Steven Spielberg (30 page)

“It took me three days to figure out what to do with
Amblin',
”
he recalls. “It was pretty obvious that television was the way to go for Steven. I was in television, and the people I knew were in television. That would be Steven's first exposure. I thought, ‘What the hell could I do? Call the guy who's in charge.'”

T
HE
guy in charge was Sidney J. Sheinberg. The tall, imposing, thirty-three-year-old Texan was vice-president of production for Universal TV.

“My feeling about the future of television,” he said shortly after hiring Spielberg, “is that there are no rules.” Sid Sheinberg came to California in 1958 to teach law at UCLA and was hired the following year by the legal department of Revue Productions, the television production arm of MCA, then a leading Hollywood talent agency. After helping negotiate MCA's purchase of Universal in 1962, Sheinberg began climbing the corporate ladder as a TV business affairs executive. He started a new era in television in 1964 when he came up with the idea for the made-for-TV movie (then known as the NBC “World Premiere”). As Universal's TV division thrived, Sheinberg soon became the favored son and heir apparent of MCA president Lew Wasserman.

Remembering Sheinberg's days in TV, writer-producer William Link says that he “would give you a decision within seconds. There was no stall; there wasn't that famous Hollywood ‘slow no.' There was none of that. He has a lawyer's mind, and story conferences were great with Sid. He would make [creative] suggestions, which was rare [for an executive]. Sid would re-plot, he could restructure, and it was a two-way street. He was a sophisticated
man.” Martin Hornstein, an assistant director who worked on Universal TV shows with Spielberg, remembers Sheinberg as “a visionary. He wasn't afraid to try new things.”

It was shortly before 9:00 on a rainy night in the fall of 1968 when Silvers made his call about
Amblin'
to Sheinberg's office in MCA's executive headquarters, the Black Tower. “He's in a meeting with some NBC people,” Sheinberg's secretary told Silvers. “I'll try and get him to take your call.”

Sheinberg came on the line and barked, “Jesus Christ, I'm in the middle of a goddam meeting, arguing with these people.”

Silvers gamely pushed ahead, “Sid, I've got something I want you to see.”

“I've got a whole goddam pile of film here [to look at],” Sheinberg replied. “I'm going to be here half of the night. I'll be lucky to get out of here by midnight.”

“I'm going to put this [film] in the pile for the projection booth. You really should look at it tonight.”

“You think it's that goddam important?”

“
Yes,
I think it's that goddam important. If you don't look at this, somebody else will.”

Taking no chances about Sheinberg changing his mind, Silvers told Sheinberg's projectionist, “If he says, ‘That's all,' put it up and run it anyway.”

“Now, the projectionist isn't going to do that,” Silvers explains, “but I wanted to impress on him how important it was. Sometime in that night, Sheinberg took the half hour and watched it. The next morning I got in early and there were about five or six messages. George Santoro had been calling. George was Sid's right-hand man. I returned the call to George. George said, ‘Who is Steven Spielberg?'”

“He's a young man that we know,” replied Silvers, who remembers thinking, “Aha! He's hooked! Got him!”

“Can we talk to him?” Santoro asked.

“I think I can arrange that.”

Sheinberg later recalled his initial reaction to
Amblin'
and to the phone call from Silvers that alerted him to it: “He said there's this guy who's been hanging around the place who's made a short film. So I watched it and I thought it was terrific. I liked the way he selected the performers, the relationships, the maturity and the warmth that was in that short. I told Chuck to have the guy come see me.”

S
ILVERS
immediately called Spielberg: “They want to talk to you. When can you be over here?”

“I'll leave right now.”

“Fine, you come over here to the office. I need to talk to you first.”

When Spielberg arrived shortly thereafter, Silvers told him, “Look, whatever the hell you do up there, remember, they're talking business and you're
talking opportunity. The best thing to do is a lot of listening. And don't sign anything, for Chrissake.”
††

Spielberg recalled what happened in Sheinberg's office: “He's a very nice man, Sid. Very austere. He sat there in his French [provincial] office, overlooking Universal. Like a scene out of
The
Fountainhead.
He always calls people ‘sir.' He said, ‘Sir, I liked your work. How would you like to go to work professionally?' And … well, what are you gonna say to that! He laid out the whole program. ‘You sign the contract and start in television. If you do a few shows and other producers like your work, you can—maybe—branch out into feature films.' It was a dream contract come true. I mean, it was all very vague. But it
sounded
great.”

