Steven Spielberg

by Joseph McBride

  This was the first snub of a Spielberg film by the Academy, but it was not to be the last.

  *

  SPIELBERG had one bit of unfinished business before he could start directing at Universal—college. When Sheinberg offered him a seven-year contract, with a starting salary of $275 a week, Spielberg hesitated for a moment, evidently thinking of what his father’s reaction would be.

  “Well,” said Spielberg, “I haven’t graduated yet.”

  To which Sheinberg impatiently replied, “Do you wanna graduate college or do you wanna be a film director?”

  “I signed the papers a week later,” Spielberg says. “I quit college so fast I didn’t even clean out my locker. I went from Cal State at Long Beach to Stage 15 at Universal—where Joan Crawford met me at the door.”

  That’s only a slight exaggeration. Spielberg completed the first semester of his junior year at Long Beach State, officially dropping out of college on January 31, 1969, the day before he began rehearsals with Crawford on Night Gallery, his first TV show for Universal. He said later, “I began directing a year shy of graduation, which my father will never forgive me for.”

  *

  AMEASURE of the faith Universal had in Spielberg came when the actress originally cast in Night Gallery balked at being directed by a twenty-two-year-old. Rather than changing directors, Universal fired Bette Davis and replaced her with Joan Crawford. During the show’s filming, Crawford was asked by a journalist how she felt about working with such a young director. She replied, “They told me when I signed to do this that he was twenty-three!”

  Following the tempestuous teaming of Davis and Crawford in Robert Aldrich’s 1962 Grand Guignol classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, the two legendary actresses were reduced in the late sixties to competing for increasingly tacky roles as geriatric horror queens. When Crawford accepted a $50,000 offer from Universal to star in one episode of the three-part NBC “World Premiere” TV movie Night Gallery, she was not in a position to be choosy about her director. She needed the money, and she was well aware of what had happened to Davis.

  Written by Rod Serling in the waning, sadly derivative days of his career, and originally pitched as a theatrical feature, Night Gallery served as the pilot for a series of supernatural tales that vainly attempted to recapture the eerie magic of The Twilight Zone. Spielberg, who had been deeply influenced by that series while growing up in Arizona, was assigned to direct “Eyes,” the middle episode in the Night Gallery anthology movie.†

  Adapted from a story published in Serling’s 1967 collection, The Season to Be Wary, “Eyes” is the lurid tale of Claudia Menlo, a wealthy blind woman who blackmails her doctor (Barry Sullivan) into removing the eyes of a desperately impoverished small-time gambler (Tom Bosley) and transplanting them into her so she can have a few hours of sight. When she removes her bandages, she finds that the world is still mysteriously dark—the lights of New York City have been extinguished by the great blackout of 1965. A massive suspension of disbelief is required to go along with even the secondary devices of the gimmicky yarn: Why wouldn’t the victim simply skip town before the operation, after taking Miss Menlo’s money to cover his gambling debt? Why would she want the removal of her bandages to take place at night? When she stumbles outside in the dark, why can’t she see the headlights of cars jamming the street outside her building?

  But “Eyes” was enlivened by Spielberg’s energetic and inventive visual style, and by a credibly monstrous performance by Crawford. “It was a trick piece,” the producer of Night Gallery, William Sackheim, says of Spielberg’s episode. “It’s not going down in the history of film as one of the greatest things ever done, but it’s a showy piece that worked well.”

  *

  SPIELBERG claimed that after signing his contract with Universal, he was left to molder in an office with “Nobody to call. Nothing to do. No producer on the lot was going to give me a break.” His first assignment for the studio was “to escort this tall young man and give him a tour of Universal Studios because he’d just sold the novel The Andromeda Strain to [director] Robert Wise and Universal.” The tall young man was Michael Crichton, who later would write the novel on which Spielberg based Jurassic Park. Despite his characteristic impatience, Spielberg actually had little time to feel neglected by the Black Tower, for his assignment to direct “Eyes” was reported in Daily Variety on January 23, 1969, less than six weeks after the announcement of his signing by the studio.

