Steven Spielberg (34 page)

One of those who hired Spielberg was Richard Irving, executive producer of
The
Name
of
the
Game
(and uncle of actress Amy Irving, whom Spielberg later married). When Dick Irving was looking for a director in the fall of 1970 for “LA 2017,” a futuristic episode dealing with ecological catastrophe, Sheinberg told him in no uncertain terms, “I've got just the guy to do this. Use Steven.”

The episode's producer, Dean Hargrove, had seen
Amblin'
at one of Sheinberg's screenings. “I thought it was very imaginative, and very impressive relative to his age and resources,” says Hargrove, “but I didn't infer from that film the scope of this guy's talent.” After Irving passed the word from Sheinberg, Hargrove watched a rough cut of “Par for the Course,” Spielberg's episode of
The
Psychiatrist
with Clu Gulager as a professional golfer coming to terms with dying of cancer, and Joan Darling as his anguished wife. The show had not yet aired, but it was enough to convince Hargrove of Spielberg's talents: “It had such a distinctive look to it, and it wasn't a particularly
exotic show, it was a medical show. There was something about his imprimatur that was discernible even then, the visualization that he brought to it, the staging. He had a very interesting way of moving the camera and moving the actors. He shot some of the most interesting masters I'd seen.
††
I thought he had an incredible filmic sense that was distinctive from all other directors'.”

S
HEINBERG
took a more soft-sell approach in offering Spielberg's services to Richard Levinson and William Link, the creator-producers of
Co
lumbo.
By the time the series began filming in the summer of 1971, Levinson and Link already had made a pair of TV movies featuring Peter Falk's rumpled but wily detective. The studio was accustomed to treating the literate and successful producers with uncommon deference and respect, and when it came to hiring Spielberg, “There were never any orders from the Black Tower, ‘You must use the kid,'” Link recalls. “You had to be impressed with his work, and it had to be your decision. It was the first year of
Columbo,
and we were looking not only for the tried and true, dependable television directors who could do mysteries, but we were also looking for some young blood, some new blood that could add some excitement to the show.”

However, TV producers naturally were reluctant to take a chance on an inexperienced director, because, as Link explains, “In television you shoot six or seven pages a day—it's Mack Sennett time. It's not like features, where you have $60 million, and Brian De Palma shoots five-eighths of a page a day. Television is the salt mines of the entertainment field. There is never enough money, never enough time. It wasn't an easy task for Steve to get assignments in television, because he didn't have the credits.”

Levinson and Link had seen
Amblin'
at
a private screening in the company of Sheinberg and Lew Wasserman. Link considered it “a terrific audition film.
Amblin'
had film techniques that were prevalent in those days, like rack focusing, which came to be a real cliché. But he was more than a remarkable talent. I mean, you didn't
see
things that burnished from a kid.” But what finally “sold Dick and me that the kid really had something,” Link says, was the same sample of Spielberg's work that had earlier convinced Hargrove: a rough cut of “Par for the Course.”
‡‡
“Then we had to sell him to Falk,” Levinson recalled. “People were saying then that Steve was a technical director, that he could handle cameras but not actors. We knew that wasn't true, but we had to convince Peter.” “Peter preferred to go with the tried and true, and Spielberg was a wild card,” adds Link. “It wasn't just verbal encomiums that would sell Mr. Falk. Peter is very bright, and it was hard to pull the wool over his one eye. We had to show him film. We showed him the Clu Gulager—Joan Darling
Psychiatrist,
and he was very impressed.”

