Steven Spielberg

  Spielberg’s most expressionistic work for episodic TV, with its vision of a future so polluted that Angelenos have to live underground, “LA 2017” allowed the director wide latitude for nightmarish visuals. Anticipating Ridley Scott’s apocalyptic images of 21st-century Los Angeles in Blade Runner, Spielberg used red and orange filters and fire-blackened Calabasas landscapes to represent the bleak, deserted surface of southern California. His sinuous tracking shots through the city’s subterranean living quarters (filmed at the Hyperion sewage treatment plant), populated by a frenetically choreographed cast, convey the feverish, claustrophobic sense of hell on Earth. Although the storyline is fairly standard sci-fi melodrama about rebels trying to overthrow a fascistic ruling class, led by the suave Barry Sullivan (the whole cautionary tale turns out to be a hallucination by series regular Gene Barry), Spielberg makes his most telling points about environmental pollution without resorting unduly to verbal rhetoric. His ability to conjure up such a compelling futuristic vision is especially remarkable given his twelve-day shooting schedule and $375,000 budget for what amounted to his first feature-length film in Hollywood. One of four series rotating under Universal’s “Four-in-One” umbrella on NBC, The Name of the Game ran in a ninety-minute time slot, which, after commercials, left seventy-four minutes of film to tell the story.

  “Steven had a very short schedule for such an ambitious show,” Hargrove says. “He was loyal to the schedule, and he was very prepared. He would show me his shot list in the morning before he would shoot. He didn’t operate off a literal storyboard, but I think he had it in his mind. There was no guesswork. Some directors would start with watching the rehearsal and then see how to shoot it. Steven worked the other way around. He would tend to start with his particular vision of how a scene was physically, like Hitchcock would do. He stayed with the picture through the dubbing process, which was something directors didn’t normally do.”

  “Some directors put in token appearances [in the editing room], and some were into their work enough to want to be sure it was done as well as it could be,” says “LA 2017” film editor Frank Morriss. “Steve was one of those. He had his hand in as much as he could get it in. He was very inventive and amazingly knowledgeable about editing. He was just a little punk, but [his personality] was like a fountain. I learned a ton from Steve. My relationship with Steve never seemed like work to me. It was all so much fun.”

  When “LA 2017” aired on January 15, 1971, NBC gave it unusually vigorous promotion because of its offbeat qualities and the timeliness of its subject matter. Daily Variety reviewer Jack Hellman found the program “a dramatic thunderbolt on ecology…. Unlike other shows dealing with ecology in documentary form, this bizarre concoction had all the feel of high drama with all the stops out…. Steven Spielberg directed with firm strokes.”

  “That show opened a lot of doors for me,” Spielberg said.

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  IF “LA 2017” prefigured the flamboyantly visual filmmaking style for which Spielberg would soon become famous, his Owen Marshall episode, “Eulogy for a Wide Receiver,” showcased another side of his talents, the more low-key humanism that would become predominant in such films as The Color Purple and Schindler’s List. Though it could have been just another clichéd TV message-melodrama, “Eulogy” proved affecting in its three-dimensional portrait of high school football coach Dave Butler (Stephen Young), whose pressure tactics prove fatal to his star player, Steve Baggett (Anson Williams), a boy with a concealed rheumatic heart condition.

  When he was assigned to Owen Marshall, Spielberg was offered a script about a young opera singer. “Steve just hated it,” recalls story consultant Jerry McNeely. “Today I see why, but at the time we all thought he was a spoiled brat. It was a very talky, quiet, involved, plotty kind of thing, and obviously Steve was looking for a way to do his things. He asked, ‘Do you have anything else?’ So we looked around and found ‘Eulogy for a Wide Receiver’ [written by Richard Bluel]. Steve said, ‘God, I would rather do this, but it needs work.’ So I spent a weekend and put it through a heavy rewrite.”

  Spielberg brought to the project not only his practical experience filming grade school and high school football games, but also a sharply critical perspective on school athletics. The wimp who was bullied by the jocks he wrote about for his school paper responded viscerally to the script’s attack on the paramilitary nature of high school football and to the torment of the player who literally kills himself for his Vince Lombardi–like coach.