  Spielberg had the impression that Sheinberg “twisted somebody’s arm—or broke it off!” to get him his maiden assignment. But Sackheim, a veteran of many successful TV productions, insists that Sheinberg “never called me and said, ‘Put Steven Spielberg on it.’ I didn’t know Steven, but Steven, I guess, was kind of a legend even then. A legend in the sense that he just kind of climbed over the fence and plunked himself in a trailer—at least that was the story I heard. Sheinberg called me one day and said, ‘Sir, I have something I want you to see. Have you ever heard of Steven Spielberg?’ I said, ‘The legend, the kid?’ He set up a screening of Amblin’. It was an incredible piece of work, a very professional job. I said to Sheinberg, ‘I wonder if Steven Spielberg might be a good director for this. I think it might be an interesting idea.’ Sheinberg said, ‘I think it would be a great idea. Let’s go with it.’”

  But Sheinberg then had to sell Spielberg on the idea. The problem, unbeknown to Sackheim, was the script.

  “The script was terrible,” Spielberg said later. “It was by a very good writer, Rod Serling. But the story was not one of his best…. I really didn’t want to do the show. I said to Sid Sheinberg, ‘Jesus, can I do something about young people?’ He said, ‘I’d take this opportunity if I were you.’… And, of course, I took it. I would have done anything. I would have shot … I dunno … the Universal directory if I had to. Just to get on a soundstage. I began rereading the macabre script, trying to make it interesting visually; and it turned out to be the most visually blatant movie I’ve ever made, which goes to show how much the script inspired me.”

  Despite his low opinion of the script, Spielberg found Serling “the most positive guy in the entire production company. He was a great, energetic, slaphappy guy who gave me a fantastic pep talk about how he predicted that the entire movie industry was about to change because of young people like myself getting the breaks.”

  *

  WHEN Spielberg was told that Joan Crawford had been cast in “Eyes,” “That’s when the cold sweat began.” It was on a Sunday, shortly before the start of filming, that he had his first meeting with the legendary star, who was sixty-two years old and had been working in Hollywood since 1925. Spielberg called Chuck Silvers and said anxiously, “They’ve told me I’ve gotta go and talk to her today. Tell me what’s going to happen.”

  “How are you dressed?” asked Silvers.

  “Jeans.”

  “Fine, don’t try to be anybody but yourself.”

  “They’re going to send a limousine for me!” Spielberg said excitedly.

  “Make sure you allow the chauffeur to do his job. Make sure he opens the door for you. Make sure you sit down until he opens the door to you.”

  (Silvers says that the message he was trying to convey to Spielberg was, “Be yourself, but let’s start being the director.”)

  “Just remember she’s a very, very famous lady,” Silvers continued. “Before you’re picked up, sit down and write down a number of names of pictures she was in that you remember.”

  (“Because I knew he was nervous,” Silvers explains, “I wanted to give him something to do while he was waiting.”)

  Spielberg was familiar only with Crawford’s work in Baby Jane and Mildred Pierce. So he went out and bought a copy of Lawrence J. Quirk’s book The Films of Joan Crawford. Before his 8:00 P.M. appointment with Crawford at her Hollywood apartment, he gave himself a crash course in her career.

  As Spielberg told the story to Crawford biographer Bob Thomas, when he arrived
at her apartment, he heard her call out in a warm voice, “Come in, Steven,” but at first he didn’t see her. Then, wrote Thomas, Spielberg “was startled to find her standing behind the couch with a mask covering her eyes. He watched in astonishment as she stumbled about the room, bumping into furniture, holding out a protective hand as she moved.”

  “This is how a blind person walks through a room,” she told him. “I’m practicing for the role. How difficult it is without the benefit of sight. You feel lost in a world of blackness. I’ve got to do this on the set, Steven. I need to practice with the furniture two days before we shoot so I’ll be able to let my eyes go blank and still find my way around like a blind person.”

