Steven Spielberg (38 page)

S
PIELBERG'S
dynamic compositions in
Duel
reflect his awareness of the importance of point of view in visual storytelling, with the camera alternating between the vantage points of the truck and David Mann inside his car. Some of the most powerful shots were taken from a camera with a fish-eye lens mounted on top of the truck as it bears down upon the tiny automobile, and from a low-slung platform mounted on the front of a camera car traveling up to 135 miles per hour as it filmed the back of the Valiant from the angle of the truck's bumper. The upward angle from the camera car to the hurtling truck made the truck assume what Spielberg called “Godzilla proportions.”

Spielberg and cinematographer Jack Marta also heightened the visual tension by their use of wide-angle lenses, artificially shortening the distance between the truck and the car. The close-ups of the frantic Mann are so tight that he often appears to be on the verge of bumping into the camera. Some were taken from a fixed camera-mount outside the car, but many were shot with a handheld camera by an operator on the seat or the floor of the car. The quarters became so cramped that in one accident of framing visible only in the theatrical version, Spielberg can be glimpsed for a moment in Mann's rearview mirror, sitting in the back seat.

“When [the studio] saw Steven's dailies the first few days, they were thinking of pulling the rug, it looked so unusual,” Matheson reports. But Eckstein maintains that Spielberg was never in danger of being taken off the picture, and that Sid Sheinberg was “ecstatic” when he saw the rough cut. “I think there were some excesses in
Duel,
”
the producer adds, “but they were so much balanced by the excitement or the energy of the piece. Sometimes with Steven you want to yell, ‘Less is more.' That's about his only flaw.”

The agonizing slow-motion demise of the truck as it tumbles off the hillside, lured by Mann's driverless automobile, provoked strong opposition from the network, although it was one of the film's most memorable images.

“In the script, the truck explodes. I thought that was too easy,” Spielberg recalled. “… I thought it would be much more interesting to show the truck expiring, slowly ticking away—the truck's a nasty guy, you want to see him twisting slowly, a cruel death. I just took it upon myself. I thought, ‘I'm the director, so I can change the script. I just won't blow the truck up.' Well, when the network saw the film, all they kept saying was, ‘It's in your contract to blow the truck up,
read
your contract.'” Eckstein finally persuaded network executives not to force Spielberg to blow up the truck.

Staging the climactic scene required the rigging of a spring-loaded hand throttle attached to the steering wheel of the truck, so that Carey Loftin could keep the truck going in the direction of the hillside after climbing outside the cab and jumping off at the last minute. Spielberg had six cameras set up at various spots around the cliff to record the scene late in the afternoon on the last day of shooting, October 4.

“I damn near went over the cliff myself,” Loftin remembers. “I pulled the throttle and the whole damn thing fell off. I got out and realized the truck was slowing down. I thought, ‘I gotta get my right foot on the throttle.' I tried to get the speed up. I shouldn't have done it.”

As the truck raced toward the edge of the cliff, all Loftin could think about was that he was due at the opening of Florida's Walt Disney World the following day to perform an automobile stunt.

“I could have turned the truck and just called it off, but I had to go to Florida. I rolled and wound up right on the edge of the cliff myself. It was over three hundred feet down. The truck wound up at the bottom and the little car was on
top
of the truck.”

“The scissors in my editing room came down just a frame after Carey's butt is out of the frame,” Spielberg said. “He's at the beginning of the shot. Leaping for his life.”

“I remember sitting in dailies watching the crash,” Eckstein says. “It was the last day. It
had
to be the last day. The first five cameras really didn't have it. We were afraid we were going to have to piece it together. I remember that terrible moment sitting there. Finally the last camera got it. The relief in that room was palpable.”