  “The day before we were supposed to start,” McNeely remembers, “Steve came in and said, ‘Oh, God, I’m depressed. I went to see Pretty Maids All in a Row.’§§ Steve said Pretty Maids did a lot of the things filmically that he was planning to do. He thought he was in fresh territory with the high school football setting. It was a minor glitch. There was never any sense of his having gotten lost. On the football field, Steve had a long boom and dolly shot—it starts in the stands and comes down, trucks along with the actors, and fellows them onto the field. There’s nothing unusual about that today with the Steadicam, but in those days that kind of shot could have taken a day or two. Steve had stuff like that in our one-hour television movie. Moves that you’d take a day or two to get, he’d get in an hour and a half!”

  The second half of the show took place on the courtroom set. “On a lawyer show, you’re stuck in that set,” McNeely notes. “Every week you’re shooting fifteen pages on that courtroom set. Everybody’s going to be sitting down except one person. They’re not fun to shoot. We had seen good, solid TV directors on Owen Marshall, but right off the bat with Steve, we sat down and watched and said, ‘Man, this is different!’ They were running a projector in the courtroom [showing football footage], and he had shot through the spokes of the projector. He switched focus from the projector to a kid sitting on the other side. I hadn’t seen that shot.”

  Spielberg also showed precocity in working with the actors. The star of the series, Arthur Hill, was an actor whose distinguished stage career had included a Tony Award for the creation of the role of George in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Shortly after he began working with Spielberg, Hill told McNeely, “This kid is really something.”

  “I was astonished, first of all, at the ability of someone so young to be able to handle people,” Hill remembers. “I was even more astonished at his eye for the camera. He seemed to be able to see more than other people saw. He didn’t seem to waste any time. He didn’t seem to get caught up in what directors often do when shooting courtroom dramas—eating up camera time, eating up miles and miles of film. He seemed to cut on the floor. We knew that this boy knew about the camera. But to find that he really knew what to do with actors! He had a nice manner, which is very helpful for a director. That gets you a long way. When a director has the attitude, ‘I don’t know everything about this, but would you like to try something?,’ you’re willing to knock yourself out for the director.”

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  SPIELBERG once recalled that he “had some bad experiences with TV stars,” although he did not specify which actors he meant. On the first day of shooting his Columbo episode, “Murder by the Book,” Spielberg and series star Peter Falk found themselves faced with the unpleasant task of shooting a scene with a supporting cast member who was “not sober and was stumbling around,” Link reports. “Steve was crushed by this. The show was going to be important to him, and he had set up an elaborate master. He had this whole thing worked out.

  “That was the thing that impressed Dick and me about Spielberg: Here’s this kid who could stage a master. Most directors can’t do it; they don’t have a clue. With most directors, it’s all talking heads. Spielberg could stage it like theater. His setups were always beautiful. His shots were never boring. He would avoid dead-on shots. He would come at you with interesting angles.”

  When the actor showed up incapacitated, Spielberg quickly had to rethink his approach to the scene. “On a feature you can shoot around” such a
problem, Link notes, “but here you can’t. You go. Unfortunately, what he had to do was break down his master; he had to do coverage. He was very disappointed, but we were impressed because he was resilient.”

  But by that stage in his career, Spielberg has recalled, “I was already saying, ‘Life’s too short to worry about the size of someone’s trailer. Or the fact that they don’t like the hairdresser because the hairdresser has coffee breath.’ Little petty things used to make me crazy. Actors not wanting to hit a mark, wanting to stage themselves, wanting to give themselves direction, not wanting to hear any of my ideas. I only had a few negative experiences in TV, but it kind of soured me along those lines.” After he started directing theatrical features, Spielberg tended to avoid working with major stars. He usually casts character actors rather than superstars in lead roles, which not only has made his life easier on the set but also befits his overriding thematic interest in “Mr. Everyday Regular Fella.”

