Steven Spielberg

by Joseph McBride

  Spielberg canceled shooting for the day, even though he hadn’t finished with the set. For the next hour he went over the scene with Crawford in her dressing room, promising, “I don’t care what the production office says. I’ll give you any number of takes until we get it on film just the way you and I believe it should be.”

  Spielberg “was painstaking the next day, calling for take after take until Joan was satisfied,” Bob Thomas reported. “The shot lasted less than five seconds in the film, but the experience proved an invaluable lesson for the young man—the director’s responsibility for his actors.”

  On the last day and night of shooting, Spielberg filmed the finale of Miss Menlo, her sight fading at sunrise, crashing through the window of her penthouse as she cries out, “I want it! I want the sun!”

  “We were thinking of using a stock shot of the sun,” editor Abroms recalls. “She had a problem, being the actress that she was, with, ‘How am I going to be motivated to feel this heat on my face? And how am I supposed to go here when there’s no glass?’ Because of Steven’s immaturity at the time, he could not quite reason with her. He said, ‘We’ll have some padding on the other side, and we’re going to catch you.’ But she just couldn’t work up enough inner motivation. Bill Sackheim took her aside and she did it.”

  “Miss Crawford and I just had our first argument,” Spielberg told The Hollywood Reporter at the end of shooting. “It wasn’t really much of a disagreement, a little thing over punching up a scene. It’s a pleasure discussing such a thing with a woman like that.”

  When Crawford died in 1977, Spielberg was the youngest speaker at a Hollywood memorial tribute organized by George Cukor. He recalled that during the shooting of Night Gallery, “She treated me like I knew what I was doing, and I didn’t. I loved her for that.”

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  SPIELBERG’S episode finished shooting two days behind its seven-day schedule, a development frowned upon in assembly-line TV production, even if the director was not entirely responsible. Spielberg then took such pains with the editing that he eventually was barred from the cutting room. He later claimed that editor Ed Abroms “threw me bodily out of his cutting room, and called the producer to complain. I think he threw something heavy at me, too, but missed.” Asked about Spielberg’s removal from the show, Abroms replied that he was “a little hesitant” to discuss the circumstances, but Sackheim insists, “Nobody threw him out.” The producer does admit that they had “a little problem trying to get the film away from him. He shot some really wild, wacky stuff. In the operation scene of Tom Bosley losing his eyes, we were having trouble putting it together.” “There was virtually no operation [scene], no footage,” Abroms says. “Steven shot the two of them on gurneys going into the operating room, and down shots on their faces—how do we put across that the eyes are being taken out? I had to pull a few tricks, some manipulation of film and some opticals.” The special-effects finale of Miss Menlo falling to her death also required some reshooting during postproduction, without Spielberg’s involvement.

  “I put the show together and didn’t work [as a director] for a year after that,” Spielberg recalls. “Because I was disillusioned with Hollywood, with show business…. I was so traumatized. The pressure of that show was too much for me…. I really felt this wasn’t the business I wanted to be in.”

  Veteran Daily Variety television reviewer Dave Kaufman had a different opinion. After the show aired November 8 on NBC, Kaufman wrote: “Steve Spielberg’s direction of the Crawford seg is topnotch.” He praised Crawford for a “superb” performance and described the episode as “highly imaginative and gripping.” But in The Hollywood Reporter, John Mahoney wrote condescendingly: “The second episode was directed by twenty-two-year-old Steven Spielberg, who employed such new techniques as the spiral wipe. The episode featured Joan Crawford in a showy fourth-gear performance, [and] looked as if it hadn’t been completed.” Forgetting Kaufman’s praise in Daily Variety, Spielberg later recalled the reviews of Night Gallery as “awful. Some critics said I shouldn’t have done it—because of my age. All of a sudden, the age factor began to plague me.”

  Despite surprisingly strong ratings, which led to a three-year run for the series, the Night Gallery pilot gave Spielberg the unwelcome reputation around Universal of being “avant-garde,” Sid Sheinberg said. “So many people take bows for his success now, but at the time, they complained because he wanted to put the camera on the floor.” Spielberg’s agent at the time, Mike Medavoy, recalls, “After the first Night Gallery, while they thought he had some talent, they had all those episodic guys working, and he wasn’t like Michael Ritchie, whom they thought the world of, and a lot of other people. There were young guys working all the time, but Steven was really young. He looked like he was fifteen years old.”

