Steven Spielberg

The Twilight Zone influenced not only Spielberg but a whole generation of film directors-in-waiting. Like them, he came running at the sound of Marius Constant’s theme, which he compared to a bugle call drawing one to the TV set. The tune inspired the five-note alien signature of Close Encounters. Spielberg would also attempt, unsuccessfully, to replicate the series, first in a film version, then on TV in the ill-fated Amazing Stories.

The family camera admitted Spielberg to his first real life of the mind. Here his skill was not in doubt. It gave him absolute control of a world. While other kids were involved in a Little League baseball team or in music, he was watching TV and, his phrase, ‘drowning in little home movies’. Once he exhausted the technical possibilities of the little Kodak’s single lens, flip-up viewfinder and thirty-five-second clockwork motor, he persuaded his father to buy a better model with a three-lens turret. Being able to cut from long shot through medium shot to close-up widened his horizons.

Over the years, his versions of his debut in narrative film have varied. Initially, he went off alone during a camping trip and experimented with shooting something other than the family. ‘The first film I ever made was… about an experience in unseen horror, a walk through the forest. The whole thing was a seven-hundred-foot dolly shot and lasted fourteen minutes.’ Story films quickly followed. ‘My first… I made when I was twelve,’ he says, ‘for the Boy Scouts.’ For the Photo Proficiency badge, he had to tell a story in a series of still photographs. Spielberg went one better with a movie, variously remembered as Gun Smoke or The Last Gun. A 3 1/2-minute western about a showdown between homesteaders and a land baron, it cost $8.50, which he raised by whitewashing the trunks of neighbours’ citrus trees at 75c a tree. Fellow Scouts with plastic revolvers played all the characters, and Spielberg persuaded a man with a cigarette to puff into the barrel of a gun so that the film could end on the sheriff’s smoking pistol shoved back into his holster. The Scouts loved his movie, and Spielberg got his badge. ‘In that moment,’ he said, ‘I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.’

The instant gratification of story film influenced Spielberg against abstraction. ‘I think if I had made a different kind of movie, if that film had been maybe a study of raindrops coming out of a gutter and forming a puddle in your back yard, I think if I had shown that film to the Boy Scouts and they had sat there and said, “Wow, that’s really beautiful, really interesting. Look at the patterns in the water. Look at the interesting camera angle” – I mean, if I had done that, I might have been a different kind of film-maker.’

Until then, his record in the Scouts had been as undistinguished as that in high school. He couldn’t cook, was so hamfisted he never learned to tie knots well, and enlivened a demonstration of sharpening an axe by cutting his finger open in front of five hundred Scouts at a summer jamboree. He avoided weekend camps, which robbed him of his only chance to see a UFO; other Scouts returned from a camp in the desert with stories of a strange glow in the sky. But movies made him, if not popular, then at least accepted. He freely acknowledged that his first films were exercises in ingratiation. They gave him, he said, ‘a reason for living after school hours’. The school bully could also be placated by putting him in a film. He rented Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier and War of the Worlds on 8mm, and showed them at 25c a head in the family den. As well, he sold popcorn and soda – an integral part of the film experience for him. The proceeds went to charity. The point, then as later in his career, wasn’t profit but popularity.

Over the next four years he made about fifteen story films. Old enough now to be allowed to see almost anything at his local cinema, the Kiva, he plundered Hollywood for ideas. Some of the lessons of The Great Locomotive Chase, Disney’s version of the Civil War raid on which Buster Keaton had based his classic 1926 comedy The General, were put into effect in Duel, and parts of Henry Levin’s version of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth would be restaged for Raiders of the Lost Ark. One of the first films he saw which was not straight escapism was The Searchers. John Ford’s story of racist loner John Wayne searching for the niece kidnapped by Indians opened his eyes to the poetic possibilities of landscape. ‘I wasn’t raised in a big city,’ Spielberg says. ‘I lived under the sky all through those formative years, from third grade right through high school. That’s my knowledge of a sort of lifestyle.’ Ford, brought up on the imagery of Catholic paintings and ‘holy pictures’, instinctively employed aspects of the natural world as metaphors for mental and moral states. Dust represented dissolution; rivers a sense of peace and cleansing; silhouettes presaged death. Certain landscapes, like Monument Valley, were for him intellectual universes in miniature. Those weathered towers of limestone rising from the desert against a vast sky became the unalterable precepts by which honourable men must live. Spielberg would make his own pilgrimage to them in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, one of many films to exhibit a Fordian vision of the American west.

