Steven Spielberg

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 Village Voice’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

I have more of a bubble-gum outlook on life than I think Welles did when he made Citizen Kane.

Spielberg, of making his first feature

WITH HIPPY Hollywood discredited, the yuppie producers who were to dominate the 1970s found themselves suddenly in favour. Michael and Julia Phillips, East Coast Jewish, with a background in publishing rather than movies, exemplified them. From the moment they arrived in 1971, Michael in his conservative New York tailoring, the shapely Julia in hot pants, they were Hollywood’s hippest couple. Michael had read Law and worked on Wall Street as a securities analyst, and Julia was a protégée of David Begelman, but they talked like liberals, smoked dope, played touch football, liked surfing and lived at the beach. They were cool. They didn’t mind John Milius turning up at parties with a .357 Magnum and firing it out to sea as the sun came up.

The timing of their arrival was impeccable. Journalists already talked about the USC group as ‘an invisible studio’, but while it included plenty of directors and writers, it had no producers. The Phillipses filled that niche. Julia knew they could become the vital link between Old Hollywood and New. ‘I think we perform the peculiar function of putting together the Marty Scorseses and the Robert Redfords,’ she drawled. ‘We are equally intimate with both these kinds of people and we can put the old glove in touch with the new glove, you know?’

In his search for a feature, Spielberg saw less of the USC gang. On his way back from Europe, he’d stopped over in New York, where he’d met a man who was to become one of his closest friends. Burly, bearded, seven years older than Spielberg, Brian De Palma was the son of a Philadelphia surgeon. His childhood was tormented by rivalry with his brothers, an obsession with his mother and the infidelities of his father. At one point, he made midnight raids in black commando gear to sneak compromising photographs of him with his nurse. A science buff, early computer freak and maniac for Hitchcock, whose fascination with voyeurism and the erotic manipulation of women he shared, De Palma came to movies through underground theatre and film. His friends were actors like Robert de Niro, whose career he launched. In 1971 he’d just finished Hi Mom! with de Niro. When a friend of Spielberg’s brought De Palma to his hotel, he brushed past Spielberg and walked around the room, examining the furniture. Spielberg was impressed. Here was someone who, unlike him, didn’t give a flying fuck what people thought. When De Palma won a Warners contract and moved to Hollywood, they became friends, and remained close.

Another new friend was Sydney Pollack, who directed twenty Ben Casey, Frontier Circus and Kraft Suspense Theater episodes a year for Universal in the sixties before making highly-regarded features like This Property is Condemned and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? In 1972 he was just finishing Jeremiah Johnson with Robert Redford, from a script written in part by Milius.

Pollack, an ex-actor, grave and dignified, with something in common physically with Sid Sheinberg, increasingly occupied the role in Spielberg’s life as older brother and counsellor. He and Freddie Fields introduced Spielberg to more influential people, including Guy McElwaine, an ICM agent, and Alan Ladd Jr, then production head of Twentieth Century-Fox. Spielberg knew Ladd through George Lucas, who liked Ladd’s self-effacing style.

Two other members of the group, David Giler and Joey Walsh, were writers. Giler, later to contribute to the script of Alien, was developing a contemporary comedy based on The Maltese Falcon, The Black Bird. Walsh, an ex-child actor and recovering gambling addict who kept his hand in playing poker with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, had collected some of his experiences into a screenplay called ‘Slide’, about Charlie and Bill, two amateur gamblers with otherwise dead-end lives who become friends, get involved with a couple of call girls, share some laughs and a few losses.

Later, Julia Phillips would paint Spielberg as someone out of his depth in this society,

hanging around with men who were too old for him. Who bet and drank and watched football games on Sunday. Who ran studios and agencies. The group centred around Guy [McElwaine] and Alan Ladd Jr. otherwise known as Laddy, and included such disparate types as Joey Walsh and David Giler, the former more for the betting than the football, the latter more for the drinking than the football.

Pollack too would incur her displeasure when he took over the Japanese gangster screenplay The Yakuza, written by Paul Schrader, one of the beach group, and had Robert Towne add an element of international romance. But few people shared her perceptions of Spielberg’s new friends. Most admired Pollack as a director who expertly balanced box office and art. Ladd was also respected as the most thoughtful of studio bosses, the model of Hollywood’s next wave of producers. The New York Times’s Aljean Harmetz, while conceding Ladd was ‘taciturn and emotionally reserved’, also rated him as ‘perhaps more than any other current top executive in love with movies’.

