Steven Spielberg

by Joseph McBride

  Only recently liberated from a long stint on the Hollywood blacklist, Corey ran a prestigious acting studio in a storefront theater on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. His students in the 1950s and 1960s included James Dean, Jack Nicholson, Richard Chamberlain, and Carol Burnett, and a number of directors and future directors, including Roger Corman, Irvin Kershner, and Robert Towne, who came to learn about directing actors. Tony Bill took Corey’s acting classes and brought Spielberg along with him.

  “He came for the better part of a year,” Corey recalls. “He always avoided acting. He’d sit in the back—very quiet, very attentive. Sometimes he wouldn’t sit, he’d stand in the back. I would always bug him about bringing in scenes [to perform]. He’d say, ‘Yeah,’ and he didn’t. He was interested in directing. He wanted to watch me work with people and see how performances were altered by me throwing things at people.”

  What Spielberg absorbed in Corey’s class was a playful, improvisatory, daringly unconventional approach to acting, a way of evoking nonclichéd, naturalistic behavior that would help him immensely when faced with the pressures of TV directing. As Patrick McGilligan observes in his biography of Nicholson, Corey taught his students “not to approach a situation head-on, emotionally, but to deal with the content of a scene obliquely.” Often, Robert Towne recalled, “the situation that he would give would be totally contrary to the text, and it was the task of the actors, through the interpretation of the various bits of business they could come up with, to suggest the real situation through lines that had no bearing on the situation.”

  Around the same time he met Corey, Spielberg found another kind of acting teacher when he paid a visit to the set of “Wind Fever,” an episode of Universal’s TV anthology series Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater, directed by Robert Ellis Miller and starring Leo G. Carroll, William Shatner, and John Cassavetes. Spielberg remembers Cassavetes as “one of the first people I met in Hollywood, one of the first people who ever talked to me and gave me the time of day.”

  When Cassavetes saw Spielberg on the set, “he pulled me aside and he said, ‘What do you want to do?’ And I said, ‘I want to be a director.’ He said, ‘Okay, after every take, you tell me what I’m doing wrong. And you give me direction.’ So here I am, eighteen [actually nineteen] years old, and there’s a professional film company at Universal Studios doing this TV episode, and after every take he walks past the other actors, walks past the director, he walks right up to me and says, ‘What did you think? How can I improve it? What am I doing wrong?’ And I would say, ‘Gah, it’s too embarrassing … Mr. Cassavetes, don’t ask me in front of everybody, can’t we go around the corner and talk?’”

  For Cassavetes, acting in Hollywood movies and TV shows was only a day job, supporting his independent filmmaking projects. He invited Spielberg to work on Faces, a low-budget movie he had begun directing in January 1965. Cassavetes was not speaking metaphorically when he described Faces as “a home movie”: he filmed it in his own home in the Hollywood Hills and at the home of his mother-in-law. Shot in 16mm black-and-white, it had a small volunteer crew and a cast headed by Gena Rowlands, the director’s wife. Released in 1968, Faces was an influential piece of American neorealism, a raw, no-holds-barred “view of a culture run psychologically amok,” as Ray Carney describes it in The Films of John Cassavetes.

  Although he received no credit, Spielberg recalled that Cassavetes “made me a production assistant on Faces for a couple of weeks, and I hung around and watched him shoot that movie. John was much more interested in the story and the actors than he was [in] the camera. He loved his cast. He treated his cast like they had been a part of his family for many years. And so I really got off on the right foot, learning about how to deal with actors as I watched Cassavetes dealing with his repertory company…. I’ve thought that one of the best ways of being a director was to, as John did, scrounge around for the cast, promise them anything but give them quality, and look with great poignance and attitude at your cast and your crew up through your eyebrows, your nose facing the ground! That’s something else I learned from John.”

