Steven Spielberg

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

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.