Steven Spielberg (37 page)

O
N
November 22, 1963, the fantasy and science-fiction writer Richard Matheson was playing golf in Simi Valley, California, when he heard the news that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Matheson and his golfing partner, writer Jerry Sohl, stopped playing and headed back toward Los Angeles. Matheson recalls that as Sohl drove through a narrow canyon, a truck began tailgating them at a dangerously high rate of speed: “I'm sure the emotion with which I reacted to that experience was so much more extreme because we were going through the trauma of the Kennedy assassination. Partially we were terrified, and partially infuriated, turning our rage about the Kennedy assassination into rage at the truck driver. We were screaming out the window, but the truck driver's window was closed and he couldn't hear it. My friend had to pull up, skidding onto one of these dirt places [turnouts] in the road. In the writer's mind, once you survive death, you start thinking of a story. The story idea occurred to me and I jotted it down on the back of an envelope. I tried to sell it to
The
Fugitive
and several other TV series. They thought, ‘There's not enough there.' So I thought, ‘Guess I've got to write it as a story.'”

Matheson's gripping short story about a battle to the death between a truck and a car, “Duel,” was not written until seven years later. The author,
whose scriptwriting credits also include several classic
Twilight
Zone
episodes, adapted “Duel” for Spielberg's TV movie version, which aired on November 13, 1971, as ABC's Saturday night Movie of the Weekend. The critical praise and the reaction from those in the industry who saw
Duel
vaulted the director, a month before his twenty-fifth birthday, into the leading ranks of Hollywood filmmakers.

Stephen King has given a vivid appreciation of the electrifying visual and aural qualities Spielberg brought to Matheson's story: “In this film, a psychotic trucker in a big ten-wheeler pursues Dennis Weaver over what seems to be at least a million miles of California highways. We never actually see the trucker (although we do see a beefy arm cocked out of the cab window once, and at another point we see a pair of pointy-toed cowboy boots on the far side of the truck), and ultimately it is the truck itself, with its huge wheels, its dirty windshield like an idiot's stare, and its somehow hungry bumpers, which becomes the monster—and when Weaver is finally able to lead it to an embankment and lure it over the edge, the noise of its ‘death' becomes a series of chilling Jurassic roars … the sound, we think, a
Tyran
nosaurus
rex
would make going slowly down into a tar pit. And Weaver's response is that of any self-respecting caveman: he screams, shrieks, cuts capers, literally dances for joy.
Duel
is a gripping, almost painfully suspenseful rocket ride of a movie.”

D
UEL
was a perfect match of story and director. Spielberg has always tended to place his protagonist—“Mr. Everyday Regular Fella”—in an extraordinary situation testing his abilities to survive and overcome the tedium and terror of mundane reality. Spielberg remembered his reaction when his secretary, Nona Tyson, showed him Matheson's story in the April 1971 issue of
Playboy:
“I was just knocked out by it. And I wanted to make it into a feature film.”

By the time Spielberg read “Duel,” Universal already had bought the film rights for George Eckstein, a producer on the Robert Stack segments of
The
Name
of
the
Game
TV series. Matheson's magazine story was brought to Eckstein by Steven Bochco, the young writer and future TV producer credited with writing Spielberg's
Columbo
episode. “I hired Dick Matheson to do a script,” adds Eckstein. “He and I developed the script together.” Matheson at first resisted Universal's offer, “Because I didn't see how you could get a whole movie out of it—it was just one guy in a car. At one point I suggested having his wife aboard so he would have somebody to talk to. Thank God they paid me no attention.”

“We were all facing deadlines,” Eckstein relates. “I was looking for a director. The script was floating around. Steven Spielberg got ahold of the script and came in my office and said he wanted to do it. I knew Sid [Sheinberg] was very high on him, and I had seen
Amblin';
Sid had shown it to all the producers on the lot. It was charming, and it was wonderful that a
twenty-one-year-old kid had directed this, but it was just a nice little picture. There were no hints of genius.

