front of the kids matters to Spielberg more than anything.
Duel is all about fathers failing, women taking control, men losing it. It’s frankly Oedipal. With it, Spielberg struck out at Arnold’s abandonment of his family and its resultant fragmentation. Though Spielberg always spoke warmly of his sisters – ‘I come from a family of beautiful women,’ he says, comparing Sue, the middle sister, to Sophia Loren – he was ambivalent about Sue’s 1975 decision and that of the youngest, Nancy, to leave the US and work on a kibbutz in Israel. Leah’s recent remarriage, to another computer engineer, Bernie Adler, also distressed him. Superficially his attitude to his stepfather was cordial, though he was not above jokes about his mother’s ‘taste for printed circuitry’.
A truer sense of his betrayal by both parents emerged in a tirade a few years later, where he excoriated David Mann as ‘typical of that lower-middle-class American who’s insulated by suburban modernisation’:
It begins on Sunday; you take your car to be washed. You have to drive it but it’s only a block away. And, as the car’s being washed, you go next door with the kids and buy them ice cream at the Dairy Queen and then you have lunch at the plastic McDonald’s with seven zillion hamburgers sold. And then you go off to the games room and you play the quarter games: Tank and the Pong and Flim-Flam. And by that time you go back and your car’s all dry and ready to go and you get into the car and drive to the Magic Mountain plastic amusement park and you spend the day there eating junk food.
Afterwards you drive home, stopping at all the red lights, and the wife is waiting with dinner on. And you have instant potatoes and eggs without cholesterol – because they’re artificial – and you sit down and turn on the television set, which has become the reality as opposed to the fantasy this man has lived with that entire day. And you watch the prime time, which is pabulum and nothing more than watching a night light. And you see the news at the end of that, which you don’t want to listen to because it doesn’t conform to the reality you’ve just been through prime time with. And at the end of all that you go to sleep and you dream about making enough money to support weekend America. This is the kind of man portrayed in Duel.
This was an astonishing recital for someone who would say later, ‘I never mock suburbia. My life comes from there,’ who admired Norman Rockwell and who would make his own tributes to Formica and frozen pizza in E.T. and Poltergeist. It is more explicable as an attack not on suburban values but on fathers who fail to abide by them.
Duel pioneered a new kind of TV feature by making virtues of its necessities. Second-rate actors? Who cares? Spielberg was, as he remained, indifferent to glamour in his performers, preferring anonymous suburban faces, rumpled clothes, unwashed hair, spotty skin. No sets? Cheap technicians? No matter; he would make the best of what he was given. His cameraman, Jack A. Marta, and composer Billy Goldenberg, a staff composer who’d scored his Columbo episode, were journeymen, a fact Spielberg exploited by taking over as much control as possible of camera and music. The emphatic comic-book framing and the homage to Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho score in the wheep-wheeping violins show his hand.
Fortunately one other technician on the Universal lot was the best in the business. Carey Loftin had begun stunt driving in 1935 as a motor cyclist on a fairground Wheel of Death. He graduated to car and bike stunts in serials, managed the crashes and chases for Abbott and Costello, doubling Abbott in the more hazardous scenes, a fact that delighted Spielberg, a fan of the two forties comics. Loftin also ramrodded the stunts on Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, another Spielberg favourite, and reached the peak of his career in 1968 with the vertiginous car chase around San Francisco for Bullitt.
Another veteran, Dale Van Sickel, drove the car in Duel. Loftin handled the truck himself. He arranged a parade of five gas tankers on the backlot for Spielberg. Four had modern flat-fronted GMC-Mack prime movers with wide windows that revealed the driver down to his knees. Spielberg chose the fifth, an ancient shit-brown Brand X eighteen-wheeler, mud-spattered, rusted and slovenly. Its old-fashioned divided windshield not only gave the vehicle a look of frowning malevolence but, if the glass was dirty, hid the driver completely. It looked as if the truck was driving itself. Sure, Loftin told him in his slow Tennessee drawl, he could rig that truck for anything the script demanded, even crashing the car at the climax and carrying it over a cliff.
Duel was shot on location around Lancaster and Palmdale, sixty or seventy miles outside Los Angeles, on the edge of the Mojave Desert. Between the desert and Los Angeles, Soledad Canyon, on the edge of the Pinnacles National Monument, offered miles of lonely blacktop, much of it twisting and mountainous.
Spielberg mapped out the entire film in storyboards, like a giant comic book, in this case forty yards long. Though they didn’t invent them – Hitchcock, among others, used them all the time – storyboards became a major weapon of the Movie Brats. Men like Spielberg’s regular artists Ed Verreaux and George Jensen were adept at generating hundreds of pages of graphic art, complete with framings and camera movements, from the director’s stick-figure diagrams. Storyboards dictated a two-dimensional style, reducing narrative to a handful of poses. Following style, dialogue was scaled down to the two or three lines needed to fill a talk balloon. Teenagers raised on the same visual conventions loved the result but, applied to a serious subject, it imposed a Classics Comics glibness. Coppola, Scorsese and many others abandoned this crutch as they embraced the multivalent possibilities of film, but Lucas and Spielberg clung to it. Many would credit the failure of Empire of the Sun in part to storyboarding, and the success of Schindler’s List to the fact that Spielberg abandoned it for that film.
Having worked out the action in advance, Spielberg walked the locations for days before shooting, banging stakes into the dirt where stunts would begin and end, and where his three cameras would be placed. Instead of resetting the camera for each new shot, he had the car and truck drive past each camera in turn, capturing three shots in the time it usually took to him one. The weather was perfect, blazingly sunny, the valley baking in the heat, the mountains a brown smudge on the horizon. One can almost smell the softening blacktop, the truck’s oily fumes, the sizzling grease of the roadside café.
Shooting went two days over schedule, in part because Spielberg saw rushes only every three days, and had to drive miles to do so. The budget rose to $425,000, but Eckstein was delighted with the result. Scenes like the truck ploughing through a roadside snake farm to crush the booth where Weaver is making a phone call showed a glee in violence of which more disciplined directors were incapable. To Spielberg, the lessons of junk film and cartoon proved perfectly applicable to live action. ‘The challenge was to turn a lorry into Godzilla,’ he said. ‘It was sort of Godzilla v. Bambi.’
Godzilla nearly won in real life. As a precaution against drivers going to sleep at the wheel, the truck had a ‘Dead Man’s Hand’ which cut the engine if pressure was released. Since Loftin had to jump just before the collision, he tied down the control, but as he prepared to leap, leaving the truck to accelerate over the cliff, the cord slipped. He had no alternative but to ride the vehicle almost to the edge before jumping. ‘My scissors cut at literally the instant Carey’s butt left the cab,’ said Spielberg. But the near-accident left a continuity error. The truck door is open – ‘Leaving room for a sequel,’ Spielberg joked.
With only three weeks between the end of shooting and the air date, Universal allocated four editors to cut the film. Spielberg rollerskated from on cutting room to another. But the effect is seamless. Among the first people to see it was Barry Diller. ‘I saw a rough cut of Duel,’ he said, ‘and I remember thinking, “This guy is going to be out of television so fast because his work is so good.”’ In the event, however, Duel was sold to NBC, who scheduled it for their World Premiere Movie slot.
Before Duel was aired, Universal loaned Spielberg to CBS for another made-for-TV feature, this time a horror film called Something Evil.