  “I spent eight months on the lot then,” Spielberg told The Hollywood Reporter in 1971, “and now that I was officially there I got a Rolodex and a charge number and I was forgotten except for the one segment of Night Gallery I directed starring Joan Crawford. I submitted three properties to people and was turned down on all of them.”

  *

  ON his final day of shooting the Night Gallery episode, Spielberg announced his next project, Snow White, to The Hollywood Reporter: “It’s the story of seven guys in San Francisco who run this Chinese food factory.” He was not kidding.

  Planned as a feature film for Universal, Snow White was a cynical update of the beloved fairy tale to the swinging sixties, based on a Donald Barthelme novella first published in a February 1967 issue of The New Yorker. The straitlaced Spielberg would have had to strain to find anything congenial to his talents in this protracted dirty joke, in which the heroine cheerlessly dispenses her sexual favors among her seven randy roommates. Barthelme’s rambling, pretentiously obscure story has minimal character or plot development. Although intended as a satire, it has little humor, a confused attitude toward the free-love movement’s effect on women, and a dismal finale: Snow White’s false “prince” winds up dead of poisoning, and one of her seven roommates is hanged. On February 23, 1969, The New York Times reported that producer Dick Berg, impressed with Spielberg’s work on Amblin’, had hired him and TV writer Larry Grusin to give Snow White the “youth treatment.”

  Universal’s grasp of the youth market was, to say the least, rather shaky. “Universal at the time was a disaster,” recalls Medavoy, who brought the Snow White project to Spielberg. “The only picture they had was Airport.” A frenzy of misguided would-be with-it-ness soon led the studio to plunge recklessly into the counterculture with Monte Hellman’s terminally arty Two-Lane Blacktop, Peter Fonda’s torpid Western The Hired Hand, and Dennis Hopper’s incomprehensible The Last Movie, all released in 1971. Even if Spielberg relished the idea of paying back Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs for terrifying him as a child, he can be grateful in retrospect that the Black Tower finally had sense enough to scuttle the notion of making a bawdy lampoon of an animated classic that has captivated audiences since 1937.

  In May 1969, Spielberg came up with a much better idea for a movie, one that he later described as “a tragic fairytale.” The banner headline in the May 2 issue of the Hollywood Citizen–News would have grabbed any young filmmaker’s attention, for it read like a Hollywood story pitch: NEW BONNIE’N [sic] CLYDE.

  Although the movie Spielberg finally made more than four years later—The Sugarland Express—departed considerably from the facts of the original incident, its emotional core was clear to him from the opening paragraph of the article: “An ex-convict, freed just two weeks ago and willing to do anything ‘to talk to my kids and love them,’ kidnapped a Texas highway patrolman in his squad car today in a high-speed c[h]ase that ended seven hours later in a gunfight with lawmen.” The article reported that Robert Samuel (Bobby) Dent and his wife, Ila Faye, had taken hostage a highway patrolman named J. Kenneth Crone. Threatening to kill him with a shotgun, the Dents drove several hundred miles across southeast Texas in
Crone’s patrol car, followed by a posse of more than a hundred cars. Eventually, Texas Department of Public Safety Captain Jerry Miller struck a deal with Dent, who agreed to free Crone unharmed if Miller would let him see his two children, a boy and a girl, at the home of Dent’s father-in-law in Wheelock. “I want ten or fifteen minutes to talk to my kids and love them and I don’t think they’ll be seeing us again,” Dent told the lawman. But when he entered the house, Dent’s children were nowhere to be seen, and he was shot to death.

