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Steven Spielberg and Duel
The Making of a Film Career
By STEVEN AWALT ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Copyright © 2014 Rowman & Littlefield
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8108-9260-6
CHAPTER 1
It Began as It Would End—with a Crash
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA—1952
The young boy was expecting an exciting time. His dad had promised to take him to see the circus, after all, and remembering his previous trip to the big top, five-year-old Stevie Spielberg already had anticipatory images of elephants, lions, and clowns parading around in his head.
Arnold Spielberg, Stevie's father, parked the family car and led his son by the hand to a building with an outsized marquee that promised "The Greatest Show on Earth" above its entrance. Stevie and Arnold took their place in a bustling line of people. As they stood waiting, Stevie sized up the building. It was certainly large, as most buildings were from the vantage of such a small boy, but where could the circus big top be inside such a place? How did they fit all of the animals and circus performers inside?
After about an hour and a half of waiting in line, Arnold and Stevie reached the box office, where Arnold bought two tickets, and then made their way into the dark recesses of the building. The crowd they moved in was ushered through a row of doors, into a dimly lit and cavernous hall. As they passed through the threshold, Stevie held his breath with excitement, expecting the candy-colored wonders of the circus to reveal themselves to him: carnival streamers, daring acrobats and mighty strongmen, brave lion tamers and fearless fire eaters. He anticipated the dull smell of sawdust on the ground, and firm wooden bleachers in the round where everyone had a great view of the center ring. Once his eyes adjusted to the shadowy room, however, his young heart deflated in disappointment. They were in a long, lifeless rectangular room full of folding chairs in neat rows, all facing forward to a wall covered floor to ceiling by thick, burgundy curtains.
"To go into this big cavernous hall and there's nothing but chairs and they're all facing up, they're not bleachers, they're chairs—I was thinking, 'Something's up, something is fishy,'" Steven Spielberg has subsequently said, reflecting back on the experience.
Arnold and Stevie took their seats in the folding chairs, facing front along with everyone else in the growing audience, faces upturned, gazing blankly at the curtains that yielded no promise of a circus. After what seemed to Stevie an interminable wait, the curtains slowly parted, his imagination holding out a hitch of hope that the circus and its performers were merely hiding behind the thick drapes.
"I expect to see the elephants and there's nothing but a flat piece of white cardboard, a canvas. And I look at the canvas and suddenly a movie comes on and it's The Greatest Show on Earth."
Arnold Spielberg had brought his son from their home in Camden, New Jersey, over to Philly for his first motion picture, the bigger-than-life Technicolor event film that would go on to win the Oscar for Best Picture in 1953, directed by master showman Cecil B. DeMille and starring Charlton Heston, Betty Hutton, and James Stewart. Knowing the boy had enjoyed the circus he and his wife, Leah, had taken Stevie to the previous summer, Arnold thought the five-year-old might be old enough to appreciate an afternoon at the movies. As the film began, DeMille himself promised that children of all ages would forget their troubles and delight in "a magic world ... a circus world of tinsel and spun candies and thrills."
Stevie, however, was hardly amused by the laughter and thrills that DeMille was hawking.
"At first I was so disappointed, I was angry at my father, he told me he was taking me to a circus and it's just this flat piece of color.... For a while, I kept thinking, 'Gee, that's not fair. I wanted to see three-dimensional characters and all this was flat shadows, flat surfaces.'"
Despite the initial letdown, one moment late in the film stuck with Stevie, and he would carry the impact of the moment with him throughout his life. In the final act, DeMille stages a monumental train crash in which an automobile on the tracks is smashed by a speeding circus locomotive. The auto and its passenger are thrown end over end from the tracks, but the locomotive charges on, slams into the caboose of another circus train stopped on the tracks ahead, and chews its way through train cars as it bashes its way down the rail line. The special effects, as expected from DeMille, were quite impressive for 1952, and surely a terror and a thrill to behold for a child of Stevie's impressionable age. Massive train cars are crushed and hurled off the tracks, tossing their occupants and belongings around within, loosing a quintet of lions as their holding pens are destroyed, pushing heavy cargo cars right out toward the audience ("off the screen and into my lap," as Spielberg would later describe it) in a cacophony of multiton impacts, screeching iron and steel, screams, and roars.
"It wasn't long after my disappointment gave way to extreme exhilaration and fear of this new medium that was frightening me and images were washing over me, especially this train crash, this epic train wreck where a car hits a train, the train buckles, and people fall out of their sleeper berths, and it's a complete disaster."
Stevie likely didn't realize how the destructive imagery of DeMille's colossal, stupendous train wreck from The Greatest Show on Earth affected him on a visceral level, but the impression the kinetic force of motion and destruction made on him would in time contribute to birthing many of cinema's greatest images—cinematic moments so powerful that even an accomplished visionary like DeMille could hardly imagine such wonders to come.
