“I didn’t see him for a few months. Then I got a call from him on a Sunday. He said, ‘I’ve got something for you to look at.’ I asked him, ‘How long is it?’ ‘Twenty-six minutes.’ ‘OK, I’ll book a room this afternoon.’ I suppose I felt guilty. He wouldn’t go into the projection room. He was too nervous, or he didn’t want any questions thrown at him. I went into the projection room alone and I viewed Amblin’. I looked at what I still feel is the perfect motion picture.”
• • •
EVEN though Spielberg was far from a beginner—after all, he had been making films for half of his twenty-two years—Amblin’ became its young director’s official “debut” film when it was released theatrically in December 1968. Eloquently wordless, this short film tells the bittersweet story of a girl and boy who come together but ultimately drift apart while hitchhiking from the desert to the sea in southern California.
The uncredited godmother of Amblin’ was Julie Raymond, who put Spielberg together with aspiring producer Denis Hoffman, with whom she had worked at Pacific Title. Nine years older than Spielberg, Hoffman was running the optical and title company Cinefx. He also managed a rock group called October Country and was looking for a film project that could feature their music. Early in 1968, shortly after Spielberg’s twenty-first birthday, Raymond took Hoffman to lunch with the young filmmaker.
Hoffman’s first impression of Spielberg was that he was “very aggressive, charming, and dedicated. He ate, breathed, and slept film. His dream was to be a director, plain and simple. He said he’d do anything if I’d put up the money. Steve was a disarming person. He had a kind of childlike quality about him, a naïveté. You wanted to help him. It’s not an accident Spielberg is where he is, it’s not luck, it’s all a plan he had. He’s not only a genius in filmmaking, he’s a genius in promoting himself. He and I had a great ambition to make films. The truth is I helped him out because I wanted to get someplace. I wanted to get into production. And I did it as a friend to help him out, because I liked him and he needed help.”
The first project they discussed was Slipstream.
“He needed about $5,000 to finish it. He’d gone to his dad and his dad had not given him the money. The photography was gorgeous, but what I recollect of it was boring—a lot of people riding on a lot of bicycles. It went on forever and it didn’t excite me. Probably because of my ego, I told him, ‘I’m really not interested in completing something.’
“I told Steve I wanted to see something in writing. I wanted to see a treatment or a script. He presented me with two or three different projects, three-or four-page treatments. He first proposed a short film about a drive-in movie theater. It took place at nighttime. People left their cars to get candy, and it was about what they saw along the way. When they came back, they couldn’t find their cars—the cars were all Volkswagens. It was a cute premise, but it cost too much, and my music group couldn’t fit into it. I thought he would have an easier time as a first-time director if he did not have to handle dialogue. I told him, ‘Let’s do something that doesn’t require so many sets, so many people. Let’s do something without sound, with no dialogue. We’re going to be on location, without a lot of equipment. It will be easier. And let’s do something that could use my music.’
“The next script was tailor-made. I picked Amblin’ because it did not have any dialogue and the premise was very timely. Steve was not a rock ’n’ roll fan, but he went off and wrote it to our specifications. He did the story, but I set the guidelines. We had several meetings; it was a cooperative effort. Amblin’ was not done as a labor of love for him. Amblin’ was done because he needed a vehicle to become a director.”
Spielberg has described Amblin’ as “an attack of crass commercialism. I had made a lot of little films in l6mm that were getting me nowhere. They were very esoteric. I wanted to shoot something that could prove to people who finance movies that I could certainly look like a professional movie-maker. Amblin’ was a conscious effort to break into the business and become successful by proving to people I could move a camera and compose nicely and deal with lighting and performances. The only challenge that’s close to my heart about Amblin’ is I was able to tell a story about a boy and a girl with no dialogue. That was something I set out to do before I found out I couldn’t afford sound even if I wanted it.”
*
BURRIS and Spielberg had learned a great deal about economizing from their sorry experience with Slipstream. Or at least they had learned how to manipulate an inexperienced would-be producer. “The original budget they made up [for Amblin’] was for $3,000 or $4,000,” Hoffman recalled. “They were cutting a lot of corners.” Realizing that figure was unrealistically low, Hoffman authorized further expenditures until his total outlay reached about $20,000, including costs for lab work at Cinefx, CFI, and Ryder Sound Service; 35mm release prints by Technicolor; and several thousand dollars’ worth of advertising and publicity.