  The casting of Peter Falk as Columbo, the Everyman detective, was what Link calls “one of those marriages made in television heaven.” But the perfectionistic Falk’s battles for creative control of Columbo were legendary. Spielberg considers the seventy-six-minute “Murder by the Book” one of his two best TV episodes, along with the “Par for the Course” episode of The Psychiatrist. Of the seven initial Columbo episodes filmed in the summer of 1971, “Murder by the Book” was the second to go before the cameras, but it was chosen to inaugurate the regular run of the series on September 15, and it remained the creators’ favorite episode of that long-running series. Nevertheless, the director’s diplomatic comments on working with Falk suggest he did not feel entirely in charge of the situation.

  “The Columbo was fun,” Spielberg said in 1977, “because Columbo was an experience in helping, but mostly watching, Peter Falk find this terrific character…. Peter was still finding things. I was able to discover ‘Columboisms’ along with Peter that he’s kept in his repertoire.” However, Link disputes the notion that Spielberg added anything to the character of Columbo, which was “fully formed when Spielberg came in. We had done two pilots with [Falk as] Columbo. We had all the kinks out when we did the series.”

  “Let’s face it, we had some good fortune at the beginning,” Falk recalled. “Our debut episode, in 1971, was directed by this young kid named Steven Spielberg. I told the producers, Link and Levinson, ‘This guy is too good for Columbo.’ Let me tell you the thing I most appreciated about Steven. I’m rehearsing a scene where I’m walking up a street talking to a guy, and it suddenly dawns on me: there’s no camera around that I can see. Steven was shooting me with a long lens from across the street. That wasn’t common, twenty years ago. The comfort level it gave me as an actor, besides its great look, artistically—well, it told you this wasn’t any ordinary director.”

  Spielberg’s elegant but relatively unobtrusive direction of “Murder by the Book” reflected his growing maturation as a professional filmmaker. The droll teleplay about an untalented mystery writer (the magnificently unctuous Jack Cassidy) with a homicidal envy of his partner (Martin Milner) was credited to the series’s story editor Steven Bochco, later the successful producer of such series as NYPD Blue and L. A. Law. Unlike in “Eyes” or “LA 2017,” Spielberg did not need to resort to showy visual flourishes to energize a clichéd storyline. “When I was first starting out, I used a lot of fancy shots,” he recalled. “Some of the compositions were very nice, but I’d usually be shooting through somebody’s armpit or angling past someone’s nose. I got a lot of that out of my system and became less preoccupied with mechanics and began to search more for the literary quality in the scripts I was reading.”

  From the opening shot of “Murder by the Book,” which begins on an extreme overhead view of the murderer’s Mercedes driving along Sunset Boulevard and glides back from an office window to show his unsuspecting partner working at the typewriter, Spielberg gracefully uses the camera to create suspense and involve the viewer’s emotions. His unconventional use of sound helps conjure up an ominous, unsettling mood: throughout the opening sequence, the car is eerily silent, and we hear only the sound of the clattering typewriter. Spielberg suggested the use of this motif to composer Billy Goldenberg, who synthesized typewriter sounds as part of the musical score.

  When it came to mixing the sound for another murder scene, Spielberg and Link came up with a chilling editing device, perhaps inspired by a similar touch in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 Blackmail. “Usually the producer or associate producer mixes the picture,” Link says. “Usually your director goes on to something else. Not Spielberg. Spielberg was right there. The cliché [in showing a woman being attacked] was a big scream. Spielberg and I both decided we were going to cut out the scream and go to black [using only music over the image]. My partner hated it. To the day Dick died, he hated it. It was an abstract thing we were doing.” That was the only creative disagreement Spielberg encountered with Levinson or Link. “This is the only picture I produced,” Link says, “where Dick and I saw the director’s cut and said, ‘Freeze it.’ Steve was annoyed. He said, ‘There is twenty feet I want to get rid of.’ We said, ‘Steve, be our guest, shake out your twenty feet.’”

  Reviewing “Murder by the Book,” Tony Scott of Daily Variety had some reservations about the script but commented that the program “moves expertly along at [the] hands of director Steven Spielberg.” Spielberg had gone from “tyro” to “expert” in the Hollywood trade press in only two and a half years!

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  “WE are very proud of this one,” Spielberg and his collaborators on “Par for the Course” proclaimed in a trade advertisement when NBC aired the program Spielberg considers “my best work in television.”

