‘Snow White’, Thomas Crapper, and the “despondent, comatose state” that almost destroyed Steven Spielberg
The rose-tinted origin of Steven Spielberg is that he exploded onto the scene when his feature-length debut, Duel, premiered in November 1971, and wasted no time in establishing him as one of the most dynamic and exciting directorial prospects in Hollywood, but that’s not strictly true.
While it’s definitely accurate that people within the industry sat up and took notice of the 24-year-old’s raw potential and prowess after his nerve-shredding thriller won glowing praise, it was more of a salvation than a statement of intent, with his nascent career close to hitting the skids the year before.
Spielberg was as undeniably ambitious as he was precocious, making his filmmaking bow with the pilot episode of Night Gallery in 1969, which hit the airwaves a month before he turned 22, but since the ‘New Hollywood’ era hadn’t yet burst into full bloom, major studios were still wary of someone so young.
His biggest supporter was Sid Sheinberg, the vice-president of Universal, who believed in him so much that he was awarded a seven-year contract based on the strength of his short, Amblin’. However, the road between putting pen to paper and Duel‘s first day of shooting was paved with failure and misery.
He was still picking up TV gigs, but Spielberg’s attempts to pitch his first feature were being constantly batted away, which might be because they didn’t sound very good. He pitched a modern-day adaptation of Snow White that was set in a Chinese food factory in San Francisco for some reason, and also a satirical biopic on the life and times of Thomas Crapper, who was erroneously credited with inventing the flushing toilet, but lives on forever after his name literally became synonymous with shit.
He also presented Universal with an original idea, which was at least made, albeit by another director. Spielberg only received a story credit on 1973’s Ace Eli and Rodger of the Skies, but he wasn’t happy with how his work had been butchered, mangled, and made unrecognisable by the time it hit cinemas.
Unsurprisingly, he found himself “in a despondent, comatose state” after multiple rejections, and he asked his mentor if he could take an extended sabbatical from his contract, with the would-be auteur also noticing that Sheinberg’s ironclad confidence in him hadn’t been reciprocated by the studio’s other power players.
“Nothing was really happening for me there, because I was kind of like Sid Sheinberg’s folly, and because of that, I wasn’t getting hired by any of the producers,” the eventual highest-grossing director in cinema history recalled. “And so I went to Sid, and I said, ‘Sid, I’m not getting any jobs. No one on the lot’s hiring me. Can I have a year off to write?”
He took that year off to develop ideas and immerse himself in the craft of filmmaking, and in a stroke of luck that changed everything, when he returned, Richard Matheson’s short story, Duel, was published in Playboy in March 1971. By September, Spielberg was shooting the adaptation, which toppled the first domino on his path toward greatness.