“What most impressed me about Spielberg was that his idea of how to do
Duel
was very much in sync with my idea of how to do it, which was to shoot primarily from the point of view of the driver, to keep the camera inside the car and not drop back, or to drop back as seldom as possible. I also was impressed with Steven's eagerness to do the project. You work with a lot of directors, it's a job, but he was
excited.
His enthusiasm was infectious for everybody who worked with him. And he did his homework. He was a young director you knew could shoot a show in the time he was given.”

Some consideration was given to making
Duel
as a theatrical film, but that proved a hard sell both to the studio and to creative talent. Universal told Spielberg he could make it as a feature if Gregory Peck would agree to play the lead, but the veteran actor refused. Matheson considers that fortunate, because making
Duel
at theatrical length “wouldn't have worked. Even extending this, as they did later, to a theatrical didn't work. They had to add a lot, [eighteen] minutes. It was so tight at seventy-three minutes, it was perfect. You can't expand perfection.”
*

After being rebuffed by Peck, Eckstein took the project to Barry Diller, ABC's vice president in charge of movies for television (Diller later became a prominent film studio executive). At first, recalls Eckstein, “Barry felt it wouldn't sustain a ninety-minute time slot, which equaled seventy-three minutes of film.” But then Diller watched Spielberg's
Psychiatrist
episode “Par for the Course,” and that convinced him Spielberg could make
Duel
work as a Movie of the Week.

T
HE
greatest directorial challenge Spielberg faced in preparing
Duel
was to avoid visual repetition, because the film is essentially one long chase. The problem was exacerbated by the tight shooting schedule (sixteen days) and the budgetary necessity of shooting much of the film on a fifteen-mile stretch of road winding through six arid canyons along Highway 14, thirty to forty miles north of Los Angeles (near the stretch of desert highway where Spielberg shot
Amblin').
But the young director of
Duel
proved to be “an incredibly inventive guy,” says the film's editor, Frank Morriss. “Many sequences were shot in the same area, going around the same turns, the same hills, the
same road. It was never apparent in the picture. We were able to use fifteen different angles of the truck going around a curve and you do not notice it.”

Already accustomed to using storyboards to preplan his episodic TV shows, Spielberg went one step further with his innovative storyboard for
Duel:
“I had an artist paint an entire map, as if a helicopter camera had photographed the entire road where the chase was taking place. And then that entire map had little sentences—like, ‘This is where the car passes the truck,' or ‘This is where the truck passes the car and then the car passes the truck.' And I was able to wrap this map around the motel room [in Lancaster where he stayed during location shooting], and I just crossed things off. When we were shooting, I'd try to progress eight or ten inches on the map—sometimes two feet if we had an exceptionally good day—until the entire map was shot. That overview gave
me
a geographical sense, a lot of help in knowing where to spend the time, where to do the most coverage, where to make a scene really sing out.” Spielberg also had storyboard drawings of every shot on IBM computer cards, pinned to a bulletin board in his motel room. Each day he took his quota of cards for reference while shooting, tearing them up when the shots were completed.

Filmed between September 13 and October 4, 1971, and rushed to air only five weeks later,
Duel
had a production cost of about $750,000, according to Eckstein, not the $425,000 Spielberg has claimed.
†
The young director was surrounded by a highly experienced crew, including cinematographer Jack A. Marta (who received
Duel
's only Emmy nomination), first assistant director Jim Fargo (who later became a director), stunt coordinator Carey Loftin, and unit production manager Wallace Worsley. “Steven was wonderful to work with,” says Eckstein. “He was very firm in his opinions. He had very few doubts. He commanded respect in everybody, which was rare in a twenty-three-year-old [
sic
]. He was not deferential, but he was respectful of the Jack Martas, the people with a lot of experience. And the people around him had as much respect for him. They respected him and they were a little bit in awe of him.”