All this time, Spielberg had hoped Universal would finance The Sugarland Express, but in the end they blew cool, deciding that, despite the success of Duel, the new film was too much like Fox’s unsuccessful Vanishing Point. The script went into turnaround – for sale to anyone who would refund its development costs. Spielberg also negotiated for a while with agent Allan Carr, who planned a version of Bronte Woodard’s novel Meet Me at the Melba, about life in the thirties South, but producer Joe Levine wouldn’t OK him as director.

Grudgingly, Universal offered Spielberg a cinema feature from the studio’s roster of stock projects, and for ten weeks in the spring of 1972 he worked unenthusiastically with writer William Norton on a Burt Reynolds vehicle. Norton was to make his name with a succession of violent rural thrillers, and White Lightning set the tone with its story of ex-con ‘Gator’ McClusky who returns to the swamps of the South to avenge his younger brother, slaughtered by crooked sheriff Ned Beatty. Spielberg was wary of Reynolds, as he was of all stars. The actor had just broken into the list of the top ten box-office earners at number three, beneath Clint Eastwood and Ryan O’Neal, and, like Eastwood, had firm ideas about what worked for him on screen. Most producers encouraged him to forget dialogue and even character, and to concentrate on sexual magnetism and good-ol’-boy humour. Also like Eastwood, Reynolds trailed a team of buddy/collaborators, notably his stunt coordinator Hal Needham, who enjoyed a degree of trust and control which any director would have to harness. Sensing he lacked the skill or the interest to deal with these problems, Spielberg, in Variety-speak, ‘ankled’.

Of all the projects in play among his new friends, Spielberg preferred Joey Walsh’s ‘Slide’. He feared being pigeonholed as an action director and would often confide that he ‘basically wanted to make romantic films’, or ‘women’s films’, or was ‘really a director of comedies’. This last perception would survive until, during the making of 1941 in 1979, he confessed, ‘Comedy is not my forte.’ More important, however, was Slide’s buddy theme. Spielberg’s fascination with the male friendship he’d never achieved in childhood and the way in which men supported one another and formed effective teams would dominate Jaws, the Indiana Jones films, Always, even Schindler’s List.

He and Walsh worked on Slide throughout 1972. His method, the guided joint improvisation he’d used with Robbins and Barwood on Sugarland, was to become standard for him, the response of a natural film-maker to the hostile world of the written word. ‘I don’t know if Steven ever told me what to do – ever,’ Walsh says, ‘but when he didn’t giggle like a little boy eating a cookie, saying “This is great,” I knew something was wrong, and I always took that as a gauge and somehow I looked deeper into the scene.’ Walsh wanted to produce the film, so as to prevent studio interference. Both Spielberg and McElwaine backed him up, and MGM seemed happy with the package. Spielberg, delighted, told journalists that ‘Slide’ would be his next film.

At Universal, business was picking up. The avatar of a new attitude to features was George Lucas’s American Graffiti, which officially started production on 26 June 1972. Though he was technically working for Universal, Lucas shot most of the film well away from Hollywood, within driving distance of his Marin County home. Ned Tanen watched the daily budget, but otherwise left the thorny Lucas to himself. It was becoming clear to all the studios that these new film-makers, raised in a college environment and with little concept of normal employment practices, responded ill to being treated as employees. ‘We are the pigs,’ Lucas said of his generation of directors. ‘We are the ones who sniff out the truffles. You can put us on a leash, keep us under control. But we are the guys who dig out the gold.’ He compared a studio editor cutting his work, a practice taken for granted in Hollywood, to someone amputating his children’s fingers. Old Hollywood was astonished and offended at the comparison, but soon John Milius would be able to say, ‘Nobody in a studio challenges the final cut of a film now. I think they realise the film-makers are likely to be around a lot longer than the studio executives.’

The conflict between New and Old Hollywood came to a head for the first time when Lucas showed his final cut of American Graffiti to an audience that included Tanen and Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola was seen as the godfather of New Hollywood, able to deploy the same omnipotent octopoid power as Don Vito Corleone. When Tanen closed his deal with Lucas on American Graffiti he’d imposed two conditions. One was a reduction in the budget to $600,000. The other was that Coppola must act as the project’s moral, if not financial, guarantor. Magisterially, Coppola agreed. Now, at the preview screening, he took it on himself to defend the film, and Lucas, when Tanen dared to criticise it. ‘You should be getting down on your knees and thanking George for saving your job!’ he blustered. Reaching for his chequebook, he offered to buy the film there and then from Universal. (Fortunately, Tanen didn’t call his bluff, Coppola was, as usual, broke.) ‘This film is going to be a hit!’ he shouted – which it was, grossing $112 million. Though he didn’t know it yet, Ned Tanen had already lost Lucas. Lucas had tried to interest him in a version of Flash Gordon, but been turned down. Even before American Graffiti finished shooting, Lucas smuggled a copy to Alan Ladd Jr, along with his script for another space opera. It convinced Ladd to back him in the new film, Star Wars, and so deprive Universal of $250 million.

