bogged down in wrangles over finance, in which, to Robertson’s fury, Begelman sided with Cinerama. Robertson was forced to pay $25,000 to Cinerama, with a further $25,000 if the film was ever made. In sworn depositions, he claimed Begelman ‘sandbagged’ and ‘completely subverted’ him.
Aware of this debacle, and knowing Robertson’s interest in old planes, Spielberg offered him a treatment he’d written with a friend, Claudia Salter, about a World War I flyer and his son barnstorming around America in the early twenties. Robertson liked Ace Eli and Rodger of the Skies. He bought it, hiring Salter to write a screenplay.
After graduation from USC, Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins had tried to sell some screenplays, but without success. Spielberg began feeding them his ideas. George Lucas was staying with the writers while he cast what would become his first studio feature, American Graffiti. The abstracted Lucas seldom spoke to anyone as he wandered in and out, but to him it seemed the dweeby guy with the big nose and the glasses was there almost all the time. Spielberg’s voice filled the house as he leaned over the shoulders of Robbins and Barwood, suggesting lines, laughing at those they’d written, and urging them on.
One of Spielberg’s ideas was a comedy he’d already tried to float at Universal, a modern Snow White, about seven men who run a Chinese food factory in San Francisco. Another was based on a clipping from the Los Angeles Citizen News about a May 1969 Texas incident when Ila Faye Dent, just released after a shoplifting conviction, persuaded her husband Robert to break out of prison to retrieve their two-year-old daughter from court-appointed foster parents. On the way, they kidnapped state patrolman James Crone, which led to a massive car chase across the state.
From this story, Barwood and Robbins, with Spielberg’s collaboration, worked up the tale of Lou Jean and Clovis Poplin’s flight in search of Baby Langston. Police Captain Tanner, hamstrung by the incompetence of his men and the young couple’s sentimental appeal, trails them with a motorcade as they bumble across Texas. Crowds cheer them and high school bands play them through town, while well-wishers offer free gas and chicken dinners, and fill the car with gifts. Even the vigilantes who ambush them on a used-car lot manage only to riddle the cars and do no harm to the fugitives at all. The dream dies at the end, when Clovis is killed, but until then it’s a folk tale straight from Reader’s Digest. The screenplay was called ‘Carte Blanche’, then ‘American Express’, but later it was renamed, in honour of the town towards which the Poplins were fleeing, The Sugarland Express.
Each decade throws up its hot writing teams, and Barwood and Robbins were to be as hot as any during the seventies. Episodic and oriented totally towards action, their work seems mechanical today, a loose stringing together of action sequences, owing more to animators like Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, Frank Tashlin and Walt Disney than to the meticulous plot- and scene-builders of the 1940s. But Spielberg called them ‘geniuses’ and praised their ‘wonderful cartoon imagination’. Once Barwood and Robbins went on to direct their own films, he found and encouraged other partnerships like theirs. Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, his protégés in the eighties, were Barwood and Robbins writ large, not least in their fascination with animation.
As if to underline the comparison with Jones and Avery, Barwood, Robbins and Spielberg put Lou Jean and Clovis into an Indian Chief mobile home on a used-car lot and had them watch Chuck Jones’s Road Runner evade Wile E. Coyote on the screen of a nearby drive-in cinema. Spielberg lavished all his craft on this scene when the film was finally made. Birdus Fleetus and Lupus Persisticus (Jones’s cod-Latin names for his hero and villain) were his boyhood heroes, and he prevailed on Universal to buy from Warners forty seconds of Jones’s cartoon to underline the film’s most poignant moment.
His Universal contract had won Spielberg an agent. He was accepted by the prestigious International Creative Management, founded by David Begelman, a plump middle-aged man, famous as one of Hollywood’s highest-betting poker players, but also well-known, because of arguments like that with his ex-client Cliff Robertson, as chronically unreliable. Spielberg’s first representative at ICM was Mike Medavoy, himself later a studio executive. ‘Spielberg came in with… Amblin’,’ Medavoy recalled. ‘I saw it and I said: “Terrific!”’ Medavoy got him a few commercials, one of which featured a black actress named Margaret Avery, whom Spielberg would remember when he came to direct The Color Purple.
But he and Medavoy disagreed over Universal, to which Spielberg, disconsolate about the lack of work on the outside, was thinking of returning. Medavoy recalled:
I wanted him to get out of that contract. He wanted to stay. He was right, actually, to stay. My feeling was that at Universal at that particular time – this was right before Airport – he’d get boxed into doing garbage. And I had just gotten Phil Kaufman out of his contract. So I said, ‘Listen, you should get another agent, I don’t think your career is going to go anywhere if you stay there.’ So I got him another agent within the same agency.
The new agent was Begelman’s partner, Freddie Fields, who was decisively to launch Spielberg’s career. During his sabbatical, Fields took him round the traditional circuit of all film-makers looking for backing. One stop was at Twentieth Century-Fox, then being run by Richard Zanuck while his father Darryl, who’d founded the company almost forty years before, enjoyed European retirement with a series of darkly dramatic French mistresses like the singer Juliette Greco.
Novelist John Gregory Dunne described Zanuck, then thirty-eight, as ‘a tightly controlled man with the build of a miniaturised half-back, twelve-month tan, receding brown hair and manicured fingernails that are chewed to the quick. He has hesitant blue eyes, a quick embarrassed smile and a prominent jaw whose muscles he reflexively keeps knotting and unknotting.’ The tics hid a violent temper. Around Fox, Zanuck was known as ‘Little Napoleon’, after Nehemiah Persoff’s twitchy gang boss in Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot.
David Brown, twenty years older than Zanuck, a pipe-smoker with a bushy moustache which earned him the nickname ‘The Walrus’, handled story operations from New York and acted as Zanuck’s adviser and lieutenant. He affected a vague manner that belied his long experience as magazine writer, editor and publisher. His politeness and tact made him ideal to act as a buffer between the volatile Zanuck and the world. An odd but effective team, Zanuck and Brown had launched some of Fox’s biggest hits, though their decision in 1970 to abandon the broad entertainment values of their earlier successes like The Sound of Music, Hello Dolly! and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for more challenging, adult films was already eroding their power with the acutely profit-conscious Fox board.
It was this pair that Fields brought Spielberg to meet. As a package, he offered Ace Eli, with Robertson to star and Spielberg to direct. Zanuck suspected Spielberg was a better salesman than director. ‘I found him tremendously gifted, at least from a conversational point of view, but it was a highly physical and complex film, and I didn’t think he had the experience to do stunt flying and all that.’ They did buy the script, however, Spielberg’s only sale during his absence from Universal.
Spielberg later gave the impression that he spent a year away from Universal, but, despondent with his attempt at independence, he actually returned after only four months.
‘Sid,’ he told Sheinberg, ‘I’m ready to eat crow and pay my dues. Assign me something.’
Word of his problems on Eyes had spread, however, and nobody wanted him. ‘I was regarded on the Universal lot as a folly, a novelty item, bric-a-brac for the mantelpiece. Something to joke about at parties.’
Fortunately, Night Gallery got good reviews when it went out on 8 November 1969, and NBC commissioned the rest of the series. With hindsight, Spielberg could see that he had a lot to learn, and that the best way to do so was to work. He could admit now that Eyes was a disaster, and that watching Sackheim eviscerate his
