Steven Spielberg (29 page)

“People say, ‘How did you get to know Spielberg?'” Daviau relates with a laugh. “I got to really know Spielberg because I shot sunrise and sunset every day for
eight
straight
days,
with Steven Spielberg in high gear. Every morning he wanted to get up and shoot the sunrise. ‘Steven, we got a
great
sunrise yesterday.' ‘Yeah, but this one might be better!' It was very loosely structured, and Steven was making it up as he went along. So we would do sunrise and then we'd shoot all day and we would get a sunset shot.
Then
we would drive in to town, to Technicolor, and see our rushes from the day before. Steven was just doing it to get an idea of how we could reshoot that one little shot that we could do better. We'd drive all the way back, get to bed, and
bang!
Five
A
.
M
., Steven would be up, going, ‘Up!
Up!'”

Other
Amblin'
crew members who went on to careers in Hollywood included composer Michael Lloyd; Spielberg's teenaged sister Anne, who served as continuity supervisor and prepared the food; production assistant Thom Eberhardt, a Long Beach State student who is now a director; production assistant Robin C. Chamberlin, who later produced the TV series
Wings;
and assistant cameraman Donald E. Heitzer, a UCLA film school graduate who also worked with Daviau on rock 'n' roll shorts and eventually became an associate producer and production manager.

Hoffman remembered the picture as “a labor of love” for everyone concerned, but for some it was just labor, and unpaid labor at that. After toiling from early morning to late evening on the grueling locations, the crew would return to their little desert motel “beat to shit,” Heitzer says. Burris recalls that the crew kept changing because “Guys would say, ‘Fuck this, I'm leaving.'” “The hours were hard,” admits Heitzer, one of those who left Pearblossom before the film finished shooting. “It was tough. It was very strenuous. It was hot. It was the middle of nowhere. We would climb up a hillside and set up the camera. We didn't have the normal amenities.”

Heitzer soon discovered Spielberg was not as relaxed as he appeared: “We would leave early in the morning for location, and Spielberg said he would vomit every morning before he came out. It's understandable—every director is nervous, and he was a young kid. But still, he was the leader. He was serious. When you take somebody's dough and you're making something there probably isn't a market for, you'd
better
be serious.”

S
PIELBERG
found the editing process on
Amblin
' “cathartic, since the editing was crucial to the story.” He shot more than three hours of film for a twenty-six-minute short, and by the time he was ready to start editing, his producer had little money left to hire an editing room. Once again, Julie Raymond came to the rescue: “I got him an editing room in Hollywood where he could cut the film—Hal Mann Laboratories. I had known Hal; he had been head of the lab for Pacific Title.”

“Julie Raymond called me and recommended Spielberg,” Mann recalls. “We had worked with him before at Pacific Title. He had done some 16mm work and he brought it to be developed. Larry Glickman [the company's owner] did a lot of work with students. He was very kind, giving, and understanding. We gave them the [film] stock for the cost of the stock plus five percent. At that time Spielberg was another student. I semi-remembered him. He was working with an [assistant] editor [Burris] on
Amblin',
and he had just gotten to the point of doing special effects. I guess he ran out of money. He needed a place to edit and stay all kinds of hours. He came in and we spoke. We were impressed with him and said we would give him help. He seemed like a nice kid, very polite and respectful. Everybody was ‘sir.' He conducted himself in a businesslike way. We had one spare editing
room we let him use; we told him he could have the room for free if he worked late.”

Spielberg spent six weeks huddled over Mann's Moviola, editing the picture and the soundtrack, which included Michael Lloyd's music, a wistful title song performed by October Country lead singer Carole Camacho, and the only other human sounds in the film, Pamela McMyler giggling during a pot-smoking sequence. Spielberg's editing was bold, elliptical, and propulsive, with a jazzy, New Wave–like fondness for sudden, offbeat jump cuts and freeze-frames. He worked on the editing seven days a week, from about four each afternoon until four each morning, with only a single crewman in the building with him and Burris during the night hours. Spielberg was determined to have the film ready for release by the end of the year, the deadline for Academy Award consideration in the live-action short subject category.

