Steven Spielberg

  For some of the leading international directors, Duel marked Spielberg’s seemingly overnight arrival as one of their peers. François Truffaut, Fred Zinnemann, and Spielberg’s idol, David Lean, were among those expressing admiration for the film. “I knew that here was a very bright new director,” Lean said later. “Steven takes real pleasure in the sensuality of forming action scenes—wonderful flowing movements. He has this extraordinary size of vision, a sweep that illuminates his films. But then, Steven is the way the movies used to be.”

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  “UNTIL Duel, I thought maybe I’d made the wrong decision signing that seven-year Universal contract,” Spielberg reflected in a 1977 interview. “… After Duel, everything fell into place and made perfect sense.”

  Even though he suddenly found himself a hot director, Spielberg still remained bound by that onerous contract. He was more eager than ever to make features now that he had demonstrated his talent so spectacularly in television. Shortly after the end of production on Duel, Spielberg began shooting Something Evil, a stylish but predictable horror film for CBS-TV. “Universal had nothing for me,” Spielberg recalled, “and rather than watch me sit in my office and kill time, they said, ‘Go ahead.’” Spielberg’s subsequent TV movie for Universal, Savage (1973), was “an assignment bordering on force majeure. Savage was the first and last time the studio ordered me to do something.”

  Something Evil, written by Robert Clouse, starred Sandy Dennis and Darren McGavin as a couple who escape city life for a Pennsylvania farmhouse only to find that the house is inhabited by a demon seeking to possess their adolescent son (Johnny Whitaker). Echoing William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel The Exorcist (the film version of which was released in 1973), Something Evil allowed Spielberg and cinematographer Bill Butler room for some flamboyantly surrealistic visual imagery of the family’s battle with the demon, but the formulaic plot made the film seem a bit of a comedown after the freshness of Duel.

  Spielberg remembers Something Evil primarily as a technical exercise, and Butler responded enthusiastically to Spielberg’s “desire to experiment … the newness of his thinking.” “I loved Steve’s tenacity,” says his acting teacher Jeff Corey, who played a possessed Pennsylvania Dutch farmer in the TV movie. “I remember him spending a whole day on one shot. He covered a whole party, starting from exterior to interior, going through the living room and the kitchen, in one shot. He wouldn’t let go until he had it. I was a little more pliable [as a director], but he certainly had guts.”

  When Something Evil aired on January 21, 1972, as the CBS Friday Night Movie, Daily Variety reviewer Dave Kaufman wrote, “Clouse engages in a good deal of hokum in his teleplay, stressing weird special effects more than characterization, and director Steven Spielberg does the same. Thus Sandy Dennis, as the femme driven into hysteria, begins her performance on a high key and never wavers. There is no shading for real impact…. Spielberg displays a keen awareness of numerous techniques, but not of [the] importance of vivid emotional involvement.”

  Still stymied in his efforts to persuade Universal to let him make The Sugarland Express, Spielberg continued to look elsewhere for his opportunity to break out of television. Following his abortive attempt to direct Ace Eli for Fox, the next film announced as Spielberg’s feature “debut” was McKlusky, a Burt Reynolds car-chase picture written by William W. Norton Sr. for United Artists. Already in danger of being typecast, the director of Duel began preproduction on McKlusky in February 1972. Spielberg met with Reynolds, started casting other parts, and scouted locations in the South, but then “realized it wasn’t something that I wanted to do for a first film. I didn’t want to start my career as a hard-hat, journeyman director. I wanted to do something that was a little more personal.” By April, Joseph Sargent had signed on to replace Spielberg as director of McKlusky, released in 1973 as White Lightning.

  The next, and last, TV movie Spielberg directed was The Savage Report, which aired as Savage on March 31, 1973.|| Dealing with what later would become known as “tabloid television,” Spielberg’s NBC World Premiere movie starred Martin Landau as crusading TV political journalist Paul Savage and Barbara Bain (Landau’s wife and Mission: Impossible costar) as Savage’s producer. The teleplay by Mark Rodgers, William Link, and Richard Levinson revolved around the blackmailing of a nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court (Barry Sullivan). “Universal had a commitment to do a replacement series, and NBC was in bed with Universal—anything Sheinberg wanted to do got on the air, in most cases,” Link says. “Sheinberg came to Dick and me and said, ‘I’ve got an old script [by Rodgers] you might be able to adapt. Let’s do it as a pilot.’ We didn’t like that script. We rewrote it, but there’s just so much you can do—it was sow’s purse time. We told Sid, ‘The only way we can make this is if we have a brilliant director. Get Spielberg.’

