Duel (w/ Dave Lester)

Eli Price (00:03.278)
Hello and welcome to the establishing shot of podcast where we do deep dives into directors and their filmography fees. We are here on episode, uh, 30. Four, uh, of the podcast and, uh, I'm Eli price. I'm your host and, uh, I'm here with our guest today, Dave Lester, uh, joining us all the way from the Seattle area. Is that right?

Dave Lester (00:32.484)
Seattle area, greater Seattle area up here in the Pacific Northwest. Yes.

Eli Price (00:35.46)
Yeah. All right. I got it right. Yeah. But yeah, we're here jumping into our first episode, like covering film material for Spielberg. Had a couple of weeks ago. You know, we're recording this the day actually that my first Spielberg.

Dave Lester (00:40.374)
You win.

Eli Price (01:03.628)
Overview episode came out. So But yeah when this releases it'll be a couple weeks ago now and Yeah, we're jumping in getting getting going in the films. So I'm excited to jump into Dual is gonna be the main subject of our talk today And then we'll touch briefly on his other two TV movies something evil and savage

But yeah, it's good to have you Dave. How are you doing? And kind of update everyone. You joined me for Insomnia, is that right? And then no one's here. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Lester (01:40.772)
That is correct. Yeah. Christopher Nolan's insomnia. I still make the case that it's one of his most underrated thrillers. So that was a lot of fun. I'm, I'm so excited to be back. I love, I think I mentioned it last episode, but I love what you do with this podcast. I love the idea of picking a director and starting at the beginning and going through their work and seeing how their art and their work progresses over time. And sometimes you see similar themes and.

Eli Price (01:48.644)
Yeah, that was fun.

Dave Lester (02:08.726)
similar aspects of how they see the world coming out. And I think it's such a, it's such a cool way to experience this type of artwork cinema. And, and yeah, I mean, I've done it just personally with like the Cohen brothers, with Gilbert who we're talking about today and with Catherine Bigelow. I think my wife and I might move on to Spike Lini pretty soon. So, um, yeah, man, great podcast. I enjoy it.

Eli Price (02:12.484)
with that.

Eli Price (02:24.388)
Mm -hmm.

Eli Price (02:32.068)
Ooh, yeah.

Yeah, I appreciate it. Yeah, and you've gotten a new podcast going yourself since we last talked, I believe. You mentioned it, I think, on the Insomnia one. But yeah, I've been listening to it. It's really good. Yeah, tell everyone a little bit about that.

Dave Lester (02:42.402)
Yes.

Dave Lester (02:46.52)
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, really fun.

I so yeah, my second podcast is called does the Bible say that and Basically what I do is I just you know, I'm going through Genesis right now I pretty much go verse by verse passage by passage and it's not a sermon. It's not preaching It's just talking about what the Bible says and then also discussing what it means and you know sometimes there's discussion dialogue debate about that second point, but I kind of think yeah think of it in two

different ways for two different people who may tune in and listen to the podcast. One for the Christian, because I think we're dealing with a time in our country right now where people are, you know, they use the word deconstruction and deconstruction isn't always a complete destruction of faith. Sometimes deconstruction means I am holding something out at arm's length and kind of re -examining it and looking at it again.

Eli Price (03:42.308)
Mm -hmm.

Dave Lester (03:50.468)
And so I figured for the Christian, it's good just to let's just solo script, Torah. Let's just look at the Bible. What does the Bible say? What does Bible mean? And then secondarily, and this is the reason I don't really preach or do a sermon that often. I put sermons that I preach on there every once in a while, special episodes. But the main part of the podcast is for someone who is an atheist and agnostic for a friend who is maybe not a Christian anymore.

Eli Price (03:57.188)
Mm -hmm.

Dave Lester (04:17.604)
I want the podcast not to be threatening in any way if someone wants to actually dive in and say, okay, well, I've never really read the Bible. What does the Bible say? What is the, you know, what's the Bible all about? So it's kind of that starting point. If somebody's curious about finding out what, what one of the most important books, even if, you know, even if one is a stone cold atheist, like the impact of the Bible across the world has been, uh, just incredible, you know, through thousands of years. So.

