"The Most Irresponsible Experience": How Steven Spielberg Nearly Lost His Career
The legend of the Hollywood renaissance, who gave us such masterpieces as Jaws, the Indiana Jones series, Jurassic Park, and many other cult films, almost ruined his creative future at the very beginning of his career.
And all would have been well except for his excessive creativity, which "appalled" the executives.
In a recent interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the filmmaker talked about his not-so-great career start. It happened during the filming of the horror series Night Gallery, and Spielberg had to leave the crew as a result.
Night Gallery is an anthology of short films in the genre of mysticism, horror, and fantasy, released over a three-year period from 1970 to 1973. Spielberg co-directed the pilot series, released in 1969.
"And they hired me once again to come back and do a segment... and I came on the set, and because [my segment] was only 11 minutes long, I had this idea of shooting the whole 11 minutes in one shot," Spielberg says.
The director decided to get creative and shoot the entire movie in one take. And what might be considered a brilliant directorial move today did not impress the conservative executives in '69.
Remarkably, the team members themselves were, on the contrary, enthusiastic.
According to Steven Spielberg, the management was unhappy with the lack of classic 1960s cinematography and camerawork, which they felt was especially necessary for TV shows.
"That's one of the most irresponsible experiences I've ever had with a director working for me, and we're going to reshoot the show with another director," the now-great director continued, recalling a phone call he received from one of the executives.
Immediately after this unpleasant conversation, Spielberg was fired. Who knows, maybe it was his groundbreaking methods that would have made the show much more iconic.
Or maybe the director really lacked experience: we all stumble along the way.
Obviously, this was not the end of his career as a director. Spielberg's feature film Duel debuted in 1971, first as part of the ABC Movie of the Week anthology and then on the big screen.
And in 1975, the thriller Jaws became a true phenomenon, cementing Spielberg's status as a cinematic classic.