  “Steve reads the script and agrees with us—it stinks. We called Sid and said, ‘Why don’t you call Steve and hotbox him. Get him to do it.’ We never told Steve. I remember it was on a Sunday, a rainy day, and Steve had a meeting on the twelfth floor [with Sheinberg]. Dick and I crossed our fingers. Steve came back almost in tears. We asked, ‘What happened?’ We were playing dumb because we had set this up. He said Sheinberg gave him a big hype, bending his arm that he had to do the script. Steve had made the mistake of saying that he wasn’t in the Universal business, he was in the Steven Spielberg business. Maybe he got a little angry. Sheinberg hit the roof and threatened to put him on suspension. They had a very good relationship, but Steve was hurt by that. We told him, ‘You ought to do it, Steve. You don’t want to be on suspension.’ I don’t think we admitted to him that we had Sheinberg sell him on it. In a way he was right—the script is not very good, but he did a brilliant job.”

  Martin Landau considered the show “ahead of its time” as a critique of TV news, and claimed it never led to a series because “we got shot down for the wrong reasons. It was clearly political. The network news department took exception to our show. I got a call from Sid Sheinberg and he said, ‘It’s the best thing we’ve got, NBC is crazy about it, it’s on the air.’ And it went from there to being buried in a week’s time.” Daily Variety reviewer Tony Scott, on the other hand, felt the seventy-two-minute movie would have trouble generating a series because it “barely scrapes by in [the] plot department.” But he added that Savage “generates interest thanks to Steven Spielberg’s superior and often inventive direction, and character studies.”

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  RENEWING his campaign to make a feature at Universal, Spielberg shifted some of his focus from Sid Sheinberg to another executive, Jennings Lang. Spielberg shrewdly courted Lang, who helped him make the transition to features. “When Sid was bringing Steven along, Jennings was the patriarch,” says Peter Saphier, Lang’s assistant at the time. “After all, Jennings was a mentor to Sid, and he felt a real connection to Steven.”

  The roguish, coarse-talking Lang was a legend in Hollywood circles. A former agent whose clients included Joan Crawford and Joan Bennett, he carried on an affair with Bennett that in 1951 provoked the actress’s estranged husband, producer Walter Wanger, to shoot him in the groin. Subsequently joining MCA when it was still a talent agency, Lang was largely responsible for building MCA’s Revue Productions, and then Universal TV, into a powerhouse of production and syndication. By the time Spielberg came to the studio, Lang was a senior vice-president of Universal Pictures, outranked in the MCA hierarchy only by board chairman Jules Stein and president Lew Wasserman. Lang’s title carried with it the rare power to approve and supervise a slate of theatrical films.

  While directing TV shows in the early 1970s, Spielberg began spending time at Lang’s home, also befriending the executive’s wife, singer Monica Lewis, and their adolescent son Jennings Rockwell (Rocky) Lang. “My father was involved in nurturing and advising Steven,” Rocky says. “I recall Steven being around a lot when Sugarland started. His girlfriends would come over to dinner with him. Through my eyes, my paren
ts were sort of surrogate parents to Steven, and I looked at Steven as an older brother.”

  Now a director and producer himself, Rocky already was trying his hand at filmmaking by the time he was in eighth grade and met Spielberg. “Steven sent me a clapper board for elementary school graduation, and he put ‘Congratulations’ on the clapper board,” he recalls. “After Steven looked at my Super-8 movies, he put the curse on me. He sent me a photo of himself when he was younger and told me I was more advanced than him at the same age. It put tremendous pressure on me. My sister-in-law is a psychologist, and she said she knows a lot of young filmmakers who are afflicted with ‘Steven Spielberg disease’—all these kids set their sights on being the next Steven Spielberg, and they get depressed when they aren’t as successful as he was at an early age. It’s created this sort of neurotic behavior around him.”