Sheinberg recalled being so convinced of Spielberg's precocious talent that he unhesitantly took a chance on “this nerdlike, scrawny character…. I said, ‘You should be a director.' And Steven said, ‘I think so, too.' Steven was very much a young boy.”

“Sid was really the fairy godfather,” Silvers says, “because he had the ability to make it happen. He's the one who saw it and reacted. What a lucky phone call that was! But without any question in my mind, if it had not been through the aegis of Universal, it would have been somebody else. Steven would have gone on to be exactly what he is now. That kind of talent is bigger than life. That talent could not have gone unrecognized.”

W
HEN
his meeting with Sheinberg ended, Spielberg went straight back to Silvers's office.

“They offered me a contract,” Spielberg said.

“You didn't sign anything?”

“No.”

Spielberg then “asked me if I would be his manager,” Silvers relates. “I said, ‘Steven, you need someone who knows a hell of a lot more about the business than I do. I'm not the right person.' He asked me what I wanted [for helping him]. I said, ‘Well, Steven, by the time you really make it big, I'll probably be too goddam old for you to do me any good.' If I had known then what I know now, I would have given him a completely different answer. In effect, what I told him was, ‘When you can, pass it on. When you make it big, you can be nice to young people. I learned from people I had no way of thanking. You learned it here, and you can, in effect, pay off the people. You can pass it on.'

“Steven made a promise and he's kept it. He has a hospital wing with
his name on it [the Steven Spielberg Pediatric Medicine Research Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in West Hollywood]. At USC there's a Steven Spielberg scoring stage. You look at the list of first-time directors and new writers and first-time producers he has made an opportunity for—he puts his money and he puts his business personality on the line.

“He's kept the other promise to me. He said, ‘How about something personal? What do
you
want?' I said, ‘Every time we meet I would like a hug.' Whenever I see him, he gives me a hug.”

T
HEY
just signed me and told me to imagine up something, which to me is proof that the old Hollywood way of doing things is breaking up a bit,” Spielberg said in a December 1968 interview with the
Los Angeles Times.
His studio contract felt “like a dream come true,” he later recalled. “At last I had the means to show what I could do. But it was not something I wanted to do for the benefit of others. No, I wanted to do it for myself, for everything I had believed in since I was a child. I could finally bring to life all those stories I had in my head.”

But his elation was tempered by the anxiety he felt as a young amateur filmmaker suddenly thrust into a professional director's chair. Even before he started directing his first television program at Universal, he told
The
Hollywood
Reporter,
“Now I'm caught up in this tremendous meatgrinder.
Amblin'
is the only film I will ever make with so much freedom.”

A
MBLIN
'
had its world premiere on December 18, 1968, in a one-week Academy Award–qualifying engagement at Loew's Crest Theater in Westwood. Spielberg's short was ill-matched with Otto Preminger's misfired comedy about hippies and gangsters,
Skidoo.
The newspaper ads barely
squeezed in a minuscule mention of
Amblin
'
:
“It Packs the Wallop of a Rock  Concert!” But
Los Angeles Times
feature writer Wayne Warga called it “a  splendid film to watch.”

On the night of the premiere, producer Denis Hoffman threw a party at a screening room on Sunset Boulevard, and Spielberg showed up looking self-consciously hip in a Nehru jacket. By a happy coincidence, it was also Spielberg's birthday. His twenty
-second
birthday, even though the
Times
reported the following day that he was twenty-one. As part of the Oscar campaign conducted by publicist Jerry Pam, Hoffman held another screening party for
Amblin'
that month at the Directors Guild of America Theater and took out ads in the trade papers. Spielberg also was invited to screen
Amblin
' before a USC directing class taught by Jerry Lewis, who told his students, “That's what filmmaking is all about.”

Despite all the ballyhoo,
Amblin'
proved a difficult sell to theaters. “The problem was it was too long,” Hoffman recalled. “The theater people didn't like it, because it caused them to give up one screening per day. They would play a seven-minute short, but this was twenty-six minutes. We had a terrible time trying to get them to play it.”