  Filmed in the fall of 1970 and aired the following March 15, that episode of The Psychiatrist, with Clu Gulager as the dying golf pro, was ‘‘one of the most brilliantly directed shows I’ve ever seen,” Sid Sheinberg told an interviewer shortly after shooting was completed. Sheinberg’s opinion was widely shared at the studio. After the show received its first internal screening, recalls TV editorial supervisor Richard Belding, “There wasn’t a word. Everybody had tears in their eyes. It was just a hell of a show. That was the starting of Steve.”

  The feeling of something extraordinary in the air had begun to get around the lot when the show was still shooting. “Steven shot so much film on that they could have made a feature,” Chuck Silvers remembers. “One day, I happened to pass Bill Wade, the head of the camera department, on the street. He told me, ‘You’ve got to go down to the soundstage. It’s something you’ll never see again. Your friend Spielberg is directing.’ I said, ‘I’ve seen people directing before.’ He said, ‘You’ve never seen a crew stand there and cry.’ They were shooting Clu Gulager’s death scene. I didn’t go down there, but a couple of other guys did, and they said it was dead quiet at the end of the scene. Spielberg said, ‘Cut,’ and it still remained dead quiet between shots.”

  Spielberg attributed the intensely personal qualities of “Par for the Course” and his other Psychiatrist episode, “The Private World of Martin Dalton,” largely to the fact that producer Jerrold Freedman allowed him to have “a lot of input into the writing of the shows. So it was a real challenge.” In “Private World,” scriptwriter Bo May created a protagonist with strong resonances of Spielberg himself: a child (Stephen Hudis) who escapes from his troubled family life into a world of fantasy and comic books. “Several elements of this sensitive show point to Spielberg’s excellent rapport with children,” Marc Wielage wrote in a 1982 article on Spielberg’s TV work. “… Both episodes of The Psychiatrist are marked by fascinating Daliesque dream sequences, with excellent cinematography by Lloyd Ahern. These TV shows are closer to the heart of Spielberg’s current work than any of his other programs, with unusually sensitive, three-dimensional characters caught up in crises that challenge their everyday lives.”¶¶

  “Par for the Course” (based on a story by Thomas Y. Drake, with
a script by Drake, Freedman, May, and Herb Bermann) seemed unexpected terrain for such a young director, with its intimate portrait of a man coming to terms with his impending death. But the story, and the unusual creative freedom he was given by the producer, enabled Spielberg to draw on previously unexplored emotional depths from his own childhood experience. The filming of that program, Spielberg said, was “the first time since my 8mm days when I could have an idea at nine o’clock in the morning and incorporate that idea into the show at two o’clock in the afternoon.”

  He gave as an example a scene in which two of Gulager’s golf partners visit him in the hospital: “As it was written, they’re so uncomfortable: Gulager has faced his death many times, but these two men can’t face it along with him. They can’t share his acceptance, and eventually they have to leave. I thought it would be very moving—it was just an idea I had in the morning—if these two golf partners went out to the eighteenth hole with a shovel and dug out the entire eighteenth hole, put it in a shoebox, stuck in the flag, brought it to the hospital room, and laid this thing on him. So in the scene he gets the gift, opens it up, and here’s the dirt and the grass and the flag. It was wonderful. Clu began to cry—as a person and as an actor. His immediate response when the camera was rolling was to burst into tears. He tore the grass out of the hole and he squeezed the dirt all over himself and he thanked them for bringing him this gift, the greatest gift he had ever received. It was just a very moving moment that came out of being loose with an idea. Everything didn’t have to be locked down because of so many hours in the day and so much film in the camera and so much money in the budget.”

  The best-remembered scene in “Par for the Course” involves Joan Darling, who plays Gulager’s wife. Chuck Silvers gives a vivid recollection of the unusual way Spielberg shot the scene: When she learns from a doctor that her husband has only a few days to live, “she goes into his room knowing this and she puts on a bright face. She comes out in the hallway, and all of a sudden you know from the look on her face and from her body language that she’s just barely hanging on. She sees a pay phone at the end of the hallway. She gets on the phone and she’s trying to put through a long-distance call to her mother. She has a terrible time handling the conversation. My God, it was truly great acting.