Steven Spielberg (36 page)

“She turned sideways to the phone, the camera was in very close. I thought, Here it comes, she's going to come totally unglued. You hear the phone pick up, and she turns her back to the camera. No director in his right mind is going to leave her face! But the camera starts to pull back and you hear her say one word: ‘Mama.' Steven is able to present intimacy by doing the opposite thing—the opposite of what anybody else would have done. The whole thing was like that. He broke all the rules and did better by breaking them.”

When she was offered the role in “Par for the Course,” Darling “was living on Cape Cod and trying to decide whether to retire from the business. I got a call from my agent, ‘Can you be on the set at Universal at ten in the morning?' Some girl fell out, and the producers remembered me from
Marcus
Welby.
I told them, ‘I can't get there till noon.' They picked me up at the airport and took me straight to wardrobe. I hadn't met Steven Spielberg yet. When I come on the set for the first time, I always case the director to see how he works. I was looking around for the director, and I see this kid in a cowboy hat. I went over and eavesdropped. He said a couple of things to Clu and I thought, Oh, my God, this is a real director!

“Later that day we still hadn't met, and I was sitting under a tree. Steven
came up to me and said, ‘You know, when Jack Kennedy was shot, Jackie Kennedy—' I said, ‘Don't say a word. I know exactly what you mean.' We had an immediate, nonverbal communication. It was the beginning of trust between us. I knew that he wanted my best stuff and that he would be receptive. When he said, ‘like Jackie Kennedy,' I knew what he meant. It was her way of placing her manners, her way to behave out in front of abject terror. I understood that and knew how to do that. He trusted me that I understood it. That is the absolute good direction—you drop an analogy that feels yummy to the actor, but doesn't dictate.

“I realized right away that his understanding of psychology is as complex as mine. We both have an incredible enthusiasm, an unsullied childlike enthusiasm for the world and for being in it. We both have a curiosity, a sophisticated interest in human behavior. He has an enormous soul. He
sees
so much. I'm not talking visually—he sees the details, he sees the dynamic of a person. I have to reach to catch up with him. ‘Par for the Course' is an astounding piece of work. This piece was all adult content. I was so impressed with his adult understanding of the world. I don't think since this piece did he really show the world what he was capable of in this area until he made
Schindler's
List.
”

Darling later became a film and television director herself, and directed two episodes of Spielberg's TV series
Amazing
Stories,
including his sister Anne's haunting tale of childhood, “What If …?” “When I first started directing,” Darling remembers, “I called him up and asked him, ‘What should I do?' He said, ‘Get a real good pair of shoes.' I said, ‘OK.' The second time I got a feature, I called him, and he was on the set of
Close
Encounters
of
the
Third
Kind.
He said, ‘Don't shoot a lot of people going in and out of doors.' I literally asked him, ‘Steven, when the archivists come and ask me what kind of advice you gave me, do you want me to tell them you said—' He said, ‘Well, it really doesn't work.' I told him, ‘I don't know anything about the camera. How should I decide where to put the camera?' He said, ‘Notice where you're standing when you watch the rehearsal and put the camera there.' That's so profound a statement, because it focused me on, ‘What kind of story am I telling?'”

Daily
Variety
reviewer Tony Scott praised “Par for the Course” as “magnificently” directed. “Gulager's powerful interpretation of the dying golfer, railing against fate, is an unsettling reminder of the frailty of life. Miss Darling deserves special attention as the wife who lives with life-in-death, and in the scene where she calls her mother long-distance, she creates a poignant portrait of what can happen when too much accumulates…. The Gulager-Darling relationship is beautifully rendered.”

“Young Steve Spielberg from his direction of that small film was firmly established as one of the most exciting talents in town,” Cecil Smith of the
Los
Angeles
Times
wrote in 1973. Smith added that he had been Darling's “profound admirer” ever since seeing “that gut-wrenching performance.”

Chuck Silvers was so moved by Spielberg's direction of “Par for the
Course” that he made a point of asking his protégé, “Steven, how the hell do you know what pain is? In your young life, how do you know about pain?”

Spielberg told him, “Every week I used to go visit my grandfather in the nursing home [when Fievel Posner was living near the Spielbergs in Arizona]. I just watched him. I'd just play, and I'd watch him and I'd watch my mom and I'd watch people in the hospital.”

“What he obviously observed was not what was going on on the surface, but what was important,” Silvers realized. “The little kid was standing back and observing. I think he's been watching people for as long as he's been able to see. He somehow is able to see what's behind the surface.”

S
INCE
1968, Spielberg had been living with Ralph Burris in an old two-bedroom writers' bungalow at 3649½ Regal Place across from Universal, a small but convenient San Fernando Valley dwelling whose only distinction was that Bobby Darin had written his hit song “Splish Splash” while living there.

“We didn't hang out that much together,” Burris remembers. “He had a couple of different girlfriends; one was an agent. We tried to do things together, but the truth is we led separate lives.”

