Steven Spielberg (31 page)

Spielberg was familiar only with Crawford's work in
Baby
Jane
and
Mil
dred
Pierce.
So he went out and bought a copy of Lawrence J. Quirk's book
The
Films
of
Joan
Crawford.
Before his 8:00
P
.
M
. appointment with Crawford at her Hollywood apartment, he gave himself a crash course in her career.

As Spielberg told the story to Crawford biographer Bob Thomas, when he arrived at her apartment, he heard her call out in a warm voice, “Come in, Steven,” but at first he didn't see her. Then, wrote Thomas, Spielberg “was startled to find her standing behind the couch with a mask covering her eyes. He watched in astonishment as she stumbled about the room, bumping into furniture, holding out a protective hand as she moved.”

“This is how a blind person walks through a room,” she told him. “I'm practicing for the role. How difficult it is without the benefit of sight. You feel lost in a world of blackness. I've got to do this on the set, Steven. I need to practice with the furniture two days before we shoot so I'll be able to let my eyes go blank and still find my way around like a blind person.”

At that point, Thomas related, “She removed the blindfold. Her huge eyes blinked in bewilderment as they gazed for the first time on the man who would be her director. Her smile froze as she studied the smooth, beardless face. ‘Hello, Steven,' she said, offering a brave hand. ‘Hello …Joan,' he replied, wishing that he could escape.”

“Goodness,” she told him, “you certainly must have done something important to get where you are so soon. What films have you directed?”

“Uh, none.”

“No films at the studio?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Then …?”

“Well, I did make a movie that the studio liked. That's why they signed me.”

“Oh? And what was that?”

“It was, uh, a twenty-minute short I made at Cal State Long Beach.”

“At school.”

“Yes.”

“Do you happen to be the son of anybody in the Black Tower?”

“No, ma'am. I'm just working my way through Universal.”

“Steven,” she laughed, “you and I both made it on our own. We're going to get along just fine! C'mon, let's go to dinner.”

While they dined on Polynesian food at the Luau, a campy Beverly Hills hangout popular with movie people, Crawford drank vodka while Spielberg sipped a non-alcoholic fruit punch. She pumped him on his background, and he told her about his aspirations to make films. She spoke about her life with her late husband, Alfred Steele, president of the Pepsi-Cola Company; she had remained involved with the company as a board member and spokeswoman. She laughed uproariously when Spielberg said, “I guess about the only thing we have in common is that we're both members of the Pepsi generation.”

By the end of the evening, their unlikely camaraderie had progressed to
the point that she said, “Now, I know what television schedules are, and I know the pressure that will be on you to finish the show on time. You'll want your first work as a director to be something you can be proud of, and I'll break my ass to help you. Don't let any executive bug you because the picture's not on schedule. If you have any problems with the Black Tower, let me take care of it. I'll be your guardian angel. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Spielberg, smiling with relief.

The next day he told Chuck Silvers, “I was on cloud nine all the way home.” He had passed his first test as a professional director.

“It was a quantum leap,” he said later. “I never got over the idea of directing
Joan
Crawford!!
But she was great…. She took pity on me, this little kid with acne all over my face. She must have been expecting George Stevens or George Cukor to direct her first TV show.”

Contrary to Spielberg's belief,
Night
Gallery
was not Crawford's first acting job on television. She had done nine previous TV shows, the first in 1953 and the most recent a 1968 episode of Lucille Ball's sitcom
The
Lucy
Show.
But Crawford “
was
a little apprehensive” about the television medium, Sackheim says. “You're talking about a woman who probably never shot more than two pages of dialogue a day in her life. Now you're shooting
eight
pages. She had difficulty remembering her lines. Ultimately we had cue cards made up. I remember she apologized to Steven. She was very upset about her own inability to provide what he needed.”

Spielberg remembered, “I was so frightened that even now the whole period is a bit of a blank. I was walking on eggs…. I don't know if you've ever not been to bed for four days in a row? Shooting
Night
Gallery
was like that. I don't take drugs. I never have. Or I would have used every drug under and over the counter at that time. That show put me through dire straits. It was good discipline but a very bad experience.”

Joan Crawford remained true to her word, however, treating him “like I had been working fifty years…. Once she knew I had done my homework —I had my storyboards right there with me every minute—she treated me as if I was The Director. Which, of course, I was. But at that time she knew a helluva lot more about directing than I did.”

But as cast member Barry Sullivan recalled shortly before his death in 1994, Spielberg also “handled her very nicely. He was very flattering. He used the right butter-up words, not the words he would have used normally. She had fallen in love with him, but she didn't trust herself, that was my interpretation. She was very impressed with him, but she didn't know why. She thought he was some kind of nut.”

T
HE
first day of shooting, February 3, “was frightening because I hadn't met the crew before,” Spielberg recalled at a 1973 American Film Institute seminar. “I came on the set and they thought it was a joke. They really thought it was a publicity stunt and I really couldn't get anybody to take me
seriously for two days. It was very embarrassing…. I set up a shot in
Night
Gallery
—I shot through a bauble [in a chandelier], just a real gimmicky shot—and I remember seeing people titter and say, ‘He doesn't have long to go.'”

Barry Sullivan realized what Spielberg was feeling. He took the director aside and told him, “Life is short. Don't put yourself through this if you don't have to.” That advice, Spielberg recalled, “has stayed with me, although it's an old cliché.”

