Steven Spielberg

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

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.