To create the death cry of the truck, Spielberg first thought of mixing truck noises with the distorted sound of a woman's scream. “So I went into the studio and screamed,” recalls Joan Darling. “He wanted a death-of-the-monster sound.” In the end, however, Spielberg decided not to use Darling's scream, but the sound of a famous monster of filmland. One of the sound editors came up with the idea of distorting the roar of the prehistoric Gill-Man from Universal's 1954 horror movie
The
Creature
from
the
Black
Lagoon
—the chilling sound Stephen King recognized as a “Jurassic roar.”

Postproduction on
Duel
had to be rushed to make the November airdate. Because of Spielberg's frequent use of multiple cameras, there was so much film to edit (95,000 feet, a shooting ratio of twelve to one) that Frank Morriss had to bring in four other editors and several sound editors to help him
assemble different sequences. For thirteen days, Morriss recalls, Spielberg kept “roller-skating from editing room to editing room” to supervise their work.

“
I
SAW
the rough cut of
Duel,
”
Barry Diller recalled, “and I remember thinking, This guy is going to be out of television so fast because his work is so good. It was sad because I thought I'd never see him again. It was a director's film, and TV is not a director's medium.”

In a promotional move that was unusual for a TV movie and reflected the studio's high degree of pride in
Duel
and in Steven Spielberg, Universal threw a press preview party on the lot, showing the film simultaneously in several screening rooms. The first public indication that something extraordinary was about to appear on the nation's television screens came from
Los
Angeles
Times
TV columnist Cecil Smith. On November 8, Smith reported on another advance screening held at Universal by Spielberg and Eckstein for film students from Claremont College, some of whom were older than the director. Asked by Professor Michael Riley how he would have approached
Duel
differently if it had been made for the big screen, Spielberg replied, “Time. I took sixteen days shooting … I would have liked fifty. Time to try things.” Smith hailed
Duel
as a “unique” TV movie, because it was virtually a silent movie and “so totally a cinematic experience.” He added, “Steve Spielberg is really the
wunderkind
of the film business. At twenty-four, he looks fourteen and talks film like a contemporary of John Ford. He's been making movies all his life.”

That article prompted many people in the film industry to stay home and watch
Duel
the following Saturday night. They were alerted further by a full-page ad placed in the Hollywood trade papers that Friday by Spielberg, Eckstein, Matheson, and composer Billy Goldenberg. Over a picture of the truck bearing down upon the helpless Weaver standing in the road, the ad said simply: “We invite you to a unique television experience.”

In the following Monday's
Daily
Variety,
TV reviewer Tony Scott wrote, “Film buffs rightfully will be studying and referring to ‘The Duel' [
sic
]
for some time. Finest so far of the ABC Movies of the Weekend, [the] film belongs on the classic shelf reserved for top suspensers. Director Steven Spielberg builds step by logical step towards the exquisitely controlled climax and symbolic conclusion of Richard Matheson's teleplay. Anyone switching channels after the first five-minute hooker is in need of whole blood.”

That week, Spielberg received about a dozen offers to direct feature films. “I visited Steven in his office,” Matheson recalls, “and the walls were plastered with letters of congratulations from people in the business.”

Although it performed only moderately well in the TV ratings,
Duel
became Spielberg's first feature-length film released theatrically (aside from the single theatrical screening of
Firelight)
when the expanded version was
distributed in Europe, Australia, and Japan. A sleeper success at the box office, grossing $8 million, it established Spielberg's reputation with international critics and won the grand prize at the Festival de Cinema Fantastique in Avoriaz, France, as well as the prize for best first film at Italy's Taormina Film Festival.
¶

The veteran critic of
The
Sunday
Times
of London, Dilys Powell, “kicked off my career,” Spielberg once declared. Before the film's international debut in England in November 1972, “She saw
Duel
and then arranged for another screening in London for the critics. As a result, the film company spent more money than they'd intended on the film's promotion.”