Frank Capra also returned to the screen in 1959 after eight years in the wilderness to direct A Hole in the Head, though neither it, nor the film that followed, A Pocketful of Miracles, a remake of his 1933 Lady for a Day, in which sentimental gangsters transform an impoverished street-corner apple seller into a socialite so that her daughter can make an advantageous marriage, rivalled Mr Deeds Goes to Town or Mr Smith Goes to Washington.

While his future colleagues in the New Hollywood like Brian De Palma were surrendering to the moral intricacies and multiple deceptions of Alfred Hitchcock or, in the case of Martin Scorsese, relishing the social disquiet behind Sam Fuller’s tabloid cinema and the pastel melodramas of Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray, Spielberg made Ford and Capra his models. Lacking a strong moral structure of his own, he absorbed theirs, populist, sentimental, reverent and patriotic. Never comfortable talking to actors, he adopted their technique too, employing landscape and weather as symbols of character, and developing a fluid camera style and skill in directing masses of people that swept his audiences past fragile narratives and sketchy characters. ‘Film for me is totally pictorial,’ he says. ‘I’m more attracted to doing things with pictures and atmospheres – the idea of the visual telling the story.’

In this state of mind, Spielberg also dabbled in theatre:

I was probably the only student director at Arcadia High School in Arizona who was allowed to control and put together a show. I did Guys and Dolls and brought the action, especially the brawl in the Hot Box, into the audience. I guess that’s kind of commonplace in today’s theatre, but then it was very strange to have people running up and down the aisles singing and acting. I got killed for it! Every critic in Arizona who could write said, ‘How dare he open up the proscenium and do this drivel in the audience. Guys and Dolls is meant to be on stage.’ I did the standards – Arsenic and Old Lace, I Remember Mama – everything you were allowed to do then.

Like many directors destined to work in sf and fantasy, Spielberg discovered the quirky magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. Edited by Forrest J Ackerman, self-styled ‘Mr Sci Fi’, whose Los Angeles home contained the world’s largest collection of sf movie memorabilia, it celebrated horror film and its techniques with jocular reverence.

The wave of cheap science fiction films that was Hollywood’s response to the sf publishing boom washed through American cinemas throughout 1959 and 1960. Spielberg was banned from seeing the 1958 I Married a Monster from Outer Space, a relatively modest and reticent film despite its gaudy title, but went anyway, and was racked by nightmares. In particular he came to admire the work of Jack Arnold, who directed The Incredible Shrinking Man, It Came from Outer Space, The Space Children and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The catchpenny titles disguised thoughtful exercises in imagination and suspense which made evocative use of natural surroundings and domestic interiors. The shrinking man in Richard Matheson’s story, exposed to fallout from an atomic test, dwindles away in an ordinary suburban home; the film’s menaces are a cat and a spider. In It Came from Outer Space, written by Ray Bradbury, aliens arrive outside a small desert township. The man who first makes contact with them, John Putnam, is an archetypal Spielberg character, an unassuming Jeffersonian natural philosopher and amateur astronomer who muses about the nature of the universe and the desert, to both of which he has a gently mystical attitude.

Spielberg shared the general enthusiasm for The Thing (from Another World), a rare example of a major director, Howard Hawks, dealing with an sf subject. The script also had an important pedigree. It was based on a story called ‘Who Goes There?’ written by John W. Campbell before he became editor of Analog. Like most of Campbell’s work, it is refreshingly iconoclastic. A crashed alien ravages an Arctic research station, smashing down the scientist who tries to befriend it. It’s left to a few tough professional airmen to kill it off and save the world. At the end, a reporter broadcasts the story, warning his listeners, ‘Watch the skies. Keep watching the skies.’

