Burris’s first impression of Spielberg was that he was “a nerdy little guy, but something about this guy was unique—the passion he had, the total involvement and interest in films. There was something so charismatic about him you couldn’t avoid liking him.” His fascination with Spielberg intensified when he began watching Spielberg’s amateur films. After only one semester of law school, Burris dropped out to pursue a career in the film industry. “He’s really the reason I came to this town,” Burris acknowledges. “I don’t know whether to thank him or curse him.”
In 1967, he and Spielberg moved into a house in the Palms section of West Los Angeles, and they continued living together in West Hollywood and North Hollywood until Spielberg bought his first house in 1971. Aside from their common interest in film, their friendship was a classic case of opposites attracting.
“I was flaky and a dilettante,” Burris recalls. “I was kind of the hippie, and he was sort of the straight guy. He was always very straitlaced and driven. Steven was never a drinker. He never used drugs. He was a different kind of guy for the era. He was the nerd who became the king. You couldn’t get him laid—then you couldn’t get girls off him.
“We had an apartment, but we didn’t hang out that much together. The truth is we led separate lives. He was exposed to the hippie movement through me. I think it was a source of constant embarrassment to him when we were living together. I would always bring these chicks to the apartment. He would be going crazy because they would be passing around nude. It may have embarrassed him, but it certainly intrigued him. I remember one time when two chicks came down from Canada and they jumped him. They were horny.”
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DURING his college years, Spielberg recalls with some exaggeration, “I did almost nothing except watch movies and make movies.”
The Los Angeles area was a paradise for a film buff in the late sixties. Spielberg watched new movies at art theaters in Long Beach, Seal Beach, and West L.A., and haunted revival theaters such as the Nuart near the UCLA campus and the Vagabond near MacArthur Park. This was a period when his aesthetic horizons were broadened by intensive exposure to foreign films: “Anything that wasn’t American impressed me. I went through a period of Bergman. I think I saw every picture Ingmar Bergman made. It was wonderful! You’d go to the theater and see all the Bergman films one week. You’d go to the same theater the next week and see … maybe, Jacques Tati. I loved him! Truffaut is probably my favorite director. I saw all the New Wave French films while at school.”
But Spielberg had trouble finding people who would take him seriously as a filmmaker. When he tried to persuade executives at Universal to watch Firelight and his other 8mm movies, they told him they wouldn’t be interested unless he could show them something made in l6mm or 35mm. Taking that advice to heart, Spielberg “earned enough money working in the cafeteria and other odd jobs to buy a roll of film, rent a [16mm] camera from Birns & Sawyer, and go out weekends to shoot small, experimental films…. I made a film about a man being chased by someone trying to kill him. But running becomes such a spiritual pleasure for him that he forgets who is after him. I did a picture about dreams—how disjointed they are. I made one about what happens to rain when it hits dirt. They were personal little films that represented who I was.”
Lacking the resources of a film school, Spielberg relied on Theta Chi to provide most of his cast and crew. “He drew upon us as his slave pool,” says Burris. “He had a way of hooking you into what he was doing.” Burris was most impressed by Encounter, a 16mm, black-and-white film Spielberg made in his freshman year with the help of frat brother Butch Hays. “When I saw it, that’s when I really got interested in Spielberg. I could see he had a lot of talent.” A film noir with existential overtones, Encounter—about twenty minutes long—evidently was the film Spielberg had in mind when he talked about running for one’s life becoming a “spiritual pleasure.” Frat brother Roger Ernest‡ played a sailor in the merchant marine who is set upon by a mysterious attacker. A knife-and-gun duel on top of a water tower leads to a twist ending akin to an Alfred Hitchcock TV drama, involving a murderer (Theta Chi’s Peter Maffia) who, it is revealed, staged the attack to do away with his identical twin.
