great directors like Howard Hawks, Michael Curtiz and George Cukor, Spielberg ran some of her movies and pored over books on her career. Though only five feet four inches tall, she immediately drew the eye, even next to his hero Spencer Tracy. He set up a preliminary meeting at her Hollywood apartment.
Crawford was his introduction to the contradictory power of stars, nondescript in real life, magnetic on screen. Her magnetism, however, wasn’t immediately apparent when, acutely conscious of his gawky appearance, Spielberg was ushered in, since she was standing in the middle of the room with a mask over her eyes.
‘This is how a blind person walks through a room,’ she explained as she groped towards him. ‘I need to practise with the furniture two days before we shoot.’
Then she took off the mask and saw him for the first time.
‘Actually I heard later that she had been promised a director like George Cukor,’ Spielberg said, ‘and had no idea that they were going to assign an acne-ridden, sniffling-nosed, first-time-out director. I only knew years later that she had a temper tantrum when she found out that she had to work with me.’
There was no immediate sign of irritation. Crawford grilled him. What had he made? No features, just a short? Was he perhaps related, she asked drily, to someone in the Black Tower?
‘No, ma’am,’ he quavered. ‘I’m just working my way through Universal.’
Spielberg never described the meal that followed the same way twice. Sometimes he remembers Crawford saying, ‘Steven, you and I both made it on our own. We’re going to get along just fine. C’mon, let’s go out to dinner.’ In other versions, she tells him tersely, ‘I don’t want you sitting with me in a restaurant. People will think you’re my son, not my director.’ Given the course of their relationship, the second version seems more probable.
On the first day of the eight-day shoot, Crawford arrived at 8.45 a.m. precisely, swathed in mink and trailed by her personal hairdresser, make-up man, costume lady, and three men carrying iceboxes of Pepsi, which she handed around among the sixty-man crew. Nobody needed cooling. Crawford’s contract stipulated that the studio was chilled, as it had been in her great days at Warner Brothers, to 55 degrees.
The week before, Spielberg had been given an audience with Serling, daunting for someone who knew him only as the suave black-suited mc of The Twilight Zone. Serling told him that, by contract, not a word of any script could be changed without his approval. (This wasn’t true. Universal had full story approval on all its series, and didn’t hesitate to use it when ratings began to slide.) Feeling himself straitjacketed again, Spielberg fought back, diagramming a series of jump cuts, looming low-angle close-ups and sinuous crane shots reminiscent of those horror/suspense series like Thriller and The Outer Limits, which were lonely islands of German Expressionism in the ocean of Hollywood pap. Some of these devices, like his quick cuts to a series of progressively larger close-ups to build emotional pressure, he would use again and again until they became fixtures of his visual style. But as he tried to explain them during Day One, traditionally spent blocking out camera movements, he found the technicians scornful. Stuff like that was regarded as an unhealthy hangover from live TV drama. The house style called for sets lit with the intensity of an electronic flash, and characters framed in umbilicus-and-up medium shot.
Undeterred, Spielberg lined up his opening, a medium close-up of the back of a large chair that swivelled at the touch of a diamond-ringed finger to reveal Joan. He had plenty more of the same: an unbandaging that owed something to Eisenstein in its swift cutting, and a climax, as Crawford stumbled to her death through a window, that recalled the overt symbolism of 1930s montage expert Slavko Vorkapich. ‘I remember shooting through the baubles on chandeliers,’ says Spielberg, embarrassed – though the shot of Sullivan’s image inverted in distorting glass as he arrives in Crawford’s office is one of the most memorable in Eyes.
He might have got away with it had Crawford been as malleable on set as off. Instead, she exhibited a steely stubbornness, bombarding him with questions about her character. ‘Joan was climbing the walls while they were filming,’ recalled Serling’s wife Carol. ‘She was calling Rod all the time, and he reassured her.’
Under his tan, Spielberg was in a cold sweat. Seeing him pale, Barry Sullivan took him aside and told him something he would never forget: ‘Don’t put yourself through this,’ he said, ‘unless you absolutely have to.’
Spielberg saw he had no choice but to accede to most of Crawford’s demands. When she couldn’t remember her lines, he printed up cue cards, at Sullivan’s suggestion, with print large enough for her to read through her bandages. He agreed as well to the retakes she requested, knowing that to deny her could lead to a catastrophic confrontation in front of the crew.
With her young director under control, Crawford relaxed. She gave him cologne, and a bracelet. He responded by placing each morning, in her dressing room, a single rose in a Pepsi bottle. A loyal Pepsi drinker, Crawford belched every time she finished a bottle – a sign of enjoyment, she explained. When Spielberg told her he’d never learned how to belch, she taught him.
The price of conciliation was delay. At the end of the shoot, two days of script remained unfilmed. Sackheim stepped in and directed the last day. A few days later, Spielberg showed Sackheim his rough cut. The producer sat next to Spielberg in the editing room, groaning faintly at each new visual excess.
‘We’re going to have to perform major surgery on your show,’ Sackheim said at the end.
‘And he went in,’ said Spielberg, ‘and shifted the vision from my choices to his own choices.’
Exhaustion and depression forced extreme decisions. ‘I was in a despondent, comatose state,’ Spielberg recalled. ‘I learned a lot of lessons with that show, but rather than say, “Well, I’ll let that roll off my back and go on to the next show,” I went to Sid Sheinberg and said, “I can’t do TV any more. It’s just too tough. I quit.”’
Wisely, Sheinberg refused his resignation. Instead he offered a year-long leave of absence. ‘So my salary was suspended and I went home and wrote for a year. All I did was write.’
Spielberg’s first thought had been to break into the underground, where some of the USC group were making their reputation. ‘I went to the underground to make films in 16mm – and I couldn’t get in there. I could not raise $100 to make a film.’
Networking had won him a few useful contacts at Universal. One was composer John Williams. Spielberg admired his music for Mark Rydell’s version of William Faulkner’s The Reivers, folksy and ebullient by turns. Its cross-fertilisation of the American tradition with the European – ‘like a combination of Aaron Copland and Debussy’, Spielberg said – marked Williams as someone who shared his taste.
Another new acquaintance was Cliff Robertson. As much a victim of the TV ghetto as Spielberg was, the boyish-looking actor had starred in The Hustler and Days of Wine and Roses on TV, only to see Paul Newman and Jack Lemmon click with them in the cinema. When he appeared in The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon, a teleplay based on Daniel Keyes’s story ‘Flowers for Algernon’, about a mentally handicapped man who becomes a genius through experimental surgery, Robertson recognised a potential hit and bought the film rights himself, adapting it into the screenplay Charly. Seven years later, in 1968, his foresight was rewarded with an Academy Award for Best Actor.
Robertson was Spielberg’s first call after he started his leave. The actor loved World War I aircraft and, after the success of Charly, he wrote a treatment for a flying movie called I Shot Down the Red Baron, I Think, which would use rare original aircraft accumulated
