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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’.
