In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

NINE " T H E S T E V E N S P I E L B E R G B U S I N E S S " THE DIRECTOR OF THAT MOVIE IS THE GREATEST YOUNG TALENT TO COME ALONG IN YEARS. — B I L L Y W I L D E R IN 1 9 7 4 , A F T E R A P R E V I E W OF THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS N November 22, 1963, the fantasy and science-fiction writer Richard Matheson was playing golf in Simi Valley, California, when he heard the news that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Matheson and his golfing partner, writer Jerry Sohl, stopped playing and headed back toward LosAngeles. Matheson recalls that as Sohl drove through a narrow canyon, a truck began tailgating them at a dangerously high rate of speed: "I'm sure the emotion with which I reacted to that experience was so much more extreme because we were going through the trauma of the Kennedy assassination. Partially we were terrified, and partially infuriated, turning our rage about the Kennedy assassination into rage at the truck driver. We were screaming out the window, but the truck driver's window was closed and he couldn't hear it. Myfriend had to pull up, skidding onto one of these dirt places [turnouts] in the road. In the writer's mind, once you survive death, you start thinking of a story. The story idea occurred to me and I jotted it down on the back of an envelope. I tried to sell it to The Fugitive and several other TV series. They thought, There's not enough there.' So I thought, 'Guess I've got to write it as a story.' " Matheson's gripping short story about a battle to the death between a truck and a car, "Duel," was not written until seven years later. The author, , O 2 0 0 S T E V E N $ P I E L B E R G whose scriptwriting credits also include several classic Twilight Zone episodes , adapted "Duel" for Spielberg's TV movie version, which aired on November 13, 1971, as ABC's Saturday night Movie of the Weekend. The critical praise and the reaction from those in the industry who saw Duel vaulted the director, a month before his twenty-fifth birthday, into the leading ranks of Hollywood filmmakers. Stephen King has given a vivid appreciation of the electrifyingvisual and aural qualities Spielberg brought to Matheson's story: "In this film, a psychotic trucker in a big ten-wheeler pursues Dennis Weaver over what seems to be at least a million miles of California highways. We never actually see the trucker (although we do see a beefy arm cocked out of the cab window once, arfH at another point we see a pair of pointy-toed cowboy boots on the far side of the truck), and ultimately it is the truck itself, with its huge wheels, its dirty windshield like an idiot's stare, and its somehow hungry bumpers, which becomes the monster—and when Weaver is finally able to lead it to an embankment and lure it over the edge, the noise of its 'death' becomes a series of chillingJurassic roars . . . the sound, we think, a Tyrannosaurus rex would make going slowly down into a tar pit. And Weaver's response is that of any self-respecting caveman: he screams, shrieks, cuts capers, literally dances for joy. Duel is a gripping, almost painfully suspenseful rocket ride of a movie." D U E L was a perfect match of story and director, Spielberg has always tended to place his protagonist—"Mr. Everyday Regular Fella"—in an extraordinary situation testing his abilities to survive and overcome the tedium and terror of mundane reality. Spielberg remembered his reaction when his secretary, Nona Tyson, showed him Matheson's story in the April 1971 issue of Playboy: "I was just knocked out by it. And I wanted to make it into a feature film." By the time Spielberg read "Duel," Universal already had bought the film rights for George Eckstein, a producer on the Robert Stack segments of The Name of the Game TV series. Matheson's magazine story was brought to Eckstein by Steven Bochco, the young writer and future TV producer credited with writing Spielberg's Columbo episode. "I hired Dick Matheson to do a script," adds Eckstein. "He and I developed the script together." Matheson at first resisted Universal's...

Share