Читать книгу Steven Spielberg - John Baxter - Страница 7

Show business is high school plus money.

Hollywood saying

AFTER THE parched landscape of Arizona, Spielberg loved the hills and vineyards of Saratoga. But this move finally wrecked the rickety marriage of Leah and Arnold Spielberg. Arnold had barely finished sketching a design for the house he hoped to build when the couple separated. Leah returned to Phoenix and started divorce proceedings. The separation wrenched Steven, who developed insecurities about marriage and a sense of loss that would be reflected in his films, which are filled with sons seeking fathers and children deprived of their families.

Saratoga also exposed him to anti-Semitism for the first time. Unlike her parents, Leah hadn’t kept a devout household. Spielberg called their style of Judaism ‘storefront Kosher’. When the rabbi called, the mezuzah was put on the door frame and the menorah on the mantel, and removed after he left. Spielberg understood vaguely that his mother’s family fled from Odessa to escape pogroms. His first memory of numbers is of a man, one of a group his grandmother was tutoring in English, trying to entertain him by displaying his concentration camp tattoo, and illustrating by turning his arm to show how 6 upside-down became 9.

As a boy, Spielberg was embarrassed by his heritage. ‘My grandfather would come to the porch when I was playing football with my friends and call out my name in Hebrew. “Schmeul! Schmeul! Dinner’s ready.” They would say, “Isn’t that your place? Who’s this Shmoo?” I’d say, “I don’t know. It’s not me he’s calling.”’ To anyone who asked, his name was German. He resisted the pressure from his grandmother to conform to what he called ‘the Orthodox mould’, but at the same time the religion’s emphasis on family values fed his need to belong. As an adult, he became a classic Jewish father – and, sometimes, mother. Though no enthusiast for cooking, he would prepare Leah’s recipes at home, and occasionally get up early on location to make matzoh for 150 people, an almost sacramental act that reaffirmed the production unit as his surrogate family.

The America in which Spielberg grew up accepted racial discrimination as a fact of life. Medical and law schools operated quotas for Jewish students, and colleges had Jewish fraternities. One still occasionally encountered a discreet ‘Christian Only’ in ‘Positions Vacant’ ads. Many golf clubs operated a racial ban. Realtors wouldn’t sell houses in certain districts to Jewish families. ‘Neighbourhoods for [a Jew],’ wrote William Manchester, ‘like his summer camps and winter cruises, would advertise “Dietary rules strictly enforced.”’

In Phoenix, even as one of only five Jewish children in his school, Spielberg hadn’t stood out, but Saratoga was actively anti-Semitic. Pennies were tossed at him in study hall, and he was mocked so much in gym that he gave up sports altogether; admittedly no great sacrifice for him. The Spielberg house, the only one not to display lights at Christmas, was just a walk away from the school, but after he’d been bullied on the way home, Steven insisted Leah pick him up each day. Once, in fury at the slurs of a neighbouring family, he smeared their windows with peanut butter. Explaining his decision to film Alice Walker’s book The Color Purple, rather than choosing a black director, he would say, ‘I felt I was qualified because of my own kind of cultural Armageddon, even though as a child I exaggerated the pain – as all children will do – and I became the only person discriminated against in history as a child.’

Because of this discrimination, but from a lack of academic interest as well, Spielberg’s grades, never high, sagged still further in Saratoga. When he graduated from high school with a dismal C average, it was in the knowledge that no major college would accept him. And not being in college meant that he was eligible for the draft. ‘I would have done anything to stay out of Vietnam,’ he said. But this wish dovetailed so neatly with his ambition to become a film director, ideally before he was twenty-one, that they soon fused in his mind.

The moment the 1963 summer vacation commenced, Steven persuaded Arnold to let him spend it with an uncle in Canoga Park, a suburb of Los Angeles. His uncle lent him his 1957 Plymouth convertible, but only on the understanding he stayed in the slow lane, going no faster than forty-five m.p.h. Since the speed limit in the fast lane in those days was sixty-five, other cars rocketed by, but Spielberg didn’t care. He was in heaven. Disneyland had opened in 1955, and he made the first of many long drives to the suburb of Anaheim where Walt Disney had built his fantasy world.