For all the film’s flair, however, Hawks’s right-wing paranoia always jarred. It’s to Arnold’s films (and Bradbury’s script for Outer Space) that much of Spielberg’s later work is traceable. After Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released, Spielberg asked Bradbury, ‘Well, how did you like your film?’ and explained he’d been inspired by It Came from Outer Space. Bradbury and Arnold’s idea, that alien visitors may be benign, and concerned mainly to return home as quickly and quietly as possible, would surface in both Close Encounters and E.T. The fathers of the ‘space children’ who discover an alien in a beachside Californian cave work on a nearby scientific project and share the dislocated life Spielberg knew well, and which he evoked in The Goonies. And while the Black Lagoon may only have been in a corner of the Universal backlot lake, the underwater footage shot in the crystal springs of a Florida park played so effectively on the sense of ‘something’ lurking below us where we swim that the aquaphobic Spielberg paid it homage in the opening scenes of Jaws.

From the start, it wasn’t the atmosphere of fantasy films Spielberg enjoyed so much as their depiction of alternative realities through model work, special effects and elaborate make-up. His sisters, resented because of the attention they drew from his mother, and thus away from him, became victims of his exercises in imagination. He would scare them by building his face into a horror mask with papier mâché made from wet green toilet paper, or would lurk outside the window of Anne, the youngest, and groan ‘I am the moooooon’ until she became hysterical. He convinced them that the bedroom closet hid the decomposing body of a World War II airman, then left it to their curiosity to peek in at the plastic skull he’d hidden there, with goggles over the eyes and a flashlight inside. After they had been terrified by William Cameron Menzies’ Invaders from Mars, which featured the disembodied head of the Martian super-mind, played by an actress with green-painted face, fringed with tentacles, in a glass bubble, he locked them in the closet, this time with an empty fishbowl within which, he said, the head would materialise. All these domestic horrors and more would be recycled in Poltergeist.

War films could be just as interesting as science fiction, providing there were elaborate uniforms, and plenty of buildings were blown up. Firms like Castle Films sold World War II documentaries on 8mm, and Spielberg used some of these as stock footage for a flying story called Fighter Squadron. Arnold persuaded Skyharbor airport in Phoenix to let Steven shoot a friend in the cockpit of a P-51. In 1960, inspired by his father’s purchase of a war-surplus Jeep, Spielberg made the forty-minute Escape to Nowhere, about a World War II American platoon evading a Nazi army in the Libyan desert. He found a few fake German helmets, put them on friends and had them walk slowly past the camera, passing the helmets back down the line so that it looked like an army. Leah drove the Jeep and created uniforms in Wehrmacht grey in which Steven costumed his sisters and friends, who were then machine-gunned and forced repeatedly to roll down a hill in the desert which stood in for North Africa.

‘There was always a camera in his hands,’ Leah says. ‘Once he took a big cardboard carton from the supermarket and cut windows and doors and took it in the back alley and set it on fire to film it. When we saw it, it looked like a real building burning. These are things that in retrospect you try to figure out, but at the time it just seemed normal. He was my first child, and having no prior experience I thought all kids played like that.’

Escape to Nowhere won a prize at the Canyon Film Festival – a 16mm camera. Knowing he couldn’t afford 16mm film processing, Spielberg traded it for a more sophisticated H8 8mm Bolex. At the same time, with a little help from his father, he got a Bolex Sonorizer, with which he could put a soundtrack on his magnetically striped film.

He began to have friends, nerds like himself with over-active imaginations. During the run of the dinosaur film The Lost World in 1960, he and friends mixed white bread, Parmesan cheese, milk, creamed corn and peas in a paper bag and smuggled it into the Kiva. Then they made vomiting sounds and dripped the mixture from the balcony. It started a chain reaction of vomiting. The film was stopped and the lights went up as the malefactors escaped down the fire stairs.

