Steven Spielberg

  “What most impressed me about Spielberg was that his idea of how to do Duel was very much in sync with my idea of how to do it, which was to shoot primarily from the point of view of the driver, to keep the camera inside the car and not drop back, or to drop back as seldom as possible. I also was impressed with Steven’s eagerness to do the project. You work with a lot of directors, it’s a job, but he was excited. His enthusiasm was infectious for everybody who worked with him. And he did his homework. He was a young director you knew could shoot a show in the time he was given.”

  Some consideration was given to making Duel as a theatrical film, but that proved a hard sell both to the studio and to creative talent. Universal told Spielberg he could make it as a feature if Gregory Peck would agree to play the lead, but the veteran actor refused. Matheson considers that fortunate, because making Duel at theatrical length “wouldn’t have worked. Even extending this, as they did later, to a theatrical didn’t work. They had to add a lot, [eighteen] minutes. It was so tight at seventy-three minutes, it was perfect. You can’t expand perfection.”*

  After being rebuffed by Peck, Eckstein took the project to Barry Diller, ABC’s vice president in charge of movies for television (Diller later became a prominent film studio executive). At first, recalls Eckstein, “Barry felt it wouldn’t sustain a ninety-minute time slot, which equaled seventy-three minutes of film.” But then Diller watched Spielberg’s Psychiatrist episode “Par for the Course,” and that convinced him Spielberg could make Duel work as a Movie of the Week.

  *

  THE greatest directorial challenge Spielberg faced in preparing Duel was to avoid visual repetition, because the film is essentially one long chase. The problem was exacerbated by the tight shooting schedule (sixteen days) and the budgetary necessity of shooting much of the film on a fifteen-mile stretch of road winding through six arid canyons along Highway 14, thirty to forty miles north of Los Angeles (near the stretch of desert highway where Spielberg shot Amblin’). But the young director of Duel proved to be “an incredibly inventive guy,” says the film’s editor, Frank Morriss. “Many sequences were shot in the same area, going around the same turns, the same hills, the same road. It was never apparent in the picture. We were able to use fifteen different angles of the truck going around a curve and you do not notice it.”

  Already accustomed to using storyboards to preplan his episodic TV shows, Spielberg went one step further with his innovative storyboard for Duel: “I had an artist paint an entire map, as if a helicopter camera had photographed the entire road where the chase was taking place. And then that entire map had little sentences—like, ‘This is where the car passes the truck,’ or ‘This is where the truck passes the car and then the car passes the truck.’ And I was able to wrap this map around the motel room [in Lancaster where he stayed during location shooting], and I just crossed things off. When we were shooting, I’d try to progress eight or ten inches on the map—sometimes two feet if we had an exceptionally good day—until the entire map was shot. That overview gave me a geographical sense, a lot of help in knowing where to spend the time, where to do the most coverage, where to make a scene really sing out.” Spielberg also had storyboard drawings of every shot on IBM computer cards, pinned to a bulletin board in his motel room. Each day he took his quota of cards for reference while shooting, tearing them up when the shots were completed.

  Filmed between September 13 and October 4, 1971, and rushed to air only five weeks later, Duel had a production cost of about $750,000, according to Eckstein, not the $425,000 Spielberg has claimed.† The young director was surrounded by a highly experienced crew, including cinematographer Jack A. Marta (who received Duel’s only Emmy nomination), first assistant director Jim Fargo (who later became a director), stunt coordinator Carey Loftin, and unit production manager Wallace Worsley. “Steven was wonderful to work with,” says Eckstein. “He was very firm in his opinions. He had very few doubts. He commanded respect in everybody, which was rare in a twenty-three-year-old [sic]. He was not deferential, but he was respectful of the Jack Martas, the people with a lot of experience. And the people around him had as much respect for him. They respected him and they were a little bit in awe of him.”

  A dissenting view on Spielberg’s talents and his relationship with the crew was offered by Carey Loftin, who also drove the truck in Duel. The crusty action-movie veteran was not terribly impressed by the young director. “At that point, I don’t think he had any strong points,” Loftin recalls. “He was a kid. To be honest, I thought anybody could have done it better. I could have done better. I’m too old to lie. I disagreed with quite a few things on it.”