Spielberg “lived on pizza and night air,” Mann recalls. “He spent close to two weeks, day and night, just listening to film scores [to guide him in editing the film]. He had a record player, and he had brought all these 33 rpm records. He was walking around all night listening to them in conjunction with his film. He was quite a perfectionist. He wanted to know everything about everything. He wanted to know how our lab worked, how our special-effects machine worked. We had two or three special-effects operators, and he wanted to know what they did. He got advice from a lot of good people. Very few people begrudged him the time or the knowledge. People wanted to help him. He was a very forceful person in a quiet way. He didn't sound like a know-it-all; he was eager to learn. We got a kick out of it. Every once in a while someone comes along you want to go all the way for. We all thought he would go places. Film was his life.”
**

I
N
later years, Spielberg dismissed
Amblin'
as “a great Pepsi commercial” with “as much soul and content as a piece of driftwood.” Since buying his debut movie from Hoffman in 1977, Spielberg has not seen fit to reissue it. “Steven was reluctant to have people see that film for many years,” Daviau says, “because he felt that it was so obviously calculated to do what it did, that is, convince a group of executives at Universal to put their money on this guy who's a twenty-one-year-old director. It was so obviously aimed at that kind of an audience, with enough of a flash of the new, but it was a very old-fashioned movie in a lot of other ways. I think it's fair to say he was a little embarrassed by it.”

“I can't look at it now,” Spielberg admitted in 1978. “It really proved how
apathetic I was during the sixties. When I look back at that film, I can easily say, ‘No wonder I didn't go to Kent State,' or ‘No wonder I didn't go to Vietnam or I wasn't protesting when all my friends were carrying signs and getting clubbed in Century City.' I was off making movies, and
Amblin'
is the slick by-product of a kid immersed up to his nose in film.”

Spielberg is underrating his own movie. The visual precocity of
Amblin'
still has the power to astonish after all these years, and despite its obviously calculated attentiveness to the demands of the marketplace, the film is much more than a mere director's showcase or a soulless piece of sixties youth-market exploitation. The simplicity and charm of its storytelling are affecting, and Spielberg's microcosmic treatment of that era's cultural divisions, as represented in the contrasting personalities of the hitchhiking couple, is shrewd and surprisingly complex. The film's ambivalent perspective on hippiedom, which reflected the director's own personality as a maverick working within the establishment, also demonstrated Spielberg's canny career instincts. While satisfying his ostensible target audience of young moviegoers, Spielberg simultaneously was pitching the film to his real, and more limited, target audience of middle-aged Hollywood executives who viewed the emerging youth culture with a mixture of wariness and fascination. In so doing, he made a film that managed to be both commercial in its broadly based appeal and surreptitiously personal in its underlying feelings—a combination that would become a hallmark of Spielberg's career.

With his guitar case, Army fatigue hat, and casual clothing, the Richard Levin character in
Amblin'
appears to be a hippie, or at least a middle-class Jewish kid trying his best to be a hippie. His shyness and sexual awkwardness appeal to the Pamela McMyler character, whose pretty but funky, fragile but weatherbeaten appearance stamps her as a drifter bruised by experience. As she takes the lead in initiating him into pot-smoking and lovemaking, her playfulness seems to loosen him up, but his underlying uptightness becomes more pronounced as the wordless story progresses.

The boy's anxious refusal to let his traveling companion look inside his guitar case, at first a seemingly harmless quirk, gradually alerts her to a secretive side of his personality. When they finally reach the Pacific Ocean, he frolics in the surf, fully clothed, as she rocks morosely in a beach swing, sensing that their brief journey together has no future. In a series of time-compressing jump-cuts, Spielberg brings her closer and closer to the guitar case lying in the sand. When she opens it, with a touching smile of mingled chagrin and amusement, she finds the emblems of the boy's true personality—a business suit and tie, brown wing-tipped shoes, toothpaste and mouthwash, a roll of toilet paper—along with a paperback copy of Arthur C. Clarke's
The
City
and
the
Stars,
a seemingly incongruous inclusion that helps alert the knowledgeable viewer to the extent of Spielberg's personal identification with the character.

