style="font-size:15px;"> Sheinberg offered him six directing assignments. For Marcus Welby MD, a plodding but popular series starring Robert Young as a kindly Santa Monica physician, Spielberg directed an episode called The Daredevil Gesture, about a teenage haemophiliac who risks his life on a class field trip to prove his courage. Unable to instil individuality with bravura camerawork, he tried for Significance in performances. ‘I was taking Marcus Welby seriously,’ he said later, self-mockingly. ‘… and a lot of these older actors would look at me… wondering, “Gee, I’m doing three shows this week and this guy is acting like this is Twelve Angry Men with Henry Fonda.” And I’m trying to flush out Marcus Welby and making an ass of myself on the set.’
He had even less success with Make Me Laugh, another segment of Night Gallery. In a variation on the Midas Touch, black comic Godfrey Cambridge is given the magic power to make people laugh – but only to laugh, even at his own death. Towards the end of shooting, in a repeat of the post-production interference of Eyes, Tom Bosley replaced Eddie Mayehoff in the role of Cambridge’s manager, and Jeannot Szwarc, not Spielberg, was called in to direct his scenes. The episode aired on 6 January 1971.
Life as a TV director was exhausting. ‘It’s very, very hard to learn film-making when you’re watching five-day television shows,’ Spielberg said. ‘People are running and shouting, and the pitch is so ear-shattering you become a neurotic before you become a movie-maker.’ Even so, it taught him a lot. ‘You learn to do your homework,’ he said. ‘TV pulled a long train, and I was the last carriage. If you didn’t finish on time and under budget, they would just cut you loose.’
He had also returned at exactly the right moment. Episode drama was dying. Networks were demanding more features. Rather than abandon their popular characters and titles. Universal lengthened episodes to ninety minutes and widened their scope while keeping to the same tight schedule and budget. Despite their length, these films still had to be shot in ten days.
Among the inflated series was The Name of the Game. Set in the world of magazine publishing, it had a rotating roster of three leading men: Gene Barry, Anthony Franciosa and Robert Stack. In the autumn of 1970, Spielberg directed L.A. 2017, an episode written by Philip Wylie which aired on 15 January 1971. Barry crashes his car on the way to an environmental conference and wakes up in 2017 to find that Angelenos have taken refuge underground from smog and gang warfare. After siding with the rebels who want to overthrow big boss Barry Sullivan, he retreats to the surface and is transported back to his own time, converted overnight to clean-air legislation.
L.A. 2017 earned Spielberg minor eminence when he was invited to screen it at the World Science Fiction Convention. Most fans dismissed the long-haired young director in tailored leather jacket and open-necked flowered shirt as another psyched-up fast-talking Hollywood hype, but the experience alerted him to the existence of a growing national market for fantasy and science fiction. Unlike himself at their age, these kids had money to spend and the power to do pretty much what they pleased. They were obsessive about inside and advance information on science fiction films. Spielberg, still young enough to remember what it was like to be a fan, took note. Jeff Walker, a publicist who came to specialise in promoting films, including some of Spielberg’s, to this market, comments that today ‘there’s an entire market segment that thrives on knowing the stuff beforehand, that was created by [Spielberg] practically, and George [Lucas], and [Star Trek producer Gene] Roddenberry.’
Success gave Spielberg some leverage, and Freddie Fields was able to renegotiate his terms of employment. On 28 December 1970 Variety noted that he’d signed a five-year exclusive contract as a producer and a six-year non-exclusive deal as director. It was his first step on the road to total control, and an early recognition that his ambitions lay less in creative film-making than in the building of a production empire. A pecking order operated on the Universal lot. Feature directors looked down on the TV contingent as hacks, just as directors at other studios looked down on Universal’s features and the bright pastel ‘house style’ that extended even to credits, trailers and print advertising. Instantly recognisable, a Universal film was also instantly dismissable. In the fifties, TV had launched Arthur Penn, John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet and Sam Peckinpah, but in the seventies it was more often a graveyard of reputations. Spielberg was the only director under thirty-five at Universal. Most of the colleagues with whom he was to share the chores of Name of the Game and Night Gallery, like Robert Collins, Daryl Duke and Robert Michael Lewis, were ten years older, and saw little in their future but more of the same.
Feature film producer/directors were an elite. The emblem of their standing was a bungalow on the lot. The prosaic word belied the lushness of these buildings. ‘A sort of pseudo-English manor house,’ says screenwriter David Freeman, ‘[they were] a bungalow the way summer houses in Newport are cottages.’ Hitchcock’s, the most lavish, had two levels, with a dining room, screening and editing rooms, and its own art department. Don Siegel rubbed along in something the size of a suburban house. Billy Wilder had two storeys on a hill, past which the tour trams coasted in silence to avoid disturbing him and I.A.L. Diamond, at work on The Front Page.
Spielberg hungered for a bungalow. Instead, he had a corner office in the Black Tower, well below the seventeenth floor where Wasserman and Sheinberg controlled his destiny. From there, he looked out on a future that contained, he was beginning to discover, nothing as solid as the films of Wilder or Hitchcock. He had plenty of ideas for features and, now that he was back on the inside, no shortage of people to pitch them to. But everywhere he met a brick wall. His career may have looked to be up and running, but it became increasingly clear that he was jogging on the spot.
Universal incorporated Night Gallery with McCloud, San Francisco International Airport and The Psychiatrist into an omnibus for NBC, Four-in-One. Writer/director Jerrold Freedman was in charge, and Spielberg joined his team. It was a useful move. ‘He had his own long-haired film society right in the heart of Universal Studios,’ he says of Freedman. ‘He employed a number of writers, directors, people dealing with esoterica, and he hired people from his college and people he knew from the East. I was just a young person, whom he liked at the time, and to whom he said, “Here, do two Psychiatrists for me.”’
The Psychiatrist, written by Richard Levinson and William Link in the school of Ben Casey, Doctor Kildare and other successful doctor shows, featured Roy Thinnes as an idealistic LA shrink and Luther Adler as the obligatory older, more cynical colleague. Spielberg did The Private World of Martin Dalton (10 February 1971) and Par for the Course (10 March 1971). Martin Dalton was cribbed from a famous incident in Robert Lindner’s collection of psychiatric case histories, The Jet Propelled Couch. A disturbed twelve-year-old (Stephen Hudis) invents a fantasy universe from TV and comic books, and begins to retreat into it. Responding to a subject close to home, Spielberg seized the chance to create a surrealist dream world and also to work with young actors, for which he already showed a flair.
It was Par for the Course, however, with golf pro Clu Gulager coming to terms with his imminent death from duodenal cancer, which attracted most attention, and which Spielberg regards as his best TV work. Always most comfortable illustrating an emotion than conveying it in dialogue, he wrote a scene in which two buddies bring Gulager in hospital a gift they know he will relish – the cup from the eighteenth hole at his course, which they’ve dug out of the centre of the green. Gulager breaks down and crushes the dirt and grass over his head.
Levinson and Link were so pleased with Par for the Course that they asked for Spielberg to direct Murder by the Book, the first regular episode, after two feature-length pilots, of the detective series Columbo. The role of the Los Angeles Police Department’s scruffiest, least tidy but most perspicacious detective, who allowed himself in each episode to be patronised by his arrogant quarry before springing a brilliant deductive trap at the end, had been planned for Bing Crosby. He turned it down, however, when it looked as if the