  One of the most chilling aspects of Duel is that the driver’s face is never seen. We see only his sinister-looking cowboy boots and his arm, disingenuously waving Weaver into the path of an oncoming car. Spielberg followed Matheson’s lead in declining to psychoanalyze the truck driver, understanding that it is more frightening to contemplate the existence of unmotivated evil than to ascribe it to some mundane cause. The truck and its driver are as enigmatic in their fathomless malevolence as the shark in Jaws or the Tyrannosaurus rex in Jurassic Park. But Loftin thought, “To do all this for no reason, it didn’t make sense. If you have action, you gotta have a reason, or that’s a stunt show.”

  During the first day of shooting, Loftin approached Spielberg and suggested that a scene be added to give the truck driver a clear motivation for seeking revenge. “Look at the truck,” Spielberg told him. “It’s beat up. It’s terrible-looking. It’s painted to look worse than it is. You’re a dirty, rotten, no-good son of a bitch.”

  “Kid,” replied Loftin, “you hired the right man.”

  In what Eckstein remembers as “the casting session with the truck,” production manager Wally Worsley “brought a bunch of trucks for Steve and me to look at on the back lot. Some looked new, but Steve wanted a truck that looked like it had been around, a street-smart truck.” Spielberg chose a battered Peterbilt gasoline tanker truck, which he described as “the smallest one, but the only one that had a great snout. I thought that with some remodeling we could really get it to look human. I had the art director add two tanks to both sides of the doors—they’re hydraulic tanks, but you ordinarily wouldn’t have two. They were like the ears of the truck. Then I put dead bugs all over the windshield so you’d have a tougher time seeing the driver. Dead grasshoppers in the grille. And I gave the truck a bubble bath of motor oil and chunky-black and crud-brown paint.”

  Casting the lead human character in Duel proved far more difficult. Besides Peck, at least three other actors turned down the role of David Mann, including David Janssen, star of TV’s The Fugitive. Also considered was Dustin Hoffman, the young star of The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy. “We were going after feature people,” Eckstein says. “We were turned down ‘because I don’t do television.’ We went through name after name. We wanted Everyman, with a vulnerable quality. We were very lucky to wind up with Dennis Weaver.” Matheson reports that Universal “finally had to shut down [its TV series] McCloud to get Weaver.”

  Spielberg was delighted at the chance to work with the actor who had delivered such a memorably quirky performance as the cowering, sex-crazed motel clerk in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. In Duel, Weaver perfectly embodies an Everyman for the Age of Anxiety, a tremulous worm who turns “Valiant” (as the model of his little red car is ironically named) and hysterically accepts the challenge of an irrational highway duel to prove his dubious manhood.‡ One of the few major flaws in Duel is that David Mann’s emasculation is laid out verbally in such a heavy-handed fashion, through voiceovers and other dramatic devices. There is no need to refer to his home life, since the theme is implicit in the action. The problem was exacerbated when the scene was added for the expanded version showing the henpecked Mann arguing with his unhappy wife about another man’s display of sexual interest in her at a party the night before.

  If he were to remake Duel, Spielberg acknowledged
in 1982, “I’d make it a little tougher, I’d take all the narration out, all of Dennis Weaver’s inner monologues and probably most of the dialogue…. I objected to the amount of dialogue the network imposed on the show. They forced the producer, George Eckstein, and the writer, Richard Matheson, to keep adding narration internalizing Dennis Weaver so the audience would understand his deepest fears. I don’t believe you need that.”§

  *

  SPIELBERG’S dynamic compositions in Duel reflect his awareness of the importance of point of view in visual storytelling, with the camera alternating between the vantage points of the truck and David Mann inside his car. Some of the most powerful shots were taken from a camera with a fish-eye lens mounted on top of the truck as it bears down upon the tiny automobile, and from a low-slung platform mounted on the front of a camera car traveling up to 135 miles per hour as it filmed the back of the Valiant from the angle of the truck’s bumper. The upward angle from the camera car to the hurtling truck made the truck assume what Spielberg called “Godzilla proportions.”

