While not overtly politically conscious, Amblin’ is hardly the work of an “apathetic” filmmaker, but that of a deeply feeling filmmaker who captures the disaffected mood of his generation with both fidelity and artful understatement. Spielberg described Amblin’ in 1968 as “hopefully standing for everything that’s happening today. It takes no position on marijuana or sex, just simply presents them.” He could have phrased that better, for while Amblin’ may not take a “position” in the sense of preaching about changing social mores, it examines them concretely, passionately, and without resorting to caricature. Spielberg’s deft and witty use of the camera, the vigorous and unexpected rhythms of his compositions and editing, and the engaging naturalism of the performances he draws from his actors give Amblin’ a sense of emotional spontaneity and freshness within the framework of a mature, highly controlled, even classical visual style. Compared to some of the better-known youth pictures of the sixties, which are so hysterically overstated as to be virtually unwatchable today, Amblin’ is an elegant and unpretentious miniature, a time capsule of the period that transcends cliché and requires no apology from its director.
*
“WHEN I saw Amblin’,” Chuck Silvers reports, “I’ve got to be honest with you, I cried. It was everything it should have been. It was perfect. Certain things he did with the camera were fun, but they weren’t just for fun—he was telling a story. It was such a simple story, so well told, and it was a silent motion picture. Steven Spielberg is as close to a natural-born cameraman as anybody I’ve ever known of; he knows what he has in mind has to be conveyed visually. I don’t want to cast myself in any way as his teacher. I wish to hell I had been. How the hell do you teach Maria Callas how to sing? Who taught Da Vinci? You can expose people to things, but they have to have it in themselves. As far as I’m concerned he’s the most gifted person in motion pictures. Not just today—ever.
“I didn’t trust my own reaction to Amblin’. I thought maybe I wasn’t being as objective as I could be. I saw it again, and I looked at it in a more professional sense. I didn’t find anything I would change, and that’s very unusual for me. I ran it for some of the editors I was close to. One of the guys even cried—Carl Pingitore. Carl was a gruff bear. He said, ‘That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’ When I had shown Amblin’ to three or four editors, I knew I had available to me Steven’s showcase.”
The “hell of a big break” Silvers had wished for Steven now was about to come to pass. As Spielberg has said, what happened next was “truly a Cinderella story.” Although others who worked at Universal at the time have tried to take credit for bringing Amblin’ to the attention of Universal’s top brass, Silvers was the person who did so first.
“It took me three days to figure out what to do with Amblin’,” he recalls. “It was pretty obvious that television was the way to go for Steven. I was in television, and the people I knew were in television. That would be Steven’s first exposure. I thought, ‘What the hell could I do? Call the guy who’s in charge.’”
*
THE guy in charge was Sidney J. Sheinberg. The tall, imposing, thirty-three-year-old Texan was vice-president of production for Universal TV.
“My feeling about the future of television,” he said shortly after hiring Spielberg, “is that there are no rules.” Sid Sheinberg came to California in 1958 to teach law at UCLA and was hired the following year by the legal department of Revue Productions, the television production arm of MCA, then a leading Hollywood talent agency. After helping negotiate MCA’s purchase of Universal in 1962, Sheinberg began climbing the corporate ladder as a TV business affairs executive. He started a new era in television in 1964 when he came up with the idea for the made-for-TV movie (then known as the NBC “World Premiere”). As Universal’s TV division thrived, Sheinberg soon became the favored son and heir apparent of MCA president Lew Wasserman.
Remembering Sheinberg’s days in TV, writer-producer William Link says that he “would give you a decision within seconds. There was no stall; there wasn’t that famous Hollywood ‘slow no.’ There was none of that. He has a lawyer’s mind, and story conferences were great with Sid. He would make [creative] suggestions, which was rare [for an executive]. Sid would re-plot, he could restructure, and it was a two-way street. He was a sophisticated man.” Martin Hornstein, an assistant director who worked on Universal TV shows with Spielberg, remembers Sheinberg as “a visionary. He wasn’t afraid to try new things.”
It was shortly before 9:00 on a rainy night in the fall of 1968 when Silvers made his call about Amblin’ to Sheinberg’s office in MCA’s executive headquarters, the Black Tower. “He’s in a meeting with some NBC people,” Sheinberg’s secretary told Silvers. “I’ll try and get him to take your call.”
Sheinberg came on the line and barked, “Jesus Christ, I’m in the middle of a goddam meeting, arguing with these people.”
Silvers gamely pushed ahead, “Sid, I’ve got something I want you to see.”
“I’ve got a whole goddam pile of film here [to look at],” Sheinberg replied. “I’m going to be here half of the night. I’ll be lucky to get out of here by midnight.”
“I’m going to put this [film] in the pile for the projection booth. You really should look at it tonight.”
“You think it’s that goddam important?”
“Yes, I think it’s that goddam important. If you don’t look at this, somebody else will.”
Taking no chances about Sheinberg changing his mind, Silvers told Sheinberg’s projectionist, “If he says, ‘That’s all,’ put it up and run it anyway.”
