and said, “I can’t do TV any more. It’s just too tough. I quit.”’
Wisely, Sheinberg refused his resignation. Instead he offered a year-long leave of absence. ‘So my salary was suspended and I went home and wrote for a year. All I did was write.’
Spielberg’s first thought had been to break into the underground, where some of the USC group were making their reputation. ‘I went to the underground to make films in 16mm – and I couldn’t get in there. I could not raise $100 to make a film.’
Networking had won him a few useful contacts at Universal. One was composer John Williams. Spielberg admired his music for Mark Rydell’s version of William Faulkner’s The Reivers, folksy and ebullient by turns. Its cross-fertilisation of the American tradition with the European – ‘like a combination of Aaron Copland and Debussy’, Spielberg said – marked Williams as someone who shared his taste.
Another new acquaintance was Cliff Robertson. As much a victim of the TV ghetto as Spielberg was, the boyish-looking actor had starred in The Hustler and Days of Wine and Roses on TV, only to see Paul Newman and Jack Lemmon click with them in the cinema. When he appeared in The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon, a teleplay based on Daniel Keyes’s story ‘Flowers for Algernon’, about a mentally handicapped man who becomes a genius through experimental surgery, Robertson recognised a potential hit and bought the film rights himself, adapting it into the screenplay Charly. Seven years later, in 1968, his foresight was rewarded with an Academy Award for Best Actor.
Robertson was Spielberg’s first call after he started his leave. The actor loved World War I aircraft and, after the success of Charly, he wrote a treatment for a flying movie called I Shot Down the Red Baron, I Think, which would use rare original aircraft accumulated by another fanatic in Ireland. Robertson’s agent, David Begelman, sold the idea to Cinerama Corporation for $150,000, but the project bogged down in wrangles over finance, in which, to Robertson’s fury, Begelman sided with Cinerama. Robertson was forced to pay $25,000 to Cinerama, with a further $25,000 if the film was ever made. In sworn depositions, he claimed Begelman ‘sandbagged’ and ‘completely subverted’ him.
Aware of this debacle, and knowing Robertson’s interest in old planes, Spielberg offered him a treatment he’d written with a friend, Claudia Salter, about a World War I flyer and his son barnstorming around America in the early twenties. Robertson liked Ace Eli and Rodger of the Skies. He bought it, hiring Salter to write a screenplay.
After graduation from USC, Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins had tried to sell some screenplays, but without success. Spielberg began feeding them his ideas. George Lucas was staying with the writers while he cast what would become his first studio feature, American Graffiti. The abstracted Lucas seldom spoke to anyone as he wandered in and out, but to him it seemed the dweeby guy with the big nose and the glasses was there almost all the time. Spielberg’s voice filled the house as he leaned over the shoulders of Robbins and Barwood, suggesting lines, laughing at those they’d written, and urging them on.
One of Spielberg’s ideas was a comedy he’d already tried to float at Universal, a modern Snow White, about seven men who run a Chinese food factory in San Francisco. Another was based on a clipping from the Los Angeles Citizen News about a May 1969 Texas incident when Ila Faye Dent, just released after a shoplifting conviction, persuaded her husband Robert to break out of prison to retrieve their two-year-old daughter from court-appointed foster parents. On the way, they kidnapped state patrolman James Crone, which led to a massive car chase across the state.
From this story, Barwood and Robbins, with Spielberg’s collaboration, worked up the tale of Lou Jean and Clovis Poplin’s flight in search of Baby Langston. Police Captain Tanner, hamstrung by the incompetence of his men and the young couple’s sentimental appeal, trails them with a motorcade as they bumble across Texas. Crowds cheer them and high school bands play them through town, while well-wishers offer free gas and chicken dinners, and fill the car with gifts. Even the vigilantes who ambush them on a used-car lot manage only to riddle the cars and do no harm to the fugitives at all. The dream dies at the end, when Clovis is killed, but until then it’s a folk tale straight from Reader’s Digest. The screenplay was called ‘Carte Blanche’, then ‘American Express’, but later it was renamed, in honour of the town towards which the Poplins were fleeing, The Sugarland Express.
Each decade throws up its hot writing teams, and Barwood and Robbins were to be as hot as any during the seventies. Episodic and oriented totally towards action, their work seems mechanical today, a loose stringing together of action sequences, owing more to animators like Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, Frank Tashlin and Walt Disney than to the meticulous plot- and scene-builders of the 1940s. But Spielberg called them ‘geniuses’ and praised their ‘wonderful cartoon imagination’. Once Barwood and Robbins went on to direct their own films, he found and encouraged other partnerships like theirs. Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, his protégés in the eighties, were Barwood and Robbins writ large, not least in their fascination with animation.
As if to underline the comparison with Jones and Avery, Barwood, Robbins and Spielberg put Lou Jean and Clovis into an Indian Chief mobile home on a used-car lot and had them watch Chuck Jones’s Road Runner evade Wile E. Coyote on the screen of a nearby drive-in cinema. Spielberg lavished all his craft on this scene when the film was finally made. Birdus Fleetus and Lupus Persisticus (Jones’s cod-Latin names for his hero and villain) were his boyhood heroes, and he prevailed on Universal to buy from Warners forty seconds of Jones’s cartoon to underline the film’s most poignant moment.
His Universal contract had won Spielberg an agent. He was accepted by the prestigious International Creative Management, founded by David Begelman, a plump middle-aged man, famous as one of Hollywood’s highest-betting poker players, but also well-known, because of arguments like that with his ex-client Cliff Robertson, as chronically unreliable. Spielberg’s first representative at ICM was Mike Medavoy, himself later a studio executive. ‘Spielberg came in with… Amblin’,’ Medavoy recalled. ‘I saw it and I said: “Terrific!”’ Medavoy got him a few commercials, one of which featured a black actress named Margaret Avery, whom Spielberg would remember when he came to direct The Color Purple.
But he and Medavoy disagreed over Universal, to which Spielberg, disconsolate about the lack of work on the outside, was thinking of returning. Medavoy recalled:
I wanted him to get out of that contract. He wanted to stay. He was right, actually, to stay. My feeling was that at Universal at that particular time – this was right before Airport – he’d get boxed into doing garbage. And I had just gotten Phil Kaufman out of his contract. So I said, ‘Listen, you should get another agent, I don’t think your career is going to go anywhere if you stay there.’ So I got him another agent within the same agency.
The new agent was Begelman’s partner, Freddie Fields, who was decisively to launch Spielberg’s career. During his sabbatical, Fields took him round the traditional circuit of all film-makers looking for backing. One stop was at Twentieth Century-Fox, then being run by Richard Zanuck while his father Darryl, who’d founded the company almost forty years before, enjoyed European retirement with a series of darkly dramatic French mistresses like the singer Juliette Greco.
Novelist John Gregory Dunne described Zanuck, then thirty-eight, as ‘a tightly controlled man with the build of a miniaturised half-back, twelve-month tan, receding brown hair and manicured fingernails that are chewed to the quick. He has hesitant blue eyes, a quick embarrassed smile and a prominent jaw whose muscles he reflexively keeps knotting and unknotting.’ The tics hid a violent temper. Around Fox, Zanuck was known as ‘Little Napoleon’, after Nehemiah Persoff’s twitchy gang boss in Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot.
David Brown, twenty years older than Zanuck, a pipe-smoker with a bushy moustache which earned him the nickname ‘The Walrus’, handled story operations from New York and acted as Zanuck’s adviser and lieutenant. He affected a vague manner that belied his long experience as magazine writer, editor and publisher. His politeness and tact made him ideal to act as a buffer between the volatile Zanuck and the world. An odd but effective team, Zanuck and Brown had launched some of Fox’s biggest hits, though their decision in 1970 to abandon the broad entertainment values of their earlier successes like The Sound of Music, Hello Dolly! and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for more challenging, adult films was already eroding their power with the acutely profit-conscious Fox board.
It was this pair that Fields brought Spielberg to meet. As a package, he offered Ace Eli, with Robertson to star and Spielberg to direct. Zanuck suspected Spielberg was a better salesman than director. ‘I found him tremendously gifted, at least from a conversational point of view, but it was a highly physical and complex film, and I didn’t think he had the experience to do stunt flying and all that.’ They did buy the script, however, Spielberg’s only sale during his absence from Universal.
Spielberg later gave the impression that he spent a year away from Universal, but, despondent with his attempt at independence, he actually returned after only four months.
‘Sid,’ he told Sheinberg, ‘I’m ready to eat crow and pay my dues. Assign me something.’
Word of his problems on Eyes had spread, however, and nobody wanted him. ‘I was regarded on the Universal lot as a folly, a novelty item, bric-a-brac for the mantelpiece. Something to joke about at parties.’
Fortunately, Night Gallery got good reviews when it went out on 8 November 1969, and NBC commissioned the rest of the series. With hindsight, Spielberg could see that he had a lot to learn, and that the best way to do so was to work. He could admit now that Eyes was a disaster, and that watching Sackheim eviscerate his work, however humiliating, had been a salutary display of the power of editing.
Sheinberg offered him six directing assignments. For Marcus Welby MD, a plodding but popular series starring Robert Young as a kindly Santa Monica physician, Spielberg directed an episode called The Daredevil Gesture, about a teenage haemophiliac who risks his life on a class field trip to prove his courage. Unable to instil individuality with bravura camerawork, he tried for Significance in performances. ‘I was taking Marcus Welby seriously,’ he said later, self-mockingly. ‘… and a lot of these older actors would look at me… wondering, “Gee, I’m doing three shows this week and this guy is acting like this is Twelve Angry Men with Henry Fonda.” And I’m trying to flush out Marcus Welby and making an ass of myself on the set.’
He had even less success with Make Me Laugh, another segment of Night Gallery. In a variation on the Midas Touch, black comic Godfrey Cambridge is given the magic power to make people laugh – but only to laugh, even at his own death. Towards the end of shooting, in a repeat of the post-production interference of Eyes, Tom Bosley replaced Eddie Mayehoff in the role of Cambridge’s manager, and Jeannot Szwarc, not Spielberg, was called in to direct his scenes. The episode aired on 6 January 1971.
Life as a TV director was exhausting. ‘It’s very, very hard to learn film-making when you’re watching five-day television shows,’ Spielberg said. ‘People are running and shouting, and the pitch is so ear-shattering you become a neurotic before you become a movie-maker.’ Even so, it taught him a lot. ‘You learn to do your homework,’ he said. ‘TV pulled a long train, and I was the last carriage. If you didn’t finish on time and under budget, they would just cut you loose.’
He had also returned at exactly the right moment. Episode drama was dying. Networks were demanding more features. Rather than abandon their popular characters and titles. Universal lengthened episodes to ninety minutes and widened their scope while keeping to the same tight schedule and budget. Despite their length, these films still had to be shot in ten days.
Among the inflated series was The Name of the Game. Set in the world of magazine publishing, it had a rotating roster of three leading men: Gene Barry, Anthony Franciosa and Robert Stack. In the autumn of 1970, Spielberg directed L.A. 2017, an episode written by Philip Wylie which aired on 15 January 1971. Barry crashes his car on the way to an environmental conference and wakes up in 2017 to find that Angelenos have taken refuge underground from smog and gang warfare. After siding with the rebels who want to overthrow big boss Barry Sullivan, he retreats to the surface and is transported back to his own time, converted overnight to clean-air legislation.
L.A. 2017 earned Spielberg minor eminence when he was invited to screen it at the World Science Fiction Convention. Most fans dismissed the long-haired young director in tailored leather jacket and open-necked flowered shirt as another psyched-up fast-talking Hollywood hype, but the experience alerted him to the existence of a growing national market for fantasy and science fiction. Unlike himself at their age, these kids had money to spend and the power to do pretty much what they pleased. They were obsessive about inside and advance information on science fiction films. Spielberg, still young enough to remember what it was like to be a fan, took note. Jeff Walker, a publicist who came to specialise in promoting films, including some of Spielberg’s, to this market, comments that today ‘there’s an entire market segment that thrives on knowing the stuff beforehand, that was created by [Spielberg] practically, and George [Lucas], and [Star Trek producer Gene] Roddenberry.’
Success gave Spielberg some leverage, and Freddie Fields was able to renegotiate his terms of employment. On 28 December 1970 Variety noted that he’d signed a five-year exclusive contract as a producer and a six-year non-exclusive deal as director. It was his first step on the road to total control, and an early recognition that his ambitions lay less in creative film-making than in the building of a production empire. A pecking order operated on the Universal lot. Feature directors looked down on the TV contingent as hacks, just as directors at other studios looked down on Universal’s features and the bright pastel ‘house style’ that extended even to credits, trailers and print advertising. Instantly recognisable, a Universal film was also instantly dismissable. In the fifties, TV had launched Arthur Penn, John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet and Sam Peckinpah, but in the seventies it was more often a graveyard of reputations. Spielberg was the only director under thirty-five at Universal. Most of the colleagues with whom he was to share the chores of Name of the Game and Night Gallery, like Robert Collins, Daryl Duke and Robert Michael Lewis, were ten years older, and saw little in their future but more of the same.
