“She turned sideways to the phone, the camera was in very close. I thought, Here it comes, she’s going to come totally unglued. You hear the phone pick up, and she turns her back to the camera. No director in his right mind is going to leave her face! But the camera starts to pull back and you hear her say one word: ‘Mama.’ Steven is able to present intimacy by doing the opposite thing—the opposite of what anybody else would have done. The whole thing was like that. He broke all the rules and did better by breaking them.”
When she was offered the role in “Par for the Course,” Darling “was living on Cape Cod and trying to decide whether to retire from the business. I got a call from my agent, ‘Can you be on the set at Universal at ten in the morning?’ Some girl fell out, and the producers remembered me from Marcus Welby. I told them, ‘I can’t get there till noon.’ They picked me up at the airport and took me straight to wardrobe. I hadn’t met Steven Spielberg yet. When I come on the set for the first time, I always case the director to see how he works. I was looking around for the director, and I see this kid in a cowboy hat. I went over and eavesdropped. He said a couple of things to Clu and I thought, Oh, my God, this is a real director!
“Later that day we still hadn’t met, and I was sitting under a tree. Steven came up to me and said, ‘You know, when Jack Kennedy was shot, Jackie Kennedy—’ I said, ‘Don’t say a word. I know exactly what you mean.’ We had an immediate, nonverbal communication. It was the beginning of trust between us. I knew that he wanted my best stuff and that he would be receptive. When he said, ‘like Jackie Kennedy,’ I knew what he meant. It was her way of placing her manners, her way to behave out in front of abject terror. I understood that and knew how to do that. He trusted me that I understood it. That is the absolute good direction—you drop an analogy that feels yummy to the actor, but doesn’t dictate.
“I realized right away that his understanding of psychology is as complex as mine. We both have an incredible enthusiasm, an unsullied childlike enthusiasm for the world and for being in it. We both have a curiosity, a sophisticated interest in human behavior. He has an enormous soul. He sees so much. I’m not talking visually—he sees the details, he sees the dynamic of a person. I have to reach to catch up with him. ‘Par for the Course’ is an astounding piece of work. This piece was all adult content. I was so impressed with his adult understanding of the world. I don’t think since this piece did he really show the world what he was capable of in this area until he made Schindler’s List.”
Darling later became a film and television director herself, and directed two episodes of Spielberg’s TV series Amazing Stories, including his sister Anne’s haunting tale of childhood, “What If …?” “When I first started directing,” Darling remembers, “I called him up and asked him, ‘What should I do?’ He said, ‘Get a real good pair of shoes.’ I said, ‘OK.’ The second time I got a feature, I called him, and he was on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He said, ‘Don’t shoot a lot of people going in and out of doors.’ I literally asked him, ‘Steven, when the archivists come and ask me what kind of advice you gave me, do you want me to tell them you said—’ He said, ‘Well, it really doesn’t work.’ I told him, ‘I don’t know anything about the camera. How should I decide where to put the camera?’ He said, ‘Notice where you’re standing when you watch the rehearsal and put the camera there.’ That’s so profound a statement, because it focused me on, ‘What kind of story am I telling?’”
Daily Variety reviewer Tony Scott praised “Par for the Course” as “magnificently” directed. “Gulager’s powerful interpretation of the dying golfer, railing against fate, is an unsettling reminder of the frailty of life. Miss Darling deserves special attention as the wife who lives with life-in-death, and in the scene where she calls her mother long-distance, she creates a poignant portrait of what can happen when too much accumulates…. The Gulager-Darling relationship is beautifully rendered.”
“Young Steve Spielberg from his direction of that small film was firmly established as one of the most exciting talents in town,” Cecil Smith of the Los Angeles Times wrote in 1973. Smith added that he had been Darling’s “profound admirer” ever since seeing “that gut-wrenching performance.”
Chuck Silvers was so moved by Spielberg’s direction of “Par for the Course” that he made a point of asking his protégé, “Steven, how the hell do you know what pain is? In your young life, how do you know about pain?”