A dissenting view on Spielberg's talents and his relationship with the crew was offered by Carey Loftin, who also drove the truck in
Duel.
The crusty action-movie veteran was not terribly impressed by the young director. “At that point, I don't think he had any strong points,” Loftin recalls. “He was a kid. To be honest, I thought anybody could have done it better. I could have done better. I'm too old to lie. I disagreed with quite a few things on it.”

One of the most chilling aspects of
Duel
is that the driver's face is never seen. We see only his sinister-looking cowboy boots and his arm, disingenuously waving Weaver into the path of an oncoming car. Spielberg followed Matheson's lead in declining to psychoanalyze the truck driver, understanding that it is more frightening to contemplate the existence of unmotivated
evil than to ascribe it to some mundane cause. The truck and its driver are as enigmatic in their fathomless malevolence as the shark in
Jaws
or the
Tyrannosaurus
rex
in
Jurassic
Park.
But Loftin thought, “To do all this for no reason, it didn't make sense. If you have action, you gotta have a reason, or that's a stunt show.”

During the first day of shooting, Loftin approached Spielberg and suggested that a scene be added to give the truck driver a clear motivation for seeking revenge. “Look at the truck,” Spielberg told him. “It's beat up. It's terrible-looking. It's painted to look worse than it is. You're a dirty, rotten, no-good son of a bitch.”

“Kid,” replied Loftin, “you hired the right man.”

In what Eckstein remembers as “the casting session with the truck,” production manager Wally Worsley “brought a bunch of trucks for Steve and me to look at on the back lot. Some looked new, but Steve wanted a truck that looked like it had been around, a street-smart truck.” Spielberg chose a battered Peterbilt gasoline tanker truck, which he described as “the smallest one, but the only one that had a great snout. I thought that with some remodeling we could really get it to look human. I had the art director add two tanks to both sides of the doors—they're hydraulic tanks, but you ordinarily wouldn't have two. They were like the ears of the truck. Then I put dead bugs all over the windshield so you'd have a tougher time seeing the driver. Dead grasshoppers in the grille. And I gave the truck a bubble bath of motor oil and chunky-black and crud-brown paint.”

Casting the lead human character in
Duel
proved far more difficult. Besides Peck, at least three other actors turned down the role of David Mann, including David Janssen, star of TV's
The
Fugitive.
Also considered was Dustin Hoffman, the young star of
The
Graduate
and
Midnight
Cowboy.
“We were going after feature people,” Eckstein says. “We were turned down ‘because I don't do television.' We went through name after name. We wanted Everyman, with a vulnerable quality. We were very lucky to wind up with Dennis Weaver.” Matheson reports that Universal “finally had to shut down [its TV series]
McCloud
to get Weaver.”

Spielberg was delighted at the chance to work with the actor who had delivered such a memorably quirky performance as the cowering, sex-crazed motel clerk in Orson Welles's
Touch
of
Evil.
In
Duel,
Weaver perfectly embodies an Everyman for the Age of Anxiety, a tremulous worm who turns “Valiant” (as the model of his little red car is ironically named) and hysterically accepts the challenge of an irrational highway duel to prove his dubious manhood.
‡
One of the few major flaws in
Duel
is that David Mann's emasculation is laid out verbally in such a heavy-handed fashion, through voiceovers and other dramatic devices. There is no need to refer to his home life, since the theme is implicit in the action. The problem was exacerbated when the scene was added for the expanded version showing the henpecked Mann
arguing with his unhappy wife about another man's display of sexual interest in her at a party the night before.

If he were to remake
Duel,
Spielberg acknowledged in 1982, “I'd make it a little tougher, I'd take all the narration out, all of Dennis Weaver's inner monologues and probably most of the dialogue…. I objected to the amount of dialogue the network imposed on the show. They forced the producer, George Eckstein, and the writer, Richard Matheson, to keep adding narration internalizing Dennis Weaver so the audience would understand his deepest fears. I don't believe you need that.”
§