Their parting as roommates was precipitated by two upheavals in their lives. One was natural and the other was economic.

“Steve rescued me from the earthquake of '71,” Burris recalls. “It happened at six
A.M.
[on February 9, with the worst damage located in the San Fernando Valley]. I had been out partying the night before and I was pretty wasted. When the earthquake hit, I woke up and envisioned a tidal wave coming over the mountains. So I threw a cover over my head and started chanting—I was into that shit in those days. My room was in the back of this little house, and Steve's was in the middle. Steve came running in and said, ‘It's an earthquake! Get out!' We went running through the living room—stereos were falling down, but the place didn't fall down. We were on a hill, out by the swimming pool, and we could look out on the mountains. We could see the earthquake coming—the hills were rolling, and we could see transformers exploding. The whole valley turned to liquid. We had a lot of damage, but we didn't own that much. I freaked out and went to Hawaii. He signed [a new contract] with Universal and bought a house.”

Spielberg's deal, signed in December 1970, was described by the director as “a more liberal amendment” to the exclusive seven-year contract he had signed two years earlier.
Daily
Variety
reported Spielberg now had “a five-year exclusive pact as a producer and a six-year nonexclusive contract as a director for feature films, vidpix and [episodic] TV.” The new deal gave him just enough freedom to keep him from wanting to leave Universal for greener pastures and never return, but it still gave Universal first call on his services. It also allowed Spielberg to put down modest roots in Hollywood, enabling
him to make a downpayment on a small house in casual but fashionable Laurel Canyon, which he bought for $50,000. Shared with a cocker spaniel named Elmer, the house was decorated largely with movie posters, in a style Spielberg described as “bachelor funky.”

After producing the 1971 feature
The
Second
Coming
of
Suzanne,
Burris tried unsuccessfully to produce another film. He then embarked on a busy career as a production manager, but he has not worked with Spielberg since they made
Amblin'
together. “We went our separate ways,” Burris says. “I see him occasionally. I have a signed poster of
E.T.
at home: ‘To the longest friendship I've ever had.'”

S
PIELBERG'S
social life after he moved to Laurel Canyon revolved around moviegoing or small gatherings at home to watch movies and TV shows with his friends. He tended to avoid large Hollywood parties, but when he went to them, he was all business. Joan Darling marvels at “how incredibly smart Steven was about the things that needed to be done socially to be successful in the business.” But he also found pleasure in the social advantages of being a successful Hollywood director. “There was no way any woman was going to think of him as a nerd,” Darling says. “It was fun for him to date and have pretty women go out with him. I always thought he was a really attractive guy. His sense of humor, his playfulness—he's my kind of man.” Even in his early twenties, she felt, Spielberg had an unsatisfied urge to settle down with the right woman and have a family: “Family was really important to him.”

Darling and her husband, Bill Svanoe, a singer and screenwriter, became part of Spielberg's circle. “We would go out to a movie and get a bite to eat and talk about the movie afterward,” she recalls. “We would lie around on the floor and laugh. We would write three-page movies together. I have one we wrote about a lobster. We would just laugh until we would make ourselves silly. Steven and Bill and I went out to the Riverside Raceway. I had a Super-8 camera. I handed it to Steven and he shot a whole film. He and Bill were interested in gadgets—not just movie gadgets, but all kinds of gadgets. One time Steven called us and said, ‘You've gotta come over to this bowling alley at the corner of La Cienega and Santa Monica.' It had the first video games, fighter-pilot story-type games, and he was just overwhelmed with fascination. He's an extraordinarily curious person.

“We were all ambitious and wanting work and none of us was getting the kind of work we wanted to do. Steven knew he wanted to do features. We would talk about what we wished to do [in features], if Steven could get a directing job. I remember saying to my husband, when Steven was very discouraged trying to sell a script and break in, that he always had a positive, forward motion, whatever he may have been suffering inside.”

Not everybody sympathized with Spielberg's frustration. Jerry McNeely, the story consultant on
Owen
Marshall,
remembers an incident shortly after
Spielberg directed his show for that series. McNeely and the producer, Jon Epstein, were walking on the Universal lot when “Steve drove up in a nice little green Mercedes convertible and stopped. He had a gripe about something, I can't remember what it was. Steve drove off and Jon said, ‘Yeah, kid, how many kids your age have a Mercedes convertible? Be happy you're working.'”

“TV for me wasn't an art form. It was a job,” Spielberg recalled in 1995. “I actually, because of television, didn't know for a while there whether or not I wanted to continue making film, because I felt that it was like working in a sweatshop and I wasn't getting any of that stimulation, that gratification that I even got making 8mm war movies when I was twelve years old. I didn't have that passion, because television sort of smothered the passion. It's only when I got into feature films—actually when I got into TV movies and made
Duel
—that I kind of rediscovered the fun about making films.”