A much less artsy project brought Spielberg’s filmmaking activities to the attention of the school paper. The Forty-niner reported in February 1966 that “the starting gun went off last week in the campus cafeteria” on a short comedy called The Great Race.§ Noting that “Spielberg has been studying directing for one year as an apprentice at Universal Studios,” student reporter Bruce Fortune wrote that the Keystone Kops-like farce was being filmed by Spielberg in collaboration with Butch Hays. Roger Ernest and Halina Junyszek, Hays’s diminutive Russian girlfriend, played the lead roles. The 16mm black-and-white movie, “complete with sound and musical score,” dealt with “a young man who, after an argument with his girl, chases her around the campus. Filming will go on all semester and so, during his chase, Spielberg plans to link events of the college together … as Halina and Roger rush through crowded hallways, campus buildings, Pete’s Gulch, and the Theta Chi toilet race.” Pete’s Gulch was the makeshift Western town erected every year by campus social groups for the school’s annual 49er Days, a frolicsome charitable fund-raising event. As part of the festivities, Theta Chi staged a race with students riding toilets mounted on soapbox-derby racing cars.
Spielberg’s incorporation of such sophomoric but crowd-pleasing activities into The Great Race was, like his filming of Saratoga High’s “Senior Sneak Day,” a way of ingratiating himself with his fellow students.
*
NOTHING sums up the frustrations of Spielberg’s academic experience at Long Beach State better than his record in Howard Martin’s TV production course. He received a C. “My particular claim to fame is the grade he got in class, which does not reflect on his visual talents,” Martin now says. “I wish it hadn’t happened.”
The Radio-TV Department boasted a fully equipped TV studio, complete with control booth, suitable for training students in the fundamentals of three-camera production. But Martin came to realize that Spielberg “was not particularly interested in going into a television station and working as a producer-director.” Martin gave Spielberg the C because of the youngster’s lack of “concentration” on the subject at hand. “In many ways, he was not a beginning student as many students were. I think he was taking television to get some additional experience in another medium. He was concerned to get out of it what he wanted.”
Martin did see evidence of Spielberg’s talents on one class project, Ball of Fat, a live dramatic adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s short story “Boule de Suif,” the ironic tale of a prostitute’s heroic sacrifice for some hypocritical members of society at a stagecoach station during the Franco-Prussian War (John Ford echoed the story in his 1939 Western classic Stagecoach). The one-hour teleplay was produced outside of class time on a voluntary basis, with Martin directing a cast recruited from the college drama department. The production class spent about a month rehearsing blocking and camerawork, then built the set and shot the program over a single weekend.
Spielberg operated one of the three cameras. The large, cumbersome cameras owned by the school did not have zoom lenses. For moving shots, the operator had to push the camera himself, carefully dollying while maintaining focus and composition. With more than a decade of experience as a filmmaker behind him, Spielberg already had acquired considerable facility in the expressive use of the camera. Martin knew little about Spielberg’s background, so it came as something of a surprise when the previously inattentive student began to speak up on the studio floor: “Quite frequently he would say, ‘I have a suggestion that might work a little better.’ His suggestions did make it better, particularly in the third act. We would mark the changes in the script and insert them. They had to do with kinds of framing, where the focus might lie, where the camera moved in and out, or a crossover involving a particular character. He brought a good deal
of aplomb to the studio.”
Martin may not have appreciated Spielberg’s suggestions as much at the time. Perhaps it was because of his extra effort on Ball of Fat that Spielberg was surprised to receive a C in the class. “He was terribly upset he couldn’t get the grade changed,” department chairman Morehead remembers. “He thought he deserved better. That was not my problem. I wish I had known at the time he was going to be so terribly important. I would have paid more attention.”
*
THE most vivid account Spielberg has given of his time as an observer at Universal is contained in a letter he wrote to Don Shull in June 1965, shortly after his graduation from high school. The letter is jocular and self-deprecating, but it reveals the extent to which Spielberg’s precocious combination of charm, chutzpah, and unshakable determination enabled him to make the most of his opportunity to roam the studio lot.
