Steven Spielberg

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.