Even after that, Spielberg had to pass another formidable hurdle. The
cinematographer for his
Columbo
episode, “Murder by the Book,” was Russell L. Metty, who had won an Oscar for Stanley Kubrick's
Spartacus
and had worked on four films with Orson Welles. After meeting Spielberg, Metty told the producers, “He's a kid! Does he get a milk and cookie break? Is the diaper truck going to interfere with my generator?” “Metty was a crusty old guy, with barnacles all over him—he would always refer to Orson Welles as ‘The Kid,'” Link recalls. “Russ was a guy in his sixties, and here's this twenty-one-year-old kid [Spielberg was actually twenty-four at the time]—it's not a generation gap, it's a generation
chasm.
”

The cameraman initially complained about Spielberg's unorthodox techniques, telling the producers, “Your hot-shot director has me in this room down on Sunset Boulevard which is four walls of glass. Where the hell do you expect me to put my lights?” “We didn't know what he was talking about,” Levinson admitted. “We didn't know anything about lights. And to our eternal credit, we said, ‘He's the director. Do what he says.'”

But during the shooting, Link says, “Steve used to call us from the set and say, ‘Come on down.' We said, ‘Steve, we've got six more shows to write and produce. You're doing a great job. The dailies are wonderful.' He'd say, ‘Come on down.' We finally figured out he had nobody to talk to. He was the youngest person on the set. While waiting for setups, he was lonely. I don't think there was anybody he could bond with on those sets. We would go down on the set or go to our own bungalow and schmooze with him.”

T
HAT
same summer, Spielberg was hired to direct an episode of the new
Owen
Marshall
lawyer series. “We were handed him,” admits Jerry McNeely, its cocreator and executive story consultant. “The Black Tower wanted him working. My first inkling that this was somebody out of the ordinary was the producer, Jon Epstein, telling me how pleased he was we were getting Spielberg. He was just a kid, but he had done
Night
Gallery,
Marcus
Welby,
and
The
Psychiatrist
with Joan Darling. My memory is literally that he did not have a beard. I don't mean he wasn't
wearing
a beard—I mean he looked too young to have
grown
a beard yet. He looked like he was maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. That was a startling thing, right off the bat. I was goggle-eyed: ‘Here's a director! And it's The Kid!' By the time we started, I realized that this was
not
a fuzzy-cheeked kid. He knew what he was doing.

“What's really remarkable is that the genius was visible that soon. For people like Sheinberg to take a chance on him, it's one thing to give him a TV show to direct, but it's another to let him be the star warming up in the bullpen. There was definitely that feeling at the time. Jon Epstein said, ‘We got this kid genius.' I don't think Jon meant it literally—I don't think he knew the
size
of it. But those were the terms they were throwing around.”

“
T
ELEVISION
is basically a producer's medium,” notes
Name
of
the
Game
producer Dean Hargrove. “The producer is the one who makes the final decisions on casting and editing. In films the director is everything, but in television, directors tend to be more of an employee.” But even though Spielberg made no major changes in novelist Philip Wylie's script for “LA 2017,” the young director “clearly made [the show] reflect his sensibilities,” Hargrove says. “He brought his own imagination not only to the visuals in the piece, but in the way he played it. It had a consistent acting style—a little more than real but not unreal. Steven was shrewd in casting—we did it together—and he got along with the actors very well.”

Spielberg's most expressionistic work for episodic TV, with its vision of a future so polluted that Angelenos have to live underground, “LA 2017” allowed the director wide latitude for nightmarish visuals. Anticipating Ridley Scott's apocalyptic images of 21st-century Los Angeles in
Blade
Runner,
Spielberg used red and orange filters and fire-blackened Calabasas landscapes to represent the bleak, deserted surface of southern California. His sinuous tracking shots through the city's subterranean living quarters (filmed at the Hyperion sewage treatment plant), populated by a frenetically choreographed cast, convey the feverish, claustrophobic sense of hell on Earth. Although the storyline is fairly standard sci-fi melodrama about rebels trying to overthrow a fascistic ruling class, led by the suave Barry Sullivan (the whole cautionary tale turns out to be a hallucination by series regular Gene Barry), Spielberg makes his most telling points about environmental pollution without resorting unduly to verbal rhetoric. His ability to conjure up such a compelling futuristic vision is especially remarkable given his twelve-day shooting schedule and $375,000 budget for what amounted to his first feature-length film in Hollywood. One of four series rotating under Universal's “Four-in-One” umbrella on NBC,
The
Name
of
the
Game
ran in a ninety-minute time slot, which, after commercials, left seventy-four minutes of film to tell the story.