PHOENIX, ARIZONA—1957
It was the winter of 1957, and the Spielberg family had just moved from Haddon Township, New Jersey (where they had moved from Camden in August of 1952), to the improbable new locale of the American West in Phoenix, Arizona. The move was hard on the family, particularly Steve. Arnold had been working for the RCA Corporation since the middle of 1949, a career that led the recent college graduate to transplant his family from their home in Cincinnati, Ohio, the city where Steve was born in 1946. They relocated to New Jersey, where they made their home for nearly eight years, and then to the desert community of Phoenix in early 1957 for better opportunities with General Electric. The move to Phoenix had a profound effect on Steve, but it was ultimately Phoenix that he would call his "real home." Despite the loneliness he felt upon leaving his friends, school, home, and all of the things he had known in New Jersey, Steve grew to enjoy the alien environment of the desert country, with its wide, dusty vistas; its colorful, unique, and resilient flora; and the kinds of critters one would only find back in New Jersey in a zoo or a pet shop—all manner of snakes, lizards, arachnids, and insects that a young boy could hunt out in the desert wasteland that the edges of town kept back as best they could.
Around this time, Arnold received a film camera, a brand new 8 mm Eastman Kodak Brownie Movie Camera II with a fixed 13 mm lens, as a gift from Leah. "A real cheap, no-frills camera," Arnold Spielberg said. "It worked fine. Steve glommed onto it pretty quick."
"My dad would take the camera along and film [family] trips and we'd sit down and watch the footage a week later. It would put me right to sleep. ... I would sit and watch the home movies and criticize the shaky camera movements and bad exposures until my father finally got fed up and told me to take over."
Arnold didn't have to tell Steve twice to take charge of the family film productions or to take the 8 mm camera off his hands, as the young boy was increasingly drawn to the creativity and control the magical device afforded him. In short order, Steve became the Spielberg family's de facto documentarian.
"I became the family photographer and logged all our trips.... I was fascinated. I had the power of choice. This is what I chose to show. This is my view of the trip."
Claiming such control over the world around him by capturing memories from his own point of view gave the young boy a voice and a modicum of command over an ever-changing life and environment. At school, Steve felt isolated and apart from his classmates, a "wimp in a world of jocks." He was a painfully thin young man with, as are so many young boys on the verge of puberty, features a bit too outsized for a boy's own good—too large a set of ears, too large a nose, things that would cause him great embarrassment and provide fodder for his classmates' mockery. Couple his own sense of physical self with the regular abuse he endured at the hands of bullies as he tried to acclimate to his new school, and Steve felt an outsider, shunned by others as he tried to adjust to and connect with his new environment.
It was with his eye pressed to the tiny viewfinder of the movie camera that Steve found himself truly in control of the world around him, master of what his audience could see within his frame, in command of time and space itself. Increasingly, Steve found that merely documenting the family vacations and events was not enough.
"I began to think that staging real life was much more exciting than just recording it," Spielberg has reflected.
So I'd do things like forcing my parents to let me out of the car a hundred yards before we reached the campgrounds when we went on trips. I'd run ahead and film them arriving and unpacking and pitching camp.... I began to actually stage the camping trips....
I dramatized everything. My dad had to wait for me to say "Action!" before he could put the knife into the fish to clean it. That was my first PG-13 moment.
When it came to the life of his imagination, not unlike many boys, Steve had a streak of the destructive and a dramatic penchant for playacted mayhem. Back in New Jersey, childhood friends marveled at Steve's elaborate productions staging imaginary wars as he cut a swath through so many plastic army soldiers, chopping, sawing, and ultimately separating their heads from their bodies in what childhood friend Scott MacDonald called Steve's "elaborate torture chamber."
"We used to go down in his basement, and he would show us how he would put his toy men in a guillotine he had made out of a black shoebox. ... It was a great effect," recalled MacDonald.
When not destroying his action figures, torturing his sisters' innocent dolls, or making a hellacious mess of his mother's kitchen with any substance that remotely resembled blood—ketchup, crushed tomatoes, and, in time, cherries burst from exploding pressure cookers—Steve enjoyed creating repeated collisions between the engines of his scale Lionel model trains. After numerous intentional tragedies on the miniature railroad that Steve had constructed in his bedroom, Arnold threatened to take the boy's train set away for good if he deliberately crashed the models again.
The threat of losing his train set inspired Steve to film what he considers his true debut as a filmmaker. Against his father's will, Steve would stage one last moment of miniature destruction with his trains, only this time, the final wreck would be staged for the camera and captured on film for the boy's repeated enjoyment. Steve was moving from capturing the reality of vacations and household events to wholly re-creating reality and using the medium that had caught his imagination to heighten that reality with spectacle.