Feature film producer/directors were an elite. The emblem of their standing was a bungalow on the lot. The prosaic word belied the lushness of these buildings. ‘A sort of pseudo-English manor house,’ says screenwriter David Freeman, ‘[they were] a bungalow the way summer houses in Newport are cottages.’ Hitchcock’s, the most lavish, had two levels, with a dining room, screening and editing rooms, and its own art department. Don Siegel rubbed along in something the size of a suburban house. Billy Wilder had two storeys on a hill, past which the tour trams coasted in silence to avoid disturbing him and I.A.L. Diamond, at work on The Front Page.
Spielberg hungered for a bungalow. Instead, he had a corner office in the Black Tower, well below the seventeenth floor where Wasserman and Sheinberg controlled his destiny. From there, he looked out on a future that contained, he was beginning to discover, nothing as solid as the films of Wilder or Hitchcock. He had plenty of ideas for features and, now that he was back on the inside, no shortage of people to pitch them to. But everywhere he met a brick wall. His career may have looked to be up and running, but it became increasingly clear that he was jogging on the spot.
Universal incorporated Night Gallery with McCloud, San Francisco International Airport and The Psychiatrist into an omnibus for NBC, Four-in-One. Writer/director Jerrold Freedman was in charge, and Spielberg joined his team. It was a useful move. ‘He had his own long-haired film society right in the heart of Universal Studios,’ he says of Freedman. ‘He employed a number of writers, directors, people dealing with esoterica, and he hired people from his college and people he knew from the East. I was just a young person, whom he liked at the time, and to whom he said, “Here, do two Psychiatrists for me.”’
The Psychiatrist, written by Richard Levinson and William Link in the school of Ben Casey, Doctor Kildare and other successful doctor shows, featured Roy Thinnes as an idealistic LA shrink and Luther Adler as the obligatory older, more cynical colleague. Spielberg did The Private World of Martin Dalton (10 February 1971) and Par for the Course (10 March 1971). Martin Dalton was cribbed from a famous incident in Robert Lindner’s collection of psychiatric case histories, The Jet Propelled Couch. A disturbed twelve-year-old (Stephen Hudis) invents a fantasy universe from TV and comic books, and begins to retreat into it. Responding to a subject close to home, Spielberg seized the chance to create a surrealist dream world and also to work with young actors, for which he already showed a flair.
It was Par for the Course, however, with golf pro Clu Gulager coming to terms with his imminent death from duodenal cancer, which attracted most attention, and which Spielberg regards as his best TV work. Always most comfortable illustrating an emotion than conveying it in dialogue, he wrote a scene in which two buddies bring Gulager in hospital a gift they know he will relish – the cup from the eighteenth hole at his course, which they’ve dug out of the centre of the green. Gulager breaks down and crushes the dirt and grass over his head.
Levinson and Link were so pleased with Par for the Course that they asked for Spielberg to direct Murder by the Book, the first regular episode, after two feature-length pilots, of the detective series Columbo. The role of the Los Angeles Police Department’s scruffiest, least tidy but most perspicacious detective, who allowed himself in each episode to be patronised by his arrogant quarry before springing a brilliant deductive trap at the end, had been planned for Bing Crosby. He turned it down, however, when it looked as if the series’ success might interfere with his golf. Peter Falk replaced him. The series’ story editor, Stephen Bochco, later the force behind Hill Street Blues and LA Law, wrote Murder by the Book, in which Columbo unmasks crime writer Jack Cassidy as the murderer of his collaborator Martin Milner. It aired on 15 September 1971 to excellent reviews, but allowed Spielberg little room for creativity. He did his best, opening the film not with the conventional theme but the sound of a typewriter, and setting up some sharp angles inside Milner’s high-rise office to exploit its spectacular view of Los Angeles, but in most respects the film is routine.
Spielberg also made an episode of Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law called Eulogy for a Wide Receiver, about a football coach accused of feeding amphetamines to his players. However, any charm that series TV might have held for him was running out. In particular, its casts of B-movie players and studio trainees grated increasingly. ‘At twenty-three, I was already saying, “Life’s too short to worry about the size of someone’s trailer. Or the fact that they don’t like the hairdresser because the hairdresser has coffee breath.” Little petty things used to make me crazy.’
If Spielberg needed a further caution that TV eroded talent, he could find it in the experience of Rod Serling, who as Night Gallery dragged into its second year with diminishing ratings, found most of his stories rejected. As the studio even barred him physically from story conferences and began buying scripts of its own, with the emphasis on action, it became clear to him that he’d been hired mainly as a master of ceremonies. ‘I’ll just be the front man, a short hunk of gristle,’ he told a reporter. ‘[Night Gallery] is not mine at all. [It’s] another species of formula series drama.’
After the autumn of 1971 Spielberg wasn’t to escape such problems, but at least he encountered them on a higher plane, since Universal had by then grudgingly given him his first true feature and first international success. Much was to change for him, and for New Hollywood, with the making of Duel.
5 Duel (#ulink_af25636f-ef1e-5d8c-8edd-16184f3f53d4)
We’re old now, but when we were the New Hollywood…
Steven Spielberg. 1994
THE YEAR 1971 carried a sense of threat for Americans. In February, an earthquake rocked the San Fernando Valley, shaking Universal’s black tower to its foundations and toppling some of the ancient sets. Sixty-two people died when old apartment houses collapsed all over the city, as if they too had been built not to last but to act as movie backgrounds. In September, convicts rioted at Attica prison in upstate New York, took guards prisoner and plunged into a bloodbath. Servicemen were returning home from Vietnam at an increasing rate, but the war remained a running sore. Lieutenant William Calley was sentenced to life imprisonment in March for the My-Lai massacre, only to be released to house arrest by President Nixon pending his appeal.
The automobile, its pleasures and dangers, was, even more than usual, a national preoccupation. GM recalled 6.7 million Chevrolet cars and trucks and Ford 220,000 Pintos to correct design faults. Two Detroit car novels, Arthur Hailey’s Wheels and Harold Robbins’ The Betsy, were the year’s big sellers. They were matched only by William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist and Tom Tryon’s The Other, occult thrillers with suburban or rural settings that probed the unease about daily life bedded as deep in the mouth of America as an abscessed tooth.
Dennis Hoffman, the producer of Amblin’, kept asking what had happened to his film. Spielberg was directing and McMyler had a small role in The Boston Stranger. But he, the man who’d given them their chance, whose name was on Amblin’, who’d put up the money, had zilch. The Universal short subjects department finally offered $90,000 for the rights. ‘But the sex and the joint have gotta go,’ they said. ‘This is a family company.’ Indignantly, Hoffman refused, and Spielberg, while not making an issue of it, backed him up. Amblin’ had served its purpose in getting him into the studio. What happened to it now didn’t matter that much. Retrieving the film from Universal, Hoffman sold it to Paramount, which released it late in 1970 as the support film to what looked like a cheap youth picture. But Love Story, Arthur Hiller’s adaptation of Erich Segal’s best-seller, with its tearful celebration of young love on its deathbed, became the year’s sleeper, making stars of Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw, and grossing more than $100 million. Everywhere, people stopped Spielberg and said, ‘Say, I saw that movie of yours.’ He wasn’t any longer just some nephew or cousin of Sid Sheinberg’s who had almost fucked up the Joan Crawford TV pilot. Something of his had made it to the Big Silver. He was a movie director.
All over Hollywood, young directors had become hot in the wake of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda’s hymn to dope, rock and the road, Easy Rider. Variety’s 1970 Cannes Festival report acclaimed American cinema as ‘the new avant garde’, while 1971’s International Film Guide rated it
more innovative, more directly concerned with issues, and more deeply expressive of individual personal vision. Features like Alice’s Restaurant, The Strawberry Statement, Woodstock… as well as hundreds of lesser known independent films, reject traditional romantic clichés and get very close to the bizarre configurations of contemporary American experience.
Old Hollywood didn’t know what to make of this unexpected new direction in the industry. ‘In those times,’ says Michael Pye, ‘there was just this moment when it was possible for a whole generation of young talent to come in and make very much the films they wanted, because no one was any longer very sure what sort of film a studio product would be.’
Overnight, directors fresh from film school had their fantasies funded by an industry hipped on being hip. ‘Every studio in town was narcotised by Easy Rider’s grosses,’ wrote the novelist Joan Didion, a devoted Hollywood-watcher and occasional screenwriter, ‘and all that was needed to get a picture off the ground was the suggestion of a $750,000 budget, a low-cost NABET or even a non-union crew, and this terrific twenty-two-year-old director.’
The 1970/71 releases included a score of first or early films by directors of Spielberg’s generation: Glenn and Randa (Jim McBride), Getting Straight (Richard Rush), Cover Me, Babe (Noel Black), Watermelon Man (Melvin van Peebles), Up in the Cellar (Theodore J. Flicker). A few of the newcomers were his friends: John Korty (Riverrun) and Brian De Palma (Hi, Mom!).
At Universal, however, the revolution was a long time coming. Never one for quick decisions, Lew Wasserman rode out the first youth wave by ignoring it. As far as he was concerned, Universal was mainly in the TV business. In 1971, however, he appointed Ned Tanen, a producer from the music business with no particular qualifications except his relative youth, to acquire low-budget ‘alternative’ projects. By early 1972 Tanen had bought Monte Hellman’s Two Lane Blacktop, Frank Perry’s Diary of a Mad Housewife and John Cassavetes’ Minnie and Moskowitz.
Everyone Spielberg knew seemed to have a feature deal. As he bounced around Hollywood, from the campus of USC for a screening of student films to a Preston Sturges retrospective in Santa Monica, over a roast beef sandwich at Musso and Frank’s or at a party at Coppola’s place, the stories kept coming. Phone calls from producers who’d unearthed some long-forgotten script and wanted to discuss it, offers from Metro or Fox to ‘come in and talk a deal’.
Milius sent him his latest screenplay. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, which he’d just sold to John Huston. It was an epic western – the sort of script that Howard Hawks or John Ford might have made. When The Godfather opened in March 1972, its baroque, Continental richness drowned him in darkness thick as chocolate sauce. That such films could be made in Hollywood was incredible!
Coppola, with William Friedkin and Peter Bogdanovich, had launched The Directors’ Company. It was a Renaissance gesture, an alliance of princes. They pledged to share in each other’s profits and never to concede final cut to anyone. Old Hollywood smirked. They’d seen these groups before. They came and they went. Sooner or later they’d start bickering. One or another of them would do better than the rest. Someone would screw someone else’s wife… It was an old story.
Spielberg watched these evolutions with alarm. Reputations were being made before his eyes. Fame was being conferred. People were becoming immortal. And he was directing The Psychiatrist! He would have jumped at anything Ned Tanen offered him, but there could be no rapprochement between the eager Spielberg and this moody executive with his permanent sneer, his dour pleasure in the deal, and his belief that Hollywood was characterised by ‘negativity and illusion – especially negativity’. While Tanen was in charge, Spielberg didn’t have a chance. It drove him crazy. ‘The truth is,’ said a friend, ‘Steve would have made anything that got him into features.’
Spielberg says he first came across Richard Matheson’s short story ‘Duel’ when his secretary Nora Tyson, with a blush about even knowing what was inside the world’s most successful men’s magazine, showed him the April 1971 Playboy containing the story, in which a lone motorist is pursued by a homicidal truck driver in a gas tanker. Matheson doesn’t agree. He’d written the film script long before he and Spielberg met. He based it on an incident when a truck driver tried to bump him off the road near his San Fernando Valley home, a common enough event on an increasingly congested system of which the trucker, like the bikers of Easy Rider, regarded himself as a sort of cowboy hero, subject only to his own rules. Its hero, Dave Mann, an archetypal corporate cipher with a house in the suburbs, a wife and two children, sets out on a trip to save an important account. Cutting across country, he overtakes a fume-belching gas tanker, the driver of which regards this as an insult. With mounting violence, he pursues him across the Sierra until they crash together into a quarry. Only Dave, a better Mann for the experience, survives.
In a more probable, if less heart-warming, alternative version of the legend about how Spielberg encountered Duel, a pal in the mailroom, part of his carefully nurtured network, funnelled him an interesting screenplay already going the rounds of producers. However he came across it, Spielberg devoured Duel with the enthusiasm of a fan. Matheson had written a number of Twilight Zone episodes – and the original of The Incredible Shrinking Man.