Los Angeles, a horizontal city defined by freeways, opened Spielberg’s eyes to linear motion. The boy who was uncomfortable with the written word discovered in movement a handwriting he could read and in which he could, he sensed, become fluent. ‘Looking at most modern cities involves seeing a lot of buildings,’ writes the architectural historian Charles Moore. ‘Looking at Los Angeles involves experiencing a lot of rides… Even the strictly architectural sights of Los Angeles are experienced more than seen, often in carefully controlled time… They are theatre as much as architecture.’ The concept of the ride became central to Spielberg’s cinematic vision. He designed rides for Disneyland and the Universal Studios tour, and in 1994 an LA journalist writing of the Dive! ‘total experience’ restaurants he opened with Jeffrey Katzenberg would comment that Spielberg ‘does not so much create movies as he assembles theme-park rides in the shape of movies’.

There are no good years to enter the film industry, but 1963 was worse than many. Hollywood was drastically reorganising. Since just after World War I, it had been dominated by the major studios: MGM, Paramount, Twentieth Century-Fox, Columbia, Universal and United Artists. However, the Federal Justice Department had decided that companies which controlled every step in the production of film, from conception to marketing, were in restraint of free trade, and forced the studios to shed their theatres, and open production to independent film-makers.

Shorn of the power to control production and distribution, the studios re-inserted themselves into the equation in a different role, lending the independents money, renting them office and production space, and organising promotion and distribution. The charges they levied for their help were often extortionate. Spielberg’s fees for Jaws and his percentage of its profits, known in the trade as ‘points’, would give him a personal fortune in the millions, but it was Universal and Columbia who really profited. Of Star Wars’ $200 million US domestic income, George Lucas would complain that he personally received, after taxes, less than $20 million.

Even by milking the film-makers, however, the studios still could not defeat television. Throughout the fifties and early sixties, desperate for novelties to win back their audience, they exhumed and relaunched all the technical improvements which had been developed over the previous half century but abandoned for lack of investment or interest: 70mm, CinemaScope, 3-D, VistaVision, even Aromarama, smellovision, and the tricks popularised by William Castle; seats wired with electric buzzers and plastic skeletons falling from the ceiling.

None slowed the inexorable trend towards home entertainment at the expense of the cinema experience. Many studios saw this as the writing on the wall, and hurried to cut their losses. The accumulated movies of fifty years were sold off to TV. Everywhere, backlots were bulldozed and the land redeveloped for office buildings. By the end of the sixties, MGM and Twentieth Century-Fox, rather than retain large warehouses of costumes and props and the staff to service them, would sell everything at auction: Garbo’s gowns, Judy Garland’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, Charles Foster Kane’s Rosebud sled from Citizen Kane – the patrimony of Spielberg’s dreams, fragments of which he would later pay a fortune to retrieve.

Some of the most attractive real estate in greater Los Angeles belonged to Universal Studios. Its 374-acre studio and backlot was the first thing a visitor saw as he topped the Cahuenga Pass out of Los Angeles and slid onto the wide flat floor of the San Fernando Valley, the dormitory suburb of greater LA. Universal’s chairman, Lew Wasserman, was a cunning and stubborn negotiator with a reputation for seeing further than many. As head of the MCA talent agency he’d pioneered package and profit-sharing deals under which stars deferred salary in favour of a share of income. The first such deal he negotiated, for James Stewart, made the actor a multi-millionaire. MCA had bought Universal Studios to guarantee work to its clients and a supply of television product to the networks and advertising agencies with which it enjoyed production deals. In 1962, however, forced by the Justice Department to decide whether it was an agency or a film producer, MCA shed the former and went into film-making full time.

