Spielberg returned to Universal early that year to resume directing television programs. Ace Eli went into production in the summer of 1971 with John Erman directing. As Zanuck says, it “turned out to be a terrible film.”|| What seems most grotesque about the film is its schizoid presentation of the seamy subject matter, larding over the pain with jaunty visuals mindlessly celebrating the romance of barnstorming. After Fox gave Ace Eli a belated release in the spring of 1973, Spielberg publicly charged that his story had been “turned into a really sick film. They should bury it.”
*
“AS soon as [Spielberg] was seeing action at other studios, he was called back to Universal,” Sue Cameron of The Hollywood Reporter wrote after interviewing him in April 1971. Spielberg later claimed that it was the other way around: he was so fed up with freelancing that he begged Sheinberg to let him come back. There was truth in both accounts. Sheinberg had not lost faith in his future, and Medavoy confirms that Universal “perked up” when Spielberg found nibbles elsewhere: “They demanded he come back and do episodic [i.e., series television].” But Spielberg was desperate to get back to work as a director. “I’ll do anything,” he said. He also promised to be less avant-garde with his camerawork, agreeing “to shoot six inches below the nostrils instead of from a hole in the ground.”
Medavoy was vehemently opposed to his young client’s return to episodic television. “I said to Steven, ‘Look, it’s time for you to get out of there. You can’t be under contract and do television. I don’t want to handle you if you’re going to do that.’ He said, ‘Well, I feel a loyalty to Sid. Besides that, I’m getting a check every week.’ I said, ‘You’re going to have to trust me that I’ll be able to get you a movie and get you away from here, because this place is not going to make the kind of movies you want to make. Let me go ask permission.’ And he said, ‘I can’t do it.’ I said, ‘Well, then, you’ve got to get another agent. I don’t want to represent you if you’re going to be doing that.’ He said, ‘You can’t do that to me.’ I said, ‘I can.’
“I walked him over to Dick Shepherd, who was the head of the motion picture department then. I said, ‘Dick, here’s your new client, Steven Spielberg. Steve, here’s your new agent, Dick Shepherd. I’m outta here.’ And I walked away, hoping that he would come back and say, ‘OK, let’s get outta here.’ But he didn’t. Guy McElwaine took over [as Spielberg’s agent] with Shepherd, but he gravitated toward McElwaine, and that was the end of it.
“He had a lot of loyalty to Universal, and that’s where he stayed. I think in part it was the security. Steven always felt at that moment that the world was going to collapse from under him. Most creative people are insecure, and there was an enormous amount of insecurity in him.”
By the end of his apprenticeship in television, Spielberg would come to regard his seven-year contract with Universal as “the biggest mistake of my life.” Medavoy came to that conclusion first: “I told him that, and I put my whole relationship with him on the line on that basis. It wound up being my biggest mistake, and in the final analysis, staying at Universal wound up being the thing that saved him. Because he wound up directing Jaws.”
*
AMBLIN’ cinematographer Allen Daviau remained in touch with Spielberg throughout the director’s early days in episodic television. “He’s never given enough credit for the battles he fought at Universal Television,” Daviau says, “because they were trying to mold him into a Universal television director, even though when he went in there he stated very firmly he wanted to do feature films and that he wasn’t interested in television. They told him, ‘Just a little television to warm you up.’ Well, of course, they intended to absolutely enslave him.
“There was probably no worse preparation for feature films than the episodic television of that era. Because that was really just ‘Bang it out and get it done.’ There was another director at Universal who came in at about the same time—I’ll not name him—and [in discussions with that director], they were always pointing to Steven as somebody who was doing it the bad way: ‘Oh, he’ll come to no good end. Now, you listen to us, and you’ll have a great career here.’ Of course, it was the exact opposite, because Steven knew he had to fight in that atmosphere. And I mean to the extent that he had to literally put it on the line to walk out. They’d be yelling at him, ‘You’ll never work again in this town’ type of stuff. He stood up for it, because he didn’t want to get trapped in the episodic thing.”
