Steven Spielberg (39 page)

Still stymied in his efforts to persuade Universal to let him make
The
Sugarland
Express,
Spielberg continued to look elsewhere for his opportunity to break out of television. Following his abortive attempt to direct
Ace
Eli
for Fox, the next film announced as Spielberg's feature “debut” was
McKlusky,
a Burt Reynolds car-chase picture written by William W. Norton Sr. for United Artists. Already in danger of being typecast, the director of
Duel
began preproduction on
McKlusky
in February 1972. Spielberg met
with Reynolds, started casting other parts, and scouted locations in the South, but then “realized it wasn't something that I wanted to do for a first film. I didn't want to start my career as a hard-hat, journeyman director. I wanted to do something that was a little more personal.” By April, Joseph Sargent had signed on to replace Spielberg as director of
McKlusky,
released in 1973 as
White
Lightning.

The next, and last, TV movie Spielberg directed was
The
Savage
Report,
which aired as
Savage
on March 31, 1973.
||
Dealing with what later would become known as “tabloid television,” Spielberg's NBC World Premiere movie starred Martin Landau as crusading TV political journalist Paul Savage and Barbara Bain (Landau's wife and
Mission:
Impossible
costar) as Savage's producer. The teleplay by Mark Rodgers, William Link, and Richard Levinson revolved around the blackmailing of a nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court (Barry Sullivan). “Universal had a commitment to do a replacement series, and NBC was in bed with Universal—anything Sheinberg wanted to do got on the air, in most cases,” Link says. “Sheinberg came to Dick and me and said, ‘I've got an old script [by Rodgers] you might be able to adapt. Let's do it as a pilot.' We didn't like that script. We rewrote it, but there's just so much you can do—it was sow's purse time. We told Sid, ‘The only way we can make this is if we have a brilliant director. Get Spielberg.'

“Steve reads the script and agrees with us—it stinks. We called Sid and said, ‘Why don't you call Steve and hotbox him. Get him to do it.' We never told Steve. I remember it was on a Sunday, a rainy day, and Steve had a meeting on the twelfth floor [with Sheinberg]. Dick and I crossed our fingers. Steve came back almost in tears. We asked, ‘What happened?' We were playing dumb because we had set this up. He said Sheinberg gave him a big hype, bending his arm that he had to do the script. Steve had made the mistake of saying that he wasn't in the Universal business, he was in the Steven Spielberg business. Maybe he got a little angry. Sheinberg hit the roof and threatened to put him on suspension. They had a very good relationship, but Steve was hurt by that. We told him, ‘You ought to do it, Steve. You don't want to be on suspension.' I don't think we admitted to him that we had Sheinberg sell him on it. In a way he was right—the script is not very good, but he did a brilliant job.”

Martin Landau considered the show “ahead of its time” as a critique of TV news, and claimed it never led to a series because “we got shot down for the wrong reasons. It was clearly political. The network news department took exception to our show. I got a call from Sid Sheinberg and he said, ‘It's the best thing we've got, NBC is crazy about it, it's on the air.' And it went from there to being buried in a week's time.”
Daily
Variety
reviewer Tony Scott, on the other hand, felt the seventy-two-minute movie would have trouble
generating a series because it “barely scrapes by in [the] plot department.” But he added that
Savage
“generates interest thanks to Steven Spielberg's superior and often inventive direction, and character studies.”

R
ENEWING
his campaign to make a feature at Universal, Spielberg shifted some of his focus from Sid Sheinberg to another executive, Jennings Lang. Spielberg shrewdly courted Lang, who helped him make the transition to
features. “When Sid was bringing Steven along, Jennings
was the patriarch,” says Peter Saphier, Lang's assistant at the time. “After all, Jennings was a mentor to Sid, and he felt a real connection to Steven.”

