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.
The people who do well in the system are the people who do films that producers like to produce, not that people want to see.
Orson Welles
STROLLING AROUND the studio where he’d spent so much time as an interloper, Spielberg could hardly believe his luck.
He’d rented a cramped $130 a month apartment on Laurel Canyon and furnished it with an ad hoc mixture of bean bags and movie posters, but he spent little time there. Each evening he caught whatever film was previewing in the studio’s theatres. Next day he was on the phone, complimenting actors on their performances, directors of their direction, producers on their acumen. Producer/writer William Link remembers him as ‘a great politician. Even then, we knew we would all be working for him one day.’
He relished the sense of Universal as another world, sealed off from the city of Los Angeles. Science fiction writer and sometime scenarist Ray Bradbury, who was also, coincidentally, afflicted with some of Spielberg’s phobias, about heights, elevators and flying, shared his love of working on a movie lot, where
everything was clearly defined. Here there were absolutely sharp beginnings, and ends that were neat and irreversible. Outside, beyond the stages, I did not much trust life with its dreadful surprises and ramshackle plots. Here, walking among the alleys just at dawn or twilight, I could imagine I opened the studio and shut it down. It belonged to me because I said it was so.
The studio looked busy. The electric trolleys of the public tours with their pink-and-white candy-striped awnings and rubber wheels seemed to be everywhere. Occasionally a limo cruised by. With the new influx of visitors, security had been tightened. Scotty now rigorously checked everyone at the gate, and people with legitimate business on the backlot had to wait in the shadow of the black tower until a Teamster-driven limo arrived to take them to their meeting – another example of the union excess which was driving producers to Europe.
As the summer approached, Spielberg waited to be given a job, but nothing eventuated. It was ironic. He had an office again at Universal, yet still the phone never rang. They were paying him now, but not much. After taxes, his weekly $130 pay cheque dwindled to less than $100. With leisure to read the fine print of his contract, he found he was less employee than slave. ‘I couldn’t work outside Universal, couldn’t look for independent financing, couldn’t go underground like all my friends were doing. I was trapped in the establishment, but nobody would give me a job in the establishment.’ With his birthday looming, he pressed Sheinberg to find him a directing project. ‘And he twisted someone’s arm – or broke it off – and got someone to give me a shot at one third of the pilot for Night Gallery.’
Night Gallery was a new series being prepared for NBC, and scheduled to begin in November 1969. To write and present it, Universal had hired Rod Serling, in the hope of repeating the success of The Twilight Zone, which he had sold outright to CBS, only to kick himself as it earned a fortune in regional reruns. Serling had grudgingly ceded all creative control to Universal. He was to write and introduce the three segments of Night Gallery, each hingeing on a painting with supernatural powers. In this way he hoped to fill the one-hour slot preferred by networks while conserving the sting-in-the-tail short-story format of Twilight Zone.
Boris Sagal and Barry Shear, both practised directors, were to share the pilot under William Sackheim, a B-movie scriptwriter who became a TV producer in his fifties. Sackheim assigned Spielberg the middle story, Eyes, a characteristic piece of Serling tables-turning about a ruthless blind businesswoman who yearns for a corneal transplant despite warnings by her doctor, Barry Sullivan, that she’ll win at most twelve hours of sight. She plunders the eyes of a desperate Tom Bosley anyway, to find that her half-day coincides with New York’s city-wide 1965 blackout.
Spielberg read the script, and immediately tried to get out of the assignment.
‘Jesus, can’t I do something about young people?’ he begged Sheinberg.
‘I’d take this if I were you,’ Sheinberg said.
It was sound advice. To add class to the pilot, Universal had hired Joan Crawford. The widow of Pepsi-Cola owner Al Steele, and Oscar-winning star of wartime Hollywood’s archetypal melodrama of upward mobility and guilty passion, Mildred Pierce, Crawford had been reduced to playing straight woman to a monster in the British horror film Trog. Even at sixty-three, however, she had never, despite having appeared in game shows, variety and live dramas, made a film specifically for TV. For that particular indignity she demanded, despite her millions, a fee of $50,000, 10 per cent of the pilot’s total budget.
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