  At that point, Thomas related, “She removed the blindfold. Her huge eyes blinked in bewilderment as they gazed for the first time on the man who would be her director. Her smile froze as she studied the smooth, beardless face. ‘Hello, Steven,’ she said, offering a brave hand. ‘Hello …Joan,’ he replied, wishing that he could escape.”

  “Goodness,” she told him, “you certainly must have done something important to get where you are so soon. What films have you directed?”

  “Uh, none.”

  “No films at the studio?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Then …?”

  “Well, I did make a movie that the studio liked. That’s why they signed me.”

  “Oh? And what was that?”

  “It was, uh, a twenty-minute short I made at Cal State Long Beach.”

  “At school.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you happen to be the son of anybody in the Black Tower?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m just working my way through Universal.”

  “Steven,” she laughed, “you and I both made it on our own. We’re going to get along just fine! C’mon, let’s go to dinner.”

  While they dined on Polynesian food at the Luau, a campy Beverly Hills hangout popular with movie people, Crawford drank vodka while Spielberg sipped a non-alcoholic fruit punch. She pumped him on his background, and he told her about his aspirations to make films. She spoke about her life with her late husband, Alfred Steele, president of the Pepsi-Cola Company; she had remained involved with the company as a board member and spokeswoman. She laughed uproariously when Spielberg said, “I guess about the only thing we have in common is that we’re both members of the Pepsi generation.”

  By the end of the evening, their unlikely camaraderie had progressed to the point that she said, “Now, I know what television schedules are, and I know the pressure that will be on you to finish the show on time. You’ll want your first work as a director to be something you can be proud of, and I’ll break my ass to help you. Don’t let any executive bug you because the picture’s not on schedule. If you have any problems with the Black Tower, let me take care of it. I’ll be your guardian angel. Okay?”

  “Okay,” said Spielberg, smiling with relief.

  The next day he told Chuck Silvers, “I was on cloud nine all the way home.” He had passed his first test as a professional director.

  “It was a quantum leap,” he said later. “I never got over the idea of directing Joan Crawford!! But she was great…. She took pity on me, this little kid with acne all over my face. She must have been expecting George Stevens or George Cukor to direct her first TV show.”

  Contrary to Spielberg’s belief, Night Gallery was not Crawford’s first acting job on television. She had done nine previous TV shows, the first in 1953 and the most recent a 1968 episode of Lucille Ball’s sitcom The Lucy Show. But Crawford “was a little apprehensive” about the television medium, Sackheim says. “You’re talking about a woman who probably never shot more than two pages of dialogue a day in her life. Now you’re shooting eight pages. She had difficulty remembering her lines. Ultimately we had cue cards made up. I remember she apologized to Steven. She was very upset about her own inability to provide what he needed.”

  Spielberg remembered, “I was so frightened that even now the whole period is a bit of a blank. I was walking on eggs…. I don’t know if you’ve ever not been to bed for four days in a row? Shooting Night Gallery was like that. I don’t take drugs. I never have. Or I would have used every drug under and over the counter at that time. That show put me through dire straits. It was good discipline but a very bad experience.”

  Joan Crawford remained true to her word, however, treating him “like I had been working fifty years…. Once she knew I had done my homework —I had my storyboards right there with me every minute—she treated me as if I was The Director. Which, of course, I was. But at that time she knew a helluva lot more about directing than I did.”

  But as cast member Barry Sullivan recalled shortly before his death in 1994, Spielberg also “handled her very nicely. He was very flattering. He used the right butter-up words, not the words he would have used normally. She had fallen in love with him, but she didn’t trust herself, that was my interpretation. She was very impressed with him, but she didn’t know why. She thought he was some kind of nut.”