  It was only later that Spielberg learned the full story of the bizarre incident and the comedy of errors leading up to it. While driving with his wife between Beaumont and Port Arthur, Dent had failed to dim his headlights to a passing police car. When the cop tried to pull him over, the ex-con drove off in a panic. After a pursuit by several patrol cars, including one driven by Crone, the fleeing couple abandoned their car and sought help from a farmer. Thinking the Dents had been beaten by robbers, the farmer called the local sheriff. Crone heard the radio report and went to the farmhouse, only to be taken hostage. Rather than dying in a “gunfight,” Bobby Dent was gunned down by Robertson County Sheriff E. T. Elliott and FBI agent Bob Wyatt after hostage Crone dove for cover and Dent, in the confusion, failed to obey a command to drop his gun.‡

  When The Sugarland Express was released in 1974, it was generally assumed that what primarily interested Spielberg about the saga of Bobby and Ila Faye Dent was the opportunity to stage the biggest car chase ever put on film. Although the director was intrigued by the circuslike spectacle surrounding the chase, he said in 1974 that “there is very little to directing automobiles…. The human drama … inspired me long before I was visually wooed by the thought of all those cars.” What undoubtedly struck the deepest emotional chord in Spielberg was Bobby Dent’s fatal desire to see his children. Spielberg was the same age as Dent (twenty-two) when the events occurred. His own family’s breakup was still a raw wound for the young filmmaker as he began his professional directing career in 1969. Even though he later learned that the chain of events was not entirely set in motion from the outset by Dent’s desire to see his children, Spielberg kept to the spirit of the original article by making the attempt to reconstitute a broken family the primary dramatic focus of The Sugarland Express.

  When he proposed the story to Universal in 1969, the studio was not interested. The story was too somber, too downbeat, they told him. It wouldn’t make any money. Youth movies that were making money in the late sixties, even tragic road movies like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider, allowed their characters an intoxicating sense of rebellious freedom before they met their ultimate fate. There wasn’t much exhilaration to the story of Bobby and Ila Faye Dent; those two hopeless losers hardly fit the popular mold of romantic outlaws. Spielberg reluctantly filed away the clipping from the Hollywood Citizen–News, letting the story germinate in his mind.

  Not only had he failed to interest Universal in letting him “bring to life all those stories I had in my head,” but no one even was offering him TV episodes to direct. “I was in a despondent, comatose state and told Sheinberg I wanted a leave of absence. I got it.”

  *

  DURING the months he spent away from the studio from the summer of 1969 into the early part of 1970, Spielberg tried to raise money to make low-budget independent films in 16mm. If he had been able to do so, he said later, “I might have made underground movies first: I might have been like Brian De Palma and made nine films before breaking into the Establishment.” But once he had become a professional filmmaker, there was no turning back. He was chagrined to find that he could not even raise $1,000 to make a short.

  At the same time, Spielberg set out to develop feature-length screenplays with other writers. He began to approach other studios with projects during his informal leave of absence from Universal, with his agent’s help and encouragement. Although Universal had an exclusive contract with Spielberg, Medavoy says that “I felt that if I could get someone to buy him, I could go to Universal and ask them for a loanout. I never asked Sid for his blessing. I figured, Steven wasn’t working, so why did they have to know?”

  A future studio executive, Spielberg’s agent had been born Morris Medavoy in 1941 to Russian Jewish parents in Shanghai, where they lived in the British Protectorate before emigrating to Chile in 1947 and the United States ten years later.§ After his graduation from UCLA in 1963, Medavoy earned a reputation as an aggressive, literate young agent of rare taste and sophistication. In 1968, the same year he signed Spielberg, Medavoy also signed such director clients as George Lucas, Francis Coppola, John Milius, Terrence Malick, Michael Ritchie, Philip Kaufman, Monte Hellman, and Michelangelo Antonioni. His hot new clients at CMA became known collectively as his “Class of ’68”; to Spielberg, he was affectionately known as “The Czar.”

  “We were quite close when we first got started,” Medavoy recalls. “We spent a lot of time together. We ate a lot of peanut-butter sandwiches together. We knew some of the same women. But it’s funny, just to show you how wrong I was, I thought the real successes would be Monte Hellman, Terry Malick, John Milius, Phil Kaufman—I never expected any of the others. I never knew whether Steven was going to [be a great success]. I always thought he was extraordinarily talented, and I knew that he was ambitious. But, at first, I thought he was a guy who was going to emulate and copy as opposed to being original. And what he did was, he emulated and copied the best of them, and he became an original.”