To mark his territory, Wasserman commissioned an office block from the prestigious Chicago firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, an opaque stub of anodised aluminium and black glass. Inside, according to rumour, the dividing walls were movable. An executive in disfavour might arrive one morning to find his office subtly more cramped than when he left the night before.

From his seventeenth-floor executive suite, Wasserman squinted out over his fiefdom, and wondered how to make money with it. From high on the hill, the half-scale Gothic mansion from Hitchcock’s Psycho looked down on the plaster-and-lath sets where Lon Chaney Snr made his version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and his son Lon Jr The Wolf Man. The Invisible Man, Frankenstein and Dracula sprang from here, as did their multitudes of sequels. Jack Arnold’s films were shot on these sets and stages too. In the sixties, Ernest Borgnine and the crew were making the TV series McHale’s Navy on the black lagoon from which the creature had crawled. Interiors for Wagon Train and The Virginian were being shot on sets where Boris Karloff had once worked. Most of Universal’s income, however, was generated by a few blocks of bland shopfronts that provided a setting for modern cop shows and spy stories. Meanwhile, run-off from the hills was undermining the older sets, some of which were already collapsing.

One cost-cutting option that didn’t exist was firing people. The film production and craft unions, IATSE, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, and NABET, the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, aided by Jimmy Hoffa’s corrupt Teamsters, enjoyed near-omnipotent power. ‘Feather-bedding’ was rife. Once you were in, you were in for life – and beyond, if, like many, you apprenticed your sons. In the same way, a handful of executives circulating from studio to studio dominated management. ‘Affirmative action for family members,’ acknowledged the Los Angeles Times, ‘is an accepted practice in a town where everyone seems to be related to everyone else… A solid education and good grades are not necessarily relevant or even desirable and are considered much less valuable than the kind of insider’s knowledge acquired at the dinner table night after night.’ As Hollywood had joked when David Selznick married the daughter of MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, ‘the son-in-law also rises.’

In the thirties, under its founder Carl Laemmle, Universal had been notorious for nepotism. His son, known simply as ‘Junior’, ran production, and the payroll groaned with cousins. ‘Uncle Carl Laemmle,’ ran the crack, ‘has a very large faemmle.’ In reaction, the company promulgated an anti-nepotism rule in the forties, with jobs allocated by merit and experience. But this soon hardened into a rigid roster system, with pay hikes and other benefits graded according to length of service. Walking off a film meant you lost seniority, so productions at Universal always went ahead, no matter how inept the director or crew. Despite its large complement of staff technicians, most producers preferred to hire contract crews for anything being made to a deadline.

In 1963, the MCA board was pressing Wasserman for a decision about whether or not to follow a consultant’s advice and sell the backlot for hotels and condos, and lawyer Albert Dorskind was put in charge of assessing offers. Dorskind saved the studio. Shopping downtown one day in Farmers’ Market, the ramshackle complex of fruit and vegetable stalls and quick-lunch counters at Fairfax and Third Street, on the fringe of Hollywood, Dorskind noticed a Gray Line bus disgorging tourists. Remembering that Universal’s restaurant was losing $100,000 a year, he rang Gray Line and suggested they put Universal on their itinerary. Visitors could even lunch in the commissary – Eat With the Stars! And it would only cost Gray Line $1 a head, over and above what people ate. Gray Line jumped at it. The restaurant manager upped his prices by 20 per cent, and the commissary was soon in profit.

Spielberg stepped out of the Gray Line bus onto Universal’s hallowed ground in June 1963 with the awe of a zealot entering Jerusalem. He hid until the bus left, then spent the rest of the afternoon poking around, even walking onto sound stages where TV episodes were being shot. He found his way to the cutting rooms, where editor Tony Martinelli was working on episodes of Wagon Train. Spielberg asked questions. Flattered, and glad of a diversion, Martinelli and the other editors were happy to reply. He told them he’d made some movies, and asked if they would take a look at them. One said, ‘Bring ’em in, kid.’ Dazzled, Spielberg found a phone and called his cousin to pick him up. The next day he was back with Firelight and his 8mm films. Almost every day for the rest of his vacation he dressed in his one suit and, carrying an empty briefcase, drove to Universal. At the gate, the guard, assuming he was just another nephew with a summer job at the studio, waved him through.

