Spielberg Read online

  Spielberg had met Silver on the day he sneaked off the tram during the bathroom break. Silver spotted him and asked what he was doing. Spielberg somehow managed to communicate his enthusiasm to Silver, because instead of throwing the youth off the lot, he chatted with him for thirty minutes. Silver even asked to see some of Spielberg’s 8 mm efforts and gave him a pass so he could come back the next day without having to sneak off the tram.

  “He was very impressed with my films. Then he said, ‘I don’t have the authority to write you any more passes, but good luck to you,’ ” Spielberg recalled.

  But Silver hadn’t forgotten his young protege. Part of Silver’s job was screening upcoming films for the studio brass. After one such screening for Sid Sheinberg, then head of production for the studio’s television production arm, Silver continued to run the projector and showed the executive Amblin’. Sheinberg remembered Silver telling him, “There’s this guy who’s been hanging around the place who’s made a short film. So I watched it and thought it was terrific.”

  Sheinberg told Silver to have the young director come see him. Sheinberg was impressed with the film, but not with the filmmaker.

  “I liked the way he selected the performers, the relationships, the maturity and the warmth that was in that short. I told Chuck to have the guy come see me,” Sheinberg recalled. He also remembered Spielberg as “this nerdlike, scrawny character.”

  Sheinberg offered to put the young man under contract with the studio “for the princely sum of $275 a week,” the executive recalled with a chuckle. He has good reason to laugh at his early foresight in spotting a future talent, since that initial investment would earn the studio billions later on.

  Unemployed, still a student at Cal State Long Beach, Spielberg was not so overawed by this attention from a major studio bigwig that he didn’t immediately demand—politely—a concession for signing the measly contract. “I just have one request,” he had the temerity to tell Sheinberg, “and I’d like you to give me not so much a commitment but a promise. I want to direct something before I’m twenty-one. That would be very important to me.”

  Impressed and amused by this young man who still looked like a teenager, Sheinberg promised adding, “you should be a director.” Spielberg shot back. “I think so too.”

  Still, the cheeky young man had misgivings. He told Sheinberg he wanted to graduate from college. “I was still several months shy of my twenty-first birthday, and I hadn’t graduated from college. But Sheinberg said, ‘Do you want to graduate college or do you want to be a film director?’

  “I signed the papers a week later.”

  Spielberg’s middle-class obsession with being a college graduate vanished faster than E.T.’s spaceship. “I quit college so fast,” he later recalled, “I didn’t even clean out my locker.”

  A brief blurb in the Hollywood Reporter at the time announced the beginning of one spectacular and one stillborn career.

  The December 12, 1968, issue said: “Steven Spielberg and Pamela McMyler, writer-director and star, respectively, of Amblin’, have been signed to exclusive contracts by Universal, per Sid Sheinberg, television production vice president. Spielberg, 21, is believed to be the youngest filmmaker ever pacted by a major studio. Miss McMyler, a graduate of the Pasadena Playhouse, is currently featured in The Boston Strangler.”

  Two years after Amblin’, McMyler had a whole gossip column devoted to her in the defunct Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, announcing her appearance on a two-part episode of the NBC series, The Bold Ones. Buried in the story as a throwaway line was the fact that her part in a “short experimental film, Amblin’ (no director mentioned) had caught the eye of John Wayne, who cast her as his niece in the 1970 feature Chisum.” Today McMyler is not listed with the Screen Actors Guild Directory, which means that even if Spielberg or some other filmmaker wanted to hire her, they would be hard pressed to locate the vanished actress.

  One wonders if the now long-forgotten actress had any inkling how monumentally significant the little student film she had starred in would be for its director, and how little impact it would have on her own acting career.

  Sid Sheinberg was true to his word: his protege was allowed to direct before he turned twenty-one.

  Daily Variety, which doesn’t seem to miss any show-biz news, no matter how apparently trivial, announced in 1969: “Nine years ago Steven Spielberg borrowed his dad’s birthday present, an 8 mm camera, and made his first movie, a Western, and won a Boy Scout Merit Badge. Today, at 21, he is directing Joan Crawford and Barry Sullivan in a Universal World Premiere Movie for TV.”

