Steven Spielberg (28 page)

“Why do such men want to cast their lot with a young man who is working on his own, with his own production company? Why are they willing to do this work for nothing? Because they feel that Steve Spielberg has the ability to become an important and noticed director, and because they want to help him…. Steve looks more like a college cheerleader than an experienced film director, but he is impressive to watch, and might be on his way somewhere.”

“Every film is an experience,” Spielberg told Thronson. “I'll be learning when I'm sixty years old. I've learned more out on my own than I'll ever learn inside a studio.”

The sheer professionalism of Spielberg's approach to filmmaking impressed the student reporter: “At one point in the proceedings, the company spent almost two hours on eight takes of a sequence that is approximately thirty seconds in length and requires one actor to approach a group of his fellows and say, ‘Any of you guys want a Coke?' He pauses to follow with, ‘Well, I only thought I'd ask.' Through this brief sequence, the camera is moving rapidly, dollying in, swiveling around, and zooming in on the subject. If the director is a good one, he won't let the scene end until it is right, and sometimes that takes a while.”

But it was not long before the production came to an abrupt halt. The shooting of the beginning and ending sequences—the start and finish of the race—was scheduled over a weekend near the ocean. Spielberg and Burris had recruited a sizable turnout of bicycle riders and spectators. “They bet the farm on the last weekend of shooting,” Daviau remembers, “and it didn't just rain, it
monsooned
that weekend.”

“We basically ran out of money,” Burris says. “We were dead in the water. I've got pictures of our Chapman crane sitting in the rain. It cost $750 a day, including the driver. We got some pretty good footage [before that weekend]—it was all terrific, but we didn't get enough. We got all the establishing stuff, the racing stuff, six thousand to seven thousand feet of film [a little more than an hour of film], but we never really got into the dramatic stuff.”

“When that money was gone, Steven was very depressed,” Daviau says. “After
Slipstream,
he tried to do a little 16mm project with dolls that Serge was shooting. I just knew he had to get
something
off the ground.”

Citizen
Steve,
a biographical film his wife, Amy Irving, made as a surprise present for Spielberg's birthday in 1987, includes a forty-five-second montage
of shots from
Slipstream,
which it half-jokingly calls “the Mozart angle” in Spielberg's life, “the unfinished symphony, the unfinished film.” The laboratory that Spielberg and Burris used for
Slipstream,
Consolidated Film Industries (CFI), took a lien on the footage because the filmmakers couldn't make their payments, and in 1987 the footage still was sitting on a shelf at the lab in Hollywood. It since has been bought back by Spielberg. Unhappy as the fate of
Slipstream
was, the dynamic and lyrical scenes of bicycle racing assembled by Daviau give tantalizing glimpses of Spielberg's youthful promise.

Before the project fell apart, Spielberg gave a characteristically unpretentious and self-aware statement about his filmmaking philosophy to student reporter Jo Marie Bagala: “I don't want to make films like Antonioni or Fellini. I don't want just the elite. I want everybody to enjoy my films. For instance, if an Antonioni film played in Sioux City, Iowa, the people would flock to see [Disney's 1967 fantasy]
The
Gnome-Mobile.
But I do want my films to have a purpose! I just want to make pictures in which I say something, something I am close to and can convey to the audience. If, in doing so, I create a style, then that's my style. I'm trying to be original, but at times, even originality tends to become stylized. I feel that right now the worst thing for me to do at twenty is to develop a style.”

S
HORTLY
after Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968, the networks sent out an urgent directive to their suppliers to cut back on violence in TV shows. Spielberg happened to drop in on Chuck Silvers when Silvers was frantically trying to deal with the problem.