  *

  THE first day of shooting, February 3, “was frightening because I hadn’t met the crew before,” Spielberg recalled at a 1973 American Film Institute seminar. “I came on the set and they thought it was a joke. They really thought it was a publicity stunt and I really couldn’t get anybody to take me seriously for two days. It was very embarrassing…. I set up a shot in Night Gallery—I shot through a bauble [in a chandelier], just a real gimmicky shot—and I remember seeing people titter and say, ‘He doesn’t have long to go.’”

  Barry Sullivan realized what Spielberg was feeling. He took the director aside and told him, “Life is short. Don’t put yourself through this if you don’t have to.” That advice, Spielberg recalled, “has stayed with me, although it’s an old cliché.”

  Spielberg came to Night Gallery with a precociously well-developed sense of his own visual style. He disdained the usual TV method of mechanically “covering” scenes with master shots, medium shots, and close-ups. He had an instinctive aversion to the over-the-shoulder shooting style TV editors favor for ease in linking shots, and with his passion for control and his fondness for the moving camera already strongly in evidence, he preferred whenever possible to stage a scene in a single flowing master shot. Because of his unorthodox shooting methods and Crawford’s difficulty remembering her lines, the first two days went slowly. As Bob Thomas reported, Spielberg “knew that his bosses in the Black Tower were more interested in maintaining the schedule than in achieving quality, and he feared that both would elude him. If he failed on his first assignment, would he ever have another?”

  Spielberg’s visual flamboyance also caused friction with his producer. As film editor Edward M. Abroms recalls, “The first day we went to dailies [the screening of footage shot the previous day], the first scene up was Barry Sullivan coming into [Crawford’s] suite, seen through a chandelier. Steven put the camera close to the chandelier, and I remember Bill Sackheim going, ‘Oh, my God, what an arty-farty shot! Jesus Christ!’” Hearing such remarks, Spielberg said later, was “really a disturbing experience.” But his crew soon became “very sympathetic,” doing their best to help him get the shots he wanted.

  When Bob Hull of The Hollywood Reporter interviewed the “long-haired, very youthful-appearing tyro” on the final day of shooting, Spielberg stressed his willingness to work within the system: “I’m trying to show that it’s possible to be both commercial and, well, artful. People my age in this business are malleable, you know, not merely one-way, their way. We can learn from the past.” Diplomatically glossing over his early difficulties with the crew, he said, “I expected hostility when I started on this. But no one seemed to think it was unusual. Nobody called me ‘Hey, kid.’ As a matter of fact, the older people on the set were the first to accept me. I guess they figured that if someone up there thought I was good enough for the job, then that was good enough for them.”

  “From the time he’
d holler ‘Action!’ ‘Cut!,’ he was the director,” Chuck Silvers says. “It was a totally professional operation. On most sets there’s a lot of grab-ass, cardplaying, jokes, and lightness. You don’t see that on a Spielberg set. By showing respect he engenders respect.”

  • • •

  ON the third day of shooting, there was another crisis. Joan Crawford became ill. She was diagnosed with an inner-ear infection and given a day to rest. Spielberg’s efforts to keep up with the schedule seemed doomed.

  At the end of her first day back, a shaky Crawford told Spielberg, “Tomorrow I really need your help, Steven. That scene where I take off the bandages and see for the first time. It scares the hell out of me. That may be the most important shot in the picture, and I simply don’t know how to do it.”

  “We’ll work it out, Joan, don’t worry,” he promised. But the following day he was under intense pressure from the production office to complete his work on the apartment set so that the stage could be turned over to another production. He was almost done when the assistant director, Ralph Ferrin, said Crawford needed to speak with him.

  “Later,” said Spielberg. “I’ve got to finish with this set by six.”

  “I think you’d better talk with Joan,” Ferrin said, “or else you may not be able to finish with the show.”

  Spielberg found Crawford weeping in her dressing room.

  “You have let me down,” she told him. “I rarely ask anyone for help, but this time I needed it—badly. I asked you last night if you could spare some time today to help me with the scene where I am able to see. Now, here it is, the end of the day, and you haven’t talked to me.”