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  The second episode of The Psychiatrist Spielberg directed, entitled, “The Private World of Martin Dalton,” allowed him to tap into his own feelings about his parents’ divorce. The title character is a twelve-year-old boy who has slipped away from reality and inhabits his own bizarre fantasy world.

  Psychiatrist Thinnes eventually discovers that the boy’s problems are caused by his adoption and treatment by foster parents. Spielberg’s gentle direction of the twelve-year-old (played by Stephen Hudis) anticipated his later rapport with children in E.T. and Empire of the Sun.

  Both episodes of The Psychiatrist stand out because of their Dali-esque fantasy dream sequences. The surrealist painter Salvador Dali usually didn’t make “guest appearances” on episodic television, but Spielberg showed early on the classy twist he could give even the most pedestrian of material.

  The director never pooh-poohed television, however. After the success of Jaws and Close Encounters, when he was criticized for neglecting character in his films, he would point to the two episodes of The Psychiatrist he had directed as proof that he could serve a master other than plot or special effects.

  “I am as proud of ‘Par for the Course,’ a Psychiatrist I did, as any of my film work,” he said after Close Encounters was released.

  Levinson and Link were so impressed with his imaginative direction of the two Psychiatrist episodes that they tapped him to direct the season premiere of their immensely popular series, Columbo. Entitled “Murder by the Book,” the episode starred Jack Cassidy as a duplicitous mystery writer who plots the murder of his partner, played by Martin Milner. Cassidy’s crime unravels when he is blackmailed by a store owner (Barbara Colby), whose love for Cassidy is unrequited. For this episode, Spielberg enjoyed the services of Oscar-winning cinematographer Russell Metty.

  Perhaps his least successful venture in episodic television, if you don’t count the currently dismal seaQuest DSV, was his next job on Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law, an episode called “Eulogy for a Wide Receiver.” Anson Williams, who later would go on to greater fame as Potsy on Happy Days, played a football player who is given amphetamines by his hard-driving coach (Stephen Young). When the athlete dies, the coach is charged with murder, and Owen Marshall (Arthur Hill) and Jess Brandon (Lee Majors) are hired to defend him. Wielage in Video Review magazine called this episode, “Spielberg’s most mundane TV effort, with a predictable script by Richard Bluel and a leaden performance from Lee Majors.”

  After toiling in episodic television for more than two years, Spielberg finally was rewarded with a step up to the world of television movies. A friend in the Universal mailroom showed him a copy of a television movie written by Twilight Zone veteran Richard Matheson.

  The script was called Duel, and it would go on to win prizes at film festivals throughout Europe, where the American television movie was released as a feature.

  Spielberg fell in love with the script, especially after the constrictive nature of episodic television. As soon as he read the script, he, laid siege to the film’s producer, George Eckstien, who gave in to the persistent young director.

  Despite its supernatural flavor, Duel was based on an incident that had actually happened to the writer when an irate truck driver tried to drive him off the road. In the film, we never see the identity of the truck driver who chases the car’s driver, played by Dennis Weaver, through a western canyon.

  Duel had a shooting schedule of only nine days, and for the first time in his career—although certainly not the last—Spielberg went over schedule, but only by three days. He did stay within his budget of $300,000. The film turned out to be a bonanza for both Universal, which earned a whopping $9 million from its European theatrical release, and for Spielberg, who earned the right to direct his first full-length feature, The Sugarland Express.

  Duel has many themes which would later be explored in greater detail in the bigger budget Sugarland Express, and even in Jaws and Close Encounters. Weaver, like the characters in Jaws and Close Encounters, is a middle-class Everyman who encounters a menacing force, a gasoline tanker bent on crushing him for no discernible reason. It’s the same mindless menace as the shark that devours Robert Shaw in Jaws or the unseen aliens who sweep up Melinda Dillon’s four-year-old son in Close Encounters.

  In addition to breaking box-office records in Europe, the film won numerous prestigious awards, including the Cariddi D’Oro for best directorial debut at the esteemed Taormina Film Festival in Rome and the Grand Prix at the Festival du Cinema Fantastique in France.

  In the United States, the film also did not go unhonored. It received Emmy nominations for best cinematography and best sound editing, winning in the latter category.

  But perhaps the most appreciated accolade came from his ultimate hero, the man he often credits with making him want to become a filmmaker in the first place. Seeing director David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia as a child, Spielberg said years later, convinced him his future lay in the world of cinema. So it must have been especially gratifying when the great Lean himself condescended to watch a television movie and give Duel this endorsement:

  Immediately I knew that here was a very bright new director. 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. Just loves making films. He is entertaining his teenage self—and what is wrong with that?

  Years later, Spielberg, with amazing temerity, asked his idol to direct a half-hour segment of his new television anthology series, Amazing Stories. Lean took the offer as a joke but agreed to sign on—if he were allowed six months to shoot the thirty-minute episode!

  Although it was a love-hate affair at the time, Spielberg today remains grateful for the lessons he learned from the small screen. “Television taught me how to be a professional within a very chaotic business. Making movies is an unnatural act. Really, if God had meant for man to make movies, Thomas Edison would have been born 1,000 years ago!” he said.