Spielberg wrote the stream-of-consciousness letter under the influence of a mixed drink (Scotch and bourbon). He admitted he had been doing some indulging in alcohol of late, a newfound practice that often caused him to throw up. He also alluded somewhat boastfully to one-night stands with girls he picked up on the Sunset Strip, the crowded nightly mecca for the southern California hippie scene. Perhaps it was the pressure of ingratiating himself at Universal that led to these uncharacteristic bouts of hedonism. But he also was reacting to living in Hollywood like the proverbial kid let loose in a candy store. Shull remembers that Spielberg “talked a lot about Hollywood starlets. That was a major forward force in his career. He figured it would be the avenue to meet awesome girls. It worked. I didn’t think it was going to work.”
The transformation of Spielberg’s social life after he came to Hollywood follows a pattern Pauline Kael observed in the lives of young directors of his generation: “A man who was never particularly attractive to women now finds that he’s the padrone: everyone is waiting on his word, and women are his for the nod…. Directors are easily seduced. They mainline admiration.”
But in those early days at Universal, Spielberg had some difficulty keeping up his facade as a Hollywood swinger and mogul-in-the-making. Because he was driving a rattletrap 1962 convertible, he was “kind of embarrassed to go up to the gate of Universal in it,” Shull recalls. “That’s why he would park it five blocks away.”
Nattily attired in a blue sportcoat, black pants, scarf, and sunglasses, Spielberg hiked to the gate one fine morning in the summer of 1965, trying his best to act like he owned the place. But upon discovering that construction trucks had dribbled mud around the gate, Spielberg thought it prudent to take a more circuitous route. As he did so, a passing Lincoln sprayed him with mud from a puddle in the intersection.
Accepting some paternal advice by the gate guard to wash off the mud before going about his daily rounds, Spielberg had the misfortune on his way to the washroom to walk past a tram taking spectators on the Universal Tour. Tram riders snapped pictures of him and mockingly wondered aloud whether he was in makeup for some TV show, perhaps Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Spielberg made a failed attempt to tidy himself up in the washroom before the studio wardrobe department helpfully supplied him with a new outfit.
His agenda that day included an appointment with Sam Spiegel, who failed to show up. The Oscar-winning producer of two of Spielberg’s favorite movies, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia, had not yet returned, as expected, from Europe. But it was a sign of the seriousness with which some people at Universal regarded Spielberg that he was allowed to meet instead with legendary director William Wyler and with Jud Kinberg, one of the producers of Wyler’s recently released The Collector.
The day at Universal that had started so inauspiciously also included lunch with Charlton Heston. Earlier that year, Spielberg had spent some time watching Heston filming The War Lord for director Franklin Schaffner on the Universal back lot. Heston remembered Spielberg as “a determined young man who kept infiltrating the set, only to be ejected again. Frank finally surrendered to his persistence and let him watch.” In his letter to Shull, Spielberg indignantly recounted what happened the first time he introduced himself to Heston. The actor snubbed him, failing to acknowledge his presence. But as soon as Heston was informed that the youngster was a promising filmmaker, he turned on the charm and accepted Spielberg’s invitation to lunch. When they met at the studio commissary, Heston was flatteringly curious about Spielberg’s background. The star even picked up the check. But Spielberg was contemptuous, feeling that Heston was currying favor with him and angling for a job in a future Spielberg movie! Spielberg displayed a remarkably well-developed degree of opportunism in eagerly hobnobbing with a veteran star for whom he felt such little regard, but who he thought might also be able to give his career a critical boost in the future.
His lunch with Heston was only one of many such opportunities Spielberg created for himself while roaming the studio lot. He told Shull he often walked up to stars and directors and producers on the studio streets and invited them to lunch. Cary Grant and Rock Hudson were among those who accepted; Shull was astonished when Spielberg reported that Hudson was gay. Although impressed by Spielberg’s growing list of connections, Shull was hurt that his friend increasingly seemed to prefer the company of Hollywood movers and shakers. “Sonny and Cher were big on his list,” Shull remembers. “He was going off to Sonny and Cher’s place all the time.” Spielberg also made visits with Ralph Burris to the set of the pop-singing couple’s TV variety show. Shull finally lost touch with Spielberg around 1967: “When I went down there, he was so busy he just didn’t have any time.”