Spielberg told him, “Every week I used to go visit my grandfather in the nursing home [when Fievel Posner was living near the Spielbergs in Arizona]. I just watched him. I’d just play, and I’d watch him and I’d watch my mom and I’d watch people in the hospital.”
“What he obviously observed was not what was going on on the surface, but what was important,” Silvers realized. “The little kid was standing back and observing. I think he’s been watching people for as long as he’s been able to see. He somehow is able to see what’s behind the surface.”
*
SINCE 1968, Spielberg had been living with Ralph Burris in an old two-bedroom writers’ bungalow at 3649½ Regal Place across from Universal, a small but convenient San Fernando Valley dwelling whose only distinction was that Bobby Darin had written his hit song “Splish Splash” while living there.
“We didn’t hang out that much together,” Burris remembers. “He had a couple of different girlfriends; one was an agent. We tried to do things together, but the truth is we led separate lives.”
Their parting as roommates was precipitated by two upheavals in their lives. One was natural and the other was economic.
“Steve rescued me from the earthquake of ’71,” Burris recalls. “It happened at six A.M. [on February 9, with the worst damage located in the San Fernando Valley]. I had been out partying the night before and I was pretty wasted. When the earthquake hit, I woke up and envisioned a tidal wave coming over the mountains. So I threw a cover over my head and started chanting—I was into that shit in those days. My room was in the back of this little house, and Steve’s was in the middle. Steve came running in and said, ‘It’s an earthquake! Get out!’ We went running through the living room—stereos were falling down, but the place didn’t fall down. We were on a hill, out by the swimming pool, and we could look out on the mountains. We could see the earthquake coming—the hills were rolling, and we could see transformers exploding. The whole valley turned to liquid. We had a lot of damage, but we didn’t own that much. I freaked out and went to Hawaii. He signed [a new contract] with Universal and bought a house.”
Spielberg’s deal, signed in December 1970, was described by the director as “a more liberal amendment” to the exclusive seven-year contract he had signed two years earlier. Daily Variety reported Spielberg now had “a five-year exclusive pact as a producer and a six-year nonexclusive contract as a director for feature films, vidpix and [episodic] TV.” The new deal gave him just enough freedom to keep him from wanting to leave Universal for greener pastures and never return, but it still gave Universal first call on his services. It also allowed Spielberg to put down modest roots in Hollywood, enabling him to make a downpayment on a small house in casual but fashionable Laurel Canyon, which he bought for $50,000. Shared with a cocker spaniel named Elmer, the house was decorated largely with movie posters, in a style Spielberg described as “bachelor funky.”
After producing the 1971 feature The Second Coming of Suzanne, Burris tried unsuccessfully to produce another film. He then embarked on a busy career as a production manager, but he has not worked with Spielberg since they made Amblin’ together. “We went our separate ways,” Burris says. “I see him occasionally. I have a signed poster of E.T. at home: ‘To the longest friendship I’ve ever had.’”
*
SPIELBERG’S social life after he moved to Laurel Canyon revolved around moviegoing or small gatherings at home to watch movies and TV shows with his friends. He tended to avoid large Hollywood parties, but when he went to them, he was all
business. Joan Darling marvels at “how incredibly smart Steven was about the things that needed to be done socially to be successful in the business.” But he also found pleasure in the social advantages of being a successful Hollywood director. “There was no way any woman was going to think of him as a nerd,” Darling says. “It was fun for him to date and have pretty women go out with him. I always thought he was a really attractive guy. His sense of humor, his playfulness—he’s my kind of man.” Even in his early twenties, she felt, Spielberg had an unsatisfied urge to settle down with the right woman and have a family: “Family was really important to him.”