  *

  MUCH of his time at Universal, Spielberg “would hang out with the editors. I spent a year with them at Universal. They loved having me around. I’d sit with them and they’d show me how and why they were making a cut. I even cut a few Wagon Trains, you know—cuts and trims which I wasn’t supposed to do because I didn’t have a union card. That was the raw beginning.”||

  One of the editors Spielberg spent the most time with at Universal was Tony Martinelli, an amiable old pro who had started in the industry in 1925. “He was just sixteen when he came into my cutting room—he was still going to school,” Martinelli recalled. “We had cutting rooms in the old Universal lab building, and Chuck Silvers asked if he could send Steven up to my room. He was a personable young man, very friendly. There wasn’t a conceited bone in his body. He had an 8mm film, a version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind [i.e., Firelight]. He had a projector, and we ran it on the wall. He had sound, but he couldn’t get it to sync. It was quite a piece. Very, very well done. He had angles that were very interesting for an amateur—he was no amateur at the time. I knew he had it on the ball, from his 8mm film. He knew where he was going, and he was going in the right direction.”

  When Spielberg was honored by the American Cinema Editors in 1990 as a director who “respects the editors he works with and appreciates what they do,” Martinelli took the occasion to reminisce with him about their first meeting: “I mentioned that I had always enjoyed the 8mm film. He said I was the only one [aside from Silvers] who would look at it. Everybody else turned him down. He mentioned that I was one of the few men who let him in the cutting room. Most of the fellas dusted him off—‘I’m busy’—they frowned on it. I never closed the door on anybody. My room was always open to him. He was just a young boy, but if you asked him something he would answer. He was very hep, very sharp. He came up to the cutting room to learn from me, and I stood by and I learned from him.”

  While some editors may indeed have dusted Spielberg off, he was more welcome in the editing rooms than he recalled in expressing gratitude to Martinelli. Richard Belding, who succeeded Dave O’Connell as head of the TV editing department during the time Spielberg was an observer at Universal, recalls that Spielberg “hung around editorial quite a lot. He would go into the editors’ rooms and look over their shoulders all the time.” Spielberg “asked a million questions” of the editors, Silvers says. “It was a process of absolute technical application. He worked out his own curriculum. It was the real world. There’s no school you can really go to learn to be a filmmaker. That’s not what they teach.”

  • • •

  AT the end of his first semester of law school, in early 1967, Ralph Burris picked up the phone and told Spielberg, “Let’s go make this movie.” “This movie” was a Spielberg project called Slipstream, about high-speed bicycle racers. He wanted to make Slipstream in the standard theatrical film gauge, 35mm, as his first professional-quality short film. “Steven was a real hustler,” Burris says. “He not only knew how to make movies, he knew how to get the money to make them.”

  Burris dropped out of school and, in hopes of launching his own career as a producer, persuaded his parents, Ben and Thirza, to invest $3,000 in Spielberg’s movie. Another Theta Chi, Andre (Andy) Oveido, who had a newspaper distribution business, agreed to kick in $1,000. Oveido was given a part in the film, along with other college friends of Spielberg’s, including Roger Ernest, Peter Maffia, and Jim Baxes. Through Silvers and other people at Universal, Spielberg acquired, without cost, “short ends” of film reels, scraps of unexposed footage he used to shoot much of the movie.

  Production began on weekends during the spring of 1967 in and around Long Beach. The film was credited to Playmount Productions, a company formed by Arnold and Steven Spielberg. “I did it because nobody would give him credit,” Arnold says. “He was a kid. So when we’d go to CFI [Consolidat
ed Film Industries] to rent movie equipment, I signed for it. And I paid some of the bills. Sometimes he paid me back, sometimes not, but it didn’t make any difference. I just recently turned over to him all the books that we had. ‘Hey, Dad,’ he said, ‘you really did help me out with my career.’” Steven’s eyes proved bigger than his wallet. “We essentially underestimated what it would cost,” Burris admits. “We were very naive. Steven thought we could do it for less than $4,000, in 35mm color, with a Chapman crane [a large mobile camera platform].”

  Spielberg’s choice of a sports subject for Slipstream, like his sportswriting in high school, seemed a calculated attempt to ingratiate himself with an aspect of mainstream American culture from which he otherwise felt excluded. If Slipstream was a relatively impersonal project, particularly for a debut film, Spielberg may have felt that a film more closely reflecting his own personality would not appeal enough to the booming youth market. The hero of Slipstream was no Spielbergian nerd, but a handsome jock whose obsession with bicycle racing probably was borrowed from the personality of Don Shull.

