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
