Steven Spielberg. John Baxter
was in charge, and Spielberg joined his team. It was a useful move. ‘He had his own long-haired film society right in the heart of Universal Studios,’ he says of Freedman. ‘He employed a number of writers, directors, people dealing with esoterica, and he hired people from his college and people he knew from the East. I was just a young person, whom he liked at the time, and to whom he said, “Here, do two Psychiatrists for me.”’
The Psychiatrist, written by Richard Levinson and William Link in the school of Ben Casey, Doctor Kildare and other successful doctor shows, featured Roy Thinnes as an idealistic LA shrink and Luther Adler as the obligatory older, more cynical colleague. Spielberg did The Private World of Martin Dalton (10 February 1971) and Par for the Course (10 March 1971). Martin Dalton was cribbed from a famous incident in Robert Lindner’s collection of psychiatric case histories, The Jet Propelled Couch. A disturbed twelve-year-old (Stephen Hudis) invents a fantasy universe from TV and comic books, and begins to retreat into it. Responding to a subject close to home, Spielberg seized the chance to create a surrealist dream world and also to work with young actors, for which he already showed a flair.
It was Par for the Course, however, with golf pro Clu Gulager coming to terms with his imminent death from duodenal cancer, which attracted most attention, and which Spielberg regards as his best TV work. Always most comfortable illustrating an emotion than conveying it in dialogue, he wrote a scene in which two buddies bring Gulager in hospital a gift they know he will relish – the cup from the eighteenth hole at his course, which they’ve dug out of the centre of the green. Gulager breaks down and crushes the dirt and grass over his head.
Levinson and Link were so pleased with Par for the Course that they asked for Spielberg to direct Murder by the Book, the first regular episode, after two feature-length pilots, of the detective series Columbo. The role of the Los Angeles Police Department’s scruffiest, least tidy but most perspicacious detective, who allowed himself in each episode to be patronised by his arrogant quarry before springing a brilliant deductive trap at the end, had been planned for Bing Crosby. He turned it down, however, when it looked as if the series’ success might interfere with his golf. Peter Falk replaced him. The series’ story editor, Stephen Bochco, later the force behind Hill Street Blues and LA Law, wrote Murder by the Book, in which Columbo unmasks crime writer Jack Cassidy as the murderer of his collaborator Martin Milner. It aired on 15 September 1971 to excellent reviews, but allowed Spielberg little room for creativity. He did his best, opening the film not with the conventional theme but the sound of a typewriter, and setting up some sharp angles inside Milner’s high-rise office to exploit its spectacular view of Los Angeles, but in most respects the film is routine.
Spielberg also made an episode of Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law called Eulogy for a Wide Receiver, about a football coach accused of feeding amphetamines to his players. However, any charm that series TV might have held for him was running out. In particular, its casts of B-movie players and studio trainees grated increasingly. ‘At twenty-three, I was already saying, “Life’s too short to worry about the size of someone’s trailer. Or the fact that they don’t like the hairdresser because the hairdresser has coffee breath.” Little petty things used to make me crazy.’
If Spielberg needed a further caution that TV eroded talent, he could find it in the experience of Rod Serling, who as Night Gallery dragged into its second year with diminishing ratings, found most of his stories rejected. As the studio even barred him physically from story conferences and began buying scripts of its own, with the emphasis on action, it became clear to him that he’d been hired mainly as a master of ceremonies. ‘I’ll just be the front man, a short hunk of gristle,’ he told a reporter. ‘[Night Gallery] is not mine at all. [It’s] another species of formula series drama.’
After the autumn of 1971 Spielberg wasn’t to escape such problems, but at least he encountered them on a higher plane, since Universal had by then grudgingly given him his first true feature and first international success. Much was to change for him, and for New Hollywood, with the making of Duel.
We’re old now, but when we were the New Hollywood…
Steven Spielberg. 1994
THE YEAR 1971 carried a sense of threat for Americans. In February, an earthquake rocked the San Fernando Valley, shaking Universal’s black tower to its foundations and toppling some of the ancient sets. Sixty-two people died when old apartment houses collapsed all over the city, as if they too had been built not to last but to act as movie backgrounds. In September, convicts rioted at Attica prison in upstate New York, took guards prisoner and plunged into a bloodbath. Servicemen were returning home from Vietnam at an increasing rate, but the war remained a running sore. Lieutenant William Calley was sentenced to life imprisonment in March for the My-Lai massacre, only to be released to house arrest by President Nixon pending his appeal.
The automobile, its pleasures and dangers, was, even more than usual, a national preoccupation. GM recalled 6.7 million Chevrolet cars and trucks and Ford 220,000 Pintos to correct design faults. Two Detroit car novels, Arthur Hailey’s Wheels and Harold Robbins’ The Betsy, were the year’s big sellers. They were matched only by William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist and Tom Tryon’s The Other, occult thrillers with suburban or rural settings that probed the unease about daily life bedded as deep in the mouth of America as an abscessed tooth.
Dennis Hoffman, the producer of Amblin’, kept asking what had happened to his film. Spielberg was directing and McMyler had a small role in The Boston Stranger. But he, the man who’d given them their chance, whose name was on Amblin’, who’d put up the money, had zilch. The Universal short subjects department finally offered $90,000 for the rights. ‘But the sex and the joint have gotta go,’ they said. ‘This is a family company.’ Indignantly, Hoffman refused, and Spielberg, while not making an issue of it, backed him up. Amblin’ had served its purpose in getting him into the studio. What happened to it now didn’t matter that much. Retrieving the film from Universal, Hoffman sold it to Paramount, which released it late in 1970 as the support film to what looked like a cheap youth picture. But Love Story, Arthur Hiller’s adaptation of Erich Segal’s best-seller, with its tearful celebration of young love on its deathbed, became the year’s sleeper, making stars of Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw, and grossing more than $100 million. Everywhere, people stopped Spielberg and said, ‘Say, I saw that movie of yours.’ He wasn’t any longer just some nephew or cousin of Sid Sheinberg’s who had almost fucked up the Joan Crawford TV pilot. Something of his had made it to the Big Silver. He was a movie director.
All over Hollywood, young directors had become hot in the wake of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda’s hymn to dope, rock and the road, Easy Rider. Variety’s 1970 Cannes Festival report acclaimed American cinema as ‘the new avant garde’, while 1971’s International Film Guide rated it
more innovative, more directly concerned with issues, and more deeply expressive of individual personal vision. Features like Alice’s Restaurant, The Strawberry Statement, Woodstock… as well as hundreds of lesser known independent films, reject traditional romantic clichés and get very close to the bizarre configurations of contemporary American experience.
Old Hollywood didn’t know what to make of this unexpected new direction in the industry. ‘In those times,’ says Michael Pye, ‘there was just this moment when it was possible for a whole generation of young talent to come in and make very much the films they wanted, because no one was any longer very sure what sort of film a studio product would be.’
Overnight, directors fresh from film school had their fantasies funded by an industry hipped on being hip. ‘Every studio in town was narcotised by Easy Rider’s grosses,’ wrote the novelist Joan Didion, a devoted Hollywood-watcher and occasional screenwriter, ‘and all that was needed to get a picture off the ground was the suggestion of a $750,000 budget, a low-cost NABET or even a non-union crew, and this terrific twenty-two-year-old director.’