That's my aim with the podcast.

Eli Price (04:49.86)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I've been really enjoying it. I definitely recommend checking that out. I think it's on pretty much all the platforms. But yeah, what? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, definitely highly recommend that. But yeah, yeah, we're going to go ahead and jump into talking Spielberg. And I always like to ask my guests what.

Dave Lester (05:00.132)
Yeah, Spotify, Apple, a few other ones.

Dave Lester (05:14.784)
Yeah.

Eli Price (05:18.436)
was their introduction to Spielberg. And I know you're excited to talk about this. So yeah, give us your Spielberg experience background.

Dave Lester (05:24.354)
Oh yeah.

Dave Lester (05:29.22)
Okay, well, so to totally date myself to your listeners and viewers, I am 44 years old. I was born in 1980. So I do not remember a time in my life where I did not know who Steven Spielberg was. Um, and usually as a kid, I knew who actors were Harrison Ford, uh, Mark Hamill.

You know, I knew who performers were. I rarely was interested in filmmakers because I was like, Oh, what's a director? What's a producer? Right. But Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were two guys that I absolutely knew growing up and, and they were the storytellers of my childhood. And, you know, realistically, even now being 44, they're two major storytellers in my life. And I guess I'm kind of a.

Eli Price (06:03.492)
Mm -hmm.

Dave Lester (06:23.778)
what do they call this, geriatric millennial or something like that at our age. Maybe I'm a tail end of Gen X or the elder millennial. So however you want to clarify me, but people who were born around the time that I was born, I think people who were into film kind of had similar experiences with these two filmmakers and so much love for them because of the stories that they told. So Stephen Spielberg is like a third grandfather to me.

Eli Price (06:43.652)
Mm -hmm.

Dave Lester (06:52.45)
You know, a storyteller in my childhood, my first experience with Spielberg directing, I believe was probably ET. And it came out when I was two years old. So that means I probably saw it on a VHS video cassette tape at some point. And it was probably before age five. I actually texted my mom, shout out to Sue to check with her on these facts. But when I was five years old at Halloween, my mom homemade

Eli Price (06:52.516)
That's great.

Dave Lester (07:21.22)
me an ET costume that I walked around our neighborhood in. So that was probably the first movie that I saw of Steven Spielberg, but obviously in the 80s I grew up watching and my parents probably let me see a few movies a little too early in my life such as Jaws or Raiders of the Lost Ark, but I absolutely watched those movies like crazy. I love them. Raiders of the Lost Ark is still...

Eli Price (07:25.572)
Very cool.

Eli Price (07:43.044)
Sure.

Dave Lester (07:48.9)
one of my all time favorite movies, probably one of the best action adventure movies ever made. I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Harrison Ford playing Han Solo in the Indiana Jones in that trilogy of Indiana Jones movies in the 80s was as a boy, it was what I thought a man was growing up, like for better or worse. And with all the, there's certainly cultural critique to do about that, but.

Eli Price (07:54.34)
Hmm.

Eli Price (08:12.292)
Sure.

Mm -hmm.

Dave Lester (08:18.18)
That's, that's what I looked up to. And, you know, obviously the Indiana Jones trilogy was Steven Spielberg. And I remember distinctly seeing Indiana Jones and the last crusade in the theaters when I was nine and just being blown away. So Spielberg is like this third grandfather. He is proverbially proverbial, you know, sitting around the campfire with me. He's telling me stories that are creepy and scary.

Eli Price (08:33.316)
Hmm.

Dave Lester (08:44.708)
He's telling me other stories that are filled with awe and wonder and this like childlike imagination of what it was to be alive. And so he captured a lot of our dreams as millennials and even beyond our generation. And he stated that he was dreaming himself, which is what you talked about kind of in your first episode that he was dreaming himself when he made movies and he would go on to form DreamWorks with his friends and fellow collaborators. And so as I got older and we millennials got older,

Eli Price (08:49.348)
Mm -hmm.