Other attempts at sophistication didn’t work. ‘I’ll never forget the time I discovered girls,’ he says. ‘I was in the fifth grade. My father took me to a drive-in movie with a little girlfriend of mine. This girl had her head on my arm, and the next day my parents lectured me about being promiscuous at an early age. My growing up was like a sitcom ABC buys for a season before they drop it.’ Never passion’s plaything, except where movies were concerned, Spielberg would have a chequered emotional life that headed inexorably towards a marriage Ozzie and Harriet Nelson would have envied.

By the early sixties, Arnold and Leah’s marriage was failing. Spielberg recalled Arnold storming out of the house, shouting, ‘I’m not the head of the family, yet I am the man of the family’ – a line he would recycle in Duel. Steven fled from the cold silences of the house to the cinema’s warmth. In 1962, he saw the film that was to inspire him above all others. David Lean had spent years in the desert making Lawrence of Arabia, a truly epic picture of a larger-than-life historical character whose acts were mirrored and amplified by the landscapes in which they took place. Robert Bolt’s dialogue was minimal – indeed minimalist; aphorisms, orders, insults, seldom more than a sentence long. This was Ford crossed with Capra, but mediated by Lean. For the rest of his life, Spielberg would rate Lawrence as the one true classic of his early film-going. ‘I really kicked into high gear,’ he said of seeing it, ‘and thought, “This I gotta do. I gotta make movies.”’

Single-minded as ever, Spielberg set out to make his first feature, a science fiction adventure called Firelight. He wrote the first draft of the script in a night; the story of scientists who, investigating lights in space, provoke an alien invasion during which the visitors steal an entire city from earth and reassemble it on another planet.

Every weekend for a year, Spielberg worked on the film with anyone he could cajole or bully into helping. No girl, no football games, no summer jobs diverted him. His enthusiasm and persistence were infectious. When he needed someone exploded in the living room, Leah opened cans of cherries and stood by as her son balanced them on one end of a board and had someone jump on the other. She never got the stains off the furniture. Once again the airport closed a runway for him. A local hospital where he had worked as a volunteer in his holidays lent its corridors for a shot, though Spielberg found the experience disconcerting. ‘I saw things that were so horrifying that I had to fantasise that there were lights, props, make-up men, just to avoid vomiting.’

Once he was finished, Spielberg edited the film to 140 minutes. Actors had come and gone over the year, but he persuaded students at the nearby University of Arizona to post-synchronise the speaking parts as he ran the film on a sheet stretched over one end of the den. The Arcadia school band recorded some music for it.

The result, though he now deprecates it as ‘one of the five worst films ever made’, was good enough to screen for an audience. He persuaded his father, who had already invested $300 in the project, to gamble another $400 for the hire of a local cinema. Spielberg rented a limousine to bring him to the theatre with Leah, who had cudgelled enough friends, relatives of the actors, ex-Boy Scouts and local film fans to fill the seats. Most stayed to the end, and Arnold pocketed $100 profit.

Spielberg’s entry into the cinema was also his exit from childhood and Phoenix. Arnold had decided on another move, this time to join IBM at Saratoga, ten miles from San Jose, near San Francisco. Almost immediately, they packed up, and set out for California.

3 Amblin’ Towards Bethlehem (#ulink_bdee857d-7dec-54a7-8a0d-7a103a27d5af)

Show business is high school plus money.

Hollywood saying

AFTER THE parched landscape of Arizona, Spielberg loved the hills and vineyards of Saratoga. But this move finally wrecked the rickety marriage of Leah and Arnold Spielberg. Arnold had barely finished sketching a design for the house he hoped to build when the couple separated. Leah returned to Phoenix and started divorce proceedings. The separation wrenched Steven, who developed insecurities about marriage and a sense of loss that would be reflected in his films, which are filled with sons seeking fathers and children deprived of their families.

Saratoga also exposed him to anti-Semitism for the first time. Unlike her parents, Leah hadn’t kept a devout household. Spielberg called their style of Judaism ‘storefront Kosher’. When the rabbi called, the mezuzah was put on the door frame and the menorah on the mantel, and removed after he left. Spielberg understood vaguely that his mother’s family fled from Odessa to escape pogroms. His first memory of numbers is of a man, one of a group his grandmother was tutoring in English, trying to entertain him by displaying his concentration camp tattoo, and illustrating by turning his arm to show how 6 upside-down became 9.