Amblin’ was shot almost entirely on natural locations in southern California, but Hoffman also wangled the use of Jack Palance’s beach house at Malibu for the ending sequence and supplied his own small soundstage at Cinefx for the filming of a night exterior scene. That scene of the two characters making love in a sleeping bag by the light of a campfire was done in the studio to cut down on location expenses and so cinematographer Allen Daviau could better control the lighting conditions.
Everyone involved in the film, including Spielberg, worked for nothing but screen credit; it was a showcase film for all twenty-five of them, including the five members of October Country. Spielberg found the lead actress, redheaded gamine Pamela McMyler, in the Academy Players Directory. A graduate of the Pasadena Playhouse, she had played a small part in The Boston Strangler. The male lead, Richard Levin, was working as a librarian at the Beverly Hills Public Library. He bore a striking resemblance to the director, which helped underscore the autobiographical undertones of the character.
Spielberg has claimed Hoffman “wanted the possessory credit. That means the film said: Denis Hoffman’s Amblin’. I said, ‘Fine!’ I took the money and I made the film.” But there is no possessory credit on Amblin’, which bills Hoffman as producer and Burris as “in charge of production,” while listing as its final credit: “written and directed by Steven Spielberg.” Hoffman felt people who wrote about the film unfairly emphasized only Spielberg’s creative contribution and “made me out to be a guy with more money than brains. I discovered Spielberg. I put up the money for his movie. I took care of the cast and crew. I paid all those bills. And when all was said and done, I was forgotten about. I was the producer.”
*
ON the first day of filming Amblin’, July 6, 1968, Burris became alarmed when he found Spielberg on the Cinefx soundstage “shooting a long tracking shot of matches going up to a campfire. It made sense in terms of the story, but he wouldn’t tell us what he was doing. I knew that film was our most expensive commodity, and I thought if the whole film goes like this, we’re going to use ten thousand feet of film. I hollered, ‘Cut!’ Steve started going crazy: ‘Nobody says “Cut” on my set!’ I learned my lesson. I’ve never yelled ‘Cut’ on a set since. I don’t think he has ever forgiven me.”
“The first weekend, Denis almost canceled the whole project,” Daviau reports. “We shot the campfire scene that Saturday and Sunday, and by the end of Saturday we shot I think three or four times our promised allotment of film for that day. Denis said, ‘This is it. We’re going to pull the plug right here. I can’t afford this.’ We said, ‘All right, we’ll be good, we’ll be good!’ And the next day we were very careful and shot very little film so we could get out to the desert and start shooting the real thing.”
Once those tests of his directorial authority were out of the way, Spielberg seemed to be in his element. For the next eight days, filming shifted to locations in the desert near Pearblossom, north of Los Angeles. “It was a hundred and five degrees in July in Pearblossom,” Daviau recalls. “It was not m
eant for human beings to be out there with film cameras.” Despite that physical ordeal, Spielberg was “wonderful” with everyone involved in the production, Hoffman said: “These were a bunch of kids, absolute amateurs. Steven works with people extremely well. He has an immediate rapport with anybody. It doesn’t matter who you are, he’ll direct you. Also, he does his homework and his preparation.” Spielberg even documented the making of Amblin’ with his own 8mm camera.
“People say, ‘How did you get to know Spielberg?’” Daviau relates with a laugh. “I got to really know Spielberg because I shot sunrise and sunset every day for eight straight days, with Steven Spielberg in high gear. Every morning he wanted to get up and shoot the sunrise. ‘Steven, we got a great sunrise yesterday.’ ‘Yeah, but this one might be better!’ It was very loosely structured, and Steven was making it up as he went along. So we would do sunrise and then we’d shoot all day and we would get a sunset shot. Then we would drive in to town, to Technicolor, and see our rushes from the day before. Steven was just doing it to get an idea of how we could reshoot that one little shot that we could do better. We’d drive all the way back, get to bed, and bang! Five A.M., Steven would be up, going, ‘Up! Up!’”
