John Baxter - Steven Spielberg

This was an astonishing recital for someone who would say later, ‘I never mock suburbia. My life comes from there,’ who admired Norman Rockwell and who would make his own tributes to Formica and frozen pizza in E.T. and Poltergeist . It is more explicable as an attack not on suburban values but on fathers who fail to abide by them.

Duel pioneered a new kind of TV feature by making virtues of its necessities. Second-rate actors? Who cares? Spielberg was, as he remained, indifferent to glamour in his performers, preferring anonymous suburban faces, rumpled clothes, unwashed hair, spotty skin. No sets? Cheap technicians? No matter; he would make the best of what he was given. His cameraman, Jack A. Marta, and composer Billy Goldenberg, a staff composer who’d scored his Columbo episode, were journeymen, a fact Spielberg exploited by taking over as much control as possible of camera and music. The emphatic comic-book framing and the homage to Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho score in the wheep-wheep ing violins show his hand.

Fortunately one other technician on the Universal lot was the best in the business. Carey Loftin had begun stunt driving in 1935 as a motor cyclist on a fairground Wheel of Death. He graduated to car and bike stunts in serials, managed the crashes and chases for Abbott and Costello, doubling Abbott in the more hazardous scenes, a fact that delighted Spielberg, a fan of the two forties comics. Loftin also ramrodded the stunts on Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World , another Spielberg favourite, and reached the peak of his career in 1968 with the vertiginous car chase around San Francisco for Bullitt .

Another veteran, Dale Van Sickel, drove the car in Duel . Loftin handled the truck himself. He arranged a parade of five gas tankers on the backlot for Spielberg. Four had modern flat-fronted GMC-Mack prime movers with wide windows that revealed the driver down to his knees. Spielberg chose the fifth, an ancient shit-brown Brand X eighteen-wheeler, mud-spattered, rusted and slovenly. Its old-fashioned divided windshield not only gave the vehicle a look of frowning malevolence but, if the glass was dirty, hid the driver completely. It looked as if the truck was driving itself. Sure, Loftin told him in his slow Tennessee drawl, he could rig that truck for anything the script demanded, even crashing the car at the climax and carrying it over a cliff.

Duel was shot on location around Lancaster and Palmdale, sixty or seventy miles outside Los Angeles, on the edge of the Mojave Desert. Between the desert and Los Angeles, Soledad Canyon, on the edge of the Pinnacles National Monument, offered miles of lonely blacktop, much of it twisting and mountainous.

Spielberg mapped out the entire film in storyboards, like a giant comic book, in this case forty yards long. Though they didn’t invent them – Hitchcock, among others, used them all the time – storyboards became a major weapon of the Movie Brats. Men like Spielberg’s regular artists Ed Verreaux and George Jensen were adept at generating hundreds of pages of graphic art, complete with framings and camera movements, from the director’s stick-figure diagrams. Storyboards dictated a two-dimensional style, reducing narrative to a handful of poses. Following style, dialogue was scaled down to the two or three lines needed to fill a talk balloon. Teenagers raised on the same visual conventions loved the result but, applied to a serious subject, it imposed a Classics Comics glibness. Coppola, Scorsese and many others abandoned this crutch as they embraced the multivalent possibilities of film, but Lucas and Spielberg clung to it. Many would credit the failure of Empire of the Sun in part to storyboarding, and the success of Schindler’s List to the fact that Spielberg abandoned it for that film.

Having worked out the action in advance, Spielberg walked the locations for days before shooting, banging stakes into the dirt where stunts would begin and end, and where his three cameras would be placed. Instead of resetting the camera for each new shot, he had the car and truck drive past each camera in turn, capturing three shots in the time it usually took to him one. The weather was perfect, blazingly sunny, the valley baking in the heat, the mountains a brown smudge on the horizon. One can almost smell the softening blacktop, the truck’s oily fumes, the sizzling grease of the roadside café.

Shooting went two days over schedule, in part because Spielberg saw rushes only every three days, and had to drive miles to do so. The budget rose to $425,000, but Eckstein was delighted with the result. Scenes like the truck ploughing through a roadside snake farm to crush the booth where Weaver is making a phone call showed a glee in violence of which more disciplined directors were incapable. To Spielberg, the lessons of junk film and cartoon proved perfectly applicable to live action. ‘The challenge was to turn a lorry into Godzilla,’ he said. ‘It was sort of Godzilla v. Bambi.’

Godzilla nearly won in real life. As a precaution against drivers going to sleep at the wheel, the truck had a ‘Dead Man’s Hand’ which cut the engine if pressure was released. Since Loftin had to jump just before the collision, he tied down the control, but as he prepared to leap, leaving the truck to accelerate over the cliff, the cord slipped. He had no alternative but to ride the vehicle almost to the edge before jumping. ‘My scissors cut at literally the instant Carey’s butt left the cab,’ said Spielberg. But the near-accident left a continuity error. The truck door is open – ‘Leaving room for a sequel,’ Spielberg joked.

With only three weeks between the end of shooting and the air date, Universal allocated four editors to cut the film. Spielberg rollerskated from on cutting room to another. But the effect is seamless. Among the first people to see it was Barry Diller. ‘I saw a rough cut of Duel ,’ he said, ‘and I remember thinking, “This guy is going to be out of television so fast because his work is so good.”’ In the event, however, Duel was sold to NBC, who scheduled it for their World Premiere Movie slot .

Before Duel was aired, Universal loaned Spielberg to CBS for another made-for-TV feature, this time a horror film called Something Evil . The producer was Alan Jay Factor, who’d been behind the innovative occult series One Step Beyond . Robert Clouse’s script about a couple who move into a remote Bucks County farmhouse, to find it haunted by a spirit that menaces their son, skilfully conflated The Exorcist’s plot of a child’s demonic possession and The Other’s rural setting. (The fact that films of both were in production but not yet released made it all the more attractive.) Sandy Dennis and Darren McGavin were reliable but undistinguished as the parents. The boy was Johnnie Whittaker, from the saccharine series Family Affair .

Spielberg, however, distilled a sense of uncategorisable menace from his simple materials. In particular, he drew on his delirious adolescent experiences with bright light in the temple and from the TV screen. Abandoning the blue acetate normally taped over windows to render them more natural, he overlit them. Figures moving against their glow were haloed and distorted. The ‘God Light’, a radiance pouring through clouds of smoke or dust, would appear in most of his films.

Duel aired on 13 November 1971. Its virtuosity impressed friends who had been underwhelmed by Spielberg’s previous TV work. George Lucas recalls.

Though I’d crossed paths with Steven at film festivals in the early sixties, it wasn’t until some time in 1971 that I really took note of him. I was at a party at Francis Ford Coppola’s house and Duel was on television. Since I’d met Steven I was curious about the movie and thought I’d sneak upstairs and catch ten or fifteen minutes. Once I started watching, I couldn’t tear myself away… I thought, this guy is really sharp. I’ve got to get to know him better.