  Spielberg and cinematographer Jack Marta also heightened the visual tension by their use of wide-angle lenses, artificially shortening the distance between the truck and the car. The close-ups of the frantic Mann are so tight that he often appears to be on the verge of bumping into the camera. Some were taken from a fixed camera-mount outside the car, but many were shot with a handheld camera by an operator on the seat or the floor of the car. The quarters became so cramped that in one accident of framing visible only in the theatrical version, Spielberg can be glimpsed for a moment in Mann’s rearview mirror, sitting in the back seat.

  “When [the studio] saw Steven’s dailies the first few days, they were thinking of pulling the rug, it looked so unusual,” Matheson reports. But Eckstein maintains that Spielberg was never in danger of being taken off the picture, and that Sid Sheinberg was “ecstatic” when he saw the rough cut. “I think there were some excesses in Duel,” the producer adds, “but they were so much balanced by the excitement or the energy of the piece. Sometimes with Steven you want to yell, ‘Less is more.’ That’s about his only flaw.”

  The agonizing slow-motion demise of the truck as it tumbles off the hillside, lured by Mann’s driverless automobile, provoked strong opposition from the network, although it was one of the film’s most memorable images.

  “In the script, the truck explodes. I thought that was too easy,” Spielberg recalled. “… I thought it would be much more interesting to show the truck expiring, slowly ticking away—the truck’s a nasty guy, you want to see him twisting slowly, a cruel death. I just took it upon myself. I thought, ‘I’m the director, so I can change the script. I just won’t blow the truck up.’ Well, when the network saw the film, all they kept saying was, ‘It’s in your contract to blow the truck up, read your contract.’” Eckstein finally persuaded network executives not to force Spielberg to blow up the truck.

  Staging the climactic scene required the rigging of a spring-loaded hand throttle attached to the steering wheel of the truck, so that Carey Loftin could keep the truck going in the direction of the hillside after climbing outside the cab and jumping off at the last minute. Spielberg had six cameras set up at various spots around the cliff to record the scene late in the afternoon on the last day of shooting, October 4.

  “I damn near went over the cliff myself,” Loftin remembers. “I pulled the throttle and the whole damn thing fell off. I got out and realized the truck was slowing down. I thought, ‘I gotta get my right foot on the throttle.’ I tried to get the speed up. I shouldn’t have done it.”

  As the truck raced toward the edge of the cliff, all Loftin could think about was that he was due at the opening of Florida’s Walt Disney World the following day to perform an automobile stunt.

  “I could have turned the truck and just called it off, but I had to go to Florida. I rolled and wound up right on the edge of the cliff myself. It was over three hundred feet down. The truck wound up at the bottom and the little car was on top of the truck.”

  “The scissors in my editing room came down just a frame after Carey’s butt is out of the frame,” Spielberg said. “He’s at the beginning of the shot. Leaping for his life.”

  “I remember sitting in dailies watching the crash,” Eckstein says. “It was the last day. It had to be the last day. The first five cameras really didn’t have it. We were afraid we were going to have to piece it together. I remember that terrible moment sitting there. Finally the last camera got it. The relief in that room was palpable.”

  To create the death cry of the truck, Spielberg first thought of mixing truck noises with the distorted sound of a woman’s scream. “So I went into the studio and screamed,” recalls Joan Darling. “He wanted a death-of-the-monster sound.” In the end, however, Spielberg decided not to use Darling’s scream, but the sound of a famous monster of filmland. One of the sound editors came up with the idea of distorting the roar of the prehistoric Gill-Man from Universal’s 1954 horror movie The Creature from the Black Lagoon—the chilling sound Stephen King recognized as a “Jurassic roar.”

  Postproduction on Duel had to be rushed to make the November airdate. Because of Spielberg’s frequent use of multiple cameras, there was so much film to edit (95,000 feet, a shooting ratio of twelve to one) that Frank Morriss had to bring in four other editors and several sound editors to help him assemble different sequences. For thirteen days, Morriss recalls, Spielberg kept “roller-skating from editing room to editing room” to supervise their work.