  His first assignment was indeed a plum one: one of three segments for a pilot called Night Gallery, created and written by the master of television fantasy, Rod Serling.

  For all his bravado in sneaking on backlots and demanding concessions from Sheinberg, Spielberg felt panic when he first met one of his idols, the creator of a favorite television show from his youth, Rod Serling of The Twilight Zone.

  The chain-smoking writer-producer immediately put the twenty-one-year-old novice at ease. “Rod was the most positive guy in the entire production company,” Spielberg later recalled. “He was a great, energetic slaphappy guy who gave me a fantastic pep talk about how he predicted that the entire movie industry was about to change because of young people like myself getting the breaks.”

  The crew was just as encouraging as the creator of the series. No one seemed to mind being ordered about by a pubescent looking director. “I expected hostility when I started on this,” Spielberg said at the time. “But no one seemed to think it was unusual. Nobody called me, ‘Hey, kid.’ As a matter of fact, the older people on the set were the first to accept me. I guess they figured that if someone up there thought I was good enough for the job, then that was enough for them.”

  Not all his elders were so encouraging. In fact, probably the oldest person on the set didn’t like being directed by an adolescent.

  In 1969, the year the Night Gallery pilot was shot, its star, Joan Crawford, was in her sixty-fifth year and, according to her daughter Christina’s memoir, Mommie Dearest, in the latter stages of alcoholism, quaffing water glasses filled with 100 proof Stolichnaya vodka.

  Her film career all but over, the workaholic actress still needed to get in front of the camera, and like so many movie stars of yesteryear, TV became her living graveyard, the place where she breathed her last, professionally speaking.

  For his first directing assignment, Spielberg found himself stuck with one of the most obstreperous stars in Hollywood. Crawford was cast in the middle segment, “Eyes,” of the Night Gallery trilogy pilot. She played a wealthy blind woman who is given a chance to regain her sight for twelve hours. All she has to do is find a donor. She bribes a down-on-his-luck drunk (Tom Bosley) to surrender his corneas in return for $12,000.

  The operation is a success, but just as Crawford regains her sight, everything goes black. The onset of her vision is also the beginning of a citywide electrical blackout. Her expensive operation, which only grants her half a day’s worth of sight, is a total waste. Stumbling in the dark, she crashes through the glass door of her penthouse and falls to her death.

  Spielberg has only fond memories of the first star he ever directed. “I never saw her drunk on the set,” he told me years later, contrary to Mommie Dearest’s claim that the star was a full-blown alcoholic by that time.

  The book by her daughter, Christina, also claims Crawford was grossly insulted by being assigned a twenty-one-year-old director who looked like a teenager. She apparently managed to hide her distaste from her director, however. Spielberg fondly recalled, “Directing Joan Crawford was like pitching to Hank Aaron your first time in the game. [She] treated me like I had been directing fifty years. She was great. But I did an awful job.”

  Crawford didn’t share his enthusiasm for their collaboration. Confirming the Mommie Dearest account, other sources say Crawford campaigned to get him fired, but Rod Serling went to bat for his yo
ung protege. Failing to get him fired, Crawford threw herself into the project with the professionalism that had kept her working for more than half a century.

  A method actress, she invited the director to come to her penthouse apartment in New York and greeted him at the door blindfolded; she was getting in character.

  “She was going to be playing a blind person, and she went lurching around the apartment. I was terrified. When I suggested we go to lunch, she took off her blindfold and said, ‘I’m not going to be seen in public with you. People will think you’re my child.’ ”

  Despite such put-downs, Spielberg insists, “She was very good to me, very firm, but very kind. I called her Miss Crawford, and she insisted on calling me Mr. Spielberg. I asked her to call me Steven, but she wouldn’t. She knew I was just a scared kid, and she was setting an example—of courtesy, and yes, of respect—for the rest of the cast and crew to follow. Once she knew I had done my homework—I had my storyboards right there with me every minute—she treated me as if I was The Director. Which, of course, I was, but at that time she knew a helluva lot more about directing than I did.”