Spielberg’s first assignment on his return to Universal was “The Daredevil Gesture,” a youth-oriented episode of Marcus Welby, M.D., the popular new series starring veteran actor Robert Young. After that program, which aired in March 1970, Spielberg directed six shows for other series, airing between January and September of 1971. In order of shooting, they were another Night Gallery segment, the lackluster “Make Me Laugh” with Godfrey Cambridge;** two episodes of The Psychiatrist; single episodes of The Name of the Game and Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law; and the first regular-season Columbo. Despite his frustrations, Spielberg learned to play the studio game, working efficiently under the intense pressures of TV shooting schedules. While acquiring more confidence and finesse as a professional director, he had increasing success in using the medium of episodic television to express his own creative vision and to advance his career as a would-be feature filmmaker.
When Spielberg was assigned to Marcus Welby, assistant director Joseph E. Boston recalls, “The word came down to the set that he had only done a student film” (the crew evidently didn’t realize that he had directed part of Night Gallery). “There must have been a dozen first assistant directors on the lot who had ambitions to direct, and many had been working for years as ADs trying to make the transition. Here’s a young lad, fresh out of college, who was not going to be coming up through the ranks, but was going to start at the top. So nobody could understand what was coming down! I do remember he was on the phone a lot, and I got the impression he was usually talking about other projects. But he was accepted right away—a nice guy, no pretensions, fast and decisive, who got along.”
The “daredevil gesture” of the title is made by teenage hemophiliac Larry Bellows (Frank Webb), who insists on making a high school field trip in defiance of his overly protective mother (Marsha Hunt) but with the support of Dr. Welby. Larry, who also suffers from the trauma of divorce, “has spent most of his life in a padded nursery,” but his greatest wish is to “try to act normal, be normal.” Spielberg’s empathy with Larry’s feelings of being an outcast helped the director evoke a performance of seething, manic energy from Webb, a fellow graduate of Phoenix’s Arcadia High School.
On a visual level, the Welby episode is the least flamboyant of Spielberg’s episodic work. Like most TV series, Welby tended to look “very formulaic, because of the time pressure,” says Marty Hornstein, production manager on Spielberg’s episode. “But Spielberg’s stuff did look a little different. There would always be something a bit extra.” Spielberg’s fondness for compositions with an extreme foreground-background tension helps energize the character relationships, particularly the flatly written mother-son relationship. The director’s characteristically intricate choreography of actors and moving camera can be seen fully developed in a tracking shot in the high school locker room, filmed on the first day of shooting. Assistant director Boston remembers “being impressed by a lovely, flowing master shot he devised that encompassed over-shoulders and close-ups, with split-second cast movements, that enabled the camera to be in a unique position at just the right place and the right moment. After Steven turned it over to the DP [director of photography Walter Strenge] for lighting, I remember coming up to him and asking if he worked on that shot all night. He laughed and said he had just made it up!”
“Of course, they were all freaking out because it was the first day’s work and he didn’t get a shot by eleven or so,” Allen Daviau relates. “He goes in and pulls off this incredible master with zooms and dollies and tracks and r
ises and falls, and does it all in one shot. He’s got the day’s work done. Steven said, ‘OK, Walter, now let me get a shot with the 18mm [wide-angle lens] by the piano over here,’ and Walter Strenge goes, ‘Kid, on this show we don’t take the zoom off the camera.’ Steven loved to tell that story.”
*
ONCE Sheinberg started getting him regular assignments, Spielberg stopped complaining—for a while—about being under contract to the studio. “Universal has done an about-face,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “Thanks to [senior TV and film executives] Jennings Lang and Ned Tanen, they are not treating filmmakers as threats anymore, but as assets. I realize that Sid was up against a lot of the corporate stuff when he first got to Universal. Once he waded through that stuff, he proved to be a guy with a lot of good ideas and he will do a great job for Universal.”
The Sheinberg-Spielberg relationship has endured over the years as Spielberg’s longest and most important professional loyalty. Early on, they developed “a father and son relationship, even though Sid wasn’t that much older than Steve,” says Columbo writer-producer William Link. “Sid was very responsible for him,” recalls TV editorial chief Richard Belding. “Nobody said, ‘I don’t want him,’ but I think it took convincing.”