  *

  “I SAW the rough cut of Duel,” Barry Diller recalled, “and I remember thinking, This guy is going to be out of television so fast because his work is so good. It was sad because I thought I’d never see him again. It was a director’s film, and TV is not a director’s medium.”

  In a promotional move that was unusual for a TV movie and reflected the studio’s high degree of pride in Duel and in Steven Spielberg, Universal threw a press preview party on the lot, showing the film simultaneously in several screening rooms. The first public indication that something extraordinary was about to appear on the nation’s television screens came from Los Angeles Times TV columnist Cecil Smith. On November 8, Smith reported on another advance screening held at Universal by Spielberg and Eckstein for film students from Claremont College, some of whom were older than the director. Asked by Professor Michael Riley how he would have approached Duel differently if it had been made for the big screen, Spielberg replied, “Time. I took sixteen days shooting … I would have liked fifty. Time to try things.” Smith hailed Duel as a “unique” TV movie, because it was virtually a silent movie and “so totally a cinematic experience.” He added, “Steve Spielberg is really the wunderkind of the film business. At twenty-four, he looks fourteen and talks film like a contemporary of John Ford. He’s been making movies all his life.”

  That article prompted many people in the film industry to stay home and watch Duel the following Saturday night. They were alerted further by a full-page ad placed in the Hollywood trade papers that Friday by Spielberg, Eckstein, Matheson, and composer Billy Goldenberg. Over a picture of the truck bearing down upon the helpless Weaver standing in the road, the ad said simply: “We invite you to a unique television experience.”

  In the following Monday’s Daily Variety, TV reviewer Tony Scott wrote, “Film buffs rightfully will be studying and referring to ‘The Duel’ [sic] for some time. Finest so far of the ABC Movies of the Weekend, [the] film belongs on the classic shelf reserved for top suspensers. Director Steven Spielberg builds step by logical step towards the exquisitely controlled climax and symbolic conclusion of Richard Matheson’s teleplay. Anyone switching channels after the first five-minute hooker is in need of whole blood.”

  That week, Spielberg received about a dozen offers to direct feature films. “I visited Steven in his office,” Matheson recalls, “and the walls were plastered with letters of congratulations from people in the business.”

  Alt
hough it performed only moderately well in the TV ratings, Duel became Spielberg’s first feature-length film released theatrically (aside from the single theatrical screening of Firelight) when the expanded version was distributed in Europe, Australia, and Japan. A sleeper success at the box office, grossing $8 million, it established Spielberg’s reputation with international critics and won the grand prize at the Festival de Cinema Fantastique in Avoriaz, France, as well as the prize for best first film at Italy’s Taormina Film Festival.¶

  The veteran critic of The Sunday Times of London, Dilys Powell, “kicked off my career,” Spielberg once declared. Before the film’s international debut in England in November 1972, “She saw Duel and then arranged for another screening in London for the critics. As a result, the film company spent more money than they’d intended on the film’s promotion.”

  “You would hardly think that so slight, indeed so seemingly motiveless a plot (the script is by Richard Matheson) would be enough for a film of ninety minutes,” Powell wrote. “It is plenty. It is plenty because the increase in tension is so subtly maintained, because the rhythm and the pace of movement is so subtly varied, because the action, the anonymous enemy attacking or lying in wait, is shot with such feeling for dramatic effect…. Mr. Spielberg comes from television (Duel was made for television); he is only twenty-five. No prophecies; but somehow I fancy this is another name to look out for.”

  Traveling to Europe to promote the film (his first trip abroad), Spielberg found that with his new artistic status, people expected him to pontificate on weighty issues. In Rome, the young director “tried to steer clear of politics during his first European news conference, despite efforts by Italian journalists to politicize his ‘social comment’ film,” Variety reported in September 1973. “While expressing certain dissatisfaction with American politics, Spielberg said he intended the film as an ‘indictment of machines’ and a fight for survival between man and machine-made danger, denying contentions by journalists that the danger is the Establishment or the struggle between two Americas.” When Spielberg would not agree that the truck and the car symbolized the upper class and the working class, four journalists walked out on him.