Elsewhere in Los Angeles, the people who were to become Spielberg’s contemporaries in New Hollywood were gathering. Some almost didn’t make it. In June 1962, George Lucas, having graduated – barely – from high school in Modesto, took his Fiat Bianchina for a drive, and wrapped it round a tree. He nearly died. Others already had movie jobs. Francis Ford Coppola was writing screenplays while working as dogsbody for Hollywood’s cheapest producer, Roger Corman, and moonlighting as a director of soft-core porn. But the majority, like Spielberg, were just out of high school and wondering how to get in. Lucas, once he recovered, tried the accepted way, visiting every film production company on Ventura Boulevard, the ribbon development of low-rent two-storey office buildings and storefronts that wove along the periphery of the San Fernando Valley. He got nowhere.

Entering the business through a film school was still a novel concept. Cinema remained, in Hollywood at least, a business, not an art. Nobody anticipated the flood of film students attracted by the French New Wave, Britain’s Free Cinema documentary movement, or the underground films that were boiling out of New York and San Francisco.

After his accident, Lucas spent two more years in Modesto Junior College improving his grades, and was accepted by the University of Southern California’s film programme, the nation’s oldest. It helped that his father was moderately well-off. USC’s location on the edge of the unfashionable and dangerous downtown area belied the fact that it was a private university with high fees, whereas the plush UCLA, headquartered in well-barbered Westwood, had state funding. Despite its funky appearance, however, USC was, as one writer put it,

a citadel of privilege. Its graduates in public administration governed Los Angeles. Its doctors and technicians governed the medical establishment. The student body – overwhelmingly white and upper-middle-class – was largely immune to the social turmoil of the sixties. The school newspaper admitted that the ‘high cost of a USC education seems to screen out almost all Negroes. The notable exceptions to this rule are athletes admitted on scholarship.’ [in 1967, one of the black juniors on a football scholarship was O.J. Simpson.]

USC’s film programme didn’t rate the attention or investment of its medical or law school, let alone the football team. Its fifty students were mostly kids from second- or third-generation industry families, picking up the rudiments of sound recording or camera operation before they took the place awaiting them in the hierarchical studio system. They studied in classrooms built from World War I surplus lumber, and cut their films side by side on twenty-five ancient Moviolas in a graffiti-spattered room. The university guaranteed each student the funds and equipment to make a fifteen-minute film, but learning how to do it was mostly up to them. The faculty included a few good people, like Verna Fields, who been sound editor for Fritz Lang and taught courses when she wasn’t working on films like Anthony Mann’s El Cid. But she was in the minority.

Spielberg knew none of these people until much later. After the summer of 1963, he returned to Saratoga and high school. In vacations, he made lengthy forays to Los Angeles. Unwittingly, he followed George Lucas’s route along Ventura Boulevard, trying to find someone to look at his films. Everywhere, weary producers of promotional documentaries spurned them like the plague. One did agree to screen some of Firelight. ‘I gave him two of the best reels,’ says Spielberg. ‘I came back a week later and he was fired. Gone! His office was cleared out and now there’s a Toyota dealership where the office used to be… So part of Firelight still exists, but all the exposition is gone.’

In 1964, the decision about his immediate future was made for him. He was waiting in line at a San Jose cinema to see Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb when his sister and father drove up with an envelope. It was his Selective Service notice, confirming that, lacking a student exemption, he had been graded 1-A – prime cannon-fodder. He still went to the film, though he didn’t enjoy it, not knowing whether to laugh or be frightened. ‘I was so consumed with the possibility of going to Vietnam that I had to see it for a second time to really appreciate it.’ Wars came and went, but Kubrick was eternal.

College seemed the only feasible option. USC turned him down, and there was no money to send him through junior college to raise his grades, so the family chose academically indifferent California State College at Long Beach.