The script also addressed some of the fears that were to motivate Spielberg for the rest of his career. A few years later, British critic Gavin Millar pressed him to identify the anxieties that drove Duel. Was it the technology of the truck that frightened him?
‘No, not the truck,’ Spielberg mused. ‘Loss of control maybe.’
Since childhood, security for Spielberg had reposed in control, and in adulthood it remained a paramount concern. Control of his environment, his emotions, his work. Twenty-five years later, Oskar Schindler would expound to the Nazi camp commander Amon Goeth, ‘Control is power.’ Spielberg remembered puttering along the freeways in his uncle’s Chrysler as trucks roared past, air horns blaring at this slow-coach. It wasn’t the car he identified with in Duel; it was the truck; its omnipotence, its power.
The Vice President in charge of features programming at ABC TV in 1970 was Barry Diller, an ambitious executive in his early thirties, later to run 20th Century-Fox. Sensing the audience’s greed for movies, he’d launched the ABC Movie of the Week, a Monday-night showcase for new features, and was hungry for product. Universal saw Duel as an ideal Movie of the Week. But Spielberg, itching to escape the TV ghetto, argued that it should be a full cinema feature. And if Sheinberg would OK it, that would bypass Ned Tanen.
‘If you can find a star who’ll do it,’ Sid Sheinberg conceded cannily, ‘we’ll see.’
Spielberg sent the script to one of the few Universal regulars who could project the necessary combination of vulnerability and resolve in Dave Mann, but Gregory Peck, as Sheinberg anticipated, wasn’t interested. The project reverted to Diller, who quickly approved both it and Spielberg.
‘I saw an episode of The Psychiatrist which he’d done,’ Diller recalls. ‘I thought, “What good work.”’
Staff producer George Eckstein was assigned to bring in the production at about $300,000. To star, a disappointed Spielberg was allocated Dennis Weaver. OK, so he’d been the stuttering motel ‘night man’ in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, though most people remembered him as Chester B. Goode in the TV series Gunsmoke, limping after James Arness and calling, ‘Mistuh… er… mistuh Dillon?’ He’d found fame of sorts at Universal as a cowboy cop transplanted to the big city in McCloud, but a character actor was always a character actor.
From the moment he read the script, Weaver begged for more meat, with a scene or two where he confronts and defies the truck before the climax. ‘I just don’t want to be this guy the way he’s written,’ he complained.
But Spielberg, sensing Weaver’s core of weakness, on which so many other directors had traded, insisted he play Mann as a pussy-whipped wage-slave who greets every problem with sweaty-palmed indecision.
Mann fails to rescue a broken-down school bus menaced by the truck. When his car impotently spins its wheels as he tries to start it, the children inside, his surrogate family, jeer. Mann cuts and runs, after which, in the ultimate indignity, the truck not only spares the bus but arrogantly helps it on its way. He’s out-thought at every turn by the truck, which ambushes him at one point near a railway line, and tries to push his car into a freight train.
Too embarrassed to demand help in the lonely gas stations and greasy spoons, Mann finally waves down an old couple, who simply drive off. It’s only when his self-esteem is completely eroded that he finds the grit to oppose and defeat his opponent. To drive home the point, Spielberg recorded Mann’s self-pitying meditations on his life and nursed Weaver through his performance from the back seat, playing the recording of his internal monologue at the point where they would appear in the finished film. Cropped out for TV, but revealed when the film was shown on the big screen, Spielberg can be seen scrunched at the edge of the frame in a car interior.
Talk, often only half-heard, is the obbligato of Duel. For the first seven minutes – a sequence added for cinema release – the only soundtrack is a radio programme, incorporating a conversation between a census helpline and a comedian who sounds like Shelley Berman (but who is actually credited under the improbable name ‘Dick Whittington’). The census form is insufficiently exact, Whittington whines. ‘Head of the house’, for instance. Well, in theory, that’s him, but it’s his wife who really wears the pants. He moans on to the embarrassed, hapless operator.
Mann laughs, but he has the same problem, as we find during a chilly phone conversation with his wife, whom he failed to defend the previous night from the passes of a friend who ‘practically tried to rape me in front of other people’.
‘What did you want me to do?’ Mann grumpily asks. ‘Fight him?’
This scene, written by Eckstein, and two or three others, including the opening drive out of Los Angeles, the attempt to push the car into the train, and Mann’s encounter with the school bus, were done later to bring the film up to theatrical length at the request of Universal’s European sales organisation, CIC. The additions caused many headaches, especially finding another truck sufficiently similar to the one that had gone over the cliff.
For his part, Spielberg repudiates almost all of the additions, despite the fact that, without exception, they amplify those themes in Duel which were to become typical of his work: paternal emasculation, the decline of the father’s role in the family, and the importance of a man’s reclaiming his woman and self-respect in combat with rivals. Also, years later, he would insert a similar scene to the encounter with the school bus into Always. A driver in that film has a heart attack but Brad Johnson resuscitates him, watched by admiring kids, an impressed Holly Hunter, and a ghostly, defeated Richard Dreyfuss. Looking good in front of the kids matters to Spielberg more than anything.
Duel is all about fathers failing, women taking control, men losing it. It’s frankly Oedipal. With it, Spielberg struck out at Arnold’s abandonment of his family and its resultant fragmentation. Though Spielberg always spoke warmly of his sisters – ‘I come from a family of beautiful women,’ he says, comparing Sue, the middle sister, to Sophia Loren – he was ambivalent about Sue’s 1975 decision and that of the youngest, Nancy, to leave the US and work on a kibbutz in Israel. Leah’s recent remarriage, to another computer engineer, Bernie Adler, also distressed him. Superficially his attitude to his stepfather was cordial, though he was not above jokes about his mother’s ‘taste for printed circuitry’.
A truer sense of his betrayal by both parents emerged in a tirade a few years later, where he excoriated David Mann as ‘typical of that lower-middle-class American who’s insulated by suburban modernisation’:
It begins on Sunday; you take your car to be washed. You have to drive it but it’s only a block away. And, as the car’s being washed, you go next door with the kids and buy them ice cream at the Dairy Queen and then you have lunch at the plastic McDonald’s with seven zillion hamburgers sold. And then you go off to the games room and you play the quarter games: Tank and the Pong and Flim-Flam. And by that time you go back and your car’s all dry and ready to go and you get into the car and drive to the Magic Mountain plastic amusement park and you spend the day there eating junk food.
Afterwards you drive home, stopping at all the red lights, and the wife is waiting with dinner on. And you have instant potatoes and eggs without cholesterol – because they’re artificial – and you sit down and turn on the television set, which has become the reality as opposed to the fantasy this man has lived with that entire day. And you watch the prime time, which is pabulum and nothing more than watching a night light. And you see the news at the end of that, which you don’t want to listen to because it doesn’t conform to the reality you’ve just been through prime time with. And at the end of all that you go to sleep and you dream about making enough money to support weekend America. This is the kind of man portrayed in Duel.
This was an astonishing recital for someone who would say later, ‘I never mock suburbia. My life comes from there,’ who admired Norman Rockwell and who would make his own tributes to Formica and frozen pizza in E.T. and Poltergeist. It is more explicable as an attack not on suburban values but on fathers who fail to abide by them.
Duel pioneered a new kind of TV feature by making virtues of its necessities. Second-rate actors? Who cares? Spielberg was, as he remained, indifferent to glamour in his performers, preferring anonymous suburban faces, rumpled clothes, unwashed hair, spotty skin. No sets? Cheap technicians? No matter; he would make the best of what he was given. His cameraman, Jack A. Marta, and composer Billy Goldenberg, a staff composer who’d scored his Columbo episode, were journeymen, a fact Spielberg exploited by taking over as much control as possible of camera and music. The emphatic comic-book framing and the homage to Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho score in the wheep-wheeping violins show his hand.
Fortunately one other technician on the Universal lot was the best in the business. Carey Loftin had begun stunt driving in 1935 as a motor cyclist on a fairground Wheel of Death. He graduated to car and bike stunts in serials, managed the crashes and chases for Abbott and Costello, doubling Abbott in the more hazardous scenes, a fact that delighted Spielberg, a fan of the two forties comics. Loftin also ramrodded the stunts on Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, another Spielberg favourite, and reached the peak of his career in 1968 with the vertiginous car chase around San Francisco for Bullitt.
Another veteran, Dale Van Sickel, drove the car in Duel. Loftin handled the truck himself. He arranged a parade of five gas tankers on the backlot for Spielberg. Four had modern flat-fronted GMC-Mack prime movers with wide windows that revealed the driver down to his knees. Spielberg chose the fifth, an ancient shit-brown Brand X eighteen-wheeler, mud-spattered, rusted and slovenly. Its old-fashioned divided windshield not only gave the vehicle a look of frowning malevolence but, if the glass was dirty, hid the driver completely. It looked as if the truck was driving itself. Sure, Loftin told him in his slow Tennessee drawl, he could rig that truck for anything the script demanded, even crashing the car at the climax and carrying it over a cliff.
Duel was shot on location around Lancaster and Palmdale, sixty or seventy miles outside Los Angeles, on the edge of the Mojave Desert. Between the desert and Los Angeles, Soledad Canyon, on the edge of the Pinnacles National Monument, offered miles of lonely blacktop, much of it twisting and mountainous.
Spielberg mapped out the entire film in storyboards, like a giant comic book, in this case forty yards long. Though they didn’t invent them – Hitchcock, among others, used them all the time – storyboards became a major weapon of the Movie Brats. Men like Spielberg’s regular artists Ed Verreaux and George Jensen were adept at generating hundreds of pages of graphic art, complete with framings and camera movements, from the director’s stick-figure diagrams. Storyboards dictated a two-dimensional style, reducing narrative to a handful of poses. Following style, dialogue was scaled down to the two or three lines needed to fill a talk balloon. Teenagers raised on the same visual conventions loved the result but, applied to a serious subject, it imposed a Classics Comics glibness. Coppola, Scorsese and many others abandoned this crutch as they embraced the multivalent possibilities of film, but Lucas and Spielberg clung to it. Many would credit the failure of Empire of the Sun in part to storyboarding, and the success of Schindler’s List to the fact that Spielberg abandoned it for that film.
Having worked out the action in advance, Spielberg walked the locations for days before shooting, banging stakes into the dirt where stunts would begin and end, and where his three cameras would be placed. Instead of resetting the camera for each new shot, he had the car and truck drive past each camera in turn, capturing three shots in the time it usually took to him one. The weather was perfect, blazingly sunny, the valley baking in the heat, the mountains a brown smudge on the horizon. One can almost smell the softening blacktop, the truck’s oily fumes, the sizzling grease of the roadside café.
Shooting went two days over schedule, in part because Spielberg saw rushes only every three days, and had to drive miles to do so. The budget rose to $425,000, but Eckstein was delighted with the result. Scenes like the truck ploughing through a roadside snake farm to crush the booth where Weaver is making a phone call showed a glee in violence of which more disciplined directors were incapable. To Spielberg, the lessons of junk film and cartoon proved perfectly applicable to live action. ‘The challenge was to turn a lorry into Godzilla,’ he said. ‘It was sort of Godzilla v. Bambi.’
Godzilla nearly won in real life. As a precaution against drivers going to sleep at the wheel, the truck had a ‘Dead Man’s Hand’ which cut the engine if pressure was released. Since Loftin had to jump just before the collision, he tied down the control, but as he prepared to leap, leaving the truck to accelerate over the cliff, the cord slipped. He had no alternative but to ride the vehicle almost to the edge before jumping. ‘My scissors cut at literally the instant Carey’s butt left the cab,’ said Spielberg. But the near-accident left a continuity error. The truck door is open – ‘Leaving room for a sequel,’ Spielberg joked.
With only three weeks between the end of shooting and the air date, Universal allocated four editors to cut the film. Spielberg rollerskated from on cutting room to another. But the effect is seamless. Among the first people to see it was Barry Diller. ‘I saw a rough cut of Duel,’ he said, ‘and I remember thinking, “This guy is going to be out of television so fast because his work is so good.”’ In the event, however, Duel was sold to NBC, who scheduled it for their World Premiere Movie slot.
Before Duel was aired, Universal loaned Spielberg to CBS for another made-for-TV feature, this time a horror film called Something Evil. The producer was Alan Jay Factor, who’d been behind the innovative occult series One Step Beyond. Robert Clouse’s script about a couple who move into a remote Bucks County farmhouse, to find it haunted by a spirit that menaces their son, skilfully conflated The Exorcist’s plot of a child’s demonic possession and The Other’s rural setting. (The fact that films of both were in production but not yet released made it all the more attractive.) Sandy Dennis and Darren McGavin were reliable but undistinguished as the parents. The boy was Johnnie Whittaker, from the saccharine series Family Affair.