  They even had creative differences, although not violent enough to cause either the temperamental star or the neophyte director to stomp off the set. “Miss Crawford and I had our first argument,” he told TV Guide at the time. “It wasn’t really much of a disagreement, a little thing over punching up a scene. It’s a pleasure discussing such a thing with a woman like that.”

  Ultimately, Crawford did more than overcome her aversion to being directed by somebody who looked as though he were still going through puberty.

  She may even have felt gratitude when he helped her with Serling’s complicated dialogue. The creator of the show believed his dialogue was written in stone, and woe to anyone, even a star of Crawford’s magnitude, who dared digress from the script.

  Whether it was age or alcoholism, Crawford kept forgetting her lines. Finally, Spielberg agreed to have strategically placed cue cards scattered all over the set within her eyesight but out of camera range.

  By the time their collaboration was over, it seems Crawford was Spielberg’s biggest fan. Or so an eyewitness to the production insists.

  The reporter, the venerable Shirley Eder of the Detroit Free Press, remembered her visit to the backlot at Universal: “Joan grabbed me and said, ‘Go interview that kid because he’s going to be the biggest director of all time.’ ”

  Years later, at a press junket to promote his film Hook, an elderly Eder reminded Spielberg of her visit to the set of Night Gallery.

  Underneath the rabbinical beard that now covers most of his face, Spielberg looked as though he might be blushing. Grimacing, he said to Eder, “You already told me that story . . . and I thought you were crazy.”

  Despite his star’s enthusiasm, Spielberg wasn’t bullish on his first professional directing effort. And for once he wasn’t being self-deprecating when he claimed he did an “awful job” on Night Gallery.

  The producer of his segment had to reshoot part of the director’s work. “I was so traumatized. The pressure of that show was too much for me. I decided to take some time off, and Sid [Sheinberg] had the guts to give me a leave of absence,” he said.

  For all its problems, the segment of Night Gallery he directed remains a treasure trove for film historians and movie buffs because it contains the signature style of filmmaking he would later perfect in his blockbusters and masterpiece: the use of wide-angle lenses, lots of dolly and crane shots, and dramatic lighting to maximize the overall visual impact.

  The zoom lens had been invented only a few years before, and it was still all the rage, especially on television, where a zoom was cheaper than expensive dolly shots and the tracks that had to be laid down to accommodate them. Spielberg bucked the trend and avoided zoom shots, however, using instead complex tracking shots in which the camera moved toward the actor rather than zooming in. Spielberg also employed some fancy cutting, and one scene was a homage to a similar quick-cut sequence in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

  Actually, it wasn’t just the Night Gallery experience that temporarily soured the young filmmaker on filmmaking. After directing the pilot, he had spent several months writing three screenplays, all of which were rejected by his mentor, Sheinberg.

  “I was in a despondent, comatose state and told Sid I wanted a leave of absence,” he said.

  During a yearlong sabbatical from Universal, he wrote his first feature, which was to become The Sugarland Express, and two other screenplays, one of which he sold to the superhot producing team of Richard Zanuck and David Brown. The film, called Ace Eli and Roger of the Skies, never made it to the screen, but the importance of the Zanuck-Brown connection can’t be underestimated. A few years later the two powerful men would drop, at Spielberg’s request, a director assigned to one of their films and give the job to Spielberg. The title of this story: Jaws.

  But that triumph was six years away. In the meantime, after a year away from Universal, he found himself chomping at the bit, anxious to get away from the typewriter and in front of a camera, any camera, any medium, even television, even though Night Gallery had been such a traumatic and unsatisfying experience.

  “I suffocated in the freedom,” he said about his year off. “I needed to work, and I came back to Universal and said, ‘I’ll do anything.’ But no one would hire me.”

  Universal did take him back, and he landed an episode of Marcus Welby, M.D., which would be the first of seven shows he directed for the studio’s television arm.