Other Amblin’ crew members who went on to careers in Hollywood included composer Michael Lloyd; Spielberg’s teenaged sister Anne, who served as continuity supervisor and prepared the food; production assistant Thom Eberhardt, a Long Beach State student who is now a director; production assistant Robin C. Chamberlin, who later produced the TV series Wings; and assistant cameraman Donald E. Heitzer, a UCLA film school graduate who also worked with Daviau on rock ’n’ roll shorts and eventually became an associate producer and production manager.
Hoffman remembered the picture as “a labor of love” for everyone concerned, but for some it was just labor, and unpaid labor at that. After toiling from early morning to late evening on the grueling locations, the crew would return to their little desert motel “beat to shit,” Heitzer says. Burris recalls that the crew kept changing because “Guys would say, ‘Fuck this, I’m leaving.’” “The hours were hard,” admits Heitzer, one of those who left Pearblossom before the film finished shooting. “It was tough. It was very strenuous. It was hot. It was the middle of nowhere. We would climb up a hillside and set up the camera. We didn’t have the normal amenities.”
Heitzer soon discovered Spielberg was not as relaxed as he appeared: “We would leave early in the morning for location, and Spielberg said he would vomit every morning before he came out. It’s understandable—every director is nervous, and he was a young kid. But still, he was the leader. He was serious. When you take somebody’s dough and you’re making something there probably isn’t a market for, you’d better be serious.”
*
SPIELBERG found the editing process on Amblin’ “cathartic, since the editing was crucial to the story.” He shot more than three hours of film for a twenty-six-minute short, and by the time he was ready to start editing, his producer had little money left to hire an editing room. Once again, Julie Raymond came to the rescue: “I got him an editing room in Hollywood where he could cut the film—Hal Mann Laboratories. I had known Hal; he had been head of the lab for Pacific Title.”
“Julie Raymond called me and recommended Spielberg,” Mann recalls. “We had worked with him before at Pacific Title. He had done some 16mm work and he brought it to be developed. Larry Glickman [the company’s owner] did a lot of work with students. He was very kind, giving, and understanding. We gave them the [film] stock for the cost of the stock plus five percent. At that time Spielberg was another student. I semi-remembered him. He was working with an [assistant] editor [Burris] on Amblin’, and he had just gotten to the point of doing special effects. I guess he ran out of money. He needed a place to edit and stay all kinds of hours. He came in and we spoke. We were impressed with him and said we would give him help. He seemed like a nice kid, very polite and respectful. Everybody was ‘sir.’ He conducted himself in a businesslike way. We had one spare editing room we let him use; we told him he could have the room for free if he worked late.”
Spielberg spent six weeks huddled over Mann’s Moviola, editing the picture and the soundtrack, which included Michael Lloyd’s music, a wistful title song performed by October Country lead singer Carole Camacho, and the only other human sounds in the film, Pamela McMyler giggling during a pot-smoking sequence. Spielberg’s editing was bold, elliptical, and propulsive, with a jazzy, New Wave–like fondness for sudden, offbeat jump cuts and freeze-frames. He worked on the editing seven days a week, from about four each afternoon until four each morning, with only a single crewman in the building with him and Burris during the night hours. Spielberg was determined to have the film ready for release by the end of the year, the deadline for Academy Award consideration in the live-action short subject category.
Spielberg “lived on pizza and night air,” Mann recalls. “He spent close to two weeks, day and night, just listening to film scores [to guide him in editing the film]. He had a record player, and he had brought all these 33 rpm records. He was walking around all night listening to them in conjunction with his film. He was quite a perfectionist. He wanted to know everything about everything. He wanted to know how our lab worked, how our special-effects machine worked. We had two or three special-effects operators, and he wanted to know what they did. He got advice from a lot of good people. Very few people begrudged him the time or the knowledge. People wanted to help him. He was a very forceful person in a quiet way. He didn’t sound like a know-it-all; he was eager to learn. We got a kick out of it. Every once in a while someone comes along you want to go all the way for. We all thought he would go places. Film was his life.”**
*
IN later years, Spielberg dismissed Amblin’ as “a great Pepsi commercial” with “as much soul and content as a piece of driftwood.” Since buying his debut movie from Hoffman in 1977, Spielberg has not seen fit to reissue it. “Steven was reluctant to have people see that film for many years,” Daviau says, “because he felt that it was so obviously calculated to do what it did, that is, convince a group of executives at Universal to put their money on this guy who’s a twenty-one-year-old director. It was so obviously aimed at that kind of an audience, with enough of a flash of the new, but it was a very old-fashioned movie in a lot of other ways. I think it’s fair to say he was a little embarrassed by it.”