“Steven had a very short schedule for such an ambitious show,” Hargrove says. “He was loyal to the schedule, and he was very prepared. He would show me his shot list in the morning before he would shoot. He didn't operate off a literal storyboard, but I think he had it in his mind. There was no guesswork. Some directors would start with watching the rehearsal and then see how to shoot it. Steven worked the other way around. He would tend to start with his particular vision of how a scene was physically, like Hitchcock would do. He stayed with the picture through the dubbing process, which was something directors didn't normally do.”

“Some directors put in token appearances [in the editing room], and some were into their work enough to want to be sure it was done as well as it could be,” says “LA 2017” film editor Frank Morriss. “Steve was one of those. He had his hand in as much as he could get it in. He was very inventive and amazingly knowledgeable about editing. He was just a little punk, but [his
personality] was like a fountain. I learned a
ton
from Steve. My relationship with Steve never seemed like work to me. It was all so much fun.”

When “LA 2017” aired on January 15, 1971, NBC gave it unusually vigorous promotion because of its offbeat qualities and the timeliness of its subject matter.
Daily
Variety
reviewer Jack Hellman found the program “a dramatic thunderbolt on ecology…. Unlike other shows dealing with ecology in documentary form, this bizarre concoction had all the feel of high drama with all the stops out…. Steven Spielberg directed with firm strokes.”

“That show opened a lot of doors for me,” Spielberg said.

I
F
“LA 2017” prefigured the flamboyantly visual filmmaking style for which Spielberg would soon become famous, his
Owen
Marshall
episode, “Eulogy for a Wide Receiver,” showcased another side of his talents, the more low-key humanism that would become predominant in such films as
The
Color
Purple
and
Schindler's
List.
Though it could have been just another clichéd TV message-melodrama, “Eulogy” proved affecting in its three-dimensional portrait of high school football coach Dave Butler (Stephen Young), whose pressure tactics prove fatal to his star player, Steve Baggett (Anson Williams), a boy with a concealed rheumatic heart condition.

When he was assigned to
Owen
Marshall,
Spielberg was offered a script about a young opera singer. “Steve just hated it,” recalls story consultant Jerry McNeely. “Today I see why, but at the time we all thought he was a spoiled brat. It was a very talky, quiet, involved, plotty kind of thing, and obviously Steve was looking for a way to do
his
things. He asked, ‘Do you have anything else?' So we looked around and found ‘Eulogy for a Wide Receiver' [written by Richard Bluel]. Steve said, ‘God, I would rather do this, but it needs work.' So I spent a weekend and put it through a heavy rewrite.”

Spielberg brought to the project not only his practical experience filming grade school and high school football games, but also a sharply critical perspective on school athletics. The wimp who was bullied by the jocks he wrote about for his school paper responded viscerally to the script's attack on the paramilitary nature of high school football and to the torment of the player who literally kills himself for his Vince Lombardi–like coach.

“The day before we were supposed to start,” McNeely remembers, “Steve came in and said, ‘Oh, God, I'm depressed. I went to see
Pretty
Maids
All
in
a
Row.
'
§§
Steve said
Pretty
Maids
did a lot of the things filmically that he was planning to do. He thought he was in fresh territory with the high school football setting. It was a minor glitch. There was never any sense of his having gotten lost. On the football field, Steve had a long boom and dolly
shot—it starts in the stands and comes down, trucks along with the actors, and fellows them onto the field. There's nothing unusual about that today with the Steadicam, but in those days that kind of shot could have taken a day or two. Steve had stuff like that in our one-hour television movie. Moves that you'd take a day or two to get, he'd get in an hour and a half!”