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