Eli Price (08:53.796)
Hmm.

Eli Price (09:06.594)
Mm -hmm.

Dave Lester (09:13.508)
It was like Spielberg sat us down and said, okay, I need to tell you some terrible things about the world. And he made Schindler's List when I was, you know, 13. So I grew up with Spielberg's stories and the majority of them were always welcomed and they were always there and always around.

Eli Price (09:30.564)
Yeah, that's really cool. It's really cool to have, you know, someone that really grew up with Spielberg to give that perspective because I kind of shared a little bit on that episode of like, my memories are like kind of vague. Like I know I watched the indie movies and ET as a kid, but I don't have like strong memories of them. I really like.

Dave Lester (09:40.676)
Yeah.

Eli Price (09:58.308)
And I still have a lot of Spielberg blind spots that I'm going to be correcting through this series. So, uh, yeah, I'm, uh, I'm excited to, yeah. So, um, I have not seen, um, I'm trying to think through, through his filmography. I have not seen, uh, 1941. Um, I haven't seen the color purple. Um,

Dave Lester (10:06.946)
Which one's in rescue?

Eli Price (10:27.67)
Empire of the Sun always. And then the kind of anthology ones like, oh, I haven't seen Sugarland Express yet. As of the time of this recording, I'll be catching up with that real soon. And then I haven't seen his like anthology ones either like the Twilight Zone movie or the amazing stories that was released as a movie. Those are the ones I haven't seen in.

Dave Lester (10:37.696)
Thank you.

Eli Price (10:58.212)
in this kind of early two decades of his career. But yeah, it's. And then I kind of have a similar through each each of the phases of his career, probably like four to five blind spots, because I mean, he has so many. So I probably have like four to five blind spots in each face, maybe not the most recent one. I think I've seen maybe all but like one or two since like the two.

Dave Lester (11:15.428)
Oh yeah, absolutely.

Eli Price (11:27.844)
since the 2000s, um, but, um, or since the 2010s, but yeah. Yeah.

Dave Lester (11:30.468)
Okay. Well, not to, not to put, this is in 2010s, not to put your expectations way out of the park here, but I do have friends that say that Empire of the Sun is their favorite Spielberg movie. And that's probably, yeah, that one in Munich, I would say, are, is too very underrated. Like if you could call a Spielberg movie underrated, it's probably those two, or one of those two is like being the most. Yeah.

Eli Price (11:45.22)
Yeah, I'm excited.

Eli Price (11:56.324)
Cool.

Yeah, yeah, I'm excited about Empire of the Sun. I found like an abridged audio book on Spotify that I'm planning on listening to before that. I wasn't sure if I would have time to take in the whole book, but there's like an abridged one that's available that for not for free, but with, you know, Spotify premium, which I have already. So it felt.

Dave Lester (12:16.836)
Yeah.

Eli Price (12:28.036)
It's funny how like it feels like something's for free when you're actually paying for it. I think that's how they trick us these days. But.

Dave Lester (12:32.228)
laughter

companies I tell you yeah it's a brilliant business tactics right

Eli Price (12:39.62)
They're like, we're adding audio books now to Spotify. And it's like, oh, I'm getting something for free with what I'm already paying for. And it's like, no, you're still paying for it. But yeah, so I'm really excited to dig into these. But yeah, today we're starting at the, I guess not quite the very beginning of his directing career, because he got his start in TV.

I talked about a few of those episodes very briefly in the overview episode. I was telling Dave before we started recording that Colombo episode is probably his best TV episode he directed.

Dave Lester (13:30.468)
Yeah, I have never seen it. And another friend of mine, Dan Sertal, shout out to Dan if he listens to this. He has seen it. He's a big Colombo fan and he, I think he says that's one of the best Colombo episodes period. Like that's really, really good.

Eli Price (13:34.306)
Yeah.