A half-hour drive from Hollywood across the industrial and suburban sprawl of Los Angeles, Long Beach hardly seemed Californian. The suburb’s untidy bungalows huddling along a nondescript coastline had a lacklustre, countryfied feel that reminded Spielberg of Arizona. For years, Long Beach hosted the Iowa State Picnic, attracting 150,000 midwesterners eager for a look at the Pacific. In an attempt to attract tourists and raise the tax base, the county allowed oil companies to sink wells on artificial islands just a few yards offshore, hiding the rigs inside fake apartment buildings. Entrepreneurs also moored the superannuated liner Queen Mary as a floating convention centre, and installed next to it Howard Hughes’s gigantic and almost unairworthy ‘Spruce Goose’ flying boat.

Spielberg was as indifferent to the gimcrack atmosphere of Long Beach as he was to his college education. If the draft had ended earlier, he admitted, he probably wouldn’t have gone to college at all. As it was, his three years at Long Beach created scarcely a ripple in his life. Since it had no film courses, the man who had turned The Scarlet Letter into a flip book majored in English. He worked in the cafeteria to earn pocket money, and projected classroom films. If he squeezed all his classes into two days a week, he could spend the rest of the time in Los Angeles.

What film education he gained was in Hollywood’s rerun and repertory cinemas like the NuArt and the Vagabond. ‘Anything not American impressed me,’ he said. ‘I went through a phase of seeing Ingmar Bergman films. I must have seen every Bergman movie ever made, because that’s what they were showing at that theatre. The next week, you’d see Buñuel movies.’ Hurriedly he added, ‘Not very many.’ Buñuel’s ragged technique, quirky plots and rigorous Catholicism baffled him. He preferred Jacques Tati, France’s master of the sight gag, whose films had no dialogue.

When he could scrape up enough money, he hired a 16mm camera and shot a film. He made five during the Long Beach years, a few of which experimented with abstraction. ‘I did a picture about dreams – how disjointed they are. I made one about what happens to rain when it hits dust.’ Another was ‘about a man being chased by someone trying to kill him. But running becomes such a spiritual pleasure for him that he forgets who is after him.’ Shooting these shorts kept his hand in, but the films were arid. He was, he knew already, a ‘concept’ director who made films from the general to the particular. What he needed was a big story, and the resources to deal with it as it deserved.

Spielberg’s contacts at Universal continued to be the most promising route to a career, and he spent as much time at the studio as he could. To raise a little money, Wasserman rented office space to independent producers. Spielberg tracked some of them down in remote corners or in the two-storey cinder-block buildings, mostly ex-warehouses, that huddled like mushrooms outside the studio perimeter. A few were glad to see him. All of them had advice. None offered him a job.

After the profitable public tours had been running for a year, Wasserman, sensing a money-maker, invested $4 million in turning the Universal City Tour into a studio enterprise. Restrooms and concession stands were installed, and special rubber-tyred trams designed. On 4 July 1964 the tour was officially inaugurated. Students acted as guides. Among the earliest was a young man from Encino named Mike Ovitz with a sleepy, catlike smile. Thirty years later, he would be offered the running of the studio.

If only Spielberg had known it, he already possessed an advantage that would give him the inside track in Hollywood. Being Jewish meant he was born into the culture and ethos prevailing in sixties Hollywood. Had he been part of an industry family, he would have found work instantly. Instead, he was forced to prowl Universal, looking for a connection, a sponsor, a patron.

Chuck Silver (whom Spielberg has identified as head of the editing department, but whom Sidney Sheinberg remembers as the film librarian) spotted him in the corridor and asked who he was. As a young man, he stood out: other than the student guides, the only people under forty on the lot were actors, and he obviously couldn’t be one of those. Tickled by Spielberg’s tale of bluffing his way in, Silver wrote him a pass, and tried to introduce him to some executives, but the few that did agree to see him recoiled when he arrived with his little 8mm projector and started taking down their diplomas to make space on the wall for an impromptu screening. He learned quickly that he was competing with UCLA graduates who, thanks to Uncle Irving who ran the camera department at Warner Brothers, could boast 35mm show reels of professional quality.