  But Spielberg was “great with kids, a really accessible person,” Rocky says. “My conversations with Steven were about my girlfriend problems, my tennis, my school, and the movies I was making—he made me feel I was on the right track. The only advice Steven gave me was to be passionate about what I wanted to do. That was something I needed to learn, because I viewed the business from very early on as a commercial enterprise, like any business; I wanted to be a success and have the perks of it. He told me, ‘Take a project you really love and take it all the way,’ making a statement and leaving something behind, looking at it more seriously.”

  Spielberg’s relationship with the Langs paid off when Jennings Lang agreed to let him work with screenwriters Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins to develop the screenplay that became The Sugarland Express.** The project’s working title, Carte Blanche, was an obscure reference to the seemingly unlimited freedom enjoyed by Spielberg’s young fugitive couple driving through Texas with their hapless hostage from the Texas Department of Public Safety. Around the time Spielberg bowed out of United Artists’ McKlusky in the spring of 1972, he had pitched Carte Blanche to the young writers by reading them the Associated Press article about the 1969 Texas incident. After talking over the story with the director for a couple of days, Barwood and Robbins wrote an outline, which UA agreed to let them develop into a screenplay. But UA soon had second thoughts, and Spielberg took Carte Blanche back to Universal, which had rejected the story three years earlier.

  This time “it happened fast,” said Spielberg. “And everything was done just as I wanted to do it.” On April 11, 1972, the director showed the outline to Lang, who put the project into development that very afternoon. The following day, Spielberg and his writers flew to Texas for a week of research. Barwood and Robbins wrote the first draft in thirteen days, but Universal once again decided not to make the movie; in Hollywood jargon, the studio put the script “in turnaround.” Only a few weeks later, however, it was revived by Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown when they signed an exclusive, multipicture production deal with Universal. Lang had given Spielberg’s career a critical boost by agreeing to finance the writing of the script, but he was eased out of the production when the studio agreed to let Zanuck and Brown make the picture. “Jennings got very, very upset about Sugarland Express—he felt the studio had taken it away from him,” his assistant Peter Saphier reports. “He had a ‘cerebral incident.’ He passed out in the commissary over Sugarland. He went home for several months.”

  During the filming of Sugarland, Lang was the executive supervising the project, but that was a largely meaningless task since, as Saphier notes, “The deal with Zanuck/Brown was that they had no one supervising them while shooting.” Lang later became involved in the studio’s decision to purchase the film rights to Peter Benchley’s Jaws, the novel that served as the basis for Spielberg’s 1975 commercial breakthrough film. But that project also wound up as a Zanuck/Brown production, and Lang unhappily became just another Universal producer, making the Sensurround spectacles Earthquake and Rollercoaster and other even more forgettable pictures.

  After Lang suffered a debilitating stroke in 1983, few Hollywood people visited him. In 1994, two years before his father’s death, Rocky Lang said, “It’s brutal—if you can’t help them, your best friends are not there. Steven is still there. He’s been terrific with my parents. He’s never forgotten them. He sends them presents for their birthdays, he sends them presents on their anniversaries, he sends his movies for them to watch. He’s been over as much to see my dad as some people who owe him more.”

  Speaking of his own relationship with Spielberg, however, Rocky admitted, “I lost touch with him after Jaws, when he and my father stopped working together. I have very little contact with him now. We’re in touch maybe once a year. I don’t know Steven the person anymore. His standing socially has grown to the point where he spends the night at the White House. When you get to that status, everybody wants something from you. I wish he would help [me] out more than he does, but I don’t call him, because I don’t want to fall into that category. I have a very warm spot for Steven, and I feel a tremendous loss that I don’t have a relationship with him now.”

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  NOT long after turning down the opportunity to hire Spielberg as a director at Twentieth Century-Fox, Richard Zanuck was fired as head of the financially troubled studio by his legendary father, Darryl F. Zanuck. Following a brief interlude as executives at Warner Bros., Zanuck and David Brown, his former right-hand man at Fox, formed their own production company in 1972, signing with Universal shortly thereafter. It was a coup for Universal to have such prominent executives come aboard as producers, and Lew Wasserman’s respect for their abilities ensured Zanuck/Brown an enviable, but not unlimited, degree of creative freedom.