  One of the projects Spielberg shopped around was a World War II aviation “dogfight film” he was planning with a Medavoy client named Carl Gottlieb. A young TV comedy writer and actor, Gottlieb later played small parts for Spielberg and wrote the final shooting script for Jaws. Spielberg’s interest in airplanes and in World War II had already been abundantly demonstrated in his amateur films, notably Fighter Squad. The dogfight project attracted interest from Warner Bros., but Spielberg’s desire to direct the film was, according to Gottlieb, “the rock on which the project foundered, despite his clearly evident talent.” Spielberg and Gottlieb also tried to rouse studio interest in “a comedy about life in the Catskills,” but “the deals kept falling apart because of Spielberg being locked in as director.”¶

  Undeterred, Spielberg began work on another idea for a flying movie, in collaboration with a young screenwriter named Claudia Salter, whom he also met through Medavoy. Ace Eli and Rodger of the Skies, the first Hollywood feature to bear Spielberg’s name (he received story credit), was set in rural Kansas in the 1920s and dealt with the troubled relationship between a barnstorming pilot, Eli (Cliff Robertson), and his son, Rodger (Eric Shea). As the characters appeared on screen, the father is a drunken, abusive, pathological lout who carouses from town to town, exploiting his false romantic image as a dashing flier and great ladies’ man, while his embittered twelve-year-old son tends to his dissipated needs, pays his bills, and flirts pathetically with his women. In the first scene, Eli crashes his plane, killing Rodger’s mother before his eyes; at the end, his sense of manhood shattered, the despondent Eli rejects Rodger’s declarations of love and jumps from the plane, leaving the boy an orphan.

  Although Spielberg disowned the film made from his story, Ace Eli appeared to have been his way of working out some of his confused adolescent feelings about manhood, in a plotline that pointedly reversed the psychological roles of father and son. This bizarre project combined Spielberg’s fascination with flying—as symbol of both the exhilaration and dangers of escape —with another theme close to his heart as a filmmaker, that of the irresponsible father figure. It is a theme with personal resonance (however oblique) from his difficult relationship with his own father, whose experiences as a radio operator on B-25 bombers in World War II gave Steven his lifelong interest in aviation.

  In 1969, Spielberg had taken the script to Twentieth Century–Fox president Richard D. Zanuck, then in his last year as head of the studio. This was Spielberg’s first encounter with Zanuck, who after leaving Fox wo
uld produce The Sugarland Express and Jaws for Universal with David Brown. “I liked the [Ace Eli] script and I wanted to buy it,” Zanuck recalls. “One of the conditions of buying the script was that [Spielberg] wanted to direct it. I said [to his agents at CMA], ‘That’s very, very unlikely.’ He was trying to get his feature break; it didn’t matter where. It wasn’t likely because we were looking for experienced, front-ranked directors for our project. They said, ‘OK, would you at least meet him and consider him?’

  “So he came into my office at Fox. We chatted for a few minutes. For me, it was just kind of a mandatory thing to get out of the way. Little did I know I would work with him so closely, and little did I know that he would turn out to be the Walt Disney–Cecil B. DeMille–D. W. Griffith of our time, all rolled into one. He looked even younger than he was, and he was pretty damn young! He looked about fifteen. I went through this obligatory meeting so I could make the deal to buy the script. He struck me as nice and intelligent, a bit shy, but I didn’t see any signs of greatness out of that first meeting. I was meeting a lot of young directors. There were many young directors getting work then, but he seemed to be younger than any of those directors.”

  Zanuck agreed to look at Spielberg’s Night Gallery episode, but it did not change his mind. However, on January 6, 1970, not long after Zanuck left the studio, Fox announced that Spielberg would direct Ace Eli, with Joe Wizan producing. Shooting was scheduled for that summer on midwestern locations. Cliff Robertson, a pilot in his offscreen life, met with Spielberg and Salter and contributed ideas to the script. But the plan to have Spielberg direct fell through when producers Robert Fryer and James Cresson took over the project. Aghast at the way the young British director Michael Same had just run amok at Fox on their appalling film version of Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckenridge, Fryer declared, “I don’t want any directors under thirty-five ever again!”