The first distributor Hoffman approached, in the fall of 1968, was Universal, a logical choice since it was in the process of signing not only Spielberg but also Pamela McMyler to a contract.
*
But the studio seemed to regard
Amblin
'
itself as an afterthought, making an offer of only $2,000 for the world rights, which Hoffman indignantly refused. After being rejected by United Artists, Hoffman made a temporary releasing deal with Sigma III to split the proceeds from the Crest engagement, but the distributor chose not to exercise its right of first refusal for a national release. Hoffman contracted instead on June 15, 1970, with Four Star Excelsior Releasing Co., which found the film occasional playdates around the country for about a year (Four Star later released the film in the United Kingdom as well). Although Hoffman said in 1994 that
Amblin'
barely returned its costs overall, it did better in its nontheatrical release by UPA, which rented and sold 16mm prints for several years to such outlets as schools, libraries, and military bases.

Spielberg also managed to place
Amblin'
in the June 1969 Atlanta and Venice Film Festivals. When Hoffman wasn't able to pay Spielberg's way to Atlanta, Spielberg persuaded Universal to pick up his travel expenses.
Am
blin'
was chosen best live-action short subject by the festival, whose program described it as “a solid contender for an Academy Award nomination.” “Everybody said we were going to get the nomination,” Hoffman remembered. “Everybody believed it was a shoo-in.”

But when the nominations were announced on February 18,
Amblin'
failed to make the list. Hoffman and Spielberg were “devastated” that
Am
blin'
wasn't nominated. The Oscar winner in the live-action short-subject category was Charles Guggenheim's
Robert
Kennedy
Remembered,
the kind of sober, traditional filmmaking the Academy has always favored over more adventurous, groundbreaking work. Hoffman said he was told by members of the Academy's Short Subjects Awards Nominating Committee that
Amblin
'
“was not nominated because people at the Academy did not like the reference to drugs in the movie. In a little segment, we portrayed marijuana as a fun thing.” (In addition, one of the trade ads promoting
Amblin'
for Oscar consideration prominently featured a smoking joint and a bag of marijuana.)

This was the first snub of a Spielberg film by the Academy, but it was not to be the last.

S
PIELBERG
had one bit of unfinished business before he could start directing at Universal—college. When Sheinberg offered him a seven-year contract, with a starting salary of $275 a week, Spielberg hesitated for a moment, evidently thinking of what his father's reaction would be.

“Well,” said Spielberg, “I haven't graduated yet.”

To which Sheinberg impatiently replied, “Do you wanna graduate college or do you wanna be a film director?”

“I signed the papers a week later,” Spielberg says. “I quit college so fast I didn't even clean out my locker. I went from Cal State at Long Beach to Stage 15 at Universal—where Joan Crawford met me at the door.”

That's only a slight exaggeration. Spielberg completed the first semester of his junior year at Long Beach State, officially dropping out of college on January 31, 1969, the day before he began rehearsals with Crawford on
Night
Gallery,
his first TV show for Universal. He said later, “I began directing a year shy of graduation, which my father will
never
forgive me for.”

A
MEASURE
of the faith Universal had in Spielberg came when the actress originally cast in
Night
Gallery
balked at being directed by a twenty-two-year-old. Rather than changing directors, Universal fired Bette Davis and replaced her with Joan Crawford. During the show's filming, Crawford was asked by a journalist how she felt about working with such a young director. She replied, “They told me when I signed to do this that he was twenty-three!”

Following the tempestuous teaming of Davis and Crawford in Robert Aldrich's 1962 Grand Guignol classic
What
Ever
Happened
to
Baby
Jane?,
the two legendary actresses were reduced in the late sixties to competing for increasingly tacky roles as geriatric horror queens. When Crawford accepted a $50,000 offer from Universal to star in one episode of the three-part NBC “World Premiere” TV movie
Night
Gallery,
she was not in a position to be choosy about her director. She needed the money, and she was well aware of what had happened to Davis.

Written by Rod Serling in the waning, sadly derivative days of his career, and originally pitched as a theatrical feature,
Night
Gallery
served as the pilot for a series of supernatural tales that vainly attempted to recapture the eerie magic of
The
Twilight
Zone.
Spielberg, who had been deeply influenced by that series while growing up in Arizona, was assigned to direct “Eyes,” the middle episode in the
Night
Gallery
anthology movie.
†

Adapted from a story published in Serling's 1967 collection,
The
Season
to
Be
Wary,
“Eyes” is the lurid tale of Claudia Menlo, a wealthy blind woman who blackmails her doctor (Barry Sullivan) into removing the eyes of a desperately impoverished small-time gambler (Tom Bosley) and transplanting them into her so she can have a few hours of sight. When she removes her bandages, she finds that the world is still mysteriously dark—the lights of New York City have been extinguished by the great blackout of 1965. A massive suspension of disbelief is required to go along with even the secondary devices of the gimmicky yarn: Why wouldn't the victim simply skip town before the operation, after taking Miss Menlo's money to cover his gambling debt? Why would she want the removal of her bandages to take place at night? When she stumbles outside in the dark, why can't she see the headlights of cars jamming the street outside her building?