As a boy, Spielberg was embarrassed by his heritage. ‘My grandfather would come to the porch when I was playing football with my friends and call out my name in Hebrew. “Schmeul! Schmeul! Dinner’s ready.” They would say, “Isn’t that your place? Who’s this Shmoo?” I’d say, “I don’t know. It’s not me he’s calling.”’ To anyone who asked, his name was German. He resisted the pressure from his grandmother to conform to what he called ‘the Orthodox mould’, but at the same time the religion’s emphasis on family values fed his need to belong. As an adult, he became a classic Jewish father – and, sometimes, mother. Though no enthusiast for cooking, he would prepare Leah’s recipes at home, and occasionally get up early on location to make matzoh for 150 people, an almost sacramental act that reaffirmed the production unit as his surrogate family.

The America in which Spielberg grew up accepted racial discrimination as a fact of life. Medical and law schools operated quotas for Jewish students, and colleges had Jewish fraternities. One still occasionally encountered a discreet ‘Christian Only’ in ‘Positions Vacant’ ads. Many golf clubs operated a racial ban. Realtors wouldn’t sell houses in certain districts to Jewish families. ‘Neighbourhoods for [a Jew],’ wrote William Manchester, ‘like his summer camps and winter cruises, would advertise “Dietary rules strictly enforced.”’

In Phoenix, even as one of only five Jewish children in his school, Spielberg hadn’t stood out, but Saratoga was actively anti-Semitic. Pennies were tossed at him in study hall, and he was mocked so much in gym that he gave up sports altogether; admittedly no great sacrifice for him. The Spielberg house, the only one not to display lights at Christmas, was just a walk away from the school, but after he’d been bullied on the way home, Steven insisted Leah pick him up each day. Once, in fury at the slurs of a neighbouring family, he smeared their windows with peanut butter. Explaining his decision to film Alice Walker’s book The Color Purple, rather than choosing a black director, he would say, ‘I felt I was qualified because of my own kind of cultural Armageddon, even though as a child I exaggerated the pain – as all children will do – and I became the only person discriminated against in history as a child.’

Because of this discrimination, but from a lack of academic interest as well, Spielberg’s grades, never high, sagged still further in Saratoga. When he graduated from high school with a dismal C average, it was in the knowledge that no major college would accept him. And not being in college meant that he was eligible for the draft. ‘I would have done anything to stay out of Vietnam,’ he said. But this wish dovetailed so neatly with his ambition to become a film director, ideally before he was twenty-one, that they soon fused in his mind.

The moment the 1963 summer vacation commenced, Steven persuaded Arnold to let him spend it with an uncle in Canoga Park, a suburb of Los Angeles. His uncle lent him his 1957 Plymouth convertible, but only on the understanding he stayed in the slow lane, going no faster than forty-five m.p.h. Since the speed limit in the fast lane in those days was sixty-five, other cars rocketed by, but Spielberg didn’t care. He was in heaven. Disneyland had opened in 1955, and he made the first of many long drives to the suburb of Anaheim where Walt Disney had built his fantasy world.

Los Angeles, a horizontal city defined by freeways, opened Spielberg’s eyes to linear motion. The boy who was uncomfortable with the written word discovered in movement a handwriting he could read and in which he could, he sensed, become fluent. ‘Looking at most modern cities involves seeing a lot of buildings,’ writes the architectural historian Charles Moore. ‘Looking at Los Angeles involves experiencing a lot of rides… Even the strictly architectural sights of Los Angeles are experienced more than seen, often in carefully controlled time… They are theatre as much as architecture.’ The concept of the ride became central to Spielberg’s cinematic vision. He designed rides for Disneyland and the Universal Studios tour, and in 1994 an LA journalist writing of the Dive! ‘total experience’ restaurants he opened with Jeffrey Katzenberg would comment that Spielberg ‘does not so much create movies as he assembles theme-park rides in the shape of movies’.