“Now, the projectionist isn’t going to do that,” Silvers explains, “but I wanted to impress on him how important it was. Sometime in that night, Sheinberg took the half hour and watched it. The next morning I got in early and there were about five or six messages. George Santoro had been calling. George was Sid’s right-hand man. I returned the call to George. George said, ‘Who is Steven Spielberg?’”
“He’s a young man that we know,” replied Silvers, who remembers thinking, “Aha! He’s hooked! Got him!”
“Can we talk to him?” Santoro asked.
“I think I can arrange that.”
Sheinberg later recalled his initial reaction to Amblin’ and to the phone call from Silvers that alerted him to it: “He said there’s this guy who’s been hanging around the place who’s made a short film. So I watched it and I thought it was terrific. I liked the way he selected the performers, the relationships, the maturity and the warmth that was in that short. I told Chuck to have the guy come see me.”
*
SILVERS immediately called Spielberg: “They want to talk to you. When can you be over here?”
“I’ll leave right now.”
“Fine, you come over here to the office. I need to talk to you first.”
When Spielberg arrived shortly thereafter, Silvers told him, “Look, whatever the hell you do up there, remember, they’re talking business and you’re talking opportunity. The best thing to do is a lot of listening. And don’t sign anything, for Chrissake.”††
Spielberg recalled what happened in Sheinberg’s office: “He’s a very nice man, Sid. Very austere. He sat there in his French [provincial] office, overlooking Universal. Like a scene out of The Fountainhead. He always calls people ‘sir.’ He said, ‘Sir, I liked your work. How would you like to go to work professionally?’ And … well, what are you gonna say to that! He laid out the whole program. ‘You sign the contract and start in television. If you do a few shows and other producers like your work, you can—maybe—branch out into feature films.’ It was a dream contract come true. I mean, it was all very vague. But it sounded great.”
Sheinberg recalled being so convinced of Spielberg’s precocious talent that he unhesitantly took a chance on “this nerdlike, scrawny character…. I said, ‘You should be a director.’ And Steven said, ‘I think so, too.’ Steven was very much a young boy.”
“Sid was
really the fairy godfather,” Silvers says, “because he had the ability to make it happen. He’s the one who saw it and reacted. What a lucky phone call that was! But without any question in my mind, if it had not been through the aegis of Universal, it would have been somebody else. Steven would have gone on to be exactly what he is now. That kind of talent is bigger than life. That talent could not have gone unrecognized.”
*
WHEN his meeting with Sheinberg ended, Spielberg went straight back to Silvers’s office.
“They offered me a contract,” Spielberg said.
“You didn’t sign anything?”
“No.”
Spielberg then “asked me if I would be his manager,” Silvers relates. “I said, ‘Steven, you need someone who knows a hell of a lot more about the business than I do. I’m not the right person.’ He asked me what I wanted [for helping him]. I said, ‘Well, Steven, by the time you really make it big, I’ll probably be too goddam old for you to do me any good.’ If I had known then what I know now, I would have given him a completely different answer. In effect, what I told him was, ‘When you can, pass it on. When you make it big, you can be nice to young people. I learned from people I had no way of thanking. You learned it here, and you can, in effect, pay off the people. You can pass it on.’
“Steven made a promise and he’s kept it. He has a hospital wing with his name on it [the Steven Spielberg Pediatric Medicine Research Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in West Hollywood]. At USC there’s a Steven Spielberg scoring stage. You look at the list of first-time directors and new writers and first-time producers he has made an opportunity for—he puts his money and he puts his business personality on the line.
“He’s kept the other promise to me. He said, ‘How about something personal? What do you want?’ I said, ‘Every time we meet I would like a hug.’ Whenever I see him, he gives me a hug.”
* Ironically, when Lucas donated $4.7 million to his alma mater in 1981, he persuaded Spielberg to give USC $500,000. Spielberg received an honorary doctor of fine arts degree from the school in 1994, and two years later was elected to USC’s board of trustees.
† He apparently did not make the acquaintance of the other Long Beach State students of that era who would go on to notable careers in show business: actor-comedian Steve Martin (a philosophy major in college), sibling pop singers Karen and Richard Carpenter, and future punkish movie director Penelope Spheeris (whom Spielberg later hired to direct The Little Rascals).
‡ As well as appearing in Spielberg’s student films, Ernest had small parts as highway patrolmen in The Sugarland Express and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
§The title was borrowed from the previous year’s slapstick comedy-to-end-all-slapstick comedies, directed by Blake Edwards.
¶ His producing credits include The Sting and Taxi Driver. Among the films he has directed are My Bodyguard and the 1994 cable-TV movie Next Door, starring Spielberg’s wife, Kate Capshaw.
|| In his 1983 biography of Spielberg, Tony Crawley questions whether Spielberg could have worked on Wagon Train, which Crawley incorrectly claims had finished production before Spielberg came to the studio. Production on Wagon Train lasted until 1965, and the Universal TV editing department continued reediting episodes for reruns and syndication for some time after that. Chuck Silvers thinks it’s “very possible” Spielberg worked on the series when editors shortened episodes so stations could play more commercials and made the shows less violent, in response to changing standards and practices.
