Steven Spielberg

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.

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 VillageVoice’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 (#ulink_7f87fc26-2aa7-5cb8-8e25-6ae78d3a3105)

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’.