Steven Spielberg has worked on a variety of projects during his long and prolific career as a filmmaker. But there was one project he did in his very early years where he had to team up with one of cinema’s iconic acting legends.
The only problem was the actor didn’t see Spielberg as a professional enough director at the time.
The Acting Legend that almost quit after learning she had to work with Steven Spielberg
Everyone has to start somewhere, including Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Spielberg. Spielberg’s first paying job was on The Twilight Zone writer Ron Serling’s Night Gallery. Similar to Twilight Zone, the show was an anthology series, but focused on supernatural and horror instead of sci-fi.
A very young Spielberg was tapped to direct an installment for the series which starred Joan Crawford. But in the beginning, Spielberg had a lot going against him on his first professional job. One of those obstacles was that Crawford didn’t want to work with Spielberg on the project. So much so that she gave an ultimatum.
“I found out years later from [Universal mogul] Lew Wasserman that the second she met me, she called Wasserman and said, ‘You get me a professional director, or I won’t do the show. It’s either him or me,’” Spielberg once recalled to Entertainment Weekly. “And Wasserman said – I was actually told the story at his memorial service – ‘Well Joan, if you’re going to make me choose between Steven and you, it’s going to have to be Steven.’”
The producer was willing to take a gamble on Spielberg, and Crawford compromised and agreed to do the film despite Spielberg’s involvement.
Steven Spielberg was saved by Joan Crawford from a hostile film crew
Crawford wasn’t the only person on the Night Gallery set that had issues with an unproven Spielberg. Spielberg rubbed crew members the wrong way as well. The filmmaker was only in his 20s at the time, with an appearance that made him look even younger. This caused a lot of tension between himself and his much older crew members.
“When I came on the set, and I had long hair and I looked like a preteen. If you look at any of those pictures of me then I look like, really, a child. The crew didn’t like me,” Spielberg said.
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The crew was so against Spielberg that they wouldn’t even lend him the script of the episode he was directing.
“I reached up to say, ‘Can I borrow the script?’ And I took it down, and he snatched it away from me and he said, ‘Get your own!’ And I was the director,” he recalled.
Because of this experience, he felt his days in the show business were already numbered. Fortunately, Crawford was one of the few who defended The Schindler’s List director.
“The person who really came to my rescue was Joan Crawford – and Barry Sullivan and Tom Bosley, the three actors on the show,” Spielberg remembered. “At one point Barry Sullivan made a speech to the crew, when I was not on the set, that I only heard about later. He just lectured the crew about how inappropriate their behavior was toward the director.”
Steven Spielberg once said he had no idea what he was doing on the ‘Night Gallery’
Spielberg also greatly appreciated Crawford’s approach to their collaboration considering Spielberg was so inexperienced at the time. As a result, he didn’t have as much of a grasp on filmmaking as he would in his later years.
“I did not know what I was doing half of the time because it was intimidating,” Spielberg recalled in an interview with Turner Classic Movies. “I had never worked with a crew that size before. I’d been making 16mm movies with friends in college. I had made an unfinished 35mm film about a bicycle race and then I had done Amblin’ in 35, which got me my contract at Universal.”
At least Crawford, according to Spielberg, had a good time on set. But the generous actor made sure that the cast and crew had as much of a good time as well.
“She was elegant and she was selling Pepsi-Cola left and right. She brought huge, huge ice chests with Mountain Dew and Pepsis. Every single day gave it to the crew and said, ‘If you don’t belch after drinking, it’s an insult.’ She was having a good time,” he recalled.
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