“He came into the office and he was all charged up talking about something he was doing,” Silvers recalls. “I cut him short. I told him, ‘Steven, I'm in the middle of something here. I don't have any time, because this [program] is going on the air in a couple of days. I have to remove all this stuff.' I won't say I blew up or hollered at him. I did it with a kind of biting tone. I said, ‘I have a big problem I have to solve
now.
I
don't
have
time
to
listen,
Steven.
I don't want to see any more of your dailies. I don't want to hear your stories. I don't want to see your assemblies.' The look on his face was like I'd hit him or something. ‘Steven, the next thing I look at from you is going to be a 35mm color composite film'—which means a finished film. ‘When you have that, you call me.'

“I didn't see him for a few months. Then I got a call from him on a Sunday. He said, ‘I've got something for you to look at.' I asked him, ‘How long is it?' ‘Twenty-six minutes.' ‘OK, I'll book a room this afternoon.' I suppose I felt guilty. He wouldn't go into the projection room. He was too nervous, or he didn't want any questions thrown at him. I went into the projection room alone and I viewed
Amblin
'.
I looked at what I still feel is the perfect motion picture.”

E
VEN
though Spielberg was far from a beginner—after all, he had been making films for half of his twenty-two years—
Amblin
'
became its young director's official “debut” film when it was released theatrically in December 1968. Eloquently wordless, this short film tells the bittersweet story of a girl and boy who come together but ultimately drift apart while hitchhiking from the desert to the sea in southern California.

The uncredited godmother of
Amblin
'
was Julie Raymond, who put Spielberg together with aspiring producer Denis Hoffman, with whom she had worked at Pacific Title. Nine years older than Spielberg, Hoffman was running the optical and title company Cinefx. He also managed a rock group called October Country and was looking for a film project that could feature their music. Early in 1968, shortly after Spielberg's twenty-first birthday, Raymond took Hoffman to lunch with the young filmmaker.

Hoffman's first impression of Spielberg was that he was “very aggressive, charming, and dedicated. He ate, breathed, and slept film. His dream was to be a director, plain and simple. He said he'd do anything if I'd put up the money. Steve was a disarming person. He had a kind of childlike quality about him, a naïveté. You wanted to help him. It's not an accident Spielberg is where he is, it's not luck, it's all a plan he had. He's not only a genius in filmmaking, he's a genius in promoting himself. He and I had a great ambition to make films. The truth is I helped him out because I wanted to get someplace.
I
wanted to get into production. And I did it as a friend to help
him
out, because I liked him and he needed help.”

The first project they discussed was
Slipstream.

“He needed about $5,000 to finish it. He'd gone to his dad and his dad had not given him the money. The photography was gorgeous, but what I recollect of it was boring—a lot of people riding on a lot of bicycles. It went on forever and it didn't excite me. Probably because of my ego, I told him, ‘I'm really not interested in completing something.'

“I told Steve I wanted to see something in writing. I wanted to see a treatment or a script. He presented me with two or three different projects, three-or four-page treatments. He first proposed a short film about a drive-in movie theater. It took place at nighttime. People left their cars to get candy, and it was about what they saw along the way. When they came back, they couldn't find their cars—the cars were all Volkswagens. It was a cute premise, but it cost too much, and my music group couldn't fit into it. I thought he would have an easier time as a first-time director if he did not have to handle dialogue. I told him, ‘Let's do something that doesn't require so many sets, so many people. Let's do something without sound, with no dialogue. We're going to be on location, without a lot of equipment. It will be easier. And let's do something that could use my music.'

“The next script was tailor-made. I picked
Amblin
'
because it did not have any dialogue and the premise was very timely. Steve was not a rock 'n' roll fan, but he went off and wrote it to our specifications. He did the story, but I set the guidelines. We had several meetings; it was a cooperative effort.
Amblin'
was not done as a labor of love for him.
Amblin'
was done because he needed a vehicle to become a director.”

Spielberg has described
Amblin'
as “an attack of crass commercialism. I had made a lot of little films in l6mm that were getting me nowhere. They were very esoteric. I wanted to shoot something that could prove to people who finance movies that I could certainly look like a professional movie-maker.
Amblin'
was a conscious effort to break into the business and become successful by proving to people I could move a camera and compose nicely and deal with lighting and performances. The only challenge that's close to my heart about
Amblin'
is I was able to tell a story about a boy and a girl with no dialogue. That was something I set out to do before I found out I couldn't afford sound even if I wanted it.”