*
OUTSIDERS are seldom welcome when film or television companies are working, and sometimes when Spielberg would show up to kibitz at the back of a soundstage or a scoring stage, people would say things like, “Who’s the kid?” or “What the hell is this little kid doing here?” “He never got in the way,” the late Universal editor Tony Martinelli, who befriended him, recalled in 1994. “He never bothered anybody. He wasn’t shy, but he wasn’t pushy, either.” Still, some people at the studio were downright hostile. “They would throw me off a set once a day,” Spielberg said, “and I’d go back to my office.”
He especially remembered the humiliation of being “thrown out of a dubbing room by [veteran producer-director] Mervyn LeRoy and tossed off an Alfred Hitchcock set by an assistant director.” Not being able to watch Hitchcock at work on Torn Curtain, which was shot at the studio between November 1965 and February 1966, was a terrible disappointment for the young man who called Hitchcock “The Master”: “The sad part of the story is you’d think I’d suddenly have this Orson Welles sandbox, this great playpen—and all the opportunity in the world to use it. But it was a very bad experience.”
Before he became disenchanted with visiting soundstages, Spielberg established several important personal and professional relationships.
In the fall of 1965, he visited the set of “The Time of the Sharks,” an episode of the Ben Gazzara TV series Run for Your Life. The director was Leslie H. Martinson, whom Spielberg had watched filming PT 109 three years earlier. One of the guest stars was a clean-cut, articulate young actor named Tony Bill, who later became a producer and director.¶ Six years older than Spielberg, Bill had broken into films as Frank Sinatra’s kid brother in Come Blow Your Horn (1963). In a 1967 interview about Spielberg with the Long Beach State student newspaper, Bill said that when they first met, Spielberg “told me about his films. I saw some of them and told him if he ever needed any help to let me know. I felt he had talent that warranted help—and there’s not too many of these people around, you know. Steve is very aware. He has a very original eye—which I think is primary for any director and is something that can’t be taught. Either you’ve got it or you don’t… and Steve’s got it.”
When he watched Spielberg’s amateur movies, Bill already “was interested in young filmmakers, and I spent a lot of time going to festivals and seeing new filmmakers; it was the heyday o
f experimental film. I was attracted to people who were of my generation and my personal taste. The search for youth had not occurred by then [in Hollywood]. Youth and originality were looked down upon; movies at the time were not at all addressed to my generation. A movie about young people was a movie with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. Steven was one of the few people I knew who was younger than me. He was open to anything, which appealed to me. Steven wasn’t self-conscious and obscure. He was direct and graphic. Compared to a lot of other people—all of whom have fallen by the wayside—he was clear and economical. That’s what gave me confidence in his abilities and instincts. That basically was my reason for saying, ‘Look, if you need help, I’ll donate my services.’”
Steven had a more immediate need for help. “He was the literally starving student filmmaker, and he didn’t have a social family,” Bill recalls. “I was a successful actor, I had a house and a wife who could feed him. We took care of him.” Bill also introduced Steven to his informal circle of young maverick filmmakers. “In those days, it seemed the odds were stacked against all of us making headway in the movie business. It was such a closed shop. We were the only ones who could talk to each other. There was a group of us who all tended to know each other and enthuse about each other. Spielberg and Francis Coppola knew each other through me. Steven had the same sense of confidence I felt from Francis at that time.”
Another circle Steven joined was what he called a “longhair film society right in the heart of Universal Studios,” presided over by writer-producer Jerrold Freedman. Freedman “employed a number of writers, directors, people dealing with esoterica,” recalled Spielberg, who eventually worked for him as a director on The Psychiatrist TV series and also shared an office with him. Actor Jeff Corey remembered Freedman introducing him to Spielberg in early 1966 during the shooting of another episode of Run for Your Life. “Jeff,” said Freedman, “I’d like you to meet Stevie Spielberg. Some day he’s going to own this company.”
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