The boy is not only a
faux
hippie, a closet square, but a rather unpleasant 
user to boot, despite his seeming social maladroitness. Initially unable to get a ride on the highway while traveling alone, he latches onto the girl as bait for unsuspecting drivers, a stratagem that backfires in a series of amusing sight-gags as drivers catch on to their game. On a more serious dramatic level, subtly conveyed by Spielberg's intricate direction of the couple's wary glances toward each other, the boy callously allows the girl to become closer to him emotionally than he is able to be toward her. She comes to the unhappy realization that the (unstated) goal he is pursuing in southern California leaves no room for the feelings of a rootless, less socially ambitious vagabond. Viewing his male protagonist critically, through the eyes of a more sensitive and more clear-minded female character, Spielberg provides an implicit critique of male ambition and emotional aloofness. Although it may not have appeared so to audiences at the time, Spielberg is also giving us a surprisingly harsh and objective portrait of the artist as a young man. The Levin character takes much the same attitude toward the girl that the strait-laced Spielberg did toward his hippie roommate Ralph Burris—he is embarrassed yet intrigued by her sexual and emotional openness. The director's poignant portrayal of McMyler's character is a gesture of respect toward the counterculture from a filmmaker self-aware enough to know that he could never truly belong to it.

While not overtly politically conscious,
Amblin'
is hardly the work of an “apathetic” filmmaker, but that of a deeply
feeling
filmmaker who captures the disaffected mood of his generation with both fidelity and artful understatement. Spielberg described
Amblin'
in 1968 as “hopefully standing for everything that's happening today. It takes no position on marijuana or sex, just simply presents them.” He could have phrased that better, for while
Amblin'
may not take a “position” in the sense of preaching about changing social mores, it examines them concretely, passionately, and without resorting to caricature. Spielberg's deft and witty use of the camera, the vigorous and unexpected rhythms of his compositions and editing, and the engaging naturalism of the performances he draws from his actors give
Amblin'
a sense of emotional spontaneity and freshness within the framework of a mature, highly controlled, even classical visual style. Compared to some of the better-known youth pictures of the sixties, which are so hysterically overstated as to be virtually unwatchable today,
Amblin'
is an elegant and unpretentious miniature, a time capsule of the period that transcends cliché and requires no apology from its director.

“
W
HEN
I saw
Amblin
',” Chuck Silvers reports, “I've got to be honest with you, I cried. It was everything it should have been. It was perfect. Certain things he did with the camera were fun, but they weren't
just
for fun—he was telling a story. It was such a simple story, so well told, and it was a silent motion picture. Steven Spielberg is as close to a natural-born
cameraman as anybody I've ever known of; he knows what he has in mind has to be conveyed visually. I don't want to cast myself in any way as his teacher. I wish to hell I
had
been. How the hell do you teach Maria Callas how to sing? Who taught Da Vinci? You can
expose
people to things, but they have to have it in themselves. As far as I'm concerned he's the most gifted person in motion pictures. Not just today—
ever.

“I didn't trust my own reaction to
Amblin'.
I thought maybe I wasn't being as objective as I could be. I saw it again, and I looked at it in a more professional sense. I didn't find anything I would change, and that's very unusual for me. I ran it for some of the editors I was close to. One of the guys even cried—Carl Pingitore. Carl was a gruff bear. He said, ‘That's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.' When I had shown
Amblin
' to three or four editors, I knew I had available to me Steven's showcase.”

The “hell of a big break” Silvers had wished for Steven now was about to come to pass. As Spielberg has said, what happened next was “truly a Cinderella story.” Although others who worked at Universal at the time have tried to take credit for bringing
Amblin
'
to the attention of Universal's top brass, Silvers was the person who did so first.