Steven Spielberg (33 page)

In 1969, Spielberg had taken the script to Twentieth Century–Fox president Richard D. Zanuck, then in his last year as head of the studio. This was Spielberg's first encounter with Zanuck, who after leaving Fox would produce
The
Sugarland
Express
and
Jaws
for Universal with David Brown. “I liked the [
Ace
Eli
]
script and I wanted to buy it,” Zanuck recalls. “One of the conditions of buying the script was that [Spielberg] wanted to direct it. I said [to his agents at CMA], ‘That's very, very unlikely.' He was trying to get his feature break; it didn't matter where. It wasn't likely because we were looking for experienced, front-ranked directors for our project. They said, ‘OK, would you at least meet him and consider him?'

“So he came into my office at Fox. We chatted for a few minutes. For me, it was just kind of a mandatory thing to get out of the way. Little did I know I would work with him so closely, and little did I know that he would turn out to be the Walt Disney–Cecil B. DeMille–D. W. Griffith of our time, all rolled into one. He looked even younger than he was, and he was pretty damn young! He looked about fifteen. I went through this obligatory meeting so I could make the deal to buy the script. He struck me as nice and intelligent, a bit shy, but I didn't see any signs of greatness out of that first meeting. I was meeting a lot of young directors. There
were
many young directors getting work then, but he seemed to be younger than
any
of those directors.”

Zanuck agreed to look at Spielberg's
Night
Gallery
episode, but it did not change his mind. However, on January 6, 1970, not long after Zanuck left the studio, Fox announced that Spielberg would direct
Ace
Eli,
with Joe Wizan producing. Shooting was scheduled for that summer on midwestern locations. Cliff Robertson, a pilot in his offscreen life, met with Spielberg and Salter and contributed ideas to the script. But the plan to have Spielberg direct fell through when producers Robert Fryer and James Cresson took over the project. Aghast at the way the young British director Michael Same had just run amok at Fox on their appalling film version of Gore Vidal's
Myra
Breckenridge,
Fryer declared, “I don't want any directors under thirty-five ever again!”

Spielberg returned to Universal early that year to resume directing television
programs.
Ace
Eli
went into production in the summer of 1971 with John Erman directing. As Zanuck says, it “turned out to be a terrible film.”
||
  What seems most grotesque about the film is its schizoid presentation of the seamy subject matter, larding over the pain with jaunty visuals mindlessly celebrating the romance of barnstorming. After Fox gave
Ace
Eli
a belated release in the spring of 1973, Spielberg publicly charged that his story had been “turned into a really sick film. They should bury it.”

 
“A
S
soon as [Spielberg] was seeing action at other studios, he was called back to Universal,” Sue Cameron of
The Hollywood Reporter
wrote after interviewing him in April 1971. Spielberg later claimed that it was the other way around: he was so fed up with freelancing that he begged Sheinberg to let him come back. There was truth in both accounts. Sheinberg had not lost faith in his future, and Medavoy confirms that Universal “perked up” when Spielberg found nibbles elsewhere: “They demanded he come back and do episodic [i.e., series television].” But Spielberg was desperate to get back to work as a director. “I'll do anything,” he said. He also promised to be less avant-garde with his camerawork, agreeing “to shoot six inches below the nostrils instead of from a hole in the ground.”

Medavoy was vehemently opposed to his young client's return to episodic television. “I said to Steven, ‘Look, it's time for you to get out of there. You can't be under contract and do television. I don't want to handle you if you're going to do that.' He said, ‘Well, I feel a loyalty to Sid. Besides that, I'm getting a check every week.' I said, ‘You're going to have to trust me that I'll be able to get you a movie and get you away from here, because this place is not going to make the kind of movies you want to make. Let me go ask permission.' And he said, ‘I can't do it.' I said, ‘Well, then, you've got to get another agent. I don't want to represent you if you're going to be doing that.' He said, ‘You can't do that to me.' I said, ‘I can.'

“I walked him over to Dick Shepherd, who was the head of the motion picture department then. I said, ‘Dick, here's your new client, Steven Spielberg. Steve, here's your new agent, Dick Shepherd. I'm outta here.' And I walked away, hoping that he would come back and say, ‘OK, let's get outta here.' But he didn't. Guy McElwaine took over [as Spielberg's agent] with Shepherd, but he gravitated toward McElwaine, and that was the end of it.

“He had a lot of loyalty to Universal, and that's where he stayed. I think in part it was the security. Steven always felt at that moment that the world was going to collapse from under him. Most creative people are insecure, and there was an enormous amount of insecurity in him.”

By the end of his apprenticeship in television, Spielberg would come to
regard his seven-year contract with Universal as “the biggest mistake of my life.” Medavoy came to that conclusion first: “I told him that, and I put my whole relationship with him on the line on that basis. It wound up being
my
biggest mistake, and in the final analysis, staying at Universal wound up being the thing that saved him. Because he wound up directing
Jaws.
”

A
MBLIN
'
cinematographer Allen Daviau remained in touch with Spielberg throughout the director's early days in episodic television. “He's never given enough credit for the battles he fought at Universal Television,” Daviau says, “because they were trying to mold him into a Universal television director, even though when he went in there he stated very firmly he wanted to do feature films and that he wasn't interested in television. They told him, ‘Just a little television to warm you up.' Well, of course, they intended to absolutely enslave him.

“There was probably no worse preparation for feature films than the episodic television of that era. Because that was really just ‘Bang it out and get it done.' There was another director at Universal who came in at about the same time—I'll not name him—and [in discussions with that director], they were always pointing to Steven as somebody who was doing it the bad way: ‘Oh, he'll come to no good end. Now, you listen to us, and you'll have a great career here.' Of course, it was the exact opposite, because Steven knew he had to fight in that atmosphere. And I mean to the extent that he had to literally put it on the line to walk out. They'd be yelling at him, ‘You'll never work again in this town' type of stuff. He stood up for it, because he didn't want to get trapped in the episodic thing.”

