At Universal, however, the revolution was a long time coming. Never one for quick decisions, Lew Wasserman rode out the first youth wave by ignoring it. As far as he was concerned, Universal was mainly in the TV business. In 1971, however, he appointed Ned Tanen, a producer from the music business with no particular qualifications except his relative youth, to acquire low-budget ‘alternative’ projects. By early 1972 Tanen had bought Monte Hellman’s Two Lane Blacktop, Frank Perry’s Diary of a Mad Housewife and John Cassavetes’ Minnie and Moskowitz.
Everyone Spielberg knew seemed to have a feature deal. As he bounced around Hollywood, from the campus of USC for a screening of student films to a Preston Sturges retrospective in Santa Monica, over a roast beef sandwich at Musso and Frank’s or at a party at Coppola’s place, the stories kept coming. Phone calls from producers who’d unearthed some long-forgotten script and wanted to discuss it, offers from Metro or Fox to ‘come in and talk a deal’.
Milius sent him his latest screenplay. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, which he’d just sold to John Huston. It was an epic western – the sort of script that Howard Hawks or John Ford might have made. When The Godfather opened in March 1972, its baroque, Continental richness drowned him in darkness thick as chocolate sauce. That such films could be made in Hollywood was incredible!
Coppola, with William Friedkin and Peter Bogdanovich, had launched The Directors’ Company. It was a Renaissance gesture, an alliance of princes. They pledged to share in each other’s profits and never to concede final cut to anyone. Old Hollywood smirked. They’d seen these groups before. They came and they went. Sooner or later they’d start bickering. One or another of them would do better than the rest. Someone would screw someone else’s wife… It was an old story.
Spielberg watched these evolutions with alarm. Reputations were being made before his eyes. Fame was being conferred. People were becoming immortal. And he was directing The Psychiatrist! He would have jumped at anything Ned Tanen offered him, but there could be no rapprochement between the eager Spielberg and this moody executive with his permanent sneer, his dour pleasure in the deal, and his belief that Hollywood was characterised by ‘negativity and illusion – especially negativity’. While Tanen was in charge, Spielberg didn’t have a chance. It drove him crazy. ‘The truth is,’ said a friend, ‘Steve would have made anything that got him into features.’
Spielberg says he first came across Richard Matheson’s short story ‘Duel’ when his secretary Nora Tyson, with a blush about even knowing what was inside the world’s most successful men’s magazine, showed him the April 1971 Playboy containing the story, in which a lone motorist is pursued by a homicidal truck driver in a gas tanker. Matheson doesn’t agree. He’d written the film script long before he and Spielberg met. He based it on an incident when a truck driver tried to bump him off the road near his San Fernando Valley home, a common enough event on an increasingly congested system of which the trucker, like the bikers of Easy Rider, regarded himself as a sort of cowboy hero, subject only to his own rules. Its hero, Dave Mann, an archetypal corporate cipher with a house in the suburbs, a wife and two children, sets out on a trip to save an important account. Cutting across country, he overtakes a fume-belching gas tanker, the driver of which regards this as an insult. With mounting violence, he pursues him across the Sierra until they crash together into a quarry. Only Dave, a better Mann for the experience, survives.
In a more probable, if less heart-warming, alternative version of the legend about how Spielberg encountered Duel, a pal in the mailroom, part of his carefully nurtured network, funnelled him an interesting screenplay already going the rounds of producers. However he came across it, Spielberg devoured Duel with the enthusiasm of a fan. Matheson had written a number of Twilight Zone episodes – and the original of The Incredible Shrinking Man.
The script also addressed some of the fears that were to motivate Spielberg for the rest of his career. A few years later, British critic Gavin Millar pressed him to identify the anxieties that drove Duel. Was it the technology of the truck that frightened him?
‘No, not the truck,’ Spielberg mused. ‘Loss of control maybe.’
Since childhood, security for Spielberg had reposed in control, and in adulthood it remained a paramount concern. Control of his environment, his emotions, his work. Twenty-five years later, Oskar Schindler would expound to the Nazi camp commander Amon Goeth, ‘Control is power.’ Spielberg remembered puttering along the freeways in his uncle’s Chrysler as trucks roared past, air horns blaring at this slow-coach. It wasn’t the car he identified with in Duel; it was the truck; its omnipotence, its power.
The Vice President in charge of features programming at ABC TV in 1970 was Barry Diller, an ambitious executive in his early thirties, later to run 20th Century-Fox. Sensing the audience’s greed for movies, he’d launched the ABC Movie of the Week, a Monday-night showcase for new features, and was hungry for product. Universal saw Duel as an ideal Movie of the Week. But Spielberg, itching to escape the TV ghetto, argued that it should be a full cinema feature. And if Sheinberg would OK it, that would bypass Ned Tanen.
‘If you can find a star who’ll do it,’ Sid Sheinberg conceded cannily, ‘we’ll see.’
Spielberg sent the script to one of the few Universal regulars who could project the necessary combination of vulnerability and resolve in Dave Mann, but Gregory Peck, as Sheinberg anticipated, wasn’t interested. The project reverted to Diller, who quickly approved both it and Spielberg.
‘I saw an episode of The Psychiatrist which he’d done,’ Diller recalls. ‘I thought, “What good work.”’
Staff producer George Eckstein was assigned to bring in the production at about $300,000. To star, a disappointed Spielberg was allocated Dennis Weaver. OK, so he’d been the stuttering motel ‘night man’ in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, though most people remembered him as Chester B. Goode in the TV series Gunsmoke, limping after James Arness and calling, ‘Mistuh… er… mistuh Dillon?’ He’d found fame of sorts at Universal as a cowboy cop transplanted to the big city in McCloud, but a character actor was always a character actor.
From the moment he read the script, Weaver begged for more meat, with a scene or two where he confronts and defies the truck before the climax. ‘I just don’t want to be this guy the way he’s written,’ he complained.
But Spielberg, sensing Weaver’s core of weakness, on which so many other directors had traded, insisted he play Mann as a pussy-whipped wage-slave who greets every problem with sweaty-palmed indecision.
Mann fails to rescue a broken-down school bus menaced by the truck. When his car impotently spins its wheels as he tries to start it, the children inside, his surrogate family, jeer. Mann cuts and runs, after which, in the ultimate indignity, the truck not only spares the bus but arrogantly helps it on its way. He’s out-thought at every turn by the truck, which ambushes him at one point near a railway line, and tries to push his car into a freight train.
Too embarrassed to demand help in the lonely gas stations and greasy spoons, Mann finally waves down an old couple, who simply drive off. It’s only when his self-esteem is completely eroded that he finds the grit to oppose and defeat his opponent. To drive home the point, Spielberg recorded Mann’s self-pitying meditations on his life and nursed Weaver through his performance from the back seat, playing the recording of his internal monologue at the point where they would appear in the finished film. Cropped out for TV, but revealed when the film was shown on the big screen, Spielberg can be seen scrunched at the edge of the frame in a car interior.
Talk, often only half-heard, is the obbligato of Duel. For the first seven minutes – a sequence added for cinema release – the only soundtrack is a radio programme, incorporating a conversation between a census helpline and a comedian who