** Spielberg found time to strike up a relationship with Mann’s daughter Devorah, who was there to learn the family business (now Devorah Hardberger, she is supervisor of the laboratory at Cinema Research Corp.). Besides watching Amblin’ footage if Spielberg “needed an extra ear or an extra eye,” Devorah also began dating the young filmmaker.
†† Shortly before his meeting with Sheinberg, Spielberg used Amblin’ to sign with his first agent, Mike Medavoy of General Artists Corp., which was acquired soon after that by Creative Management Associates, a partnership of Freddie Fields and David Begelman. Medavoy did not accompany Spielberg to the meeting, but the agency subsequently negotiated his deal with Universal.
EIGHT
“THIS TREMENDOUS MEATGRINDER”
I’VE ALWAYS RESENTED THE TELEVISION MEDIUM, EVEN THOUGH IT WAS THROUGH TV THAT I FOUND AN INROAD TO THEATRICAL FILMS.
–STEVEN SPIELBERG, 1974
THEY just signed me and told me to imagine up something, which to me is proof that the old Hollywood way of doing things is breaking up a bit,” Spielberg said in a December 1968 interview with the Los Angeles Times. His studio contract felt “like a dream come true,” he later recalled. “At last I had the means to show what I could do. But it was not something I wanted to do for the benefit of others. No, I wanted to do it for myself, for everything I had believed in since I was a child. I could finally bring to life all those stories I had in my head.”
But his elation was tempered by the anxiety he felt as a young amateur filmmaker suddenly thrust into a professional director’s chair. Even before he started directing his first television program at Universal, he told The Hollywood Reporter, “Now I’m caught up in this tremendous meatgrinder. Amblin’ is the only film I will ever make with so much freedom.”
*
AMBLIN’ had its world premiere on December 18, 1968, in a one-week Academy Award–qualifying engagement at Loew’s Crest Theater in Westwood. Spielberg’s short was ill-matched with Otto Preminger’s misfired comedy about hippies and gangsters, Skidoo. The newspaper ads barely squeezed in a minuscule mention of Amblin’: “It Packs the Wallop of a Rock Concert!” But Los Angeles Times feature writer Wayne Warga called it “a splendid film to watch.”
On the night of the premiere, producer Denis Hoffman threw a party at a screening room on Sunset Boulevard, and Spielberg showed up looking self-consciously hip in a Nehru jacket. By a happy coincidence, it was also Spielberg’s birthday. His twenty-second birthday, even though the Times reported the following day that he was twenty-one. As part of the Oscar campaign conducted by publicist Jerry Pam, Hoffman held another screening party for Amblin’ that month at the Directors Guild of America Theater and took out ads in the trade papers. Spielberg also was invited to screen Amblin’ before a USC directing class taught by Jerry Lewis, who told his students, “That’s what filmmaking is all about.”
Despite all the ballyhoo, Amblin’ proved a difficult sell to theaters. “The problem was it was too long,” Hoffman recalled. “The theater people didn’t like it, because it caused them to give up one screening per day. They would play a seven-minute short, but this was twenty-six minutes. We had a terrible time trying to get them to play it.”
The first distributor Hoffman approached, in the fall of 1968, was Universal, a logical choice since it was in the process of signing not only Spielberg but also Pamela McMyler to a contract.* But the studio seemed to regard Amblin’ itself as an afterthought, making an offer of only $2,000 for the world rights, which Hoffman indignantly refused. After being rejected by United Artists, Hoffman made a temporary releasing deal with Sigma III to split the proceeds from the Crest engagement, but the distributor chose not to exercise its right of first refusal for a national release. Hoffman contracted instead on June 15, 1970, with Four Star Excelsior Releasing Co., which found the film occasional playdates around the country for about a year (Four Star later released the film in the United Kingdom as well). Although Hoffman said in 1994 that Amblin’ barely returned its costs overall, it did better in its nontheatrical release by UPA, which rented and sold 16mm prints for several years to such outlets as schools, libraries, and military bases.
Spielberg also managed to place Amblin’ in the June 1969 Atlanta and Venice Film Festivals. When Hoffman wasn’t able to pay Spielberg’s way to Atlanta, Spielberg persuaded Universal to pick up his travel expenses. Amblin’ was chosen best live-action short subject by the festival, whose program described
it as “a solid contender for an Academy Award nomination.” “Everybody said we were going to get the nomination,” Hoffman remembered. “Everybody believed it was a shoo-in.”
But when the nominations were announced on February 18, Amblin’ failed to make the list. Hoffman and Spielberg were “devastated” that Amblin’ wasn’t nominated. The Oscar winner in the live-action short-subject category was Charles Guggenheim’s Robert Kennedy Remembered, the kind of sober, traditional filmmaking the Academy has always favored over more adventurous, groundbreaking work. Hoffman said he was told by members of the Academy’s Short Subjects Awards Nominating Committee that Amblin’ “was not nominated because people at the Academy did not like the reference to drugs in the movie. In a little segment, we portrayed marijuana as a fun thing.” (In addition, one of the trade ads promoting Amblin’ for Oscar consideration prominently featured a smoking joint and a bag of marijuana.)
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