  When Spielberg was living in Saratoga, Shull and four of his jock friends would race their high-speed, $1,500 European bikes all around Santa Clara County (Steven was not included). “We used to tear up those hills,” Shull recalls. “We were animals. I think Steve would have been dusted on the first turn, maybe; he was kind of a small guy. Some of the crashes we had, I know he filed those in the back of his mind. He claimed he took some of my bicycle shenanigans and incorporated them in that movie. I never saw it.”

  A “slipstream” is defined as “the region of reduced air pressure and forward suction produced by and just behind a fast-moving ground vehicle.” Thrill-seeking bicycle riders sometimes risk their lives to speed up close behind a truck and ride in its slipstream. Slipstream was to feature a bravura action sequence of bicyclists racing down a steep hill. The hero, riding in the slipstream of a truck, is pursued by his rival, a dirty-trickster who wants to knock him off the road. But when the hero swerves around the truck, the other racer’s momentum pulls him headlong into the back of the truck, knocking him bloody and throwing him off the road.

  Roger Ernest, who helped Spielberg with the script, was cast as the dirty-trickster, a character somewhat reminiscent of the bullies who had tormented Spielberg in Phoenix and Saratoga. The good guy was played by Tony Bill, who, like everyone else involved in the production, gladly donated his services to the twenty-year-old director.

  While looking for a cameraman, Spielberg met Allen Daviau, a young film buff and beginning cinematographer. Daviau, who served as a camera operator on Slipstream, later became one of Hollywood’s most distinguished cinematographers, working with Spielberg on several of his most lyrically shot films, including E.T., The Color Purple, and Empire of the Sun. “Nobody who knew Steven back in ’67 is in the least surprised by his success,” Daviau once said. “… But nobody [then] would give him a job. He was growing old—he was all of nineteen [actually twenty]—and he was feeling that time was weighing down on him and he had to get something made.”

  When asked in 1995 what made him recognize Spielberg’s talent, Daviau replied, “I think it is that rare quality of possessing both the artistic sensitivity and the passion for the medium, with being a hard-as-nails producer at the same time and knowing how to get what he wants done and how to deal with the harder-than-nails money people to get it. Even from the beginning, he could get people to put up money!

  “For Slipstream, he had done this incredible sales job. They had gone out and gotten all these European-style bicycle racing groups in southern California to haul themselves and their bicycles, with no payment for gas or anything else, in the total darkness to some godforsaken spot in the desert, so that when the sun started to rise on the highway, these guys would be in full gear roaring toward us down the street. These people would do it over and over for this kid, for nothing, because he was inspiring.”

  Spielberg asked Daviau to be director of photography on Slipstream, but Daviau explained that he “had only shot 35mm one time, some titles and pickup shots for Roger Corman’s [1967 LSD movie] The Trip. I said, ‘I really don’t think I’ve had enough experience to be the cameraman on this, but I know a wonderful French cameraman named Serge Haignere.’” Haignere, who had come to Hollywood just before the Nouvelle Vague started, was working as an assistant cameraman on studio pictures. “When I first saw Steve,” he said during the making of Slipstream, “I saw a young kid—a scared young kid—and I remember thinking, Oh no, here comes another one who wants to invent movies! But I find out he is very creative, very talented. I wouldn’t work with him if he wasn’t. We make a very good team.”

  After visiting the location of Slipstream for the Long Beach State paper, The Forty-Niner, feature writer Ron Thronson presciently observed that Spielberg already was “carving his own place” alongside leading contemporary directors. With Firelight, Spielberg had “evidently impressed enough people in Hollywood, so that he is now given the run of a major studio lot as an observer, a privilege that is given to few men, young or old…. He is well regarded by his peers, a fact that stands by itself in consideration of the professional people who work with him and hold him high in their regard….”

  “Why do such men want to cast their lot with a young man who is working on his own, with his own production company? Why are they willing to do this work for nothing? Because they feel that Steve Spielberg has the ability to become an important and noticed director, and because they want to help him…. Steve looks more like a college cheerleader than an experienced film director, but he is impressive to watch, and might be on his way somewhere.”

