Steven Spielberg

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.

The price of conciliation was delay. At the end of the shoot, two days of script remained unfilmed. Sackheim stepped in and directed the last day. A few days later, Spielberg showed Sackheim his rough cut. The producer sat next to Spielberg in the editing room, groaning faintly at each new visual excess.

‘We’re going to have to perform major surgery on your show,’ Sackheim said at the end.

‘And he went in,’ said Spielberg, ‘and shifted the vision from my choices to his own choices.’

Exhaustion and depression forced extreme decisions. ‘I was in a despondent, comatose state,’ Spielberg recalled. ‘I learned a lot of lessons with that show, but rather than say, “Well, I’ll let that roll off my back and go on to the next show,” I went to Sid Sheinberg and said, “I can’t do TV any more. It’s just too tough. I quit.”’

Wisely, Sheinberg refused his resignation. Instead he offered a year-long leave of absence. ‘So my salary was suspended and I went home and wrote for a year. All I did was write.’

Spielberg’s first thought had been to break into the underground, where some of the USC group were making their reputation. ‘I went to the underground to make films in 16mm – and I couldn’t get in there. I could not raise $100 to make a film.’

Networking had won him a few useful contacts at Universal. One was composer John Williams. Spielberg admired his music for Mark Rydell’s version of William Faulkner’s The Reivers, folksy and ebullient by turns. Its cross-fertilisation of the American tradition with the European – ‘like a combination of Aaron Copland and Debussy’, Spielberg said – marked Williams as someone who shared his taste.

Another new acquaintance was Cliff Robertson. As much a victim of the TV ghetto as Spielberg was, the boyish-looking actor had starred in The Hustler and Days of Wine and Roses on TV, only to see Paul Newman and Jack Lemmon click with them in the cinema. When he appeared in The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon, a teleplay based on Daniel Keyes’s story ‘Flowers for Algernon’, about a mentally handicapped man who becomes a genius through experimental surgery, Robertson recognised a potential hit and bought the film rights himself, adapting it into the screenplay Charly. Seven years later, in 1968, his foresight was rewarded with an Academy Award for Best Actor.

Robertson was Spielberg’s first call after he started his leave. The actor loved World War I aircraft and, after the success of Charly, he wrote a treatment for a flying movie called I Shot Down the Red Baron, I Think, which would use rare original aircraft accumulated by another fanatic in Ireland. Robertson’s agent, David Begelman, sold the idea to Cinerama Corporation for $150,000, but the project bogged down in wrangles over finance, in which, to Robertson’s fury, Begelman sided with Cinerama. Robertson was forced to pay $25,000 to Cinerama, with a further $25,000 if the film was ever made. In sworn depositions, he claimed Begelman ‘sandbagged’ and ‘completely subverted’ him.

Aware of this debacle, and knowing Robertson’s interest in old planes, Spielberg offered him a treatment he’d written with a friend, Claudia Salter, about a World War I flyer and his son barnstorming around America in the early twenties. Robertson liked Ace Eli and Rodger of the Skies. He bought it, hiring Salter to write a screenplay.

After graduation from USC, Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins had tried to sell some screenplays, but without success. Spielberg began feeding them his ideas. George Lucas was staying with the writers while he cast what would become his first studio feature, American Graffiti. The abstracted Lucas seldom spoke to anyone as he wandered in and out, but to him it seemed the dweeby guy with the big nose and the glasses was there almost all the time. Spielberg’s voice filled the house as he leaned over the shoulders of Robbins and Barwood, suggesting lines, laughing at those they’d written, and urging them on.

One of Spielberg’s ideas was a comedy he’d already tried to float at Universal, a modern Snow White, about seven men who run a Chinese food factory in San Francisco. Another was based on a clipping from the Los Angeles Citizen News about a May 1969 Texas incident when Ila Faye Dent, just released after a shoplifting conviction, persuaded her husband Robert to break out of prison to retrieve their two-year-old daughter from court-appointed foster parents. On the way, they kidnapped state patrolman James Crone, which led to a massive car chase across the state.

From this story, Barwood and Robbins, with Spielberg’s collaboration, worked up the tale of Lou Jean and Clovis Poplin’s flight in search of Baby Langston. Police Captain Tanner, hamstrung by the incompetence of his men and the young couple’s sentimental appeal, trails them with a motorcade as they bumble across Texas. Crowds cheer them and high school bands play them through town, while well-wishers offer free gas and chicken dinners, and fill the car with gifts. Even the vigilantes who ambush them on a used-car lot manage only to riddle the cars and do no harm to the fugitives at all. The dream dies at the end, when Clovis is killed, but until then it’s a folk tale straight from Reader’s Digest. The screenplay was called ‘Carte Blanche’, then ‘American Express’, but later it was renamed, in honour of the town towards which the Poplins were fleeing, The Sugarland Express.