There are no good years to enter the film industry, but 1963 was worse than many. Hollywood was drastically reorganising. Since just after World War I, it had been dominated by the major studios: MGM, Paramount, Twentieth Century-Fox, Columbia, Universal and United Artists. However, the Federal Justice Department had decided that companies which controlled every step in the production of film, from conception to marketing, were in restraint of free trade, and forced the studios to shed their theatres, and open production to independent film-makers.

Shorn of the power to control production and distribution, the studios re-inserted themselves into the equation in a different role, lending the independents money, renting them office and production space, and organising promotion and distribution. The charges they levied for their help were often extortionate. Spielberg’s fees for Jaws and his percentage of its profits, known in the trade as ‘points’, would give him a personal fortune in the millions, but it was Universal and Columbia who really profited. Of Star Wars’ $200 million US domestic income, George Lucas would complain that he personally received, after taxes, less than $20 million.

Even by milking the film-makers, however, the studios still could not defeat television. Throughout the fifties and early sixties, desperate for novelties to win back their audience, they exhumed and relaunched all the technical improvements which had been developed over the previous half century but abandoned for lack of investment or interest: 70mm, CinemaScope, 3-D, VistaVision, even Aromarama, smellovision, and the tricks popularised by William Castle; seats wired with electric buzzers and plastic skeletons falling from the ceiling.

None slowed the inexorable trend towards home entertainment at the expense of the cinema experience. Many studios saw this as the writing on the wall, and hurried to cut their losses. The accumulated movies of fifty years were sold off to TV. Everywhere, backlots were bulldozed and the land redeveloped for office buildings. By the end of the sixties, MGM and Twentieth Century-Fox, rather than retain large warehouses of costumes and props and the staff to service them, would sell everything at auction: Garbo’s gowns, Judy Garland’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, Charles Foster Kane’s Rosebud sled from Citizen Kane – the patrimony of Spielberg’s dreams, fragments of which he would later pay a fortune to retrieve.

Some of the most attractive real estate in greater Los Angeles belonged to Universal Studios. Its 374-acre studio and backlot was the first thing a visitor saw as he topped the Cahuenga Pass out of Los Angeles and slid onto the wide flat floor of the San Fernando Valley, the dormitory suburb of greater LA. Universal’s chairman, Lew Wasserman, was a cunning and stubborn negotiator with a reputation for seeing further than many. As head of the MCA talent agency he’d pioneered package and profit-sharing deals under which stars deferred salary in favour of a share of income. The first such deal he negotiated, for James Stewart, made the actor a multi-millionaire. MCA had bought Universal Studios to guarantee work to its clients and a supply of television product to the networks and advertising agencies with which it enjoyed production deals. In 1962, however, forced by the Justice Department to decide whether it was an agency or a film producer, MCA shed the former and went into film-making full time.

To mark his territory, Wasserman commissioned an office block from the prestigious Chicago firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, an opaque stub of anodised aluminium and black glass. Inside, according to rumour, the dividing walls were movable. An executive in disfavour might arrive one morning to find his office subtly more cramped than when he left the night before.

From his seventeenth-floor executive suite, Wasserman squinted out over his fiefdom, and wondered how to make money with it. From high on the hill, the half-scale Gothic mansion from Hitchcock’s Psycho looked down on the plaster-and-lath sets where Lon Chaney Snr made his version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and his son Lon Jr The Wolf Man. The Invisible Man, Frankenstein and Dracula sprang from here, as did their multitudes of sequels. Jack Arnold’s films were shot on these sets and stages too. In the sixties, Ernest Borgnine and the crew were making the TV series McHale’s Navy on the black lagoon from which the creature had crawled. Interiors for Wagon Train and The Virginian were being shot on sets where Boris Karloff had once worked. Most of Universal’s income, however, was generated by a few blocks of bland shopfronts that provided a setting for modern cop shows and spy stories. Meanwhile, run-off from the hills was undermining the older sets, some of which were already collapsing.

