who kept his hand in playing poker with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, had collected some of his experiences into a screenplay called ‘Slide’, about Charlie and Bill, two amateur gamblers with otherwise dead-end lives who become friends, get involved with a couple of call girls, share some laughs and a few losses.
Later, Julia Phillips would paint Spielberg as someone out of his depth in this society,
hanging around with men who were too old for him. Who bet and drank and watched football games on Sunday. Who ran studios and agencies. The group centred around Guy [McElwaine] and Alan Ladd Jr. otherwise known as Laddy, and included such disparate types as Joey Walsh and David Giler, the former more for the betting than the football, the latter more for the drinking than the football.
Pollack too would incur her displeasure when he took over the Japanese gangster screenplay The Yakuza, written by Paul Schrader, one of the beach group, and had Robert Towne add an element of international romance. But few people shared her perceptions of Spielberg’s new friends. Most admired Pollack as a director who expertly balanced box office and art. Ladd was also respected as the most thoughtful of studio bosses, the model of Hollywood’s next wave of producers. The New York Times’s Aljean Harmetz, while conceding Ladd was ‘taciturn and emotionally reserved’, also rated him as ‘perhaps more than any other current top executive in love with movies’.
All this time, Spielberg had hoped Universal would finance The Sugarland Express, but in the end they blew cool, deciding that, despite the success of Duel, the new film was too much like Fox’s unsuccessful Vanishing Point. The script went into turnaround – for sale to anyone who would refund its development costs. Spielberg also negotiated for a while with agent Allan Carr, who planned a version of Bronte Woodard’s novel Meet Me at the Melba, about life in the thirties South, but producer Joe Levine wouldn’t OK him as director.
Grudgingly, Universal offered Spielberg a cinema feature from the studio’s roster of stock projects, and for ten weeks in the spring of 1972 he worked unenthusiastically with writer William Norton on a Burt Reynolds vehicle. Norton was to make his name with a succession of violent rural thrillers, and White Lightning set the tone with its story of ex-con ‘Gator’ McClusky who returns to the swamps of the South to avenge his younger brother, slaughtered by crooked sheriff Ned Beatty. Spielberg was wary of Reynolds, as he was of all stars. The actor had just broken into the list of the top ten box-office earners at number three, beneath Clint Eastwood and Ryan O’Neal, and, like Eastwood, had firm ideas about what worked for him on screen. Most producers encouraged him to forget dialogue and even character, and to concentrate on sexual magnetism and good-ol’-boy humour. Also like Eastwood, Reynolds trailed a team of buddy/collaborators, notably his stunt coordinator Hal Needham, who enjoyed a degree of trust and control which any director would have to harness. Sensing he lacked the skill or the interest to deal with these problems, Spielberg, in Variety-speak, ‘ankled’.
Of all the projects in play among his new friends, Spielberg preferred Joey Walsh’s ‘Slide’. He feared being pigeonholed as an action director and would often confide that he ‘basically wanted to make romantic films’, or ‘women’s films’, or was ‘really a director of comedies’. This last perception would survive until, during the making of 1941 in 1979, he confessed, ‘Comedy is not my forte.’ More important, however, was Slide’s buddy theme. Spielberg’s fascination with the male friendship he’d never achieved in childhood and the way in which men supported one another and formed effective teams would dominate Jaws, the Indiana Jones films, Always, even Schindler’s List.
He and Walsh worked on Slide throughout 1972. His method, the guided joint improvisation he’d used with Robbins and Barwood on Sugarland, was to become standard for him, the response of a natural film-maker to the hostile world of the written word. ‘I don’t know if Steven ever told me what to do – ever,’ Walsh says, ‘but when he didn’t giggle like a little boy eating a cookie, saying “This is great,” I knew something was wrong, and I always took that as a gauge and somehow I looked deeper into the scene.’ Walsh wanted to produce the film, so as to prevent studio interference. Both Spielberg and McElwaine backed him up, and MGM seemed happy with the package. Spielberg, delighted, told journalists that ‘Slide’ would be his next film.
At Universal, business was picking up. The avatar of a new attitude to features was George Lucas’s American Graffiti, which officially started production on 26 June 1972. Though he was technically working for Universal, Lucas shot most of the film well away from Hollywood, within driving distance of his Marin County home. Ned Tanen watched the daily budget, but otherwise left the thorny Lucas to himself. It was becoming clear to all the studios that these new film-makers, raised in a college environment and with little concept of normal employment practices, responded ill to being treated as employees. ‘We are the pigs,’ Lucas said of his generation of directors. ‘We are the ones who sniff out the truffles. You can put us on a leash, keep us under control. But we are the guys who dig out the gold.’ He compared a studio editor cutting his work, a practice taken for granted in Hollywood, to someone amputating his children’s fingers. Old Hollywood was astonished and offended at the comparison, but soon John Milius would be able to say, ‘Nobody in a studio challenges the final cut of a film now. I think they realise the film-makers are likely to be around a lot longer than the studio executives.’
The conflict between New and Old Hollywood came to a head for the first time when Lucas showed his final cut of American Graffiti to an audience that included Tanen and Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola was seen as the godfather of New Hollywood, able to deploy the same omnipotent octopoid power as Don Vito Corleone. When Tanen closed his deal with Lucas on American Graffiti he’d imposed two conditions. One was a reduction in the budget to $600,000. The other was that Coppola must act as the project’s moral, if not financial, guarantor. Magisterially, Coppola agreed. Now, at the preview screening, he took it on himself to defend the film, and Lucas, when Tanen dared to criticise it. ‘You should be getting down on your knees and thanking George for saving your job!’ he blustered. Reaching for his chequebook, he offered to buy the film there and then from Universal. (Fortunately, Tanen didn’t call his bluff, Coppola was, as usual, broke.) ‘This film is going to be a hit!’ he shouted – which it was, grossing $112 million. Though he didn’t know it yet, Ned Tanen had already lost Lucas. Lucas had tried to interest him in a version of Flash Gordon, but been turned down. Even before American Graffiti finished shooting, Lucas smuggled a copy to Alan Ladd Jr, along with his script for another space opera. It convinced Ladd to back him in the new film, Star Wars, and so deprive Universal of $250 million.
If Old Hollywood thought it could depend on the loyalty of these newcomers, it was badly mistaken. They would be satisfied with nothing less than total independence. The Brats shared a conviction that their generation must remake Hollywood in its own image. Otherwise they risked the fate of their hero and archetypal Hollywood renegade, Orson Welles. The director of Citizen Kane had deteriorated into a bloated has-been living off TV commercials for Nashua photocopiers and Gallo wine When Joe Dante, a Spielberg protégé, was in the early eighties asked to work on National Lampoon magazine’s projected film parody of Jaws, called Jaws 3 People 0, his suggestion that Welles take a role horrified everyone. ‘We’d have to put his name on the poster,’ said one executive, aghast. The decline and fall of Welles was a lesson to New Hollywood of the dangers of fighting the system. So palpable was the curse which seemed to follow him that even Spielberg, given the opportunity to back the last film of Welles’s life, The Cradle will Rock, would refuse to do so, despite Welles offering to cast Spielberg’s then wife, Amy Irving.
It was one thing to vow that you wouldn’t end up like Orson Welles, and quite another to see how you could win independence while continuing to live in a community where, for better or worse, art was organised on business lines. In her 1974 essay On the Future of the Movies, the New Yorker’s influential film critic Pauline Kael wrote of a ‘natural war in Hollywood between the businessmen and the artists… based on drives that may go deeper than politics and religion; on the need for status, and warring dreams’.
Studios executives in the seventies were mostly ex-lawyers or agents,