a consultant’s advice and sell the backlot for hotels and condos, and lawyer Albert Dorskind was put in charge of assessing offers. Dorskind saved the studio. Shopping downtown one day in Farmers’ Market, the ramshackle complex of fruit and vegetable stalls and quick-lunch counters at Fairfax and Third Street, on the fringe of Hollywood, Dorskind noticed a Gray Line bus disgorging tourists. Remembering that Universal’s restaurant was losing $100,000 a year, he rang Gray Line and suggested they put Universal on their itinerary. Visitors could even lunch in the commissary – Eat With the Stars! And it would only cost Gray Line $1 a head, over and above what people ate. Gray Line jumped at it. The restaurant manager upped his prices by 20 per cent, and the commissary was soon in profit.
Spielberg stepped out of the Gray Line bus onto Universal’s hallowed ground in June 1963 with the awe of a zealot entering Jerusalem. He hid until the bus left, then spent the rest of the afternoon poking around, even walking onto sound stages where TV episodes were being shot. He found his way to the cutting rooms, where editor Tony Martinelli was working on episodes of Wagon Train. Spielberg asked questions. Flattered, and glad of a diversion, Martinelli and the other editors were happy to reply. He told them he’d made some movies, and asked if they would take a look at them. One said, ‘Bring ’em in, kid.’ Dazzled, Spielberg found a phone and called his cousin to pick him up. The next day he was back with Firelight and his 8mm films. Almost every day for the rest of his vacation he dressed in his one suit and, carrying an empty briefcase, drove to Universal. At the gate, the guard, assuming he was just another nephew with a summer job at the studio, waved him through.
Elsewhere in Los Angeles, the people who were to become Spielberg’s contemporaries in New Hollywood were gathering. Some almost didn’t make it. In June 1962, George Lucas, having graduated – barely – from high school in Modesto, took his Fiat Bianchina for a drive, and wrapped it round a tree. He nearly died. Others already had movie jobs. Francis Ford Coppola was writing screenplays while working as dogsbody for Hollywood’s cheapest producer, Roger Corman, and moonlighting as a director of soft-core porn. But the majority, like Spielberg, were just out of high school and wondering how to get in. Lucas, once he recovered, tried the accepted way, visiting every film production company on Ventura Boulevard, the ribbon development of low-rent two-storey office buildings and storefronts that wove along the periphery of the San Fernando Valley. He got nowhere.
Entering the business through a film school was still a novel concept. Cinema remained, in Hollywood at least, a business, not an art. Nobody anticipated the flood of film students attracted by the French New Wave, Britain’s Free Cinema documentary movement, or the underground films that were boiling out of New York and San Francisco.
After his accident, Lucas spent two more years in Modesto Junior College improving his grades, and was accepted by the University of Southern California’s film programme, the nation’s oldest. It helped that his father was moderately well-off. USC’s location on the edge of the unfashionable and dangerous downtown area belied the fact that it was a private university with high fees, whereas the plush UCLA, headquartered in well-barbered Westwood, had state funding. Despite its funky appearance, however, USC was, as one writer put it,
a citadel of privilege. Its graduates in public administration governed Los Angeles. Its doctors and technicians governed the medical establishment. The student body – overwhelmingly white and upper-middle-class – was largely immune to the social turmoil of the sixties. The school newspaper admitted that the ‘high cost of a USC education seems to screen out almost all Negroes. The notable exceptions to this rule are athletes admitted on scholarship.’ [in 1967, one of the black juniors on a football scholarship was O.J. Simpson.]
USC’s film programme didn’t rate the attention or investment of its medical or law school, let alone the football team. Its fifty students were mostly kids from second- or third-generation industry families, picking up the rudiments of sound recording or camera operation before they took the place awaiting them in the hierarchical studio system. They studied in classrooms built from World War I surplus lumber, and cut their films side by side on twenty-five ancient Moviolas in a graffiti-spattered room. The university guaranteed each student the funds and equipment to make a fifteen-minute film, but learning how to do it was mostly up to them. The faculty included a few good people, like Verna Fields, who been sound editor for Fritz Lang and taught courses when she wasn’t working on films like Anthony Mann’s El Cid. But she was in the minority.
Spielberg knew none of these people until much later. After the summer of 1963, he returned to Saratoga and high school. In vacations, he made lengthy forays to Los Angeles. Unwittingly, he followed George Lucas’s route along Ventura Boulevard, trying to find someone to look at his films. Everywhere, weary producers of promotional documentaries spurned them like the plague. One did agree to screen some of Firelight. ‘I gave him two of the best reels,’ says Spielberg. ‘I came back a week later and he was fired. Gone! His office was cleared out and now there’s a Toyota dealership where the office used to be… So part of Firelight still exists, but all the exposition is gone.’
In 1964, the decision about his immediate future was made for him. He was waiting in line at a San Jose cinema to see Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb when his sister and father drove up with an envelope. It was his Selective Service notice, confirming that, lacking a student exemption, he had been graded 1-A – prime cannon-fodder. He still went to the film, though he didn’t enjoy it, not knowing whether to laugh or be frightened. ‘I was so consumed with the possibility of going to Vietnam that I had to see it for a second time to really appreciate it.’ Wars came and went, but Kubrick was eternal.
College seemed the only feasible option. USC turned him down, and there was no money to send him through junior college to raise his grades, so the family chose academically indifferent California State College at Long Beach.
A half-hour drive from Hollywood across the industrial and suburban sprawl of Los Angeles, Long Beach hardly seemed Californian. The suburb’s untidy bungalows huddling along a nondescript coastline had a lacklustre, countryfied feel that reminded Spielberg of Arizona. For years, Long Beach hosted the Iowa State Picnic, attracting 150,000 midwesterners eager for a look at the Pacific. In an attempt to attract tourists and raise the tax base, the county allowed oil companies to sink wells on artificial islands just a few yards offshore, hiding the rigs inside fake apartment buildings. Entrepreneurs also moored the superannuated liner Queen Mary as a floating convention centre, and installed next to it Howard Hughes’s gigantic and almost unairworthy ‘Spruce Goose’ flying boat.
Spielberg was as indifferent to the gimcrack atmosphere of Long Beach as he was to his college education. If the draft had ended earlier, he admitted, he probably wouldn’t have gone to college at all. As it was, his three years at Long Beach created scarcely a ripple in his life. Since it had no film courses, the man who had turned The Scarlet Letter into a flip book majored in English. He worked in the cafeteria to earn pocket money, and projected classroom films. If he squeezed all his classes into two days a week, he could spend the rest of the time in Los Angeles.
What film education he gained was in Hollywood’s rerun and repertory cinemas like the NuArt and the Vagabond. ‘Anything not American impressed me,’ he said. ‘I went through a phase of seeing Ingmar Bergman films. I must have seen every Bergman movie ever made, because that’s what they were showing at that theatre. The next week, you’d see Buñuel movies.’ Hurriedly he added, ‘Not very many.’ Buñuel’s ragged technique, quirky plots and rigorous Catholicism baffled him. He preferred Jacques Tati, France’s master of the sight gag, whose films had no dialogue.
When he could scrape up enough money, he hired a 16mm camera and shot a film. He made five during the Long Beach years, a few of which experimented with abstraction. ‘I did a picture about dreams – how disjointed they are. I made one about what happens to rain when it hits dust.’ Another was ‘about a man being chased by someone trying to kill him. But running becomes such a spiritual pleasure for him that he forgets who is after him.’ Shooting these shorts kept his hand in, but the films were arid. He was, he knew already, a ‘concept’ director who made films from the general to the particular. What he needed was a big story, and the resources to deal with it as it deserved.