  “Before signing on at Universal, in the six to seven weeks when Mr. Brown and I were deciding where to go, we were reading scripts,” Zanuck recalls. “Guy McElwaine [Spielberg’s agent] gave me the script of The Sugarland Express, which Steven wanted to direct. I sent it to Mr. Brown and he liked it. I told Steven, ‘I’ll tell you a secret. We’re going to make a deal at Universal.’ He said, ‘Oh, no, it’s in turnaround from Universal.’ I said, ‘That makes it a little harder, but doesn’t knock it out of competition.’”

  At that point, Zanuck and Brown met with Wasserman, who told them, “This picture’s a downer, and audiences won’t respond to it. It will play to empty houses, but what do I know? You’re the guys who make the picture. If you want to make it, make it.” Wasserman “turned out to be right with that evaluation,” Zanuck admits, “but his belief in us also led to The Sting and Jaws, where the [MCA] stock quadrupled. Frankly, I wish more studio executives operated today like Lew Wasserman. He backed people he had a belief in, instead of bringing them in and telling them what to do. He was always looking down the road.

  “Universal had a very high respect for Steven, and I think they had plans to have him direct something. Steven was surprised we were making The Sugarland Express at Universal. We had a meeting in the commissary. He slid into the booth and said, ‘God, I can’t believe it! Are you going to be my producer?’ I was known as a studio head. He said, ‘Who’s actually going to do the line-producing work?’ I said I was. He said, ‘That’s great. Are you going to be there every day?’ I told him I was. I had a very close working relationship and friendship with Steven.”

  “Sugarland was basically Steven’s film, one that he had developed with Matt and Hal, and the studio, recognizing the inexperience of the three of them, wanted to have a strong producer involved,” says William S. Gilmore Jr., the Zanuck/Brown production executive who served as the film’s unit production manager. “Steven had a wonderful ability to play to people older than him, as if saying ‘Help me, I’m just feeling my way,’ when in fact he had tremendous talent. It seemed like everybody in the unit had something to prove. Steven had to prove he could direct a feature as opposed to television. Zanuck had to prove he could produce films instead of being just the production manager for his father. There was such an esprit de corps. We all loved the idea, and we were doing a picture
in a non-studio way, with a small, handpicked crew moving like greased lightning.”

  “Producing is an Excedrin headache job,” Spielberg told The Hollywood Reporter shortly after the film was released. “If I can avoid it, I will. Zanuck and Brown served the picture well and gave me total freedom, the kind of [freedom from] controls I never had in television. Dick Zanuck backed me all the way…. In our few disagreements, he was right and I was wrong.”

  The third time proved lucky when Spielberg’s feature directing “debut” on Carte Blanche was announced in the Hollywood trade papers on October 17, 1972. The next day, Barwood and Robbins turned in the second draft of their novelistically nuanced screenplay, which underwent further revisions throughout the filming (Spielberg shared story credit with the two screenwriters). The title became The Sugarland Express that November, although for a while the filmmakers considered simply calling the movie Sugarland, the name of the small town where the “tragic fairytale” comes to an end.††

  In adapting the saga of Bobby Dent for the screen, Spielberg turned Dent’s wife, Ila Faye, into the movie’s central character, Lou Jean Poplin. In Sugarland, the couple’s two-year-old son has been removed to a foster home, and it is Lou Jean who persuades her convict husband, Clovis, to break out of a prerelease center—with only four months left on his sentence—to retrieve the child. The young mother’s desperation over being separated from her baby, and the tragedy-of-the-absurd that results from it, provided fertile ground for a working-out of Spielberg’s complex feelings about his own family. Spielberg conceived Lou Jean as behaving like a spoiled child, sexually manipulating Clovis to go along with her whims and finally throwing an infantile tantrum that causes him to walk into the fatal ambush. Lou Jean’s reckless need for her child is less an expression of mother love than an irresponsible prolongation of her own childhood.