Spielberg came to
Night
Gallery
with a precociously well-developed sense of his own visual style. He disdained the usual TV method of mechanically “covering” scenes with master shots, medium shots, and close-ups. He had an instinctive aversion to the over-the-shoulder shooting style TV editors favor for ease in linking shots, and with his passion for control and his fondness for the moving camera already strongly in evidence, he preferred whenever possible to stage a scene in a single flowing master shot. Because of his unorthodox shooting methods and Crawford's difficulty remembering her lines, the first two days went slowly. As Bob Thomas reported, Spielberg “knew that his bosses in the Black Tower were more interested in maintaining the schedule than in achieving quality, and he feared that both would elude him. If he failed on his first assignment, would he ever have another?”

Spielberg's visual flamboyance also caused friction with his producer. As film editor Edward M. Abroms recalls, “The first day we went to dailies [the screening of footage shot the previous day], the first scene up was Barry Sullivan coming into [Crawford's] suite, seen through a chandelier. Steven put the camera close to the chandelier, and I remember Bill Sackheim going, ‘Oh, my God, what an arty-farty shot! Jesus Christ!'” Hearing such remarks, Spielberg said later, was “really a disturbing experience.” But his crew soon became “very sympathetic,” doing their best to help him get the shots he wanted.

When Bob Hull of
The
Hollywood
Reporter
interviewed the “long-haired, very youthful-appearing tyro” on the final day of shooting, Spielberg stressed his willingness to work within the system: “I'm trying to show that it's possible to be both commercial and, well, artful. People my age in this business are malleable, you know, not merely one-way, their way. We can learn from the past.” Diplomatically glossing over his early difficulties with the crew, he said, “I expected hostility when I started on this. But no one seemed to think it was unusual. Nobody called me ‘Hey, kid.' As a matter of fact, the older people on the set were the first to accept me. I guess they figured that if someone up there thought I was good enough for the job, then that was good enough for them.”

“From the time he'd holler ‘Action!' ‘Cut!,' he was the director,” Chuck Silvers says. “It was a totally professional operation. On most sets there's a lot of grab-ass, cardplaying, jokes, and lightness. You don't see that on a Spielberg set. By showing respect he engenders respect.”

O
N
the third day of shooting, there was another crisis. Joan Crawford became ill. She was diagnosed with an inner-ear infection and given a day to rest. Spielberg's efforts to keep up with the schedule seemed doomed.

At the end of her first day back, a shaky Crawford told Spielberg, “Tomorrow I really need your help, Steven. That scene where I take off the bandages and see for the first time. It scares the hell out of me. That may be the most important shot in the picture, and I simply don't know how to do it.”

“We'll work it out, Joan, don't worry,” he promised. But the following day he was under intense pressure from the production office to complete his work on the apartment set so that the stage could be turned over to another production. He was almost done when the assistant director, Ralph Ferrin, said Crawford needed to speak with him.

“Later,” said Spielberg. “I've got to finish with this set by six.”

“I think you'd better talk with Joan,” Ferrin said, “or else you may not be able to finish with the show.”

Spielberg found Crawford weeping in her dressing room.

“You have let me down,” she told him. “I rarely ask anyone for help, but this time I needed it—badly. I asked you last night if you could spare some time today to help me with the scene where I am able to see. Now, here it is, the end of the day, and you haven't talked to me.”

Spielberg canceled shooting for the day, even though he hadn't finished with the set. For the next hour he went over the scene with Crawford in her dressing room, promising, “I don't care what the production office says. I'll give you any number of takes until we get it on film just the way you and I believe it should be.”

Spielberg “was painstaking the next day, calling for take after take until Joan was satisfied,” Bob Thomas reported. “The shot lasted less than five seconds in the film, but the experience proved an invaluable lesson for the young man—the director's responsibility for his actors.”

On the last day and night of shooting, Spielberg filmed the finale of Miss Menlo, her sight fading at sunrise, crashing through the window of her penthouse as she cries out, “I want it!
I
want
the
sun!”

“We were thinking of using a stock shot of the sun,” editor Abroms recalls. “She had a problem, being the actress that she was, with, ‘How am I going to be motivated to feel this heat on my face? And how am I supposed to go here when there's no glass?' Because of Steven's immaturity at the time, he could not quite reason with her. He said, ‘We'll have some padding on the other side, and we're going to catch you.' But she just couldn't work up enough inner motivation. Bill Sackheim took her aside and she did it.”

“Miss Crawford and I just had our first argument,” Spielberg told
The
Hollywood
Reporter
at the end of shooting. “It wasn't really much of a disagreement, a little thing over punching up a scene. It's a pleasure discussing such a thing with a woman like that.”

When Crawford died in 1977, Spielberg was the youngest speaker at a Hollywood memorial tribute organized by George Cukor. He recalled that during the shooting of
Night
Gallery,
“She treated me like I knew what I was doing, and I didn't. I loved her for that.”

S
PIELBERG
'
S
episode finished shooting two days behind its seven-day schedule, a development frowned upon in assembly-line TV production, even if the director was not entirely responsible. Spielberg then took such pains with the editing that he eventually was barred from the cutting room. He later claimed that editor Ed Abroms “threw me bodily out of his cutting room, and called the producer to complain. I think he threw something heavy at me, too, but missed.” Asked about Spielberg's removal from the show, Abroms replied that he was “a little hesitant” to discuss the circumstances, but Sackheim insists, “Nobody threw him out.” The producer does admit that they had “a little problem trying to get the film away from him. He shot some really wild, wacky stuff. In the operation scene of Tom Bosley losing his eyes, we were having trouble putting it together.” “There was virtually no operation [scene], no footage,” Abroms says. “Steven shot the two of them on gurneys going into the operating room, and down shots on their faces—how do we put across that the eyes are being taken out? I had to pull a few tricks, some manipulation of film and some opticals.” The special-effects finale of Miss Menlo falling to her death also required some reshooting during postproduction, without Spielberg's involvement.