Spielberg, however, distilled a sense of uncategorisable menace from his simple materials. In particular, he drew on his delirious adolescent experiences with bright light in the temple and from the TV screen. Abandoning the blue acetate normally taped over windows to render them more natural, he overlit them. Figures moving against their glow were haloed and distorted. The ‘God Light’, a radiance pouring through clouds of smoke or dust, would appear in most of his films.
Duel aired on 13 November 1971. Its virtuosity impressed friends who had been underwhelmed by Spielberg’s previous TV work. George Lucas recalls.
Though I’d crossed paths with Steven at film festivals in the early sixties, it wasn’t until some time in 1971 that I really took note of him. I was at a party at Francis Ford Coppola’s house and Duel was on television. Since I’d met Steven I was curious about the movie and thought I’d sneak upstairs and catch ten or fifteen minutes. Once I started watching, I couldn’t tear myself away… I thought, this guy is really sharp. I’ve got to get to know him better.
Deciding what, if anything, Duel was ‘about’ became an intellectual game. Most American critics saw the film as pop sociology, and ammunition in the fight against their particular bêtes noires: mechanisation, alienation, pollution.
Europeans detected less symbolism and more craft. ‘With almost insolent ease,’ said Tom Milne in the British cinema magazine Sight and Sound, ‘Duel displays the philosopher’s stone which the Existentialists sought so persistently and often so portentously: the perfect acte gratuite, complete, unaccountable and self-sufficient.’ Milne did, however, also note two themes which would later become Spielberg trademarks. One was the film’s roots in medieval chivalry, a preoccupation that would surface again in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. With the truck’s first swerve in front of Mann, ‘the gauntlet is down’, leading to ‘a simple mortal combat between hunter and hunted [with] the huge lumbering lorry as the dragon, and the glitteringly fragile Plymouth sedan as the prancing, pitifully vulnerable knight in armour’. Spielberg later admitted he’d seen it as a man ‘duelling with the knights of the highway’. Another theme was the opponents’ solipsistic isolation from the world. Mann and the driver hardly exist outside their confrontation. Action is their character, as it would be for the shark-hunters of Jaws, Roy Neary in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Indiana Jones.
Duel boosted Spielberg’s stock at Universal, especially among technicians, most of whom were on contract and depended on good word of mouth for their next job. They couldn’t care less about what critics said, but the kid took care of his people and made them look good. Two weeks after Duel aired, renegade producer/director Tom Laughlin signed cameraman Jack Marta to shoot his highly successful Billy Jack films. Editor Frank Morriss found himself being offered more features. Jim Fargo, the assistant director, would be picked up by Clint Eastwood and direct features for him. Some went on with Spielberg. The composer Billy Goldenberg would work on Amazing Stories when Spielberg produced his TV series at Universal in 1985. Many of the people on Something Evil would also figure in Spielberg’s later career, including cameraman Bill Butler and Carl Gottlieb, his old friend from Long Beach who has a small acting role in the film and would later appear in and co-write Jaws.
Universal received a dozen requests from other studios to borrow Spielberg for cinema features. To his frustration, they turned them down. Nor would they agree to let him do a feature for them. Instead, Levinson and Link snagged him for another pilot. Husband and wife Martin Landau and Barbara Bain were being relaunched after Mission: Impossible as investigating reporters Paul Savage and wife. No amount of protest would shift Sheinberg, and although Spielberg’s old friend Barry Sullivan played the Supreme Court justice whose blackmailing the Savages probe, the experience was humiliating. After much tinkering and some changes in title, from Watch Dog to The Savage Report, the film aired in March 1972 as Savage, to generally indifferent reviews. It was, Spielberg said later, the only time he was ever forced to make a film. But even this wasn’t enough for him to recant on his belief in consensus film-making.
After adding nine minutes to Duel, Universal sent it to Cannes in May, a curtain-raiser to its European cinema release. Spielberg went too, his first trip outside America. A friend snapped him on a rainy Paris afternoon scampering across the Place de l’Etoile, the Arc de Triomphe behind him, a lanky kid in flared jeans, square-toed boots, striped skinny-rib shirt and too-tight jacket. He stares around in awe. Paris! In July, in Rome, Spielberg asked the local Universal office to arrange lunch with Federico Fellini. Fellini agreed, and his publicist Mario Longardi went along to translate. To their astonishment, the American-style restaurant they chose in deference to his guest’s palate refused to seat them because Fellini wasn’t wearing a tie. The ‘maestro’ stormed out, shouting over his shoulder, ‘Now we go to an Italian restaurant.’ After lunch, Spielberg handed Longardi his camera and asked to be photographed with Fellini, demanding a number of re-takes, including one with his arm around the waist of a startled director. Spielberg later wrote saying that he had the pictures on display in his office, believing they brought him luck, but neither Fellini nor Longardi was convinced that this gauche kid would make it in the film industry.
The intellectual climate in Europe was just as uncongenial. In Rome, left-wing critics pressed Spielberg to endorse their reading of Duel as socialist parable: working-class truck v. bourgeois sedan. Four of them left noisily when he wouldn’t agree. He was no more ready to enrol in the avant garde. As a consensus film-maker, he couldn’t accept Cahiers du Cinéma’s politique des auteurs, which designated one single person on a film as its driving intellectual force. ‘Those directors who believe in the auteur theory will have coronaries at an early age,’ he told his Cannes press conference. ‘You can’t play all the instruments at once.’
Spielberg accepted all the compliments for Duel, even those absurdly at odds with his beliefs. Yes, it was an ‘indictment of machines’ – despite his passion for video games and electronic gadgets. And sure, Mann was a horrible example of how suburban life rots mind and soul – this from the archetypal enthusiast for suburban America. Talking to him after Jaws, Richard Natale would compare him to ‘a computer, constantly clicking, reeling out facts and figures about the movie industry like a ticker tape. He is already adept at giving the quotable quotes, at circumventing the wrong questions.’ He’d coax columnists, ‘Let’s call each other with gossip,’ and tell San Francisco alternative journalist Mal Karman, ‘If you need more stuff for your article, just make it up. I don’t care.’
Duel opened in London in October 1972, though in a cinema outside the West End, and destined for a fortnight’s run at most. But its reputation had been growing since Cannes. David Lean said, ‘It was obvious that here was a very bright new director.’ British critics, and in particular Dilys Powell, who described Duel in the Sunday Times as ‘spun from the very stuff of cinema’, reviewed it with such enthusiasm that Universal transferred it to the West End and printed a new poster plastered with their praise. It had a respectable, if not spectacular London season, but did better on the Continent. To François Truffaut, Duel exemplified all the qualities he and the other New Wave directors aimed for: ‘grace, lightness, modesty, elegance, speed’, without their shortcomings, ‘frivolity, lack of conscience, naīveté’. The film finally cleared $6 million profit, but, more important, launched Spielberg’s critical reputation, especially in London, a city that, despite his dislike of Europe, would increasingly become his second headquarters. In 1984 he told lain Johnstone, Powell’s successor at the Sunday Times, ‘If it wasn’t for your illustrious predecessor, I wouldn’t be here.’
Back in Hollywood, events were conspiring to free Spielberg from the Universal TV treadmill. By the advent of what Joan Didion called ‘the hangover summer of 1970’, the dismal box-office receipts of youth films had been assessed, and their makers were out. ‘Nobody could get past the gate without a commitment from Barbra Streisand,’ she wrote. Casualties of the collapse littered Hollywood. ‘All the terrific twenty-two-year-old directors went back to shooting television commercials, and all the twenty-four-year-old producers used up the leases on their office space at Warner Brothers by sitting out there in the dull Burbank sunlight smoking dope before lunch and running one another’s unreleased pictures after lunch.’
Fortunately Spielberg wasn’t seen as part of this group. The VillageVoice’s film critic Tom Allen was already nominating him as chief of ‘the post-Coppola generation’ – those directors who, instead of fighting old Hollywood, elected to infiltrate and subvert it from within. It was a mantle he was more than proud to wear. Today, he still defines himself as an independent movie-maker working within the Hollywood establishment’.
Two unexpected losers in the change of direction were Richard Zanuck and David Brown. A Stanford Research Institute report in 1970 had convinced both men that movies were about to undergo a seismic readjustment. With TV flooding the market, it was futile for Hollywood to continue serving a ‘movie habit’ which no longer existed. Instead, Zanuck told the board, Fox ‘must depend heavily on a very small proportion of highly successful films targeted for the youth market’. Those films, he went on, must offer something the audience couldn’t get on TV. Zanuck gambled that the ‘something’ was sex. He commissioned film versions of two notoriously explicit novels and hired soft-porn impresario Russ Meyer to make a sequel to another.
It was these films, Portnoy’s Complaint, Myra Breckinridge and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls which, Brown acknowledged, ‘did us in at Fox’. Amid complaints about the raunchiness of the new slate and, worse, a pre-tax loss of $23 million, Darryl Zanuck arrived back from Europe in August 1970. Deadpan, he recited to the assembled board a digest of the verbal obscenities in Portnoy’s Complaint (‘“Beat my meat” – one. “Blow me” – two. “Boffed” – one. “Boner” – one. “Cock” – sixteen’), then announced that, ‘As long as I am Chairman and Chief Executive of Twentieth Century-Fox, Portnoy’s Complaint or any other film with the same degree of obscenity will not be produced.’ The project was sold to Warner Brothers. After this vote of no confidence, Richard Zanuck and Brown couldn’t last long. In January 1971 Darryl Zanuck reclaimed the studio he created. His axe-man Dennis Stanfill ensured that his son’s dismissal took place with maximum humiliation. ‘There’s a ritual to severance,’ he told an astonished Richard. When Louis B. Mayer had been ousted from MGM, his complimentary Chrysler was reclaimed even before he reached the parking lot. Now, in order to get into his car, Zanuck had to step over a painter effacing his name from the tarmac.
Zanuck and Brown went to Warners with a five-film contract as independent producers. The irony of their dismissal was that they had read the market correctly. Cinema did need to capitalise on its differences from TV rather than imitate the rival form. Films had to become national events, blanketing the media, dominating conversation, relegating TV to its domestic role. Assessing Richard Zanuck and David Brown’s administration, Hollywood historian Stephen M. Silverman has described how Hollywood in the seventies followed their lead, ‘marketing total escapist fare during the summer, and [developing] the “blockbuster or bust” mentality that quickly afflicted movie-making… If a picture did not pull in at least $100 million, it was considered a wasteful exercise.’ The film-maker who would put Zanuck’s and Brown’s theories into practice and prove their validity was Steven Spielberg.
6 The Sugarland Express (#ulink_7f87fc26-2aa7-5cb8-8e25-6ae78d3a3105)
I have more of a bubble-gum outlook on life than I think Welles did when he made Citizen Kane.
Spielberg, of making his first feature
WITH HIPPY Hollywood discredited, the yuppie producers who were to dominate the 1970s found themselves suddenly in favour. Michael and Julia Phillips, East Coast Jewish, with a background in publishing rather than movies, exemplified them. From the moment they arrived in 1971, Michael in his conservative New York tailoring, the shapely Julia in hot pants, they were Hollywood’s hippest couple. Michael had read Law and worked on Wall Street as a securities analyst, and Julia was a protégée of David Begelman, but they talked like liberals, smoked dope, played touch football, liked surfing and lived at the beach. They were cool. They didn’t mind John Milius turning up at parties with a .357 Magnum and firing it out to sea as the sun came up.
The timing of their arrival was impeccable. Journalists already talked about the USC group as ‘an invisible studio’, but while it included plenty of directors and writers, it had no producers. The Phillipses filled that niche. Julia knew they could become the vital link between Old Hollywood and New. ‘I think we perform the peculiar function of putting together the Marty Scorseses and the Robert Redfords,’ she drawled. ‘We are equally intimate with both these kinds of people and we can put the old glove in touch with the new glove, you know?’
In his search for a feature, Spielberg saw less of the USC gang. On his way back from Europe, he’d stopped over in New York, where he’d met a man who was to become one of his closest friends. Burly, bearded, seven years older than Spielberg, Brian De Palma was the son of a Philadelphia surgeon. His childhood was tormented by rivalry with his brothers, an obsession with his mother and the infidelities of his father. At one point, he made midnight raids in black commando gear to sneak compromising photographs of him with his nurse. A science buff, early computer freak and maniac for Hitchcock, whose fascination with voyeurism and the erotic manipulation of women he shared, De Palma came to movies through underground theatre and film. His friends were actors like Robert de Niro, whose career he launched. In 1971 he’d just finished Hi Mom! with de Niro. When a friend of Spielberg’s brought De Palma to his hotel, he brushed past Spielberg and walked around the room, examining the furniture. Spielberg was impressed. Here was someone who, unlike him, didn’t give a flying fuck what people thought. When De Palma won a Warners contract and moved to Hollywood, they became friends, and remained close.