Darling and her husband, Bill Svanoe, a singer and screenwriter, became part of Spielberg’s circle. “We would go out to a movie and get a bite to eat and talk about the movie afterward,” she recalls. “We would lie around on the floor and laugh. We would write three-page movies together. I have one we wrote about a lobster. We would just laugh until we would make ourselves silly. Steven and Bill and I went out to the Riverside Raceway. I had a Super-8 camera. I handed it to Steven and he shot a whole film. He and Bill were interested in gadgets—not just movie gadgets, but all kinds of gadgets. One time Steven called us and said, ‘You’ve gotta come over to this bowling alley at the corner of La Cienega and Santa Monica.’ It had the first video games, fighter-pilot story-type games, and he was just overwhelmed with fascination. He’s an extraordinarily curious person.
“We were all ambitious and wanting work and none of us was getting the kind of work we wanted to do. Steven knew he wanted to do features. We would talk about what we wished to do [in features], if Steven could get a directing job. I remember saying to my husband, when Steven was very discouraged trying to sell a script and break in, that he always had a positive, forward motion, whatever he may have been suffering inside.”
Not everybody sympathized with Spielberg’s frustration. Jerry McNeely, the story consultant on Owen Marshall, remembers an incident shortly after Spielberg directed his show for that series. McNeely and the producer, Jon Epstein, were walking on the Universal lot when “Steve drove up in a nice little green Mercedes convertible and stopped. He had a gripe about something, I can’t remember what it was. Steve drove off and Jon said, ‘Yeah, kid, how many kids your age have a Mercedes convertible? Be happy you’re working.’”
“TV for me wasn’t an art form. It was a job,” Spielberg recalled in 1995. “I actually, because of television, didn’t know for a while there whether or not I wanted to continue making film, because I felt that it was like working in a sweatshop and I wasn’t getting any of that stimulation, that gratification that I even got making 8mm war movies when I was twelve years old. I didn’t have that passion, because television sort of smothered the passion. It’s only when I got into feature films—actually when I got into TV movies and made Duel—that I kind of rediscovered the fun about making films.”
* The studio cast McMyler immediately in a Dragnet episode. Amblin’ also led to her casting in Warner Bros.’ 1970 John Wayne movie Chisum. She appeared in several other films but never reached stardom.
† The other two parts were directed by TV journeymen Boris Sagal and Barry Shear.
‡ Spielberg echoed the name of E. T. Elliott in the names of both the title character of E.T. and Elliott, the boy who protects him.
§ Unlike the young hero of Spielberg’s 1987 film Empire of the Sun, which is set in Shanghai during World War II, Medavoy was not separated from his parents during the war. When Spielberg made the film, Medavoy assisted his research by supplying him with family photographs.
¶ Spielberg lobbied unsuccessfully in 1969 to direct The Christian Licorice Store, an offbeat tale of a young tennis player searching for the meaning of life. The job went instead to James Frawley, who had worked on The Monkees TV series. With Beau Bridges in the lead, the film received only a brief release in 1971.
|| As a result of studio recutting, Salter and Erman had their credits replaced with pseudonyms (Chips Rosen and Bill Sampson), and Fryer and Cresson also had their names removed (the producing credit went to the nonexistent Boris Wilson).
** Partially reshot by director Jeannot Szwarc.
†† A master is a full scene, or part of a scene, filmed in a single uninterrupted shot.
‡‡ Levinson and link created The Psychiatrist series, but were not involved in producing it.
§§ The 1971 Roger Vadim black comedy starred Rock Hudson as a high school football coach who sleeps with female students and turns out to be a murderer; it also featured one of Spielberg’s Owen Marshall cast members, John David Carson.
¶¶ Using “The Private World of Martin Dalton” as flashback fodder for another Psychiatrist episode directed by Jeff Corey, Universal cobbled them together into a feature titled Whispering Death, which played in Europe and had its American premiere on CBS-TV in 1980.
NINE
“THE STEVEN SPIELBERG BUSINESS”
THE DIRECTOR OF THAT MOVIE IS THE GREATEST YOUNG TALENT TO COME ALONG IN YEARS.