  Even the drawbacks of television directing had a salutary effect on his evolving talent as a filmmaker. “I remember that when I was first starting out, I used a lot of fancy shots,” he recalled a decade later. “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.”

  Grateful as he may have been for the lessons he learned, by the end of 1971 Spielberg was tired of episodic television, taking over characters already created by someone else, having to adapt his style to the established style of the series (except when the unwary producer let him get away with slipping in visual references to Salvador Dali). Toiling in the salt mines of episodic television wasn’t all blood, sweat, and tears, but Duel had given him a taste of directing an original script, without any baggage from previous episodes. He liked being an auteur, even on the small scale offered by the small screen.

  After rejecting several television series in 1971, he learned that the producer of the classic horror fantasy show One Step Beyond was planning a television movie called Something Evil. The plot of the film intrigued Spielberg immensely, and some of its themes later would show up, considerably enhanced, in Poltergeist.

  The horror story followed an urban family that moves to the remote Pennsylvania countryside to get away from the evils of the big city, only to find even worse evil, a Satanic presence, lurking in the boondocks. For a television movie, Something Evil boasted an A-list star of the time, Sandy Dennis, who had won an Oscar for her work in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? only a few years earlier. Veteran character actor Darren McGavin played her husband with Johnny Whittaker and Sandy and Debbie Lempert as their children. If you don’t count Joan Crawford, who was all but washed up by the time Spielberg directed her in the Night Gallery pilot, Den
nis was the first established star he ever worked with. It would be years before he cast anyone but relative unknowns in his films. As Spielberg later would say (and recant), “I don’t want to work with anyone who’s been on the cover of the Rolling Stone.”

  Something Evil also was important to Spielberg’s career because it was the first time he worked with cinematographer Bill Butler. Four years later he would call on Butler to shoot Jaws.

  After Something Evil, Spielberg spent almost a year in the wilderness, vegetating in development hell as several independent projects he was developing failed to get off the ground. After a year of frustration and underemployment, series television apparently didn’t look so bad after all, and he reluctantly agreed to shoot a pilot produced by his old mentors, Levinson and Link. At least with a pilot, he wouldn’t be forced to take on some other writer-director’s hand-me-down characters and concept. The projected series for which he made the pilot was called Savage. It revolved around the world of network news. Its title character, television reporter Paul Savage, was played by Martin Landau, costarring with his then wife, Barbara Bain. The year before, the couple left the immensely popular show, Mission: Impossible.

  Savage was designed to be the two stars’ comeback series. It wasn’t. Despite Spielberg’s growing talent as a director, the pilot failed to get picked up as a weekly series.

  But the failure of Savage soon was forgotten among the exhilaration that ensued when he finally made it to the big time, feature film directing.

  The film was called The Sugarland Express. At last, Spielberg was free from the artistic limitations of the small screen, which he detested enough not to return to for almost two decades.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Big Time,

  At Last

  SPIELBERG TYPICALLY PREFERS FANTASY OVER reality, so it’s not a coincidence that only two of his films have been based on real-life incidents. Coincidentally, the two films bookend his feature film career: The Sugarland Express and Schindler’s List.

  His feature debut was based on a dramatic incident that intrigued him when he first read about it in newspapers. A woman who had lost custody of her children persuaded her husband to break out of prison and help her get them back from foster parents. The couple lead the cops on a comic chase as they make their way to the kids’ new home, Sugarland, Texas.

  The film ends in a very un-Spielbergian way—in tragedy.

  As the director capsulized the story: “It was about these two young people who had their baby taken from them and were then pursued across Texas by the entire law enforcement division for some very small, petty crimes. It was a media event that just escalated. In Texas there is a posse theory. If a fellow officer is in trouble, everybody, all of his colleagues, jump into their cars and fall in behind to try and help the guy out. In this case ninety police cars were involved in a bumper to bumper pursuit that was strung out 150 miles across Texas.

  “And in the end, they actually hired sharpshooters who killed the young man. In the budget of my picture, I could only afford forty or so, but still people could hardly believe it.”

  After reading Spielberg’s script, Zanuck and Brown hired him to direct it, but called in veteran writers Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins to rewrite the script so thoroughly that the then cloutless director ended up with only a “story by” credit.

  In his 1992 monograph, Philip M. Taylor, a film professor at the University of Leeds, England, claimed that the ego-less director was “delighted” by the job Barwood and Robbins did on his script. Taylor used the term “tightened up” to describe the tinkering. Taking the sting out of the situation was perhaps the fact that Barwood and Robbins were old friends of Spielberg’s from film school days. Obviously, there were no hard feelings since three years later Spielberg would cast the two writers in bit parts as the missing Air Force pilots who emerge from the mother ship in Close Encounters. Remarkably unterritorial at such an age when other Young Turks are sowing their wild oats, Spielberg praised his friends’ revisions and said, “I believe I’ve gotten to the point where I can appreciate a good piece of material and translate it into film without my own ego showing up on the screen.” Making up for the slight, Spielberg was awarded the best screenplay award with Robbins and Barwood at he 1974 Cannes Film Festival.