  “Every film is an experience,” Spielberg told Thronson. “I’ll be learning when I’m sixty years old. I’ve learned more out on my own than I’ll ever learn inside a studio.”

  The sheer professionalism of Spielberg’s approach to filmmaking impressed the student reporter: “At one point in the proceedings, the company spent almost two hours on eight takes of a sequence that is approximately thirty seconds in length and requires one actor to approach a group of his fellows and say, ‘Any of you guys want a Coke?’ He pauses to follow with, ‘Well, I only thought I’d ask.’ Through this brief sequence, the camera is moving rapidly, dollying in, swiveling around, and zooming in on the subject. If the director is a good one, he won’t let the scene end until it is right, and sometimes that takes a while.”

  But it was not long before the production came to an abrupt halt. The shooting of the beginning and ending sequences—the start and finish of the race—was scheduled over a weekend near the ocean. Spielberg and Burris had recruited a sizable turnout of bicycle riders and spectators. “They bet the farm on the last weekend of shooting,” Daviau remembers, “and it didn’t just rain, it monsooned that weekend.”

  “We basically ran out of money,” Burris says. “We were dead in the water. I’ve got pictures of our Chapman crane sitting in the rain. It cost $750 a day, including the driver. We got some pretty good footage [before that weekend]—it was all terrific, but we didn’t get enough. We got all the establishing stuff, the racing stuff, six thousand to seven thousand feet of film [a little more than an hour of film], but we never really got into the dramatic stuff.”

  “When that money was gone, Steven was very depressed,” Daviau says. “After Slipstream, he tried to do a little 16mm project with dolls that Serge was shooting. I just knew he had to get something off the ground.”

  Citizen Steve, a biographical film his wife, Amy Irving, made as a surprise present for Spielberg’s birthday in 1987, includes a forty-five-second montage of shots from Slipstream, which it half-jokingly calls “the Mozart angle” in Spielberg’s life, “the unfinished symphony, the unfinished film.” The laboratory that Spielberg and Burris used for Slipstream, Consolidated Film Industries (CFI), took a lien on the footage because the filmmakers couldn’t make their payments, and in 1987 the footage still was sitting on a shelf at the lab
in Hollywood. It since has been bought back by Spielberg. Unhappy as the fate of Slipstream was, the dynamic and lyrical scenes of bicycle racing assembled by Daviau give tantalizing glimpses of Spielberg’s youthful promise.

  Before the project fell apart, Spielberg gave a characteristically unpretentious and self-aware statement about his filmmaking philosophy to student reporter Jo Marie Bagala: “I don’t want to make films like Antonioni or Fellini. I don’t want just the elite. I want everybody to enjoy my films. For instance, if an Antonioni film played in Sioux City, Iowa, the people would flock to see [Disney’s 1967 fantasy] The Gnome-Mobile. But I do want my films to have a purpose! I just want to make pictures in which I say something, something I am close to and can convey to the audience. If, in doing so, I create a style, then that’s my style. I’m trying to be original, but at times, even originality tends to become stylized. I feel that right now the worst thing for me to do at twenty is to develop a style.”

  *

  SHORTLY after Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968, the networks sent out an urgent directive to their suppliers to cut back on violence in TV shows. Spielberg happened to drop in on Chuck Silvers when Silvers was frantically trying to deal with the problem.

  “He came into the office and he was all charged up talking about something he was doing,” Silvers recalls. “I cut him short. I told him, ‘Steven, I’m in the middle of something here. I don’t have any time, because this [program] is going on the air in a couple of days. I have to remove all this stuff.’ I won’t say I blew up or hollered at him. I did it with a kind of biting tone. I said, ‘I have a big problem I have to solve now. I don’t have time to listen, Steven. I don’t want to see any more of your dailies. I don’t want to hear your stories. I don’t want to see your assemblies.’ The look on his face was like I’d hit him or something. ‘Steven, the next thing I look at from you is going to be a 35mm color composite film’—which means a finished film. ‘When you have that, you call me.’