The TV show Steven Spielberg hated with a passion: “No one can cannibalise my films”
Thanks to the way he started his career, even though Steven Spielberg broke through in an era where television was viewed as at least one step below cinema on the ladder of importance, he was nowhere near as dismissive of the small screen as many of Hollywood’s most popular actors and filmmakers.
It remained true until the 21st century that barely any self-respecting auteur or A-lister would even consider taking their talents to TV, with the unspoken rule stating that anyone who’d made their name in movies that agreed to either headline or helm a series was admitting their glory days were over.
Spielberg, who cut his teeth on episodes of Night Gallery and Columbo, disagreed. It was a made-for-TV film that helped put him on the map, with 1971’s Duel outlining that he had the chops to become a major player in the business, and he’s remained committed to the medium ever since.
Whether it’s developing and shepherding Amazing Stories, or using his producorial power to back everything from Band of Brothers, Animaniacs, and The United States of Tara to Falling Skies, Under the Dome, or Life on Our Planet, the three-time Academy Award winner has remained invested in TV.
That’s probably because no series, whether he’s involved in it or not, has actively pissed him off. It happened once, though, and under the most unexpected circumstances. Lou Ferrigno’s green-painted turn as the title character in The Incredible Hulk doesn’t come across as something that would bug the shit out of Spielberg, but the 1978 first-season episode ‘Never Give a Trucker an Even Break’ made it look easy.
The episode finds Bill Bixby’s David Banner and his muscular alter-ego help a woman retrieve her father’s stolen truck from a band of hijackers, culminating in an extended chase sequence. Either the show didn’t have the budget for the grandstanding finale, or it couldn’t be arsed shooting one of its own, since the third act simply repurposes swathes of footage from Duel.
“There is a fine line between judicious use of stock footage and rip-off,” Duel producer George Eckstein raged to The New York Times. “This case is so far over the line as to what’s permissible that they seem to have written their television episode around the stock footage of Duel, although their story was different.”
Eckstein estimated that The Incredible Hulk had used “218 cuts” from Duel, comprising ten to 12 minutes of the episode’s running time. Plainly put, there was fuck all he could do about it, since Universal Studios owned the rights to both Spielberg’s breakout thriller and the TV show, so the studio could do whatever it wanted.
However, it did spur Spielberg into action. Once he caught wind of being ripped off, he renegotiated his contract with Universal to ensure that, from that point on, “no one can cannibalise my films and regurgitate them into some other show.” As a result, he didn’t have to worry about seeing “the mothership from Close Encounters land on Laverne and Shirley five years from now.”