Bolder now, he wandered onto sets to watch directors at work, and was thrown off Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain and Franklin Schaffner’s The War Lord. He had a revenge of sorts when the studio’s head sound mixer, Ronnie Pierce, let him sit in on the soundtrack recording of Torn Curtain, and of lesser films like the Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedy Send Me No Flowers.

TV directors weren’t as fastidious as Hitchcock about visitors, and Spielberg had no trouble crashing the set of Robert Ellis Miller, who was directing a 1964 episode of Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater with John Cassavetes.

Noticing the pimply boy in the shadows, however, Cassavetes introduced himself. As they chatted, he asked Spielberg, ‘What do you want to do?’

‘I want to be a director.’

Cassavetes chewed this over. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘After every take, you tell me what I’m doing wrong.’

The next time Miller called ‘Cut!’ the actor walked up to Spielberg. ‘What do you think? How can I improve it? What am I doing wrong?’

Spielberg equivocated. ‘Gah, it’s too embarrassing right here, Mr Cassavetes. Don’t ask me in front of everybody; can’t we go round the corner and talk?’

But Cassavetes insisted. He probably enjoyed lighting a fire under Miller, a minor talent even by Universal standards, but Spielberg learned a valuable lesson. As François Truffaut said, ‘a director is someone who answers questions.’ If you came on a movie set, you had better know how to deal with anything that arose. Over the next few years, Spielberg made it his business to become expert in every aspect of film-making technique. Nobody would ever again ask him a question he couldn’t answer.

The years between 1966 and 1969 are among the poorest-documented of Spielberg’s career, and he has made sure they remain so. There is no consistency to the chronology he quotes in interviews. Projects which obviously occupied his time and energy for long periods are passed over in a sentence. The vagueness reflects his disillusion with Hollywood and the sense that he would never achieve his aim of directing before he was twenty-one.

He made few friends while at Long Beach, though one, Carl Gottlieb, would go on to co-write the script of Jaws. Another was a personable young actor named Tony Bill, who’d had a small role in Coppola’s You’re a Big Boy Now and was getting a reputation as a comedy lead. His ambitions, however, lay in production. He and Spielberg started work on a film called ‘Slipstream’, about a cycle race, but it was never finished. The cameraman, Serge Haigner, was assisted by a young man named Allen Daviau, someone else who would figure in Spielberg’s career. John Cassavetes also gave Spielberg a few weeks’ work as gofer on his film Faces.

After bluffing his way into Universal, getting into USC was easy, if not as a student, then simply to crash evening screenings and hang out. At a retrospective of USC graduate films, Spielberg got to know the more social of the film students. Not, however, George Lucas, who, secretly terrified that people might think him gauche and naive, said little or nothing to anybody, and concentrated on making movies.

Spielberg’s first friends there were Hal Barwood and his writing partner Matthew Robbins, from UCLA. They would write The Sugarland Express and go on to directorial careers, while continuing to act as his script doctors; until the early eighties, Spielberg seldom made a film without their input. He met Randal Kleiser, later director of Grease and The Blue Lagoon, Caleb Deschanel, lighting cameraman on The Right Stuff and director of The Escape Artist, Walter Murch, editor of Julia and Apocalypse Now, Howard Kazanjian, destined to be producer on Raiders and many other Lucas films, John Carpenter, director of Halloween and The Fog, composer Basil Poledouris, of Conan the Barbarian and Big Wednesday, and David S. Ward, writer of The Sting and director of Cannery Row.