Steve cut the overhead lights in his bedroom and carefully placed a couple of desk lamps around the area of track on which his trains would be put through their paces. One lamp's shade was removed to throw light across the scene; the other's shade was moved just so to highlight the area in which both trains would come together for their colossal final confrontation.
After the lighting was set, Steve excitedly grabbed one of the doomed train engines and placed it around the bend of a bit of track that would lead into the crossing where the final moments of his film would occur. He moved behind his camera where it sat hunkered on a short tripod standing beside his train set. Finger at the ready on the camera's trigger, Steve reached over to the train set's power dial without taking his eye away from the camera's plastic viewfinder, and simultaneously brought the train and camera to life. Through the viewfinder plates, Steve could see the train racing from frame right to left.
Satisfied, he let go of the camera's trigger, removed the train from the tracks, and repositioned the tripod and camera on the adjacent stretch of track. He reached into his box of train cars and pulled out his other well-worn engine, which he placed on the tracks to the left of the camera's new position. Again, the camera and the train were engaged, but this time, the new train roared from frame left to right. Without consciously reasoning why, Steve was shooting coverage of the trains in a sequence of complementary images that would propel viewers to the final crash between the two engines.
"Intuitively, I guess, I put the film together the right way," said Spielberg. "I figured if you shot one [train] going right to left and one going left to right, it would be clear they were going to crash.
"And it was the first time I kind of figured that out. I felt a little bit like the ape in 2001 who had the bone and it kept leveraging out of his hand and—oh!—it happened to break another bone and then he hit it harder and harder until he's beating the bones to death. It felt like that, you know, that sort of proto-human."
The boy continued to patiently shoot at various angles and proximities to the two engines, instinctually crosscutting in camera—as he had no means to edit his films otherwise at this point in his early amateur filmmaking career—meticulously building his sequence on the tiny spool of film inside the workings of his camera. For added drama, he even included close shots on the silent faces of the horrified plastic men stationed around his toy train tracks, witnesses to the inexorable devastation soon to happen at the crossroads.
Finally, the moment that inspired the film he would christen "The Last Train Wreck" was ready to go before Steve's camera. He set one model train at a crossing, making sure the train's leads weren't connecting to the track so it wouldn't move away, damning the engine and its brave crew where it stood. He placed the other engine at the opposite end of the track to allow it to build momentum as it raced toward the engine waiting at the crossing. He placed the camera at the center point by the trestle where the trains would come together, the lens trained on the spot where the impact would occur.
Once more, he reached over to throw electricity through the train engine, eye never leaving the camera's viewfinder. The locomotive attached to the track buzzed to life, and he squeezed the camera's trigger, finger sweating on its plastic grip.
The locomotive tore down the lengths of track toward the other engine, the trains' fates sealed. Closer, closer as the film churned out of the magazine, across the camera's gate, the modest lens throwing the images onto the surface of the exposing film. Behind the camera, Steve held his breath. Time itself seemed to stretch out of normal proportion as he viewed one train plowing toward the other through the camera's viewfinder, the imagined sounds of screaming steel, steam whistles, and shouting men in his head as the trains came together and ...
SOLEDAD CANYON, CALIFORNIA—1971
Steven Spielberg exhaled sharply as the hulking, rusting form of the 1955 Peterbilt tractor trailer raced toward the small, red, unmanned Plymouth Valiant sedan. His breath hitched, and he leaned forward on the toes of his tennis shoes, the dry earth scraping up under his feet. He started gnawing on the nail of the little finger of his left hand, eyes locked and unflinching from the two vehicles as they plowed into one another, the piercing noise of screeching steel and shattering glass filling his hearing and the fiery flash of a pyrotechnic flare the effects men had set to explode as the vehicles impacted lighting up his eyes. After a moment, he turned to look to director of photography Jack Marta and his operators behind the camera where they had just captured the two vehicles colliding.
A few crew members rushed in to douse the controlled burn between the vehicles.
Steven stood from his position behind the camera, and as the crew finished extinguishing the pyrotechnic that simulated the car's exploding gas tank, he walked to the truck driver's door and looked up at the stunt driver, veteran Hollywood stuntman Carey Loftin. Known fondly as "Old Vapor Lock" by the cast and crew, Loftin had been doing an outstanding job driving the rig that would be terrifying television audiences in a mere six weeks when the film Duel, Steven Spielberg's debut TV Movie of the Weekend, would premiere on the ABC network. Considering Loftin's pedigree—his stunt acting in scores of westerns dating back to the Golden Age of the industry, and most impressively, his stunt driving in such contemporary action films as Bullitt and Vanishing Point, which left audiences breathless—Steven was in very competent hands with the stunt performer portraying the film's heavy.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Steven Spielberg and Duel by STEVEN AWALT. Copyright © 2014 Rowman & Littlefield. Excerpted by permission of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD.
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