  Goldie Hawn, an Oscar winner for Cactus Flower and a huge box-office star at the time, agreed to work with a tyro director because the role intrigued her. Despite her commercial success, she was tired of playing dim-witted eccentrics. The Sugarland Express offered her her first opportunity to play a more substantive character, but safely within the confines of the eccentric, wacky screen persona she had patented so successfully.

  Hawn was both a blessing and a curse. Her participation gave the film instant credibility—not to mention financing. The studio in fact refused to make the film without her, and she agreed to star for only a fraction of her usual acting fee, in this case $300,000 plus 10 percent of the profits. But all the baggage she brought along, going all the way back to her days on Laugh-In, drove the director up the wall. Reshooting Hawn’s mannered takes made the film go over budget.

  “I averaged about four printed takes, and we went over budget in raw stock and printing $50,000 because of that. But the thing of it is, it was so important for Goldie because she never played a consistently dramatic role before this and to get rid of all of Goldie’s cutesy-pie crust, I had to print a lot of takes and then in the cutting room select the takes that were the most subtle,” he said.

  Still, he gave her high marks for her attempts to escape her comedic roots. “I must say that she’s totally different than she’s ever been before. She really kept all that sugarplum stuff to a minimum.”

  William Atherton played her husband and reluctant accomplice. After Hawn’s character bullies Atherton’s into hijacking a highway patrol car to get them to Sugarland, the police trail them for miles in a squad of cop cars. By now, the image has become a cliche in everything from Die Hard to police shows, but back in 1974, the image of a dozen squad cars in pursuit was original and indelible.

  The critics thought so too. The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, usually the Al Capone of film critics, raved, “This film is one of the most phenomenal directorial debut films in the history of movies. It’s a debut any director might envy.”

  Judith Crist of New York magazine went even more overboard: “The triumph of The Sugarland Express goes beyond its technical accomplishments and substance to Spielberg’s own viewpoint. He has held up a mirror and showed us our baser selves clearly and truly, to powerful effect.”

  Actually, if Crist had been more familiar with the then unknown director’s background, she might have commented that he had held up a mirror to his own past. For all the later accusations that he was merely a manufacturer of roller-coaster rides, The Sugarland Express was his first, but certainly not his last, film to deal with the theme of a child’s separation from parents.

  He was mining the emotions of his own traumatic reaction to his parents’ divorce ten years earlier when he explored the theme of a child being yanked from his parents.

  Despite its deeply felt emotion and the critical hosannas, The Sugarland Express was a box-office disappointment, grossing only $6.5 million domestically, with a worldwide take of $11 million. The glowing reviews failed to cheer up Spielberg in the wake of public rejection. “It did get good reviews, but I would have given away all those reviews for a bigger audience. The movie just broke even; it didn’t make any money,” he said.

  Ameliorating the pain somewhat was the real affection he felt for his bosses, the film’s producers. “Zanuck and Brown were probably the best experience any first-time-out director could hope for. They allowed me to make the picture my way. They allowed me to cut the picture my way, and when I was six days over schedule, they protected me from studio heads,” he said.

  Fortunately for Spielberg, the film’s poor showing at the box office didn’t sour the producers on their director. A year
later, while loitering around Zanuck-Brown’s production office at Universal, he spotted the galleys of a yet to be published novel about a really mean fish. Spielberg, a notorious nonreader, was intrigued enough to pick up the book and actually skim through it. It was a slim volume about a preposterously large shark that terrorizes a New England beach resort. The book was by a first-time novelist, Peter Benchley.

  Zanuck and Brown had already paid $175,000 for the film rights to the unpublished book on their desk and had also already assigned a director, Dick Richards.

  “I happened to be in their office one day, swiped a copy of Jaws in galley form, took it home and read it over the weekend and asked to do it,” Spielberg recalled.

  Spielberg liked the novel, but with reservations. He would later deride it as “Peyton Place at sea” after rewriting Benchley’s film adaptation. Despite the failure of The Sugarland Express, Brown was smitten enough with Spielberg to dump Richards, a more established director, and hand over the project to a twenty-six-year-old film school dropout.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Bonanza Time

  WITHOUT TOO MUCH EXAGGERATION, YOU could say that with Jaws, Spielberg won the cinematic equivalent of the lottery, the Kentucky Derby, and the Irish Sweepstakes all rolled into one. Within a month of its release, it had taken in $60 million at the box office, an unheard of amount at the time.

  After the film had grossed nearly half a billion dollars, making it the number-one movie of all time, he was asked by a reporter if its success had in any way intimidated him.

  Spielberg said, “It’s strange, because at first it had a very negative effect on me. I thought it was a fluke. No movie had ever grossed a hundred million dollars in the U.S. and Canada before. It was regarded by everybody as a kind of carnival freak. So I began believing it was some kind of freak and agreeing when people said it could never happen again.”