Most important of all, he became friendly with John Milius. Massive, bearded and irascible, a war lover, surfing buff and gun freak – when he became a director, Milius demanded as part of his deal that the studio buy him a rare firearm of his choice – Milius, Hollywood’s self-styled resident expert on legendary Americans, was the group’s renegade, indispensable to its sense of community. When the college fired him for punching a professor, the others went on strike until he was reinstated. Milius and Robbins became like older cousins to Spielberg; people to whom he could turn in an emergency, and on whom he could rely for useful, if sometimes undiplomatically phrased, advice. Quietly, Spielberg was rebuilding the family he’d lost when his parents broke up.

In the summer of 1967, Spielberg decided to take the law into his own hands. By now he was well known around Universal, so he simply began to act as if he worked there. Quizzed later, Scotty, the studio guard who waved him through every day, admitted he took him for Lew Wasserman’s son.

Independent producers came and went all the time, and there were always vacant offices in the warren at the back of the studio. Spielberg found an empty room, introduced himself to the women at the main switchboard, and told them what extension he was on. With plastic letters from a camera store, the sort used to title home movies, he listed himself on the main directory: Steven Spielberg, starring in his own production of his career.

Spielberg is vague about the amount of time he hung out at Universal. It might have been two years, or six months, or even three months. Sometimes he’s seventeen, at other times twenty-one. The vagueness reflects his disillusion with Hollywood and his sense that he would never achieve his aim of directing before he was twenty-one. When it became obvious that he would not achieve this goal, fantasy took over.

Around this time, it became generally believed that Spielberg was born not in 1946 but in 1947. Undoubtedly he himself was responsible for this error, and its persistence. His driver’s licence bore, and continued to bear, the date of birth 1947, as did his voter registration. In January 1981 a Los Angeles Times journalist noticed the discrepancy, and repeatedly tried to get a reaction from Spielberg’s publicist, but without success. In January 1988, shortly after what had apparently been his fortieth birthday, the New York Times and many other papers would publish articles on ‘Spielberg at Forty’. No attempt was made by Spielberg or Amblin to correct them. Finally confronted with the disparity in 1995, Marvin Levy, Spielberg’s spokesman on publicity, told the Los Angeles Times, ‘I’m sure there’s an answer. Maybe he didn’t care what people said about his age. He cares about one thing: making films.’ The inference is inescapable, however, that Spielberg put back his birthday so as to maintain the illusion that he might still make his first film before he was twenty-one.

As for the usefulness of his time at Universal, Spielberg admits, ‘I never made any deals, but I used the phone a lot (to call up the time) and learned how to play the game. I got fed up with the joint though, and left, and went to Long Beach College and made a short called Amblin’.’

The short-film route to a job in movies was a traditional one in the sixties. Some cinemas still showed a ‘full supporting programme’, and there were plenty of festivals interested in good new work. George Lucas had just made Filmmaker, a thirty-minute documentary about Francis Coppola shooting The Rain People. Noel Black had won his first feature with a short called Skater Dater, a teenage romance with skateboards shot in San Francisco.

Spielberg now understood enough of Hollywood to realise that only a 35mm film carried conviction. Fortunately, he says, ‘I met someone who was as enthusiastic to make movies as I was. The difference was that he was a millionaire, Dennis Hoffman. He had a [special effects] optical company. He saw some of my 8mm and 16mm films and said he’d give me $10,000 – which to me was a bloody fortune – to make a short film, but he wanted the possessory credit. That means the films said “Dennis Hoffman’s Amblin’”. I said, “Fine.” I took the money and made the film in 35mm. 1.85:1 ratio [of wide screen used by all professional cinemas]. The big time for me!’

Later Hoffman, who diversified out of the lab business into a chain called Designer Donuts, the investors in which included Spielberg, would claim that their 1968 contract covered not only Amblin’ but a feature, to be directed for Hoffman during the next ten years. The deal was one that would come back to haunt Spielberg.