Another new friend was Sydney Pollack, who directed twenty Ben Casey, Frontier Circus and Kraft Suspense Theater episodes a year for Universal in the sixties before making highly-regarded features like This Property is Condemned and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? In 1972 he was just finishing Jeremiah Johnson with Robert Redford, from a script written in part by Milius.
Pollack, an ex-actor, grave and dignified, with something in common physically with Sid Sheinberg, increasingly occupied the role in Spielberg’s life as older brother and counsellor. He and Freddie Fields introduced Spielberg to more influential people, including Guy McElwaine, an ICM agent, and Alan Ladd Jr, then production head of Twentieth Century-Fox. Spielberg knew Ladd through George Lucas, who liked Ladd’s self-effacing style.
Two other members of the group, David Giler and Joey Walsh, were writers. Giler, later to contribute to the script of Alien, was developing a contemporary comedy based on The Maltese Falcon, The Black Bird. Walsh, an ex-child actor and recovering gambling addict who kept his hand in playing poker with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, had collected some of his experiences into a screenplay called ‘Slide’, about Charlie and Bill, two amateur gamblers with otherwise dead-end lives who become friends, get involved with a couple of call girls, share some laughs and a few losses.
Later, Julia Phillips would paint Spielberg as someone out of his depth in this society,
hanging around with men who were too old for him. Who bet and drank and watched football games on Sunday. Who ran studios and agencies. The group centred around Guy [McElwaine] and Alan Ladd Jr. otherwise known as Laddy, and included such disparate types as Joey Walsh and David Giler, the former more for the betting than the football, the latter more for the drinking than the football.
Pollack too would incur her displeasure when he took over the Japanese gangster screenplay The Yakuza, written by Paul Schrader, one of the beach group, and had Robert Towne add an element of international romance. But few people shared her perceptions of Spielberg’s new friends. Most admired Pollack as a director who expertly balanced box office and art. Ladd was also respected as the most thoughtful of studio bosses, the model of Hollywood’s next wave of producers. The New York Times’s Aljean Harmetz, while conceding Ladd was ‘taciturn and emotionally reserved’, also rated him as ‘perhaps more than any other current top executive in love with movies’.
All this time, Spielberg had hoped Universal would finance The Sugarland Express, but in the end they blew cool, deciding that, despite the success of Duel, the new film was too much like Fox’s unsuccessful Vanishing Point. The script went into turnaround – for sale to anyone who would refund its development costs. Spielberg also negotiated for a while with agent Allan Carr, who planned a version of Bronte Woodard’s novel Meet Me at the Melba, about life in the thirties South, but producer Joe Levine wouldn’t OK him as director.
Grudgingly, Universal offered Spielberg a cinema feature from the studio’s roster of stock projects, and for ten weeks in the spring of 1972 he worked unenthusiastically with writer William Norton on a Burt Reynolds vehicle. Norton was to make his name with a succession of violent rural thrillers, and White Lightning set the tone with its story of ex-con ‘Gator’ McClusky who returns to the swamps of the South to avenge his younger brother, slaughtered by crooked sheriff Ned Beatty. Spielberg was wary of Reynolds, as he was of all stars. The actor had just broken into the list of the top ten box-office earners at number three, beneath Clint Eastwood and Ryan O’Neal, and, like Eastwood, had firm ideas about what worked for him on screen. Most producers encouraged him to forget dialogue and even character, and to concentrate on sexual magnetism and good-ol’-boy humour. Also like Eastwood, Reynolds trailed a team of buddy/collaborators, notably his stunt coordinator Hal Needham, who enjoyed a degree of trust and control which any director would have to harness. Sensing he lacked the skill or the interest to deal with these problems, Spielberg, in Variety-speak, ‘ankled’.
Of all the projects in play among his new friends, Spielberg preferred Joey Walsh’s ‘Slide’. He feared being pigeonholed as an action director and would often confide that he ‘basically wanted to make romantic films’, or ‘women’s films’, or was ‘really a director of comedies’. This last perception would survive until, during the making of 1941 in 1979, he confessed, ‘Comedy is not my forte.’ More important, however, was Slide’s buddy theme. Spielberg’s fascination with the male friendship he’d never achieved in childhood and the way in which men supported one another and formed effective teams would dominate Jaws, the Indiana Jones films, Always, even Schindler’s List.
He and Walsh worked on Slide throughout 1972. His method, the guided joint improvisation he’d used with Robbins and Barwood on Sugarland, was to become standard for him, the response of a natural film-maker to the hostile world of the written word. ‘I don’t know if Steven ever told me what to do – ever,’ Walsh says, ‘but when he didn’t giggle like a little boy eating a cookie, saying “This is great,” I knew something was wrong, and I always took that as a gauge and somehow I looked deeper into the scene.’ Walsh wanted to produce the film, so as to prevent studio interference. Both Spielberg and McElwaine backed him up, and MGM seemed happy with the package. Spielberg, delighted, told journalists that ‘Slide’ would be his next film.
At Universal, business was picking up. The avatar of a new attitude to features was George Lucas’s American Graffiti, which officially started production on 26 June 1972. Though he was technically working for Universal, Lucas shot most of the film well away from Hollywood, within driving distance of his Marin County home. Ned Tanen watched the daily budget, but otherwise left the thorny Lucas to himself. It was becoming clear to all the studios that these new film-makers, raised in a college environment and with little concept of normal employment practices, responded ill to being treated as employees. ‘We are the pigs,’ Lucas said of his generation of directors. ‘We are the ones who sniff out the truffles. You can put us on a leash, keep us under control. But we are the guys who dig out the gold.’ He compared a studio editor cutting his work, a practice taken for granted in Hollywood, to someone amputating his children’s fingers. Old Hollywood was astonished and offended at the comparison, but soon John Milius would be able to say, ‘Nobody in a studio challenges the final cut of a film now. I think they realise the film-makers are likely to be around a lot longer than the studio executives.’
The conflict between New and Old Hollywood came to a head for the first time when Lucas showed his final cut of American Graffiti to an audience that included Tanen and Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola was seen as the godfather of New Hollywood, able to deploy the same omnipotent octopoid power as Don Vito Corleone. When Tanen closed his deal with Lucas on American Graffiti he’d imposed two conditions. One was a reduction in the budget to $600,000. The other was that Coppola must act as the project’s moral, if not financial, guarantor. Magisterially, Coppola agreed. Now, at the preview screening, he took it on himself to defend the film, and Lucas, when Tanen dared to criticise it. ‘You should be getting down on your knees and thanking George for saving your job!’ he blustered. Reaching for his chequebook, he offered to buy the film there and then from Universal. (Fortunately, Tanen didn’t call his bluff, Coppola was, as usual, broke.) ‘This film is going to be a hit!’ he shouted – which it was, grossing $112 million. Though he didn’t know it yet, Ned Tanen had already lost Lucas. Lucas had tried to interest him in a version of Flash Gordon, but been turned down. Even before American Graffiti finished shooting, Lucas smuggled a copy to Alan Ladd Jr, along with his script for another space opera. It convinced Ladd to back him in the new film, Star Wars, and so deprive Universal of $250 million.
If Old Hollywood thought it could depend on the loyalty of these newcomers, it was badly mistaken. They would be satisfied with nothing less than total independence. The Brats shared a conviction that their generation must remake Hollywood in its own image. Otherwise they risked the fate of their hero and archetypal Hollywood renegade, Orson Welles. The director of Citizen Kane had deteriorated into a bloated has-been living off TV commercials for Nashua photocopiers and Gallo wine When Joe Dante, a Spielberg protégé, was in the early eighties asked to work on National Lampoon magazine’s projected film parody of Jaws, called Jaws 3 People 0, his suggestion that Welles take a role horrified everyone. ‘We’d have to put his name on the poster,’ said one executive, aghast. The decline and fall of Welles was a lesson to New Hollywood of the dangers of fighting the system. So palpable was the curse which seemed to follow him that even Spielberg, given the opportunity to back the last film of Welles’s life, The Cradle will Rock, would refuse to do so, despite Welles offering to cast Spielberg’s then wife, Amy Irving.
It was one thing to vow that you wouldn’t end up like Orson Welles, and quite another to see how you could win independence while continuing to live in a community where, for better or worse, art was organised on business lines. In her 1974 essay On the Future of the Movies, the New Yorker’s influential film critic Pauline Kael wrote of a ‘natural war in Hollywood between the businessmen and the artists… based on drives that may go deeper than politics and religion; on the need for status, and warring dreams’.
Studios executives in the seventies were mostly ex-lawyers or agents, more comfortable in the gloom of the boardroom and the hush of the golf course. They seldom read a book or saw any movies but the latest productions. Martin Scorsese dismissed them generically as ‘Youpeople’, while Spielberg, like many of his friends, called them ‘The Suits’.
None of the young directors had any quarrel with making money; it was the only way one measured success in a business where personal satisfaction with what appeared on the screen meant less and less. Nor were they entirely opposed to Old Hollywood, which had nurtured them and furnished the fantasies which drove them to make films. But all of them hated the compromises forced on them by the corporate caution of the agents and accountants. Spielberg lamented:
The tragedy of Hollywood today [is that] great gamblers are dead… In the old days the Thalbergs and the Zanucks and the Mayers came out of nickelodeons, vaudeville, they came out of the Borscht Belt theatre, and they came with a great deal of showmanship and esprit de corps to a little citrus grove in California. They were brave. They were gamblers. They were high rollers. There is a paranoia today. People are afraid. People in high positions are unable to say ‘OK’ or ‘not OK’. They’re afraid to take the big gamble. And that’s very very hard when you’re making movies. All motion pictures are a gamble.
By the seventies, Hollywood had largely turned its back on the old virtues, as Spielberg saw them, of showmanship and mass appeal which had drawn audiences back to the cinema every Saturday night for the latest ‘big picture’. Talky films with ageing actors had alienated teenage filmgoers, whose billions in disposable income were flowing into the pockets of record producers and clothing manufacturers.
Spielberg was one of the few newcomers to sense the path American movies must take in order to survive in the last quarter of the twentieth century. He knew instinctively that issues were Out and entertainment In. He became instrumental in transforming a cinema of stories and characters into one of sensation. Jaws would be one of the first films since Gone With the Wind to exploit a movie as a national event. ‘Up until The Godfather,’ says Julia Phillips, ‘every time you had a picture you thought was going to have reviews and audience appeal, you let it out slowly in a handful of chichi theatres in the major cities, and let it build. Then you went in ever widening waves.’ But Spielberg sensed that the twelve- to twenty-year-olds who, though they made up only 22 per cent of the population, represented 47 per cent of filmgoers, wanted the week’s hot movie now. TV promotion and TV reviewers had made the measured opinions of Time, Newsweek and even the venerable New York Times redundant. Within a decade, studio bean-counters would be able judge whether a film was a hit or flop simply by the takings of the first weekend of its release. By the time the print-media critics caught up, their judgement was irrelevant.
Spielberg also saw that overseas markets would transform the selling of cinema. Action and special effects needed no translation, so his films were perfect for foreign audiences. Long before the American economist Theodore Levitt propounded the theory of ‘globalisation’ in 1983, Spielberg was making the kind of universally appealing product which Levitt foresaw would dominate world markets in the future. Coca-Cola, Volkswagen, McDonald’s and rock stars like Madonna were sold in the same form and with the same trademark all over the world; so was Raiders of the Lost Ark, the emphatic comic-book logo of which, with its lettering of crimson and gold, would become as widely recognisable as the Coca-Cola wave. Increasingly throughout the seventies and eighties, Asia and Europe would almost equal Spielberg’s domestic audience.
At Warners, Zanuck and Brown’s five-film deal was winding down in mutual boredom. Ace Eli, from Spielberg’s story, with Cliff Robertson as the pilot, still hadn’t gone into production, and the administration was showing cold feet about most of the duo’s projects. They had accepted only one ‘youth’ package, Steelyard Blues, assembled by Michael and Julia Phillips with actor-turned-producer Tony Bill. The script was by David S. Ward, and Alan Myerson would direct Jane Fonda and the then-hot Donald Sutherland.
In midsummer, word got around of an imminent move by the partners. Lew Wasserman had decided that he wanted Universal in the feature business. Rather than promote Sheinberg or Tanen, however, he offered Zanuck and Brown a bungalow on the lot and a role as, in effect, its feature division, developing projects with studio funding, and releasing only through Universal. They leapt at the opportunity. In July they left Warners to form Zanuck/Brown Productions, and six weeks later they announced the Universal deal. In the weeks before they left and in the month immediately following, agents were asked to come in and pitch. Fields and Spielberg joined the queue.