The roguish, coarse-talking Lang was a legend in Hollywood circles. A former agent whose clients included Joan Crawford and Joan Bennett, he carried on an affair with Bennett that in 1951 provoked the actress's estranged husband, producer Walter Wanger, to shoot him in the groin. Subsequently joining MCA when it was still a talent agency, Lang was largely responsible for building MCA's Revue Productions, and then Universal TV, into a powerhouse of production and syndication. By the time Spielberg came to the studio, Lang was a senior vice-president of Universal Pictures, outranked in the MCA hierarchy only by board chairman Jules Stein and president Lew Wasserman. Lang's title carried with it the rare power to approve and supervise a slate of theatrical films.

While directing TV shows in the early 1970s, Spielberg began spending time at Lang's home, also befriending the executive's wife, singer Monica Lewis, and their adolescent son Jennings Rockwell (Rocky) Lang. “My father was involved in nurturing and advising Steven,” Rocky says. “I recall Steven being around a lot when
Sugarland
started. His girlfriends would come over to dinner with him. Through my eyes, my parents were sort of surrogate parents to Steven, and I looked at Steven as an older brother.”

Now a director and producer himself, Rocky already was trying his hand at filmmaking by the time he was in eighth grade and met Spielberg. “Steven sent me a clapper board for elementary school graduation, and he put ‘Congratulations' on the clapper board,” he recalls. “After Steven looked at my Super-8 movies, he put the curse on me. He sent me a photo of himself when he was younger and told me I was more advanced than him at the same age. It put tremendous pressure on me. My sister-in-law is a psychologist, and she said she knows a lot of young filmmakers who are afflicted with ‘Steven Spielberg disease'—all these kids set their sights on being the next Steven Spielberg, and they get depressed when they aren't as successful as he was at an early age. It's created this sort of neurotic behavior around him.”

But Spielberg was “great with kids, a really accessible person,” Rocky says. “My conversations with Steven were about my girlfriend problems, my tennis, my school, and the movies I was making—he made me feel I was on the right track. The only advice Steven gave me was to be passionate about
what I wanted to do. That was something I needed to learn, because I viewed the business from very early on as a commercial enterprise, like any business; I wanted to be a success and have the perks of it. He told me, ‘Take a project you really love and take it all the way,' making a statement and leaving something behind, looking at it more seriously.”

Spielberg's relationship with the Langs paid off when Jennings Lang agreed to let him work with screenwriters Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins to develop the screenplay that became
The
Sugarland
Express.
**
The project's working title,
Carte
Blanche,
was an obscure reference to the seemingly unlimited freedom enjoyed by Spielberg's young fugitive couple driving through Texas with their hapless hostage from the Texas Department of Public Safety. Around the time Spielberg bowed out of United Artists'
McKlusky
in the spring of 1972, he had pitched
Carte
Blanche
to the young writers by reading them the Associated Press article about the 1969 Texas incident. After talking over the story with the director for a couple of days, Barwood and Robbins wrote an outline, which UA agreed to let them develop into a screenplay. But UA soon had second thoughts, and Spielberg took
Carte
Blanche
back to Universal, which had rejected the story three years earlier.

This time “it happened fast,” said Spielberg. “And everything was done just as I wanted to do it.” On April 11, 1972, the director showed the outline to Lang, who put the project into development that very afternoon. The following day, Spielberg and his writers flew to Texas for a week of research. Barwood and Robbins wrote the first draft in thirteen days, but Universal once again decided not to make the movie; in Hollywood jargon, the studio put the script “in turnaround.” Only a few weeks later, however, it was revived by Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown when they signed an exclusive, multipicture production deal with Universal. Lang had given Spielberg's career a critical boost by agreeing to finance the writing of the script, but he was eased out of the production when the studio agreed to let Zanuck and Brown make the picture. “Jennings got very, very upset about
Sugarland
Express
—he felt the studio had taken it away from him,” his assistant Peter Saphier reports. “He had a ‘cerebral incident.' He passed out in the commissary over
Sugarland.
He went home for several months.”