“During Steven’s early career, I was his agent,” Sheinberg said in a 1988 interview. “…He didn’t just go from Night Gallery to Jaws. His career stalled at a number of occasions, and I had to restart it. I’ve been involved in starting or stimulating the careers of a significant number of directors, but it was different with Steven, because it wasn’t just getting the first job. It was having to get a number of jobs. To the point where more than one person wondered, ‘What the hell is it with Sheinberg? Why am I being leaned on so much to use this kid?’”
Shortly after signing Spielberg to a contract, Sheinberg began the selling process by arranging a screening of Amblin’ for some of the studio executives and the entire publicity staff. “They wanted us to realize that this young man was an important asset to the studio,” recalls publicist Orin Borsten, who worked regularly on Alfred Hitchcock films. “Of course, we were deeply impressed. There was a very great belief in him. He was anointed. He was the young golden boy, the successor to the great directors.” After that, the process by which Sheinberg went about finding television jobs for Spielberg fell “somewhere between selling and ordering,” Sheinberg wryly explained. Exactly where on that scale each job offer fell depended on the individual producer, not all of whom had the same degree of autonomy.
One of those who hired Spielberg was Richard Irving, executive producer of The Name of the Game (and uncle of actress Amy Irving, whom Spielberg later married). When Dick Irving was looking for a director in the fall of 1970 for “LA 2017,” a futuristic episode dealing with ecological catastrophe, Sheinberg told him in no uncertain terms, “I’ve got just the guy to do this. Use Steven.”
The episode’s producer, Dean Hargrove, had seen Amblin’ at one of Sheinberg’s screenings. “I thought it was very imaginative, and very impressive relative to his age and resources,” says Hargrove, “but I didn’t infer from that film the scope of this guy’s talent.” After Irving passed the word from Sheinberg, Hargrove watched a rough cut of “Par for the Course,” Spielberg’s episode of The Psychiatrist with Clu Gulager as a professional golfer coming to terms with dying of cancer, and Joan Darling as his anguished wife. The show had not yet aired, but it was enough to convince Hargrove of Spielberg’s talents: “It had such a distinctive look to it, and it wasn’t a particularly exotic show, it was a medical show. There was something about his imprimatur that was discernible even then, the visualization that he brought to it, the staging. He had a very interesting way of moving the camera and moving the actors. He shot some of the most interesting masters I’d seen.†† I thought he had an incredible filmic sense that was distinctive from all other directors’.”
*
SHEINBERG took a more soft-sell approach in offering Spielberg’s services to Richard Levinson and William Link, the creator-producers of Columbo. By the time the series began filming in the summer of 1971, Levinson and Link already had made a pair of TV movies featuring Peter Falk’s rumpled but wily detective. The studio was accustomed to treating the literate and successful producers with uncommon deference and respect, and when it came to hiring Spielberg, “There were never any orders from the Black Tower, ‘You must use the kid,’” Link recalls. “You had to be impressed with his work, and it had to be your decision. It was the first year of Columbo, and we were looking not only for the tried and true, dependable television directors who could do mysteries, but we were also looking for some young blood, some new blood that could add some excitement to the show.”
However, TV producers naturally were reluctant to take a chance on an inexperienced director, because, as Link explains, “In television you shoot six or seven pages a day—it’s Mack Sennett time. It’s not like features, where you have $60 million, and Brian De Palma shoots five-eighths of a page a day. Television is the salt mines of the entertainment field. There is never enough money, never enough time. It wasn’t an easy task for Steve to get assignments in television, because he didn’t have the credits.”