One cost-cutting option that didn’t exist was firing people. The film production and craft unions, IATSE, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, and NABET, the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, aided by Jimmy Hoffa’s corrupt Teamsters, enjoyed near-omnipotent power. ‘Feather-bedding’ was rife. Once you were in, you were in for life – and beyond, if, like many, you apprenticed your sons. In the same way, a handful of executives circulating from studio to studio dominated management. ‘Affirmative action for family members,’ acknowledged the Los Angeles Times, ‘is an accepted practice in a town where everyone seems to be related to everyone else… A solid education and good grades are not necessarily relevant or even desirable and are considered much less valuable than the kind of insider’s knowledge acquired at the dinner table night after night.’ As Hollywood had joked when David Selznick married the daughter of MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, ‘the son-in-law also rises.’

In the thirties, under its founder Carl Laemmle, Universal had been notorious for nepotism. His son, known simply as ‘Junior’, ran production, and the payroll groaned with cousins. ‘Uncle Carl Laemmle,’ ran the crack, ‘has a very large faemmle.’ In reaction, the company promulgated an anti-nepotism rule in the forties, with jobs allocated by merit and experience. But this soon hardened into a rigid roster system, with pay hikes and other benefits graded according to length of service. Walking off a film meant you lost seniority, so productions at Universal always went ahead, no matter how inept the director or crew. Despite its large complement of staff technicians, most producers preferred to hire contract crews for anything being made to a deadline.

In 1963, the MCA board was pressing Wasserman for a decision about whether or not to follow a consultant’s advice and sell the backlot for hotels and condos, and lawyer Albert Dorskind was put in charge of assessing offers. Dorskind saved the studio. Shopping downtown one day in Farmers’ Market, the ramshackle complex of fruit and vegetable stalls and quick-lunch counters at Fairfax and Third Street, on the fringe of Hollywood, Dorskind noticed a Gray Line bus disgorging tourists. Remembering that Universal’s restaurant was losing $100,000 a year, he rang Gray Line and suggested they put Universal on their itinerary. Visitors could even lunch in the commissary – Eat With the Stars! And it would only cost Gray Line $1 a head, over and above what people ate. Gray Line jumped at it. The restaurant manager upped his prices by 20 per cent, and the commissary was soon in profit.

Spielberg stepped out of the Gray Line bus onto Universal’s hallowed ground in June 1963 with the awe of a zealot entering Jerusalem. He hid until the bus left, then spent the rest of the afternoon poking around, even walking onto sound stages where TV episodes were being shot. He found his way to the cutting rooms, where editor Tony Martinelli was working on episodes of Wagon Train. Spielberg asked questions. Flattered, and glad of a diversion, Martinelli and the other editors were happy to reply. He told them he’d made some movies, and asked if they would take a look at them. One said, ‘Bring ’em in, kid.’ Dazzled, Spielberg found a phone and called his cousin to pick him up. The next day he was back with Firelight and his 8mm films. Almost every day for the rest of his vacation he dressed in his one suit and, carrying an empty briefcase, drove to Universal. At the gate, the guard, assuming he was just another nephew with a summer job at the studio, waved him through.

Elsewhere in Los Angeles, the people who were to become Spielberg’s contemporaries in New Hollywood were gathering. Some almost didn’t make it. In June 1962, George Lucas, having graduated – barely – from high school in Modesto, took his Fiat Bianchina for a drive, and wrapped it round a tree. He nearly died. Others already had movie jobs. Francis Ford Coppola was writing screenplays while working as dogsbody for Hollywood’s cheapest producer, Roger Corman, and moonlighting as a director of soft-core porn. But the majority, like Spielberg, were just out of high school and wondering how to get in. Lucas, once he recovered, tried the accepted way, visiting every film production company on Ventura Boulevard, the ribbon development of low-rent two-storey office buildings and storefronts that wove along the periphery of the San Fernando Valley. He got nowhere.

Entering the business through a film school was still a novel concept. Cinema remained, in Hollywood at least, a business, not an art. Nobody anticipated the flood of film students attracted by the French New Wave, Britain’s Free Cinema documentary movement, or the underground films that were boiling out of New York and San Francisco.