Anxious to be seen as creative film-makers rather than loose-cannon executives, Zanuck and Brown boxed the compass with their purchases: black exploitation and horror, comedies and thrillers, prestige pictures and women’s stories. Some were trivial, but their choices showed they knew what the market wanted: not sex, but sensation and humour. Having succeeded with Patton at Fox by giving the story of an American military hero to a radical young screenwriter, Francis Coppola, they decided to have George C. Scott repeat the feat, this time playing Douglas MacArthur, and commissioned a screenplay from Barwood and Robbins. Would Spielberg be interested in directing? He said ‘Probably,’ though in truth he hated the idea of ‘two years working in ten different countries and getting dysentery in each one of them’.
He remained keener on comedy, of which Zanuck and Brown had a number of films in development. From American Graffiti’s writers Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, they’d bought Lucky Lady, a thirties farce about booze running. Paul Newman, another client of Freddie Fields, showed some interest in it, and in Spielberg, for First Artists, the consortium he’d just formed with Barbra Streisand, Steve McQueen and Sidney Poitier to take more control of their films.
Mike Medavoy, representing Michael and Julia Phillips, sold Zanuck and Brown a period script, The Sting, about a con trick perpetrated on a gangster in Depression Chicago. The brainchild of David S. Ward, it had attracted Tony Bill. Ward, however, wanted to direct it, and was leery of letting it be shown around as a script. Bill persuaded him to recount the plot into a tape recorder, and the Phillipses, impressed, financed the screenplay.
One casualty of Zanuck and Brown’s move to Universal was Ace Eli. Lacking their protection, it was botched by Fox, who decided the ending, where Robertson commits suicide, was depressing. They reshot it, and producer, director and screenwriter all removed their names: Erman became ‘Bill Sampson’, Robert Fryer ‘Boris Wilson’ and writer Claudia Salter ‘Chips Rosen’. Spielberg probably had some part in the choice of these noms du cinema, since ‘Chips Rosen’ resembles ‘Josh Rogan’, a pseudonym he assigned to Melissa Mathison when she wrote part of his Twilight Zone: The Movie episode in 1983. Spielberg himself, however, kept his screen credit for Ace Eli’s original story. Savagely reviewed in Variety, the film was dumped in sixteen cinemas, mostly in regional centres like Washington DC and Baltimore, earning a paltry $13,400 in its first week.
With no decision in sight from Newman on Lucky Lady, Zanuck and Brown put The Sugarland Express into their schedule, burying it under a black exploitation film, Willy Dynamite, Clint Eastwood’s The Eiger Sanction, a reptilian horror film called Sssssss, and The Sting.
Wasserman wasn’t fooled when Zanuck and Brown visited his home to outline their first year’s production plans.
‘We think Steve has a great future,’ Wasserman told them, ‘but I have to tell you we do not have faith in this project.’
They pressed, and the studio chief relented, though with ill grace. ‘Make the film, fellows, but you may not be playing to full theatres.’ Had Zanuck and Brown known Wasserman better, they would have realised that such predictions tended to become self-fulfilling.
Encouraged by the Phillipses, Schrader was writing Taxi Driver for Scorsese. Hoping to win over Spielberg permanently to their side, the Phillipses encouraged their conversations about a project on UFOs.
Spielberg grew up watching films about alien contact and invasion. Trying to get his vision on paper in 1970, he wrote a short story called ‘Experiences’, about UFOs over a midwestern town which are seen only by the kids parked in the local lovers’ lane. It echoed his Boy Scout troop’s experience in the Arizona desert and his own memories of the New Jersey hillside where hundreds of people watched a meteorite shower. The Phillipses could see the idea had promise, though they urged a stronger political message, suggesting that the failure to investigate might be a kind of Watergate cover-up.
Schrader, arguably the most original mind of New Hollywood, had never seen the films that influenced Spielberg. Raised by Calvinist fundamentalists, he skipped junk film entirely: his heroes were ascetics like Robert Bresson, Yasujiro Ozu and Carl Dreyer. However, once Spielberg began describing the international network of UFOlogists and their struggle to convince officialdom, Schrader’s fascination with morally driven characters was engaged.
One of the leading investigators, J. Allen Hynek, had begun investigating UFOs for the US Air Force. After discounting 80 per cent of sightings, he was left with a residue of genuinely inexplicable phenomena. Inspired by Hynek, Schrader drafted a script, called variously ‘Pilgrim’ and ‘Kingdom Come’, about Paul VanOwen, a sceptical federal agent converted by what Hynek called a ‘close encounter of the third kind’ – physical contact with aliens, as opposed to lights in the sky or signs of a landing. He persuades the government to fund a fifteen-year investigation of the phenomenon, only to find, in Schrader’s words, ‘that the key to making contact isn’t out there in the universe, but implanted inside him’.
After one Sunday at the Phillipses’, Spielberg stopped his car in the middle of the night on Mulholland Drive, the road that weaves sinuously along the ridge between Los Angeles and the Valley. Climbing out, he flopped on his back across the bonnet to gape at the night sky. Tilting his head, he saw the Valley’s net of light inverted, spread out above his head, as if the constellations had suddenly arranged themselves in orderly lines of red, green and diamond white. He was no longer looking down on a city but up at… something else: a space ship so huge that it filled the sky?
Now at least he knew what the UFO film would look like. He was less sure what it was about.
In October 1972, Goldie Hawn had signed a three-film deal with Universal. Her career, which soared after she left TV’s comedy Laugh In to win a 1969 Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her first film, Cactus Flower, had slumped with a Warren Beatty thriller, enigmatically called $s, and the comedy Butterflies are Free. Zanuck suggested her as Lou Jean Poplin in Sugarland Express. Hawn wanted to ditch her ditzy image, and Spielberg was happy to agree. She signed in December.
Julia Phillips in her autobiography harps on Hawn’s scruffy style and dirty hair, but to Spielberg these were her charm. She became the model for the tousled, untidy women of all his films: Close Encounters’s Melinda Dillon, sleepy in T-shirt and cut-offs; tomboyish Karen Allen and Kate Capshaw in two Indiana Jones films; Holly Hunter in Always; harassed mum Dee Wallace in E.T.; Laura Dern in Jurassic Park; Julia Roberts’s Tinkerbell in Hook. All fit the ‘younger sister/older brother’ model with which Spielberg characterised his romantic relationships. Mostly sexless, these women in his films live for and through their children or boyish men. Femininity is a reward conferred by their lovers, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Color Purple, Always and Hook, women don ‘girl clothes’ as a sign of desirability. ‘It’s not the clothes,’ sighs Holly Hunter deliriously in Always when Richard Dreyfuss presents her with a cocktail dress and high heels, ‘it’s the way you see me.’
For Spielberg, as for many directors, the erotic gratification of shooting films transcended sex. ‘When I’m making a movie I become celibate,’ he has said. ‘I get into the routine of fucking my movie.’ (He also avoided seeing other films at such times, fearful, he says, of his work being impregnated by the ideas of others.) He deprecated those film-makers preoccupied with ‘sport fucking’. ‘Location shooting is the Rites of Spring to most film crews,’ he said. ‘Holiday Inns across America are probably host to more sprung beds and screaming orgasms when a movie company comes to town than at any other time.’
Spielberg lost his virginity at seventeen in a Holiday Inn motel – ‘With a creature,’ he joked, in the wake of E.T., ‘that was anything but extraterrestrial.’ During his days at Universal, he dated regularly, encouraged by the more aggressive De Palma, who made the pick-ups and set the pace. When Spielberg finagled one of the first portable phones out of the studio, he and De Palma enjoyed calling girls from their driveways to ask for a date, then ringing the doorbell half a minute later. De Palma, an enthusiast for voyeurism and porn, both of which are recurring themes in his films, shot all their excursions on the 16mm camera he always carried. Their conquests were mostly starlets as low in the pecking order as themselves. Spielberg briefly tangled with Sarah Miles, and with striking Hispanic Victoria Principal, but neither relationship was exactly serious. Miles was no stranger to romance, and the later star of Dallas was so nakedly ambitious that she founded her own talent agency and blitzed casting directors with head shots and resumes of its favourite client: herself. Spielberg later ruefully rated her ‘a great mind trapped in a great body’.
‘Spielberg has always surrounded himself with women,’ Martin Amis observed. ‘Surrogate aunts, mothers, kid sisters.’ But he recoiled from relationships which might have forced him to assume responsibility for another’s emotional well-being. Actresses never posed that problem. They were too self-absorbed for more than a passing involvement. But that cut both ways. An actress offered no reassurance or consolation when Hollywood turned and savaged you. ‘You can’t cry on a shoulder that’s wearing a shoulder pad,’ Spielberg told one friend revealingly.
On 14 December 1972, just a few days before Spielberg’s twenty-fifth birthday, Universal printed out the red-covered Final Screenplay of The Sugarland Express. Shooting would begin on 8 January 1973 near San Antonio. Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins took sole writing credit, from Spielberg’s original story, but because of his intensive observation and discussion of the script during writing, Spielberg’s signature was on almost every scene.
Scarfing up the remains of the youth boom, Warners and United Artists had also put films into pre-production about young outlaw lovers. Badlands, directed by another newcomer, Terrence Malick, a Rhodes Scholar and Harvard graduate with a convincing line of intellectual chat, was based on the 1958 plains states murders committed by Charlie Starkweather and his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, while Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us retold a Bonnie and Clyde story against a rural Depression background. Though both promised to be radically different in tone to Sugarland, Universal was nervous about so much competition. Spielberg didn’t care. Scouting locations, he was already thinking about ‘Watch the Skies’, as the UFO film was now called. Visiting Texas with Mike Fenton and Shari Rhodes to cast small roles for Sugarland, he’d earmarked some isolated airfields for what he told columnist Archer Winsten would be ‘an Air Force picture shrouded in science fiction’.
During this trip, Spielberg experienced a close encounter of his own that was to have far-reaching effects on his work. He found himself in a remote, old-fashioned hotel in Jefferson, Texas, with Diane Bucker, head of the Texas Film Commission, and Elliot Schick, the film’s production manager (and later producer of The Deer Hunter). Around midnight, as he undressed, he kept glimpsing a figure from the comer of his eye, though it disappeared as he tried to focus on it. A moment later, the entire room went cold, especially around the four-poster bed. Panicked, Spielberg roused the others and, pausing only to snap some flash pictures, fled. Bucker’s new Mercedes refused to start, so a mechanic was called. Once he had it going at 1.30 a.m., they drove sixty miles to the comforting anonymity of a Holiday Inn. Spielberg disavows any belief in the supernatural, putting such phenomena down to the power of suggestion. What the incident most resembles, in his retelling, is a movie, and in particular a favourite of his, Robert Wise’s 1963 version of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, which he called The Haunting. True to form, Spielberg recycled the experience in Poltergeist, another demonstration that in his universe everything, even the incorporeal, aspires to the condition of film.
As shooting loomed on Sugarland, he began choosing his team. He persuaded Verna Fields to take leave from USC to edit. Carey Loftin again planned the stunts, using one of the Corvettes he and Max Balchowski rebuilt as camera cars for Bullitt. Finding a cameraman was harder. Since he’d be shooting in winter, and on the open road, often in bad light, Spielberg needed the best. ‘Visually wooed,’ he said, ‘by the thought of all those cars,’ he wanted, as on Duel, to put his audience into them, like kids on a fairground ride. To do that, a cameraman had to be intimate with Robert Gottschalk’s spherical-lens Panavision cameras which, although they had only a shallow depth of field, allowed one to shoot on a wide-angle lens without distortion. In particular, he wanted to use the Panaflex, its lightweight and noiseless version, inside the cars.
He chose Vilmos Zsigmond, whom he’d met through McElwaine and Altman. A Hungarian with a massive ego, Zsigmond had bribed his way to the West with watches in 1956, bringing with him footage of the Soviet invasion. Within a decade he’d become one of Hollywood’s best cinematographers, with a reputation, earned on films like John Boorman’s Deliverance and Altman’s chilly Western McCabe and Mrs Miller, which Spielberg admired, for shooting in bad light and worse weather.
A few weeks before he began shooting, Spielberg found himself judging a student film competition with Douglas Trumbull, largely responsible for the special effects on 2001: A Space Odyssey, and composers Marvin Hamlisch and Jerry Goldsmith. The young director’s name didn’t register with Goldsmith, but Spielberg was so familiar with Goldsmith’s themes for series like Thriller and The Twilight Zone, and for Planet of the Apes and Patton, that he could hum long stretches of the music. He flirted with asking him to write the score for Sugarland, but opted instead for John Williams, who, though less inventive than Goldsmith, could be relied on to turn in a score squarely in the Hollywood vernacular.