But “Eyes” was enlivened by Spielberg's energetic and inventive visual style, and by a credibly monstrous performance by Crawford. “It was a trick piece,” the producer of
Night
Gallery,
William Sackheim, says of Spielberg's episode. “It's not going down in the history of film as one of the greatest things ever done, but it's a showy piece that worked well.”

S
PIELBERG
claimed that after signing his contract with Universal, he was left to molder in an office with “Nobody to call. Nothing to do. No producer on the lot was going to give me a break.” His first assignment for the studio was “to escort this tall young man and give him a tour of Universal Studios because he'd just sold the novel
The
Andromeda
Strain
to [director] Robert Wise and Universal.” The tall young man was Michael Crichton, who later would write the novel on which Spielberg based
Jurassic
Park.
Despite his characteristic impatience, Spielberg actually had little time to feel neglected by the Black Tower, for his assignment to direct “Eyes” was reported in
Daily
Variety
on January 23, 1969, less than six weeks after the announcement of his signing by the studio.

Spielberg had the impression that Sheinberg “twisted somebody's arm—or broke it off!” to get him his maiden assignment. But Sackheim, a veteran of many successful TV productions, insists that Sheinberg “never called me and said, ‘Put Steven Spielberg on it.' I didn't know Steven, but Steven, I guess, was kind of a legend even then. A legend in the sense that he just kind of climbed over the fence and plunked himself in a trailer—at least that
was the story I heard. Sheinberg called me one day and said, ‘Sir, I have something I want you to see. Have you ever heard of Steven Spielberg?' I said, ‘The legend, the kid?' He set up a screening of
Amblin'.
It was an incredible piece of work, a very professional job. I said to Sheinberg, ‘I wonder if Steven Spielberg might be a good director for this. I think it might be an interesting idea.' Sheinberg said, ‘I think it would be a
great
idea. Let's go with it.'”

But Sheinberg then had to sell Spielberg on the idea. The problem, unbeknown to Sackheim, was the script.

“The script was terrible,” Spielberg said later. “It was by a very good writer, Rod Serling. But the story was not one of his best…. I really didn't want to do the show. I said to Sid Sheinberg, ‘Jesus, can I do something about
young
people?' He said, ‘I'd take this opportunity if I were you.'… And, of course, I took it. I would have done anything. I would have shot … I dunno … the Universal directory if I had to. Just to get on a soundstage. I began rereading the macabre script, trying to make it interesting visually; and it turned out to be the most visually blatant movie I've ever made, which goes to show how much the script inspired me.”

Despite his low opinion of the script, Spielberg found Serling “the most positive guy in the entire production company. He was a great, energetic, slaphappy guy who gave me a fantastic pep talk about how he predicted that the entire movie industry was about to change because of young people like myself getting the breaks.”

W
HEN
Spielberg was told that Joan Crawford had been cast in “Eyes,” “That's when the cold sweat began.” It was on a Sunday, shortly before the start of filming, that he had his first meeting with the legendary star, who was sixty-two years old and had been working in Hollywood since 1925. Spielberg called Chuck Silvers and said anxiously, “They've told me I've gotta go and talk to her today. Tell me what's going to happen.”

“How are you dressed?” asked Silvers.

“Jeans.”

“Fine, don't try to be anybody but yourself.”

“They're going to send a limousine for me!” Spielberg said excitedly.

“Make sure you allow the chauffeur to do his job. Make sure he opens the door for you. Make sure you sit down until he opens the door to you.”

(Silvers says that the message he was trying to convey to Spielberg was, “Be yourself, but let's start being the director.”)

“Just remember she's a very, very famous lady,” Silvers continued. “Before you're picked up, sit down and write down a number of names of pictures she was in that you remember.”

(“Because I knew he was nervous,” Silvers explains, “I wanted to give him something to do while he was waiting.”)