“I can’t look at it now,” Spielberg admitted in 1978. “It really proved how apathetic I was during the sixties. When I look back at that film, I can easily say, ‘No wonder I didn’t go to Kent State,’ or ‘No wonder I didn’t go to Vietnam or I wasn’t protesting when all my friends were carrying signs and getting clubbed in Century City.’ I was off making movies, and Amblin’ is the slick by-product of a kid immersed up to his nose in film.”
Spielberg is underrating his own movie. The visual precocity of Amblin’ still has the power to astonish after all these years, and despite its obviously calculated attentiveness to the demands of the marketplace, the film is much more than a mere director’s showcase or a soulless piece of sixties youth-market exploitation. The simplicity and charm of its storytelling are affecting, and Spielberg’s microcosmic treatment of that era’s cultural divisions, as represented in the contrasting personalities of the hitchhiking couple, is shrewd and surprisingly complex. The film’s ambivalent perspective on hippiedom, which reflected the director’s own personality as a maverick working within the establishment, also demonstrated Spielberg’s canny career instincts. While satisfying his ostensible target audience of young moviegoers, Spielberg simultaneously was pitching the film to his real, and more limited, target audience of middle-aged Hollywood executives who viewed the emerging youth culture with a mixture of wariness and fascination. In so doing, he made a film that managed to be both commercial in its broadly based appeal and surreptitiously personal in its underlying feelings—a combination that would become a hallmark of Spielberg’s career.
The boy’s anxious refusal to let his traveling companion look inside his guitar case, at first a seemingly harmless quirk, gradually alerts her to a secretive side of his personality. When they finally reach the Pacific Ocean, he frolics in the surf, fully clothed, as she rocks morosely in a beach swing, sensing that their brief journey together has no future. In a series of time-compressing jump-cuts, Spielberg brings her closer and closer to the guitar case lying in the sand. When she opens it, with a touching smile of mingled chagrin and amusement, she finds the emblems of the boy’s true personality—a business suit and tie, brown wing-tipped shoes, toothpaste and mouthwash, a roll of toilet paper—along with a paperback copy of Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars, a seemingly incongruous inclusion that helps alert the knowledgeable viewer to the extent of Spielberg’s personal identification with the character.
The boy is not only a faux hippie, a closet square, but a rather unpleasant user to boot, despite his seeming social maladroitness. Initially unable to get a ride on the highway while traveling alone, he latches onto the girl as bait for unsuspecting drivers, a stratagem that backfires in a series of amusing sight-gags as drivers catch on to their game. On a more serious dramatic level, subtly conveyed by Spielberg’s intricate direction of the couple’s wary glances toward each other, the boy callously allows the girl to become closer to him emotionally than he is able to be toward her. She comes to the unhappy realization that the (unstated) goal he is pursuing in southern California leaves no room for the feelings of a rootless, less socially ambitious vagabond. Viewing his male protagonist critically, through the eyes of a more sensitive and more clear-minded female character, Spielberg provides an implicit critique of male ambition and emotional aloofness. Although it may not have appeared so to audiences at the time, Spielberg is also giving us a surprisingly harsh and objective portrait of the artist as a young man. The Levin character takes much the same attitude toward the girl that the strait-laced Spielberg did toward his hippie roommate Ralph Burris—he is embarrassed yet intrigued by her sexual and emotional openness. The director’s poignant portrayal of McMyler’s character is a gesture of respect toward the counterculture from a filmmaker self-aware enough to know that he could never truly belong to it.
Steven Spielberg Page 23