During the filming of
Sugarland,
Lang was the executive supervising the project, but that was a largely meaningless task since, as Saphier notes, “The deal with Zanuck/Brown was that they had no one supervising them while shooting.” Lang later became involved in the studio's decision to purchase the film rights to Peter Benchley's
Jaws,
the novel that served as the basis for Spielberg's 1975 commercial breakthrough film. But that project also wound up as a Zanuck/Brown production, and Lang unhappily became just another
Universal producer, making the Sensurround spectacles
Earthquake
and
Rollercoaster
and other even more forgettable pictures.

After Lang suffered a debilitating stroke in 1983, few Hollywood people visited him. In 1994, two years before his father's death, Rocky Lang said, “It's brutal—if you can't help them, your best friends are not there. Steven is still there. He's been terrific with my parents. He's never forgotten them. He sends them presents for their birthdays, he sends them presents on their anniversaries, he sends his movies for them to watch. He's been over as much to see my dad as some people who owe him more.”

Speaking of his own relationship with Spielberg, however, Rocky admitted, “I lost touch with him after
Jaws,
when he and my father stopped working together. I have very little contact with him now. We're in touch maybe once a year. I don't know Steven the person anymore. His standing socially has grown to the point where he spends the night at the White House. When you get to that status, everybody wants something from you. I wish he would help [me] out more than he does, but I don't call him, because I don't want to fall into that category. I have a very warm spot for Steven, and I feel a tremendous loss that I don't have a relationship with him now.”

N
OT
long after turning down the opportunity to hire Spielberg as a director at Twentieth Century-Fox, Richard Zanuck was fired as head of the financially troubled studio by his legendary father, Darryl F. Zanuck. Following a brief interlude as executives at Warner Bros., Zanuck and David Brown, his former right-hand man at Fox, formed their own production company in 1972, signing with Universal shortly thereafter. It was a coup for Universal to have such prominent executives come aboard as producers, and Lew Wasserman's respect for their abilities ensured Zanuck/Brown an enviable, but not unlimited, degree of creative freedom.

“Before signing on at Universal, in the six to seven weeks when Mr. Brown and I were deciding where to go, we were reading scripts,” Zanuck recalls. “Guy McElwaine [Spielberg's agent] gave me the script of
The
Sugarland
Express,
which Steven wanted to direct. I sent it to Mr. Brown and he liked it. I told Steven, ‘I'll tell you a secret. We're going to make a deal at Universal.' He said, ‘Oh, no, it's in turnaround from Universal.' I said, ‘That makes it a little harder, but doesn't knock it out of competition.'”

At that point, Zanuck and Brown met with Wasserman, who told them, “This picture's a downer, and audiences won't respond to it. It will play to empty houses, but what do I know? You're the guys who make the picture. If you want to make it, make it.” Wasserman “turned out to be right with that evaluation,” Zanuck admits, “but his belief in us also led to
The
Sting
and
Jaws,
where the [MCA] stock quadrupled. Frankly, I wish more studio executives operated today like Lew Wasserman. He backed people he had a belief in, instead of bringing them in and telling them what to do. He was always looking down the road.

“Universal had a very high respect for Steven, and I think they had plans to have him direct something. Steven was surprised we were making
The
Sugarland
Express
at Universal. We had a meeting in the commissary. He slid into the booth and said, ‘God, I can't believe it! Are you going to be my producer?' I was known as a studio head. He said, ‘Who's actually going to do the line-producing work?' I said I was. He said, ‘That's great. Are you going to be there every day?' I told him I was. I had a very close working relationship and friendship with Steven.”

“Sugarland
was basically Steven's film, one that he had developed with Matt and Hal, and the studio, recognizing the inexperience of the three of them, wanted to have a strong producer involved,” says William S. Gilmore Jr., the Zanuck/Brown production executive who served as the film's unit production manager. “Steven had a wonderful ability to play to people older than him, as if saying ‘Help me, I'm just feeling my way,' when in fact he had tremendous talent. It seemed like everybody in the unit had something to prove. Steven had to prove he could direct a feature as opposed to television. Zanuck had to prove he could produce films instead of being just the production manager for his father. There was such an
esprit
de
corps.
We all loved the idea, and we were doing a picture in a non-studio way, with a small, handpicked crew moving like greased lightning.”