“You would hardly think that so slight, indeed so seemingly motiveless a plot (the script is by Richard Matheson) would be enough for a film of ninety minutes,” Powell wrote. “It is plenty. It is plenty because the increase in tension is so subtly maintained, because the rhythm and the pace of movement is so subtly varied, because the action, the anonymous enemy attacking or lying in wait, is shot with such feeling for dramatic effect…. Mr. Spielberg comes from television (
Duel
was made for television); he is only twenty-five. No prophecies; but somehow I fancy this is another name to look out for.”

Traveling to Europe to promote the film (his first trip abroad), Spielberg found that with his new artistic status, people expected him to pontificate on weighty issues. In Rome, the young director “tried to steer clear of politics during his first European news conference, despite efforts by Italian journalists to politicize his ‘social comment' film,”
Variety
reported in September 1973. “While expressing certain dissatisfaction with American politics, Spielberg said he intended the film as an ‘indictment of machines' and a fight for survival between man and machine-made danger, denying contentions by journalists that the danger is the Establishment or the struggle between two Americas.” When Spielberg would not agree that the truck and the car symbolized the upper class and the working class, four journalists walked out on him.

For some of the leading international directors,
Duel
marked Spielberg's seemingly overnight arrival as one of their peers. François Truffaut, Fred Zinnemann, and Spielberg's idol, David Lean, were among those expressing admiration for the film. “I knew that here was a very bright new director,” Lean said later. “Steven takes real pleasure in the sensuality of forming action scenes—wonderful flowing movements. He has this extraordinary size of vision, a sweep that illuminates his films. But then, Steven is the way the movies used to be.”

“
U
NTIL
Duel,
I thought maybe I'd made the wrong decision signing that seven-year Universal contract,” Spielberg reflected in a 1977 interview. “… After
Duel,
everything fell into place and made perfect sense.”

Even though he suddenly found himself a hot director, Spielberg still remained bound by that onerous contract. He was more eager than ever to make features now that he had demonstrated his talent so spectacularly in television. Shortly after the end of production on
Duel,
Spielberg began shooting
Something
Evil,
a stylish but predictable horror film for CBS-TV. “Universal had nothing for me,” Spielberg recalled, “and rather than watch me sit in my office and kill time, they said, ‘Go ahead.'” Spielberg's subsequent TV movie for Universal,
Savage
(1973), was “an assignment bordering on
force
majeure.
Savage
was the first and last time the studio ordered me to do something.”

Something
Evil,
written by Robert Clouse, starred Sandy Dennis and Darren McGavin as a couple who escape city life for a Pennsylvania farmhouse only to find that the house is inhabited by a demon seeking to possess their adolescent son (Johnny Whitaker). Echoing William Peter Blatty's 1971 novel
The
Exorcist
(the film version of which was released in 1973),
Something
Evil
allowed Spielberg and cinematographer Bill Butler room for some flamboyantly surrealistic visual imagery of the family's battle with the demon, but the formulaic plot made the film seem a bit of a comedown after the freshness of
Duel.

Spielberg remembers
Something
Evil
primarily as a technical exercise, and Butler responded enthusiastically to Spielberg's “desire to experiment … the newness of his thinking.” “I loved Steve's tenacity,” says his acting teacher Jeff Corey, who played a possessed Pennsylvania Dutch farmer in the TV movie. “I remember him spending a whole day on one shot. He covered a whole party, starting from exterior to interior, going through the living room and the kitchen, in one shot. He wouldn't let go until he had it. I was a little more pliable [as a director], but he certainly had guts.”

When
Something
Evil
aired on January 21, 1972, as the CBS Friday Night Movie,
Daily
Variety
reviewer Dave Kaufman wrote, “Clouse engages in a good deal of hokum in his teleplay, stressing weird special effects more than characterization, and director Steven Spielberg does the same. Thus Sandy Dennis, as the femme driven into hysteria, begins her performance on a high key and never wavers. There is no shading for real impact…. Spielberg displays a keen awareness of numerous techniques, but not of [the] importance of vivid emotional involvement.”