Spielberg's first assignment on his return to Universal was “The Daredevil Gesture,” a youth-oriented episode of
Marcus
Welby,
M.D.,
the popular new series starring veteran actor Robert Young. After that program, which aired in March 1970, Spielberg directed six shows for other series, airing between January and September of 1971. In order of shooting, they were another
Night
Gallery
segment, the lackluster “Make Me Laugh” with Godfrey Cambridge;
**
two episodes of
The
Psychiatrist;
single episodes of
The
Name
of
the
Game
and
Owen
Marshall,
Counselor
at
Law;
and the first regular-season
Columbo.
Despite his frustrations, Spielberg learned to play the studio game, working efficiently under the intense pressures of TV shooting schedules. While acquiring more confidence and finesse as a professional director, he had increasing success in using the medium of episodic television to express his own creative vision and to advance his career as a would-be feature filmmaker.

When Spielberg was assigned to
Marcus
Welby,
assistant director Joseph E. Boston recalls, “The word came down to the set that he had only done a student film” (the crew evidently didn't realize that he had directed part of
Night
Gallery).
“There must have been a dozen first assistant directors on the lot who had ambitions to direct, and many had been working for years as ADs trying to make the transition. Here's a young lad, fresh out of college, who was not going to be coming up through the ranks, but was going to start at the top. So nobody could understand what was coming down! I do remember he was on the phone a lot, and I got the impression he was usually talking about other projects. But he was accepted right away—a nice guy, no pretensions, fast and decisive, who got along.”

The “daredevil gesture” of the title is made by teenage hemophiliac Larry Bellows (Frank Webb), who insists on making a high school field trip in defiance of his overly protective mother (Marsha Hunt) but with the support of Dr. Welby. Larry, who also suffers from the trauma of divorce, “has spent most of his life in a padded nursery,” but his greatest wish is to “try to act normal, be normal.” Spielberg's empathy with Larry's feelings of being an outcast helped the director evoke a performance of seething, manic energy from Webb, a fellow graduate of Phoenix's Arcadia High School.

On a visual level, the
Welby
episode is the least flamboyant of Spielberg's episodic work. Like most TV series,
Welby
tended to look “very formulaic, because of the time pressure,” says Marty Hornstein, production manager on Spielberg's episode. “But Spielberg's stuff
did
look a little different. There would always be something a bit extra.” Spielberg's fondness for compositions with an extreme foreground-background tension helps energize the character relationships, particularly the flatly written mother-son relationship. The director's characteristically intricate choreography of actors and moving camera can be seen fully developed in a tracking shot in the high school locker room, filmed on the first day of shooting. Assistant director Boston remembers “being impressed by a lovely, flowing master shot he devised that encompassed over-shoulders and close-ups, with split-second cast movements, that enabled the camera to be in a unique position at just the right place and the right moment. After Steven turned it over to the DP [director of photography Walter Strenge] for lighting, I remember coming up to him and asking if he worked on that shot all night. He laughed and said he had just made it up!”

“Of course, they were all freaking out because it was the first day's work and he didn't get a shot by eleven or so,” Allen Daviau relates. “He goes in and pulls off this incredible master with zooms and dollies and tracks and rises and falls, and does it all in one shot. He's got the day's work done. Steven said, ‘OK, Walter, now let me get a shot with the 18mm [wide-angle lens] by the piano over here,' and Walter Strenge goes, ‘Kid, on this show we don't take the zoom off the camera.' Steven loved to tell that story.”

O
NCE
Sheinberg started getting him regular assignments, Spielberg stopped complaining—for a while—about being under contract to the studio. “Universal has done an about-face,” he told
The
Hollywood
Reporter.
 
“Thanks to [senior TV and film executives] Jennings Lang and Ned Tanen, they are not treating filmmakers as threats anymore, but as assets. I realize that Sid was up against a lot of the corporate stuff when he first got to Universal. Once he waded through that stuff, he proved to be a guy with a lot of good ideas and he will do a great job for Universal.”

The Sheinberg-Spielberg relationship has endured over the years as Spielberg's longest and most important professional loyalty. Early on, they developed “a father and son relationship, even though Sid wasn't that much older than Steve,” says
Columbo
writer-producer William Link. “Sid was very responsible for him,” recalls TV editorial chief Richard Belding. “Nobody said, ‘I don't want him,' but I think it took convincing.”

“During Steven's early career, I was his agent,” Sheinberg said in a 1988 interview. “…He didn't just go from
Night
Gallery
to
Jaws.
His career stalled at a number of occasions, and I had to restart it. I've been involved in starting or stimulating the careers of a significant number of directors, but it was different with Steven, because it wasn't just getting the first job. It was having to get a number of jobs. To the point where more than one person wondered, ‘What the hell is it with Sheinberg? Why am I being leaned on so much to use this kid?'”

Shortly after signing Spielberg to a contract, Sheinberg began the selling process by arranging a screening of
Amblin'
for some of the studio executives and the entire publicity staff. “They wanted us to realize that this young man was an important asset to the studio,” recalls publicist Orin Borsten, who worked regularly on Alfred Hitchcock films. “Of course, we were deeply impressed. There was a very great belief in him. He was anointed. He was the young golden boy, the successor to the great directors.” After that, the process by which Sheinberg went about finding television jobs for Spielberg fell “somewhere between selling and ordering,” Sheinberg wryly explained. Exactly where on that scale each job offer fell depended on the individual producer, not all of whom had the same degree of autonomy.