Williams’s Sugarland music would indeed be consensus composing by a master pasticheur. ‘I wanted John to do a real symphony for this film,’ says Spielberg, ‘but he said, “If you want me to do The Red Pony or Appalachian Spring, you’re going to ruin your movie. It’s a very simple story, and the music should be picking and soft, with just a few violins and a small orchestra; cradle-like.”’ He used Dutch harmonica virtuoso ‘Toots’ Thielmans to enliven fragmentary music of a folksy simplicity. Working with Goldsmith, however, became an ambition for Spielberg. ‘I heard,’ says Goldsmith, ‘that Steve and Zanuck tossed a coin to decide between me and Williams to score Jaws.’ Coincidentally, Goldsmith also did the music for Ace Eli and Rodger of the Shies, but still didn’t associate its author with his fellow panellist.
From the start, the logistics of Sugarland promised the most problems. Universal’s technical departments helped Spielberg visualise the action by building models of locations like the used-car lot so he could plan his shooting with military precision. An artist sketched every scene in storyboards which he took to Texas and taped around his motel room – ‘so I could see exactly what the film would look like from a bird’s eye view… I always had a visual overview in terms of day-to-day shooting.’
A hundred cars participated in the original chase. Universal’s publicity claimed the film used 250, failing to mention that this included the crew’s private cars and support vehicles. In fact only forty appeared on camera, and even that number threatened to be unwieldy. Richard Zanuck arrived on location the first day with trepidation.
I was thinking, well, let’s take it easy. Let’s get the kid acclimated to this big-time stuff. But when I got out there the first day he was about ready to get this first shot, and it was the most elaborate fucking thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I mean tricky; all-in-one shots, the camera going and stopping, people going in and out. But he had such confidence in the way he was handling it. Here he was, a young little punk kid, with a lot of seasoned crew around, a major actress on hand, and instead of starting with something easy, he picked a very complicated thing that required all sorts of intricate timing.
And it worked incredibly well – and not only from a technical standpoint, but the performances were very good. I knew right then and there, without any doubt, that this guy knew more at that age about the mechanics of working out a shot than anybody alive at that time, no matter how many pictures they’d made. He took to it like – you know, like he was born with a knowledge of cinema. And he never ceased to amaze me from that day on.
Zanuck was right about the shooting, but charitable about the performances. Then, as later, nobody got much direction from Spielberg, who simply outlined the action and let them provide the characterisation. ‘The most I ever heard him say before a take,’ recalls one actor in his later films, ‘was, “Lots of energy” – which is what directors always say when they don’t know what they want. And afterwards he said, “A nice sense of reality.”’
Paul Freeman remarks diplomatically, ‘Steven is one of those people who do their direction of actors in the casting. They trust the performer to know his or her business, and to get on with it. On Raiders, he knew Karen Allen and I were from the stage and were used to rehearsing, so he sent us off to improvise. When we came back and showed him, he said, “Fine.” All that stuff in the tent between Karen and me was made up like that.’
Casting was, and is, agony for Spielberg. He often chooses actors from tests shot on his behalf, and almost never talks to the performers until they arrive on the set. ‘Steven goes with his nose,’ says Julian Glover, the villain of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He looks for performers who physically resemble his conception of the character and who have enough experience not to need direction. Wayne Knight arrived in Hawaii to play the fat computer hacker and embryo thief Nedry in Jurassic Park without having met him.
I got out of the van, walked up to him, and said, ‘I hope I’m the guy you wanted.’ He said, ‘Yeah, you are.’… So I get in the Jeep, and Steven gets in the Jeep, and here we are, me and Steven Spielberg sitting in this Jeep. I had never had so much as a conversation with him, and it was like, ‘So how about those Mets?’ I had no idea what to say.
If Spielberg auditions someone in person, it is seldom with a scene from the film. Usually he asks for some trivial physical action. On Raiders he held casting sessions in the Lucasfilm kitchen, asking nonplussed actors to mix and bake cookies, in an attempt to throw them back on their natural reactions. Emily Richard, the hero’s mother in Empire of the Sun, was requested simply to put her hair up for a moment. ‘He actually blushed when he asked me,’ says Richard, ‘and I blushed when I did it.’
William Atherton’s physical appearance rather than his acting recommended him for Clovis in Sugarland. ‘He’s a very soft-spoken individual with wild eyes,’ Spielberg said. ‘He could be so easily misunderstood by somebody with a pair of binoculars. One look at Bill [in Looking for Mr Goodbar] and you think, “My God, he’s going to kill Diane Keaton.”’ Michael Sacks was chosen for ‘Slide’ because Spielberg wanted the cop and Clovis to look as much alike as possible. ‘It’s two men who really began in the same small town, and went in two different directions.’
Casting as he prefers, exactly to type, paid off best in his choice of John Ford veteran Ben Johnson as Chief Tanner. With an actor whose screen persona was so firmly established, direction was superfluous. As Sacks remarked admiringly, ‘he has an extraordinary quality – he can say any cliché to you and make it seem profound.’ So effective was Johnson, however, that Spielberg came to regret his subsidiary role, feeling he should have spent more time on Tanner, explaining the compassion both for his quarry and his men that leads him to chase the fugitives rather than force a shoot-out.
The Poplins’ flight, trailed by scores of police cars, was again structured like a carnival ride, with incidents of random violence – an ambush by vigilante deputies, a chance pile-up at an intersection, the ‘potty stop’ scene, with Clovis flushing a gunman hiding in a Portaloo – breaking the exhilaration of sheer movement. Film historian Diane Jacobs rightly called Spielberg and his coevals ‘excruciatingly conscious of their medium and its history’. Hollywood had nursed them through adolescence and handed them a means of expressing themselves. As a result, they revered its past to a degree that baffled the Suits. The studios’ response to the credit squeeze of the sixties had been to sell backlots for office buildings and auction off their props. In June 1982, however, Spielberg would pay $60,500 at Sotheby-Parke Bernet for one of the surviving ‘Rosebud’ sleds from the last scene of Citizen Kane – a sequence which inspired the last shot of Raiders, where the Ark is sequestered in a giant warehouse choked with anonymous crates.
All Spielberg’s films are ‘about’ cinema before they are about anything else. ‘It’s very clear his references are to film rather than literature,’ says Tom Stoppard, who wrote the script for Spielberg’s version of J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun and acted for more than a year as his informal dramaturg. ‘If one was talking about Captains Courageous, one was talking about Spencer Tracy and the movie, rather than the book.’ Julian Glover says:
It’s not that he ever said, ‘This shot is a copy of one in Stagecoach; the remake, not the original,’ or, ‘Here’s my Lawrence of Arabia shot. But you just had a sense… He asked me to do one shot [on Indiana Jones and the Lost Crusade], and I said, ‘Steven, I don’t know why I’m making this move.’ And he said, ‘Well, in Adam’s Rib, Spencer Tracy…’ And I just held up my hands and said, ‘That’s fine.’ Obviously he knew exactly what he was doing.
Kevork Malikyan, who played Kazim in The Last Crusade, had a similar experience. Spielberg spent hours staging his death. He was to collapse into Alison Doody’s arms and slide down her body. After grabbing him, she pulls her hands back to find them covered in blood. The shot refused to gel, and Spielberg dropped it, never mentioning he’d been trying to recreate the death of a disguised Daniel Gelin in the arms of James Stewart in Hitchcock’s remake of The Man who Knew too Much.
One can multiply such stories by the dozen. TV exposed the Brats to more movies than most Hollywood professionals saw in a lifetime. They wore their knowledge self-consciously, even arrogantly, and while Spielberg didn’t carry it to the extremes of Schrader or De Palma, he prepared his first cinema feature with a sense that he was not so much creating something new as building on what had gone before. ‘Once,’ recalls John Milius, ‘Steve and I were talking about how easily we could recreate the atmosphere of a Ford or Hitchcock film. He said, “But how is it we’re able to do that?” and I said, “Simple. We stole it.”’
Older heads despaired of the Brats’ fascination with movie lore. The newcomers, too young to have worked on the films they admired, saw old films not, as their makers did, in terms of personal experience, but as collections of themes, catchphrases, stylistic tricks. Recycling a gibe of Oscar Wilde, British critic Philip French accused them of knowing ‘the credits of everything but the value of nothing’. John Gregory Dunne agreed.
It always struck me that of all the people who were at the Phillipses that summer, there were very few who actually work… the social and cultural mines. [They were] basically gadgeteers. More interested in things… People graduate from Michigan State or wherever, take their book bags, come here to film school, and have no other basis in life except the movies they’ve seen. That’s why they’re making movies about Superman and poltergeists, and about psychic phenomena… Their problem is that they have never done anything.
‘You get the feeling,’ wrote Pauline Kael in an influential review that did much to put Spielberg on the map, ‘that the director grew up with TV and wheels (My Mother the Car?), and that he has a new temperament. Maybe Spielberg loves action and comedy and speed so much that he doesn’t really care if the movie has nothing else in it.’
The model for The Sugarland Express was, inevitably, another movie. In 1951, Austrian-born Billy Wilder paid an acid tribute to the affection of his adoptive country for bread and circuses with Ace in the Hole. A reporter named Chuck Tatum, played by Kirk Douglas at his most misanthropic, happens on the story of a lifetime, a man trapped in a mine under a New Mexico mountain. Rescuers expect to dig him out in a day or two, but Tatum, spinning out the story, persuades them to sink a shaft from the top. A ghoulish carnival gathers around the stricken man, with the reporter as its arrogant ringmaster. Tatum becomes famous, but the man dies.
To nobody’s surprise, least of all Wilder’s, Ace in the Hole flopped. ‘Americans expected a cocktail,’ he said, unperturbed, ‘and felt I was giving them a shot of vinegar instead.’ But Spielberg never concealed its affinities with The Sugarland Express: ‘I loved the Ace in the Hole similarity. I liked the idea of people rallying behind a media event, not knowing who the characters are or what they’re about, but just supporting them because they are on an errand of mercy to get their baby back – and that sparks a good deal of good old American sentimentality.’ It was a theme he would return to in 1941: the power of the media to convince people of almost anything, and the readiness of those people not only to believe what they hear but to act on it, often catastrophically. Sight and Sound saw the connection between Wilder and the anarchic hymns to road violence to which The Sugarland Express superficially belonged by summing it up as ‘Ace in the Hole meets Vanishing Point’. Few people grasped that Spielberg, as he been on the side of the truck rather than the car in Duel, wasn’t deploring mob rule in Sugarland Express but relishing it.
Once he started shooting, Spielberg had his hands full controlling his first major feature crew, and in particular Zsigmond, who had ambitions to direct and wasn’t backward in suggesting how he would have planned a scene. These problems were exacerbated when Spielberg insisted on operating the camera himself for many sequences. Lighting cameramen traditionally work with an operator who runs the camera while they concentrate on placing lights and mapping out movements. Spielberg, however, still had the amateur’s love of shooting, and would continue to handle the camera on many scenes throughout his career, to the irritation of directors of photography.
‘Vilmos is a very interesting man,’ Spielberg said diplomatically, ‘And when you employ his great camera eye, you also get gratis his thoughts. He would offer ideas beyond the definition of the American cinematographer.’ Arguments were common, but Spielberg won most of them. ‘When a cameraman [has] free rein,’ he said, ‘he becomes the director and the director becomes the apprentice.’ And he felt he’d gone through his apprenticeship at Universal already. However it was Zsigmond who persuaded him that the camera, rather than occupying the position of a detached directorial Eye of God, should always represent the point of view of a character. Thereafter, Spielberg’s films became more concerned with people and a little less like cartoons.
‘Several crew members said they’d never been on a happier location,’ Goldie Hawn remarked. ‘Four of them ended up marrying local girls from San Antonio, which was our base of operations. One was a waitress, another took reservations at the Holiday Inn. Hollywood meets Texas. It was a happy company.’ Spielberg was unaffected, even amused by the nocturnal sighs and moans, which, characteristically, he noted in relation to a movie. ‘Walking along the hall at one in the morning at those Holiday Inns sometimes sounds like Gyorgy Ligeti’s Atmospheres from 2001.’ Sex helped alleviate the tensions of working in a district fed up with film units. Sam Peckinpah was shooting The Getaway in the area, and his piratical crew had looted CB radios from their hired police cars. As a result, Zanuck/Brown had to buy twenty-five junked black-and-whites at auction. After the shoot, Spielberg bought the Poplins’ car, with dozens of bullet holes still visible where the special effects technicians had drilled them, and drove it for years.
In February, he had cause to be glad he turned down White Lightning. Scandal erupted on location for Reynolds’s The Man who Loved Cat Dancing, shooting in Gila Bend, Arizona, with his one-time playmate Sarah Miles. Miles’s ‘personal assistant’ David Whiting was found dead after a Quaalude overdose, and evidence at the inquest suggested he and Reynolds had been sharing Miles’s bed. In different circumstances, it might have been Spielberg, not Vanishing Point’s Richard Sarafian, who had to handle this production and public-relations nightmare.
