Free The Film Club by David Gilmour Page A

feared this very thing before and now here it is again.
    Steven Spielberg was twenty-two when he directed Duel . He’d done some television (a Columbo episode served as his calling card) but no one anticipated that he was going to tear up the material with quite this relish. More than the truck, more than Dennis Weaver’s escalatingly frightened driver, the director is the star of Duel . Like reading the first pages of a great novel, you sense you’re in the presence of an enormous, incautious talent. It hasn’t learned to second-guess itself, to be too smart. Which is what, I suppose, Spielberg meant a few years ago when he told an interviewer that he tried to rewatch Duel every two or three years in order to “remember how I did it.” You have to be young, he implied, to be so unapologetically sure-footed.
    You can see why studio executives took one look at Duel and gave him Jaws (1975) a few years later. If Spielberg could make an unwieldy truck scary, just imagine what he could do with a shark (which, like the driver of the truck, remains out of sight. You see only its effects, a missing dog, a girl pulled suddenly underwater, a buoy exploding to the surface, things which announce the presence of danger but never give it a face. Spielberg intuited at an early age that if you want to scare people, let their imaginations do the heavy lifting).
    We watched the “Making of Duel ,” which came with the DVD. To my surprise, Jesse was intrigued listening to Spielberg talk about the shot-by-shot construction of the movie—How much thought had gone into it. How much work. The storyboards, the multiple cameras, even auditioning a half-dozen trucks to see which looked the meanest. “You know, Dad,” he said in tones of mild amazement, “up till now, I’ve always thought Spielberg was a bit of a suck.”
    â€œHe’s a film nerd,” I said. “Slightly different species.” I told him the story about a young, hard-partying actress who knew Spielberg and George Lucas and Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese in California when they were just starting out. She was amazed, she later said, that they didn’t seem to be interested in girls or drugs. All they wanted to do was hang around with each other and talk about movies. “Like I said, nerds.”
    I showed him A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). I told him how in 1948, a young, relatively unknown actor, Marlon Brando, hitchhiked from New York to Tennessee Williams’s house in Provincetown, Massachusetts, to audition for the Broadway production, how he found the celebrated playwright in a state of terrible anxiety; the electricity was out and the toilets were stopped up. There was no water. Brando fixed the power problem by putting pennies behind the fuses and then got down on his hands and knees and fixed the plumbing; when that was done, he dried his hands and went into the living room to read the part of Stanley Kowalski. He read for maybe thirty seconds, so the story goes, before Tennessee, who was half-bombed, waved him to silence and said, “That’s fine,” and sent him back to New York with the part.
    And his performance? There were actors who quit acting when they saw Brando do Streetcar on Broadway in 1949. (The same way Virginia Woolf wanted to give up writing when she first read Proust.) But the studio didn’t want Brando for the film. He was too young. He mumbled. But his acting teacher, Stella Adler, had made the ominous prediction early on that this “strange puppy thing” was going to be the greatest actor of his generation. Which is how it turned out.
    Years later, students who took acting workshops with Brando remembered his unorthodox ways, how he could recite a Shakespearean monologue standing on his head and still make it truer, more affecting than anyone else’s work that day.
    â€œ Streetcar ,” I explain, “was the play where they let the genie out of