B
URRIS
and Spielberg had learned a great deal about economizing from their sorry experience with
Slipstream.
Or at least they had learned how to manipulate an inexperienced would-be producer. “The original budget they made up [for
Amblin'
] was for $3,000 or $4,000,” Hoffman recalled. “They were cutting a lot of corners.” Realizing that figure was unrealistically low, Hoffman authorized further expenditures until his total outlay reached about $20,000, including costs for lab work at Cinefx, CFI, and Ryder Sound Service; 35mm release prints by Technicolor; and several thousand dollars' worth of advertising and publicity.

Amblin'
was shot almost entirely on natural locations in southern California, but Hoffman also wangled the use of Jack Palance's beach house at Malibu for the ending sequence and supplied his own small soundstage at Cinefx for the filming of a night exterior scene. That scene of the two characters making love in a sleeping bag by the light of a campfire was done in the studio to cut down on location expenses and so cinematographer Allen Daviau could better control the lighting conditions.

Everyone involved in the film, including Spielberg, worked for nothing but screen credit; it was a showcase film for all twenty-five of them, including the five members of October Country. Spielberg found the lead actress, redheaded gamine Pamela McMyler, in the
Academy
Players
Directory.
A graduate of the Pasadena Playhouse, she had played a small part in
The
Boston
Strangler.
The male lead, Richard Levin, was working as a librarian at the Beverly Hills Public Library. He bore a striking resemblance to the director, which helped underscore the autobiographical undertones of the character.

Spielberg has claimed Hoffman “wanted the possessory credit. That means the film said: Denis Hoffman's
Amblin'.
I said, ‘Fine!' I took the money and I made the film.” But there is no possessory credit on
Amblin',
which bills Hoffman as producer and Burris as “in charge of production,” while listing as its final credit: “written and directed by Steven Spielberg.” Hoffman felt people who wrote about the film unfairly emphasized only Spielberg's creative
contribution and “made me out to be a guy with more money than brains. I discovered Spielberg. I put up the money for his movie. I took care of the cast and crew. I paid all those bills. And when all was said and done, I was forgotten about. I was the producer.”

O
N
the first day of filming
Amblin',
July 6, 1968, Burris became alarmed when he found Spielberg on the Cinefx soundstage “shooting a long tracking shot of matches going up to a campfire. It made sense in terms of the story, but he wouldn't tell us what he was doing. I knew that film was our most expensive commodity, and I thought if the whole film goes like this, we're going to use ten thousand feet of film. I hollered, ‘Cut!' Steve started going crazy: ‘Nobody says “Cut” on
my
set!' I learned my lesson. I've never yelled ‘Cut' on a set since. I don't think he has ever forgiven me.”

“The first weekend, Denis almost canceled the whole project,” Daviau reports. “We shot the campfire scene that Saturday and Sunday, and by the end of Saturday we shot I think three or four times our promised allotment of film for that day. Denis said, ‘This is it. We're going to pull the plug right here. I can't afford this.' We said, ‘All right, we'll be good, we'll be good!' And the next day we were very careful and shot very little film so we could get out to the desert and start shooting the real thing.”

Once those tests of his directorial authority were out of the way, Spielberg seemed to be in his element. For the next eight days, filming shifted to locations in the desert near Pearblossom, north of Los Angeles. “It was a hundred and five degrees in July in Pearblossom,” Daviau recalls. “It was not meant for human beings to be out there with film cameras.” Despite that physical ordeal, Spielberg was “wonderful” with everyone involved in the production, Hoffman said: “These were a bunch of kids, absolute amateurs. Steven works with people extremely well. He has an immediate rapport with anybody. It doesn't matter who you are, he'll direct you. Also, he does his homework and his preparation.” Spielberg even documented the making of
Amblin'
with his own 8mm camera.