  The Welby episode was titled “The Daredevil Gesture.” It focused on a teenager suffering from hemophilia who was determined to prove he was just as fit as his friends by attempting a dangerous rescue on a class field trip. (Shades of Spielberg’s Boy Scout misadventures!) Dr. Welby (Robert Young) as usual saved the day—and the hemophiliac’s life. The episode is noteworthy because it championed the rights of the disabled long before such causes became politically fashionable.

  A year after his unpleasant encounter with Night Gallery, Spielberg apparently had forgotten the experience enough to take a stab at another segment of the anthology show. He directed the first half of a two-part episode, a comedy-drama called “Make Me Laugh.”

  Godfrey Cambridge played a failed stand-up comic desperate to find an appreciative audience. He meets a sad-sack genie, played by comedian Jackie Vernon, who grants him his wish. Cambridge becomes irresistible to audiences. Every word out of his mouth makes people burst into giggles. As in the case of many genie-in-a-bottle stories, the wish becomes a curse. No matter what Cambridge says, no matter how serious, people crack up.

  Suicidal, Cambridge throws himself in front of a car and dies. The segment ends, grotesquely, with onlookers laughing their heads off at the corpse!

  Due to studio politics, a supporting actor was replaced by another actor, and some original scenes had to be reshot. Spielberg was not asked to do the reshooting, however. He was replaced by Jeannot Szwarc. Ironically, in a case of history repeating itself, seven years later Szwarc would direct the sequel to Jaws.

  Just as he had championed the rights of the handicapped on Marcus Welby years before it was fashionable, Spielberg would tackle the environment on his next assignment, a ninety-minute episode of The Name of the Game. Entitled “LA: 2017,” the show was a dramatic departure from its usual reality-based flavor. On his way to an ecological conference, Gene Barry, who played a magazine publisher, crashes his car and wakes up in the year 2017 where pollution has all but destroyed the planet and people are forced to live underground.

  Barry teams up with a radical group intent on overthrowing the megalomaniac mayor of Los Angeles. Perhaps in a nod to the basic conservatism of Universal, which produced the show, Barry eventually decides the radicals are as distasteful as the noxious mayor. He flees the group and goes above ground. Spielberg very inventively—and inexpensively—filmed the above-ground shots using a red filter to suggest the suffocating pollution.
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  Barry emerges from his coma in the present day. His magazine’s commitment to cleaning up the environment has been reinforced by his coma-induced nightmare.

  Marc Wielage, who supplied these synopses in an issue of Video Review magazine, wrote of this episode of The Name of the Game, “It’s all a bit heavy-handed, but still a step up from most of the series’ pretentious treatment of issues.”

  The Spielberg touch already was evident, even in these television assignments.

  Two months after his innovative work on The Name of the Game, Spielberg came to the attention of the powerhouse producer-writer team of Richard Levinson and William Link. They hired him to direct two episodes of their show, The Psychiatrist, part of the NBC anthology series, Four in One.

  Spielberg later would say that these two episodes were his most rewarding work in television.

  The director, who was barely out of his teens, was pulling down an adult-sized salary. Director’s Guild minimum for 1969–1970 was $1,000 a week or $4,400 a month. Such a handsome salary for young man in his early twenties, however, didn’t seem to confer any social confidence on the director. As he said of his social graces at the time, “I’m usually the guy in the corner at the party eating all the dip.”

  The first episode of The Psychiatrist, filmed in early 1971, was called, “Par for the Course.” It dramatized the life of a dying golf pro, played by Clu Galager. Roy Thinnes, who played the title’s shrink, helps the golfer cope with terminal cancer. While filming, Spielberg decided to improvise a poignant scene in which the golfer’s friends dig up the 18th hole, including the flag and cup, and present it to their friend in his hospital bed.

  Spielberg recalled the scene: “It was wonderful. Clu began to cry—as a person and as an actor. He tore the grass out of the hole, and he squeezed the dirt all over himself, and he thanked them for bringing this gift . . . the greatest gift he’d ever received. It was a very moving moment that came out of being loose with an idea.”