If Old Hollywood thought it could depend on the loyalty of these newcomers, it was badly mistaken. They would be satisfied with nothing less than total independence. The Brats shared a conviction that their generation must remake Hollywood in its own image. Otherwise they risked the fate of their hero and archetypal Hollywood renegade, Orson Welles. The director of Citizen Kane had deteriorated into a bloated has-been living off TV commercials for Nashua photocopiers and Gallo wine When Joe Dante, a Spielberg protégé, was in the early eighties asked to work on National Lampoon magazine’s projected film parody of Jaws, called Jaws 3 People 0, his suggestion that Welles take a role horrified everyone. ‘We’d have to put his name on the poster,’ said one executive, aghast. The decline and fall of Welles was a lesson to New Hollywood of the dangers of fighting the system. So palpable was the curse which seemed to follow him that even Spielberg, given the opportunity to back the last film of Welles’s life, The Cradle will Rock, would refuse to do so, despite Welles offering to cast Spielberg’s then wife, Amy Irving.

It was one thing to vow that you wouldn’t end up like Orson Welles, and quite another to see how you could win independence while continuing to live in a community where, for better or worse, art was organised on business lines. In her 1974 essay On the Future of the Movies, the New Yorker’s influential film critic Pauline Kael wrote of a ‘natural war in Hollywood between the businessmen and the artists… based on drives that may go deeper than politics and religion; on the need for status, and warring dreams’.

Studios executives in the seventies were mostly ex-lawyers or agents, more comfortable in the gloom of the boardroom and the hush of the golf course. They seldom read a book or saw any movies but the latest productions. Martin Scorsese dismissed them generically as ‘Youpeople’, while Spielberg, like many of his friends, called them ‘The Suits’.

None of the young directors had any quarrel with making money; it was the only way one measured success in a business where personal satisfaction with what appeared on the screen meant less and less. Nor were they entirely opposed to Old Hollywood, which had nurtured them and furnished the fantasies which drove them to make films. But all of them hated the compromises forced on them by the corporate caution of the agents and accountants. Spielberg lamented:

The tragedy of Hollywood today [is that] great gamblers are dead… In the old days the Thalbergs and the Zanucks and the Mayers came out of nickelodeons, vaudeville, they came out of the Borscht Belt theatre, and they came with a great deal of showmanship and esprit de corps to a little citrus grove in California. They were brave. They were gamblers. They were high rollers. There is a paranoia today. People are afraid. People in high positions are unable to say ‘OK’ or ‘not OK’. They’re afraid to take the big gamble. And that’s very very hard when you’re making movies. All motion pictures are a gamble.

By the seventies, Hollywood had largely turned its back on the old virtues, as Spielberg saw them, of showmanship and mass appeal which had drawn audiences back to the cinema every Saturday night for the latest ‘big picture’. Talky films with ageing actors had alienated teenage filmgoers, whose billions in disposable income were flowing into the pockets of record producers and clothing manufacturers.

Spielberg was one of the few newcomers to sense the path American movies must take in order to survive in the last quarter of the twentieth century. He knew instinctively that issues were Out and entertainment In. He became instrumental in transforming a cinema of stories and characters into one of sensation. Jaws would be one of the first films since Gone With the Wind to exploit a movie as a national event. ‘Up until The Godfather,’ says Julia Phillips, ‘every time you had a picture you thought was going to have reviews and audience appeal, you let it out slowly in a handful of chichi theatres in the major cities, and let it build. Then you went in ever widening waves.’ But Spielberg sensed that the twelve- to twenty-year-olds who, though they made up only 22 per cent of the population, represented 47 per cent of filmgoers, wanted the week’s hot movie now. TV promotion and TV reviewers had made the measured opinions of Time, Newsweek and even the venerable New York Times redundant. Within a decade, studio bean-counters would be able judge whether a film was a hit or flop simply by the takings of the first weekend of its release. By the time the print-media critics caught up, their judgement was irrelevant.