The “32 minutes of orgasm” Steven Spielberg never got to shoot: “You’d be on the edge of your seat”
He might be one of the greatest directors in cinema history, and the highest-grossing of all time, but one word you’d never use to describe any Steven Spielberg movie is “orgasmic.” Or, at least, we hope not.
He’s made several timeless movies, a slew of classics, a couple of underrated and unsung gems, and the very occasional clunker, but at no point has Spielberg ever been viewed as a spicy, salacious, tantalising, or titillating filmmaker. Good? Of course. Great? Absolutely? Sexy, in any way, shape or form? Don’t be daft.
And yet, he was confident that had he ended up directing a picture he was supposed to, before studio politics got in the way, and it ended up in the hands of another auteur, he’d have treated audiences to over half an hour of a nonstop cinematic orgasm. Don’t worry, though; it’s not as seedy as it sounds.
You probably could have guessed that already, since this is Mr Wholesome we’re talking about, but maybe his career could have spun off in a different direction had the mastermind behind Jaws, who ushered in the age of blockbuster cinema, revealed himself to be a living, breathing, directorial orgasmatron instead.
In the early 1970s, jobbing actor Joseph Walsh penned a semi-autobiographical screenplay about his history of gambling addiction. A friend of Spielberg’s, the two whipped the script into shape over the better part of a year, and they made a deal with MGM to shoot the picture, which was called Slide, with Steve McQueen tentatively set to star.
However, when the studio tried to make too many sweeping changes, Spielberg bailed a month before principal photography was due to start and shacked up with Universal, which hired him to direct The Sugarland Express and subsequently Jaws, thus changing the course of Hollywood history forever.
Instead, Robert Altman came aboard Slide, which was retitled California Split and released to much acclaim in 1978. One of the movie’s scenes involves George Segal’s Bill Denny winning a high-stakes poker game, which sets him off on a hot streak that sees him win tens of thousands of dollars in blackjack, roulette, and craps. Walsh hated the scene, and according to him, Spielberg had a very different approach in mind.
“It was as bad a scene as you could see,” he told Elliott Gould, who also starred in the film. “It was dead. Dead. Terrible. Steven later said to me, ‘You know when they go on the streak? That’s one gigantic orgasm. I would have made that 32 minutes of orgasm. You’d be on the edge of your seat by the time the two guys are at the finish with this.”
Instead of Spielberg leaving everyone in the theatre stuck to their chairs after 30+ orgasmic filmmaking, California Split ended up with something decidedly less orgasmic. It’s a good movie, sure, but Walsh never seemed to reconcile with the fact that Altman was the wrong man for the job, uninterrupted orgasm or not.