Levinson and Link had seen Amblin’ at a private screening in the company of Sheinberg and Lew Wasserman. Link considered it “a terrific audition film. Amblin’ had film techniques that were prevalent in those days, like rack focusing, which came to be a real cliché. But he was more than a remarkable talent. I mean, you didn’t see things that burnished from a kid.” But what finally “sold Dick and me that the kid really had something,” Link says, was the same sample of Spielberg’s work that had earlier convinced Hargrove: a rough cut of “Par for the Course.”‡‡ “Then we had to sell him to Falk,” Levinson recalled. “People were saying then that Steve was a technical director, that he could handle cameras but not actors. We knew that wasn’t true, but we had to convince Peter.” “Peter preferred to go with the tried and true, and Spielberg was a wild card,” adds Link. “It wasn’t just verbal encomiums that would sell Mr. Falk. Peter is very bright, and it was hard to pull the wool over his one eye. We had to show him film. We showed him the Clu Gulager—Joan Darling Psychiatrist, and he was very impressed.”
Even after that, Spielberg had to pass another formidable hurdle. The cinematographer for his Columbo episode, “Murder by the Book,” was Russell L. Metty, who had won an Oscar for Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus and had worked on four films with Orson Welles. After meeting Spielberg, Metty told the producers, “He’s a kid! Does he get a milk and cookie break? Is the diaper truck going to interfere with my generator?” “Metty was a crusty old guy, with barnacles all over him—he would always refer to Orson Welles as ‘The Kid,’” Link recalls. “Russ was a guy in his sixties, and here’s this twenty-one-year-old kid [Spielberg was actually twenty-four at the time]—it’s not a generation gap, it’s a generation chasm.”
The cameraman initially complained about Spielberg’s unorthodox techniques, telling the producers, “Your hot-shot director has me in this room down on Sunset Boulevard which is four walls of glass. Where the hell do you expect me to put my lights?” “We didn’t know what he was talking about,” Levinson admitted. “We didn’t know anything about lights. And to our eternal credit, we said, ‘He’s the director. Do what he says.’”
But during the shooting, Link says, “Steve used to call us from the set and say, ‘Come on down.’ We said, ‘Steve, we’ve got six more shows to write and produce. You’re doing a great job. The dailies are wonderful.’ He’d say, ‘Come on down.’ We finally figured out he had nobody to talk to. He was the youngest person on the set. While waiting for setups, he was lonely. I don’t think there was anybody he could bond with on those sets. We would go down on the set or go to our own bungalow and schmooze with him.”
*
THAT same summer, Spielberg was hired to direct an episode of the new Owen Marshall lawyer series. “We were handed him
,” admits Jerry McNeely, its cocreator and executive story consultant. “The Black Tower wanted him working. My first inkling that this was somebody out of the ordinary was the producer, Jon Epstein, telling me how pleased he was we were getting Spielberg. He was just a kid, but he had done Night Gallery, Marcus Welby, and The Psychiatrist with Joan Darling. My memory is literally that he did not have a beard. I don’t mean he wasn’t wearing a beard—I mean he looked too young to have grown a beard yet. He looked like he was maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. That was a startling thing, right off the bat. I was goggle-eyed: ‘Here’s a director! And it’s The Kid!’ By the time we started, I realized that this was not a fuzzy-cheeked kid. He knew what he was doing.
“What’s really remarkable is that the genius was visible that soon. For people like Sheinberg to take a chance on him, it’s one thing to give him a TV show to direct, but it’s another to let him be the star warming up in the bullpen. There was definitely that feeling at the time. Jon Epstein said, ‘We got this kid genius.’ I don’t think Jon meant it literally—I don’t think he knew the size of it. But those were the terms they were throwing around.”
• • •
“TELEVISION is basically a producer’s medium,” notes Name of the Game producer Dean Hargrove. “The producer is the one who makes the final decisions on casting and editing. In films the director is everything, but in television, directors tend to be more of an employee.” But even though Spielberg made no major changes in novelist Philip Wylie’s script for “LA 2017,” the young director “clearly made [the show] reflect his sensibilities,” Hargrove says. “He brought his own imagination not only to the visuals in the piece, but in the way he played it. It had a consistent acting style—a little more than real but not unreal. Steven was shrewd in casting—we did it together—and he got along with the actors very well.”
Steven Spielberg Page 27