Each decade throws up its hot writing teams, and Barwood and Robbins were to be as hot as any during the seventies. Episodic and oriented totally towards action, their work seems mechanical today, a loose stringing together of action sequences, owing more to animators like Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, Frank Tashlin and Walt Disney than to the meticulous plot- and scene-builders of the 1940s. But Spielberg called them ‘geniuses’ and praised their ‘wonderful cartoon imagination’. Once Barwood and Robbins went on to direct their own films, he found and encouraged other partnerships like theirs. Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, his protégés in the eighties, were Barwood and Robbins writ large, not least in their fascination with animation.

As if to underline the comparison with Jones and Avery, Barwood, Robbins and Spielberg put Lou Jean and Clovis into an Indian Chief mobile home on a used-car lot and had them watch Chuck Jones’s Road Runner evade Wile E. Coyote on the screen of a nearby drive-in cinema. Spielberg lavished all his craft on this scene when the film was finally made. Birdus Fleetus and Lupus Persisticus (Jones’s cod-Latin names for his hero and villain) were his boyhood heroes, and he prevailed on Universal to buy from Warners forty seconds of Jones’s cartoon to underline the film’s most poignant moment.

His Universal contract had won Spielberg an agent. He was accepted by the prestigious International Creative Management, founded by David Begelman, a plump middle-aged man, famous as one of Hollywood’s highest-betting poker players, but also well-known, because of arguments like that with his ex-client Cliff Robertson, as chronically unreliable. Spielberg’s first representative at ICM was Mike Medavoy, himself later a studio executive. ‘Spielberg came in with… Amblin’,’ Medavoy recalled. ‘I saw it and I said: “Terrific!”’ Medavoy got him a few commercials, one of which featured a black actress named Margaret Avery, whom Spielberg would remember when he came to direct The Color Purple.

But he and Medavoy disagreed over Universal, to which Spielberg, disconsolate about the lack of work on the outside, was thinking of returning. Medavoy recalled:

I wanted him to get out of that contract. He wanted to stay. He was right, actually, to stay. My feeling was that at Universal at that particular time – this was right before Airport – he’d get boxed into doing garbage. And I had just gotten Phil Kaufman out of his contract. So I said, ‘Listen, you should get another agent, I don’t think your career is going to go anywhere if you stay there.’ So I got him another agent within the same agency.

The new agent was Begelman’s partner, Freddie Fields, who was decisively to launch Spielberg’s career. During his sabbatical, Fields took him round the traditional circuit of all film-makers looking for backing. One stop was at Twentieth Century-Fox, then being run by Richard Zanuck while his father Darryl, who’d founded the company almost forty years before, enjoyed European retirement with a series of darkly dramatic French mistresses like the singer Juliette Greco.

Novelist John Gregory Dunne described Zanuck, then thirty-eight, as ‘a tightly controlled man with the build of a miniaturised half-back, twelve-month tan, receding brown hair and manicured fingernails that are chewed to the quick. He has hesitant blue eyes, a quick embarrassed smile and a prominent jaw whose muscles he reflexively keeps knotting and unknotting.’ The tics hid a violent temper. Around Fox, Zanuck was known as ‘Little Napoleon’, after Nehemiah Persoff’s twitchy gang boss in Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot.

David Brown, twenty years older than Zanuck, a pipe-smoker with a bushy moustache which earned him the nickname ‘The Walrus’, handled story operations from New York and acted as Zanuck’s adviser and lieutenant. He affected a vague manner that belied his long experience as magazine writer, editor and publisher. His politeness and tact made him ideal to act as a buffer between the volatile Zanuck and the world. An odd but effective team, Zanuck and Brown had launched some of Fox’s biggest hits, though their decision in 1970 to abandon the broad entertainment values of their earlier successes like The Sound of Music, Hello Dolly! and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for more challenging, adult films was already eroding their power with the acutely profit-conscious Fox board.

It was this pair that Fields brought Spielberg to meet. As a package, he offered Ace Eli, with Robertson to star and Spielberg to direct. Zanuck suspected Spielberg was a better salesman than director. ‘I found him tremendously gifted, at least from a conversational point of view, but it was a highly physical and complex film, and I didn’t think he had the experience to do stunt flying and all that.’ They did buy the script, however, Spielberg’s only sale during his absence from Universal.