be the most promising route to a career, and he spent as much time at the studio as he could. To raise a little money, Wasserman rented office space to independent producers. Spielberg tracked some of them down in remote corners or in the two-storey cinder-block buildings, mostly ex-warehouses, that huddled like mushrooms outside the studio perimeter. A few were glad to see him. All of them had advice. None offered him a job.
After the profitable public tours had been running for a year, Wasserman, sensing a money-maker, invested $4 million in turning the Universal City Tour into a studio enterprise. Restrooms and concession stands were installed, and special rubber-tyred trams designed. On 4 July 1964 the tour was officially inaugurated. Students acted as guides. Among the earliest was a young man from Encino named Mike Ovitz with a sleepy, catlike smile. Thirty years later, he would be offered the running of the studio.
If only Spielberg had known it, he already possessed an advantage that would give him the inside track in Hollywood. Being Jewish meant he was born into the culture and ethos prevailing in sixties Hollywood. Had he been part of an industry family, he would have found work instantly. Instead, he was forced to prowl Universal, looking for a connection, a sponsor, a patron.
Chuck Silver (whom Spielberg has identified as head of the editing department, but whom Sidney Sheinberg remembers as the film librarian) spotted him in the corridor and asked who he was. As a young man, he stood out: other than the student guides, the only people under forty on the lot were actors, and he obviously couldn’t be one of those. Tickled by Spielberg’s tale of bluffing his way in, Silver wrote him a pass, and tried to introduce him to some executives, but the few that did agree to see him recoiled when he arrived with his little 8mm projector and started taking down their diplomas to make space on the wall for an impromptu screening. He learned quickly that he was competing with UCLA graduates who, thanks to Uncle Irving who ran the camera department at Warner Brothers, could boast 35mm show reels of professional quality.
Bolder now, he wandered onto sets to watch directors at work, and was thrown off Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain and Franklin Schaffner’s The War Lord. He had a revenge of sorts when the studio’s head sound mixer, Ronnie Pierce, let him sit in on the soundtrack recording of Torn Curtain, and of lesser films like the Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedy Send Me No Flowers.
TV directors weren’t as fastidious as Hitchcock about visitors, and Spielberg had no trouble crashing the set of Robert Ellis Miller, who was directing a 1964 episode of Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater with John Cassavetes.
Noticing the pimply boy in the shadows, however, Cassavetes introduced himself. As they chatted, he asked Spielberg, ‘What do you want to do?’
‘I want to be a director.’
Cassavetes chewed this over. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘After every take, you tell me what I’m doing wrong.’
The next time Miller called ‘Cut!’ the actor walked up to Spielberg. ‘What do you think? How can I improve it? What am I doing wrong?’
Spielberg equivocated. ‘Gah, it’s too embarrassing right here, Mr Cassavetes. Don’t ask me in front of everybody; can’t we go round the corner and talk?’
But Cassavetes insisted. He probably enjoyed lighting a fire under Miller, a minor talent even by Universal standards, but Spielberg learned a valuable lesson. As François Truffaut said, ‘a director is someone who answers questions.’ If you came on a movie set, you had better know how to deal with anything that arose. Over the next few years, Spielberg made it his business to become expert in every aspect of film-making technique. Nobody would ever again ask him a question he couldn’t answer.
The years between 1966 and 1969 are among the poorest-documented of Spielberg’s career, and he has made sure they remain so. There is no consistency to the chronology he quotes in interviews. Projects which obviously occupied his time and energy for long periods are passed over in a sentence. The vagueness reflects his disillusion with Hollywood and the sense that he would never achieve his aim of directing before he was twenty-one.
He made few friends while at Long Beach, though one, Carl Gottlieb, would go on to co-write the script of Jaws. Another was a personable young actor named Tony Bill, who’d had a small role in Coppola’s You’re a Big Boy Now and was getting a reputation as a comedy lead. His ambitions, however, lay in production. He and Spielberg started work on a film called ‘Slipstream’, about a cycle race, but it was never finished. The cameraman, Serge Haigner, was assisted by a young man named Allen Daviau, someone else who would figure in Spielberg’s career. John Cassavetes also gave Spielberg a few weeks’ work as gofer on his film Faces.
After bluffing his way into Universal, getting into USC was easy, if not as a student, then simply to crash evening screenings and hang out. At a retrospective of USC graduate films, Spielberg got to know the more social of the film students. Not, however, George Lucas, who, secretly terrified that people might think him gauche and naive, said little or nothing to anybody, and concentrated on making movies.
Spielberg’s first friends there were Hal Barwood and his writing partner Matthew Robbins, from UCLA. They would write The Sugarland Express and go on to directorial careers, while continuing to act as his script doctors; until the early eighties, Spielberg seldom made a film without their input. He met Randal Kleiser, later director of Grease and The Blue Lagoon, Caleb Deschanel, lighting cameraman on The Right Stuff and director of The Escape Artist, Walter Murch, editor of Julia and Apocalypse Now, Howard Kazanjian, destined to be producer on Raiders and many other Lucas films, John Carpenter, director of Halloween and The Fog, composer Basil Poledouris, of Conan the Barbarian and Big Wednesday, and David S. Ward, writer of The Sting and director of Cannery Row.
Most important of all, he became friendly with John Milius. Massive, bearded and irascible, a war lover, surfing buff and gun freak – when he became a director, Milius demanded as part of his deal that the studio buy him a rare firearm of his choice – Milius, Hollywood’s self-styled resident expert on legendary Americans, was the group’s renegade, indispensable to its sense of community. When the college fired him for punching a professor, the others went on strike until he was reinstated. Milius and Robbins became like older cousins to Spielberg; people to whom he could turn in an emergency, and on whom he could rely for useful, if sometimes undiplomatically phrased, advice. Quietly, Spielberg was rebuilding the family he’d lost when his parents broke up.
In the summer of 1967, Spielberg decided to take the law into his own hands. By now he was well known around Universal, so he simply began to act as if he worked there. Quizzed later, Scotty, the studio guard who waved him through every day, admitted he took him for Lew Wasserman’s son.
Independent producers came and went all the time, and there were always vacant offices in the warren at the back of the studio. Spielberg found an empty room, introduced himself to the women at the main switchboard, and told them what extension he was on. With plastic letters from a camera store, the sort used to title home movies, he listed himself on the main directory: Steven Spielberg, starring in his own production of his career.
Spielberg is vague about the amount of time he hung out at Universal. It might have been two years, or six months, or even three months. Sometimes he’s seventeen, at other times twenty-one. The vagueness reflects his disillusion with Hollywood and his sense that he would never achieve his aim of directing before he was twenty-one. When it became obvious that he would not achieve this goal, fantasy took over.
Around this time, it became generally believed that Spielberg was born not in 1946 but in 1947. Undoubtedly he himself was responsible for this error, and its persistence. His driver’s licence bore, and continued to bear, the date of birth 1947, as did his voter registration. In January 1981 a Los Angeles Times journalist noticed the discrepancy, and repeatedly tried to get a reaction from Spielberg’s publicist, but without success. In January 1988, shortly after what had apparently been his fortieth birthday, the New York Times and many other papers would publish articles on ‘Spielberg at Forty’. No attempt was made by Spielberg or Amblin to correct them. Finally confronted with the disparity in 1995, Marvin Levy, Spielberg’s