Amblin’ is a twenty-four-minute story of a young couple who meet in the Mojave desert and hitchhike to the Californian coast. Amateurs Pamela McMyler and Richard Levin played the lovers. Allen Daviau shot it, delighted to be working in 35mm after long periods of documentaries. The landscape was beautiful, the cars sleek, the lovers – who had no dialogue – affectingly clean-cut and attractive. A brief love scene and a shared joint gave the film a trendy modernism. Spielberg, however, was under no illusions about the worth of Amblin’. It had only one function: to demonstrate his and Daviau’s grasp of cinema technique and their ability to make a slick Hollywood product. He called it ‘a Pepsi commercial’, and joked that it had the empty decorative appeal of a piece of driftwood.

Hoffman was delighted, however, and in 1969 entered Amblin’ in the second Atlanta Film Festival, where it won an award. Convinced that his career as a producer was assured, he threw what Spielberg remembers as ‘an inflated premiere… to all the execs in Los Angeles. Or rather, he invited all the execs, but no one came.’ Fortunately, a few ‘lower-echelon studio people’ saw the film. One was Chuck Silver, who took a copy to show a Universal executive named Sidney Jay Sheinberg.

Sheinberg started his working life as a law instructor at UCLA, but in 1959 Albert Dorskind hired him as an assistant; Sheinberg’s father-in-law was business manager for a number of MCA executives. Courteous, even formal in manner, and intensely discreet, Sheinberg called everybody, even his juniors, ‘sir’, a habit he never lost. He quickly impressed the Universal hierarchy, and Jennings Lang, who ran the television division, put him in charge of long-term production planning, which included keeping an eye out for new talent.

Sheinberg remembers Chuck Silver buttonholing him one night when he’d been previewing a film in one of the studio screening rooms. ‘He said there’s this guy who’s been hanging around the place who’s made a short film,’ said Sheinberg. ‘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.’

Nervous that his moonlighting on the lot had been found out, Spielberg presented himself at Sheinberg’s office in the Black Tower.

‘Sidney is very austere. He said, “Sir, I liked your film. How would you like to go to work professionally? You sign the contract, you start in television. After TV, if you do a few good television shows and other producers on the lot like your work, you go into feature films.” It wasn’t that easy, but it sounded great.’

Spielberg dithered. ‘But I have a year left to go in college.’

‘Do you want to go to college,’ Sheinberg asked, ‘or do you want to direct?’

Spielberg’s formal education ended in that moment. ‘I left so quickly that I never even cleared out my locker,’ he said. Years later, at odd moments, he’d think of the chicken salad sandwich he’d left rotting there.

As Spielberg signed his contract a few weeks later, he murmured, ‘My father will never forgive me for leaving college.’ It was a reaction Sheinberg understood. Like Leah’s parents, his father had emigrated to escape anti-Semitic persecution. He and his attractive young wife, the actress Lorraine Gary, were devoted to each other and to their two boys.

The contract was the standard seven-year pact for ‘personal services’, under which Spielberg sold every working minute to Universal to use as they pleased. The business called it ‘the Death Pact’. Only the desperate – or the desperately ambitious – would sign it, and Spielberg was both. So was his Amblin’ star, Pamela McMyler, whom Universal also put under contract. Coincidentally, John Milius was also offered the same seven-year deal, but as a writer. He turned it down.

How old was Spielberg when Universal signed him? In early versions of what was to become a legend, he claimed unashamedly that he was twenty. ‘One day in 1969, when I was twenty-one…’ he told the Hollywood Reporter in 1971. In another version, he says he told Sheinberg when he signed the contract, ‘I just have one request, and I’d like you to give me not so much a commitment, Mr Sheinberg, as a promise. I want to direct something before I’m twenty-one. That would be very important to me.’ Sheinberg, he said, agreed. Yet for Spielberg to have signed a contract as a minor would have necessitated investigation of his age, which would have brought his true date of birth to light.

The likelihood is that Sheinberg knew that Spielberg had turned twenty-one in December 1967, and was therefore twenty-two when he signed their deal, but that he went along with the illusion for publicity reasons. Already the older man sensed an affinity that would grow over the years. Some people felt the two even looked alike. As his own children failed to show any of his flair for show business, he began to regard Spielberg as a surrogate son.