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HE MADE AN ENORMOUS IMPRESSION ON ME. . . . I THOUGHT HE WAS SO DEVELOPED SO MUCH OF HIS PERSONALITY WAS IN PLACE BY THE TIME HE WAS SEVENTEEN. — G E N E W A R D S M I T H , S P I E L B E R G ' S C L A S S M A T E A T S A R A T O G A HIGH S C H O O L P I E L B E R G began his unofficial Hollywood apprenticeship at Universal in the summer of 1964, following his junior year in high school in northern California. His mentor, Chuck Silvers, recalls that the ambitious teenager gradually "worked out his own curriculum"on the lot, visitingsets and kibitzingwith editors and sound mixers. Silvers offered Steven a place to hang out in the television editorial building, provided he could justify his presence by helping in the office for a few hours every day: "I said to him, There's a certain amount of scut work you can do that's not involved with the union.' There we had to be very careful. He couldn't even be a junior apprentice—he was a kind of guest, a self-appointed observer who made all his own arrangements with the people who responded to him." Silvers shared an office with a middle-aged woman namedJulieRaymond, the Universal Television editorial department's purchasing agent, in charge of filling orders with laboratories and other subcontractors. "Spielberg was sixteen when I first met him," she remembers. "He was working on the lot when he was still in high school. Chuck told him he could use our office to take phone calls. Chuck brought him into the office and told me the kid was floating around the lot. Spielberg used to come in to take calls and work on S i x " H E L L O K E A R T H " s " H E L L O N E A R T H " 1 1 3 scripts. I was working my butt off and going up to see my husband [who had cancer] in the VeteransHospital in Sylmar. I had so much work to do, I gave Spielberg things to do." Spielberg helped her during the summers of 1964 and 1965 by "tearing down" purchase orders—separating colored sheets and carbons—and routing copies to various departments. He also ran errands to the Technicolor laboratory adjacent to the studio lot, and to other suppliers housed in that building. In his accounts of his early days at Universal, Spielberg has never mentioned his office work with Julie Raymond.Instead he has gone to considerable lengths to turn mundane reality into romantic myth, saying that after bluffing his way past the guard and finding an empty office, he commandeered it, listinghis name in plastic letters next to Room 23Cin the building's directory. "I've never been in that office, let's say," Chuck Silvers comments diplomatically . Julie Raymond's response is more blunt: "He made up a lot of stories about finding an empty editing office and moving into it. That's a bunch of horseshit." Spielberg's unpaid clerical job was the humblest, most mundane of beginnings , but it enabled the teenager to roam the lot with a purpose while seeing the inside workings of the studio system. The old-line Hollywood system was then in its last days before splintering in the creative, financial, and political upheavals of the late 1960s. But the Universal lot was the major exception to the rule in that era of studio decline. Still booming when Spielberg went to work there, it would remain so throughout his beginnings in television and features in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Those were the days when Alfred Hitchcock was making his last featureson the lot, Universal TV was pioneering the made-for-TV movie format, and as many as two dozen TV series were shooting simultaneously.Spielberg's professional training was much the same as he would have had working his way up the ladder from B pictures to A pictures at MGMor Warner Bros, during the "Golden Age" of Hollywood in the 1930s. While most other filmmakers of his generation know the classic studio system only from history books and old movie footage , Spielberg's precocious start gave him an invaluable firsthand knowledge of how that system functioned. "I visited every set I could, got to know people, observed techniques, and...

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