– BILLY WILDER IN 1974, AFTER A PREVIEW OF THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS
ON November 22, 1963, the fantasy and science-fiction writer Richard Matheson was playing golf in Simi Valley, California, when he heard the news that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Matheson and his golfing partner, writer Jerry Sohl, stopped playing and headed back toward Los Angeles. Matheson recalls that as Sohl drove through a narrow canyon, a truck began tailgating them at a dangerously high rate of speed: “I’m sure the emotion with which I reacted to that experience was so much more extreme because we were going through the trauma of the Kennedy assassination. Partially we were terrified, and partially infuriated, turning our rage about the Kennedy assassination into rage at the truck driver. We were screaming out the window, but the truck driver’s window was closed and he couldn’t hear it. My friend had to pull up, skidding onto one of these dirt places [turnouts] in the road. In the writer’s mind, once you survive death, you start thinking of a story. The story idea occurred to me and I jotted it down on the back of an envelope. I tried to sell it to The Fugitive and several other TV series. They thought, ‘There’s not enough there.’ So I thought, ‘Guess I’ve got to write it as a story.’”
Matheson’s gripping short story about a battle to the death between a truck and a car, “Duel,” was not written until seven years later. The author, whose scriptwriting credits also include several classic Twilight Zone episodes, adapted “Duel” for Spielberg’s TV movie version, which aired on November 13, 1971, as ABC’s Saturday night Movie of the Weekend. The critical praise and the reaction from those in the industry who saw Duel vaulted the director, a month before his twenty-fifth birthday, into the leading ranks of Hollywood filmmakers.
Stephen King has given a vivid appreciation of the electrifying visual and aural qualities Spielberg brought to Matheson’s story: “In this film, a psychotic trucker in a big ten-wheeler pursues Dennis Weaver over what seems to be at least a million miles of California highways. We never actually see the trucker (although we do see a beefy arm cocked out of the cab window once, and at another point we see a pair of pointy-toed cowboy boots on the far side of the truck), and ultimately it is the truck itself, with its huge wheels, its dirty windshield like an idiot’s stare, and its somehow hungry bumpers, which becomes the monster—and when Weaver is finally able to lead it to an embankment and lure it over the edge, the noise of its ‘death’ becomes a series of chilling Jurassic roars … the sound, we think, a Tyran nosaurus rex would make going slowly down into a tar pit. And Weaver’s response is that of any self-respecting caveman: he screams, shrieks, cuts capers, literally dances for joy. Duel is a gripping, almost painfully suspenseful rocket ride of a movie.”
*
DUEL was a perfect match of story and director. Spielberg has always tended to place his protagonist—“Mr. Everyday Regular Fella”—in an extraordinary situation testing his abilities to survive and overcome the tedium and terror of mundane reality. Spielbe
rg remembered his reaction when his secretary, Nona Tyson, showed him Matheson’s story in the April 1971 issue of Playboy: “I was just knocked out by it. And I wanted to make it into a feature film.”
By the time Spielberg read “Duel,” Universal already had bought the film rights for George Eckstein, a producer on the Robert Stack segments of The Name of the Game TV series. Matheson’s magazine story was brought to Eckstein by Steven Bochco, the young writer and future TV producer credited with writing Spielberg’s Columbo episode. “I hired Dick Matheson to do a script,” adds Eckstein. “He and I developed the script together.” Matheson at first resisted Universal’s offer, “Because I didn’t see how you could get a whole movie out of it—it was just one guy in a car. At one point I suggested having his wife aboard so he would have somebody to talk to. Thank God they paid me no attention.”
“We were all facing deadlines,” Eckstein relates. “I was looking for a director. The script was floating around. Steven Spielberg got ahold of the script and came in my office and said he wanted to do it. I knew Sid [Sheinberg] was very high on him, and I had seen Amblin’; Sid had shown it to all the producers on the lot. It was charming, and it was wonderful that a twenty-one-year-old kid had directed this, but it was just a nice little picture. There were no hints of genius.
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