In May 1973, just as shooting on Sugarland ended, literary agent Roberta Pryor delivered to Zanuck in the California office and to Brown in New York typescripts of a new novel by an unknown writer. Both men read it overnight. Richer producers, once they got around to looking at it, were ready to buy the book, but by then Zanuck and Brown, often telephoning from public phones and restaurants to disguise their interest in the property, had snatched Peter Benchley’s Jaws for $175,000, with a further $75,000 for writing the first-draft screenplay, plus 10 per cent of net profits.
A few days later, Spielberg spotted the manuscript on Zanuck’s desk and took it home for the weekend. After reading until late, he tried to sleep, but woke from disturbed dreams. At 3 a.m. he picked up the book again, gripped by the story of a monster ravaging an East Coast resort until killed by a coalition of the local police chief, an Ivy League scientist and an old shark-hunter.
By Sunday night, he knew he had to film Jaws. All his life he’d feared the sea and its creatures. When he bought a house at Malibu in the eighties, he had nightmares of the waves undermining the foundations, and dreamed of piling up sandbags to protect it. He felt personally attacked by the shark, and wanted to strike back. This was reflex thinking, punch/counterpunch, the sort that video games sharpened. On Monday he walked into Zanuck and Brown’s office and said, ‘Let me direct this film.’
‘We’ve got a director,’ Brown told him.
He was Dick Richards, a competent technician but, more importantly, a client of Mike Medavoy, who also represented Benchley and had attached Richards to the project at its inception.
‘Well, if anything falls out,’ Spielberg told Brown, ‘I love this project.’
He didn’t have long to wait. Two days later, Zanuck and Brown lunched with Richards, Benchley and Medavoy. To Benchley’s mounting irritation, Richards kept referring to ‘the whale’. Finally Benchley blew his top; nobody who was unable to tell a shark from a whale was going to film his book. Richards said he’d rather make Raymond Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely anyway, and the fragile coalition collapsed.
Four days after Spielberg expressed interest, Zanuck and Brown offered him the film – and found, to their dismay, that he’d changed his mind.
‘I don’t know,’ he told Zanuck. ‘After all, it’s only a shark story.’ Wouldn’t it be perceived as another Duel: Everyman v. The Beast? At other times he compared it to just an inflated episode of Sea Hunt, the popular 1950s TV scuba series with Lloyd Bridges.
He was also finding the UFO project ‘Watch the Skies’ both more interesting and more challenging.
When pressed, Spielberg always professed scepticism about UFOs. He never mentioned his teenage UFO feature Firelight, nor the phenomenon seen by other members of his Scout troop in the Arizona desert. Later he would claim to have been converted by the US government’s objections to him making ‘Watch the Skies’. ‘I really found my faith,’ he said, ‘when I heard that the government was opposed to the film. If NASA took the time to write me a twenty-page letter, then I knew there must be something happening.’
What he really believed is unimportant. Not for the first time, he was adopting the beliefs of his audience, sensing what polls later made clear: that many Americans, without having particularly strong convictions, felt there ‘might be something to’ flying saucers. For a consensus film-maker, that was enough. Five years before John Naisbitt’s Megatrends became the fashionable read, Spielberg and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as ‘Watch the Skies’ was renamed, exemplified its propositions: that the best way to beguile America’s slow-reacting public is not to be original but to spot a trend and exploit it; that such trends seldom emerge in Washington or New York but are more apparent in a few heartland states, and in California; and that Americans had lost interest in travelling to outer space. What they now wanted was for outer space to come to them.
It was for the ability to chart the Zeitgeist, to articulate the mood of the crowd before they knew it themselves, and then to exploit it, that Spielberg most admired Orson Welles, whose radio version of War of the Worlds in 1938 convinced thousands that Martians had landed at Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. Welles, he said, ‘was not so much writing a radio program about Martians invading New Jersey as about America’s fear of invasion from Europe. War was just a few months away, but Welles’s invasion was not the Stuka, it was the Martian; it preyed on the vulnerability of the time.’ Spielberg, both in this film and in Jaws, would do the same For the record he repudiated Welles’s broadcast, but later he bought the original script for the programme and displayed it under glass at his home.
In Schrader’s script for what would become Close Encounters, VanOwen bargains with the Air Force. He’ll keep quiet, providing they give him the money to keep investigating. They agree, and he spends his life searching, a counterpart of the protagonists in films which Schrader later directed or wrote: Yukio Mishima, Hank Williams, Patty Hearst, John Latour of Light Sleeper and, archetypally, Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, visionaries drawn to self-destruction as their only means of redemption. At the end of his life VanOwen finds the aliens and, as Schrader put it, is ‘taken off the planet, like Elijah. He had fought the good fight and he was transcended.’
But Spielberg wasn’t happy with this approach.
‘Steve took violent objection,’ Schrader says. ‘He wanted the lead character of this drama to be an ordinary guy, a Joe Blow.’
‘I refuse,’ Schrader said, ‘to send off to another world, as the first example of earth’s intelligence, a man who wants to go and set up a McDonald’s franchise.’
Spielberg said, ‘That’s exactly the guy I want to send.’
After a series of increasingly recriminatory meetings, Schrader abandoned the project.
Throughout his discussions with Schrader, Spielberg had kept his options open on Jaws. He even came into the Zanuck/Brown office and handed out T-shirts printed with Doubleday’s inspired cover design of a phallic shark rising from an inky ocean towards a swimming girl. But in the long nights, he fretted that the narrative expired after the first hundred pages, and didn’t revive until the last hundred. Where was the drive for which he’d been praised in the reviews of Duel?
‘I don’t want to make a film,’ he explained to his eventual star Richard Dreyfuss. ‘I want to make a movie.’
Increasingly he visualised Jaws in far simpler terms than Benchley, as ‘an experiment in terror… the behemoth against Everyman… There is nothing subtle about Jaws. There are underpinnings that are subtle, but what it’s about is pretty slam-bang.’ He told journalist Monte Stettin, ‘Jaws isn’t a big movie. It’s a very small picture. It deals with one social issue [i.e.] There is no place in the world to stay unprotected. Which is what this film is all about.’
Benchley’s story had a journalistic simplicity. The town of Amity, an East Coast summer resort based on Martha’s Vineyard, is terrorised by a rogue Great White Shark which snaps up unwary bathers. The police chief, Brody, a newcomer from New York, bows to pressure from local businessmen to hush up the deaths, but when the shark begins taking children from the shallows and wrecking the boats sent out to hunt it, he finds his courage again and hunts down the fish. He’s helped by Hooper, a wealthy shark expert, and Quint, a local eccentric who shows them the brutal techniques necessary to kill the giant. In their final confrontation, Quint and Hooper are killed, but the shark spares Brody, sinking back into the depths with the body of Quint in its jaws.
Writing in the shadow of Watergate, Benchley drew the people of Amity as products of Nixonian moral blight. Quint is a ruthless environmental despoiler. (In case we miss this, he baits a hook with the body of an unborn baby dolphin.) The town’s Chief Selectman has sold out to the Mafia in a land deal. Brody frets about losing his job, while his wife Ellen itches for sex and attention, which Hooper, the conceited Ivy League ichthyologist, provides. Spielberg disliked them all. ‘The only likeable character was the shark,’ he said, ‘who was a garbage-eating machine and ate all the trashy characters.’ In particular, the Spielberg of the broken home, the one man in the house of women, found Hooper distasteful. He saw him as emasculating and cuckolding the sheriff, and making the sheriff as vainglorious as he was. Benchley, already writing the screenplay, didn’t agree.
Zanuck and Brown were so depressed by these conflicts that they contemplated ditching Jaws entirely. During a meeting with Peter Gimbel, the documentary producer whose Blue Water, White Death had shown in graphic detail the dangers of filming sharks, Gimbel offered to direct the film, and Zanuck and Brown, in a moment of frustration, invited him to buy them out. Fortunately for the team, Gimbel declined.
The partners finally convened a make-or-break conference with Spielberg, to which they pointedly wore their Jaws T-shirts, a reminder of his earlier commitment. Sidney Sheinberg also urged him to make the film and, with ‘Watch the Skies’ still lacking a script, Spielberg accepted at last. His deal gave him, on top of his salary, a meagre 2.5 per cent of net profits, against Zanuck/Brown’s 40 per cent and Benchley’s 10 per cent. Almost in passing, the trade papers of 21 June 1973 announced that Jaws had a director.
Spielberg was unaware that he had enlisted for the duration. The bane of Zanuck and Brown’s days at Fox had been Darryl Zanuck’s veto, exercised in its most extreme form when he fired them. Going into business on their own, they had agreed privately never to reverse a firm decision. As Bob Woodward put it, ‘Loyalty was their vice.’ They even refused to give interviews separately. If one spoke to the press, the other was always present, even if only on a telephone line. Like an old married couple, they often finished one another’s sentences.
Meanwhile, the board of an ailing Columbia, Hollywood’s most underfunded and troubled studio, had installed, at the urging of the town’s most reclusive and Machiavellian power broker, Ray Stark, a new president, David Begelman. The ex-agent, one of Hollywood’s great gamblers, took over in the summer of 1973. Within three years, he would have turned Columbia’s loss into a huge profit. Begelman’s first act was to sign a number of old friends and clients to lucrative production deals. Michael and Julia Phillips were given a contract for two pictures, both written by Schrader. Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and ‘Watch the Skies’. With Jaws still lacking a script, Spielberg signed that deal too.
All summer, editing on Sugarland had continued. Satisfied with finishing only five days over its fifty-five-day schedule and near enough to the $2.5 million budget, Spielberg initially spoke warmly of the film. ‘I guess if I had Sugarland to do over again, I wouldn’t change anything,’ he said at the time. But within a few years he all but disowned it as mechanistic and heartless, unconcerned with its characters.
Universal had promised that, if he had a release print before 10 September, the film could open on the November Thanksgiving weekend. Spielberg delivered, but from the moment the studio viewed the rough cut, they decided they had a loser. Richard Zanuck drove down to Palm Springs and showed it to his parents. Darryl didn’t think much of it either. Nor did Goldie Hawn, who found it ‘too serious, too unrelenting and too uptight’.
It contrasted starkly with their period comedy thriller The Sting, which had worked out far better than Zanuck and Brown had dared hope. After ousting scriptwriter David Ward as director, they replaced him with the bankable George Roy Hill, who had a deal at Universal but also, more important, inspired confidence in Robert Redford and Paul Newman, who starred as the two swindlers of gang boss Robert Shaw. Hill realised the film brilliantly. With its Depression setting, lovingly recreated on the Universal backlot, its ragtime score skimmed from Scott Joplin and the inspired joint performance of Redford and Newman, it exuded the heady perfume of a hit.
Rather than damage The Sting’s Christmas release, Zanuck persuaded Spielberg to withhold Sugarland Express until the following April. As their Universal deal guaranteed control of advertising, he argued that this would give them time for some intelligent promotion. Spielberg reluctantly agreed.
‘Our early ads were our own,’ said Zanuck. ‘Spielberg himself shot one of them.’ They featured the image of a road leading to an empty horizon which he would use again for Close Encounters. In the middle distance was a police car. In the foreground, scattered over the centre line, were broken glass, handcuffs, a policeman’s Stetson, a handgun, a rifle and a teddy bear. The advertising copy was ambivalent: ‘It’s Not Every Day You Take a Ride Like This!’
These ads barely survived the press and trade screenings in the first weeks of March. ‘Our campaigns didn’t work,’ Zanuck admitted. ‘We learned that any ad with a gun is anathema to the East Side public on Third Avenue in New York City. On Broadway, however, show lots of guns. We learned a great deal.’
Zanuck and Brown took Sugarland, and Spielberg, to Cannes. Benchley was also in Europe to promote his novel, so the four men met in a cabana at the Hôtel Cap d’Antibes to chew over Benchley’s screenplay, which Spielberg was due to start shooting almost immediately. After Benchley left, the film-makers gloomily contemplated the chasm between their perception of Jaws
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John Baxter
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Биографии и мемуары
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: First published in 1996 and now available as an ebook. Please note that this edition does not include illustrations.Steven Spielberg dominated the cinema of the nineties. He is one of the screen′s greatest enchanters, with a spellbinding capacity – and a box-office record – matched by very few.His power now exceeds that of the greatest moguls of Hollywood′s golden era, and films like ′Jaws, ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind′ and ′Jurassic Park′ have been seen by billions around the world, and have changed forever the way movies are made. How was it that this ′movie brat′, from an unhappy and rootless adolescence on the fringes of American society, became one of the most formidable players on the global entertainment scene?.From ′Duel′, which suggested the innate ′film sense′ Spielberg would bring to movie-making, to the Oscar-winning ′Schindler′s List ′and beyond…