Eli Price (13:45.124)
Yeah. Yeah. I remember reading that, um, Steven Spielberg saying like out of all of his TV era, that was like the script, one script that he got that he actually like was really impressed by and like wanted to like do his best work for because the script was good. So that was, that was cool to kind of see and hear. But, um, yeah, the other ones are all, they all have like,

interesting Spielberg distinctos to them, where he's kind of like, you can see he's kind of filling out some of the stuff that he would like continue to grow in his use of as far as like camera work and stuff. But he didn't have too much control over what sorts of stories he was telling in that phase. But that would kind of change with Duel.

because, um, so we'll jump back a little bit before Spielberg gets involved. You have, um, Richard Matheson, who was an author. Um, he, he wrote some short story, a lot of short stories. Um, I want to say he wrote some novels, but I'm honestly not sure I didn't do that much digging into Matheson. Um, but he also wrote, uh, some scripts for, uh, the Twilight Zone.

which was cool. Uh, and Steven Spielberg was, was familiar with him because of that. Um, and I think some like adaptations of, um, some egg growl and pull po stuff he wrote scripts for. Um, but yeah, so he, he was kind of like an author, but also like familiar with like screenwriting and stuff like that. Um, but yeah, he, uh, he authored this short story. Um, I, I'll,

I think it was the same name, but I'm not positive now that I think about it. I don't think I wrote that down in my notes. But yeah, it was. It was an

Dave Lester (15:50.692)
Right.

It was in, it was in Playboy, right? In 1971, he had a short story and it was kind of based on an experience that he actually had, which is wild.

Eli Price (16:02.788)
It was so, and it stood out, it stood out in his mind because he, it was on the day of the JFK assassination. So they, um, yeah, that, um, it was on that day they had left somewhere him and his friend. Um, and they were driving and this truck basically like kind of rammed into them and almost ran them off the road and they like pulled off and he went on and, uh, he was kind of shaken up about it. And then.

I guess later on that day was kind of like, man, what would have happened if that truck would have just like kept terrorizing us? And he's like, I should write a story based on that. And that's like where the idea came from, which I think is really cool and interesting. But yeah. Yeah. So.

Dave Lester (16:47.428)
Oh my. Yeah. Dealing with that aspect of road rage, I mean, I'm trying, because this is 1971, and I was trying to think even in getting, preparing for this episode, if there were any other movies or anything that really dealt with road rage prior to this story. I mean, in the early 70s. At least road rage in its modern form, I guess.

Eli Price (16:57.836)
Mm -hmm.

Eli Price (17:08.356)
Yeah, yeah.

Eli Price (17:14.692)
Yeah. And I think I want to say either maybe on the extra features on the DVD or maybe somewhere I was reading, I want to say someone had kind of commented that was kind of talking about the movie that like this was like when road rage was starting, but to become a thing. I guess it took what, like 50 years of vehicles for there to be.

Dave Lester (17:36.886)
Yeah.

Eli Price (17:44.42)
for Roe Rage to like really make its mark in society. Which I guess is right.

Dave Lester (17:48.344)
Yeah, okay. I mean, I'm sure it happened in the 1920s or something because people are people. But I guess to become an institution, maybe we'll say the brokerage institution, the legendary tales of, you know, bad gators. Yes, exactly.

Eli Price (17:56.524)
Right.

Yeah. Yeah.

to become like a personality trait. That's a guy who has red rage. Yeah, for sure. But yeah, so George Eckstein, who was a producer for Universal Studios at the time, read the story and bought the rights to it. And Matheson was kind of like weary of writing a script for it. But Eckstein,

Um, whichever way you say it, uh, I'm, I'm never good with that. Um, he, he kind of convinced Matheson to write the script. Um, so he did, and, uh, they didn't have, they couldn't get like a star actor to get attached to it. And so they ended up just kind of like slotting it in for an ABC. Back then they had a, what were called ABC movie of the weekend. And so it was basically like a.

made for TV movies, they would have new ones, I guess, each weekend or something like that. So Spielberg's assistant had given him the story, the short story that was in Playboy Magazine, and Spielberg read it and she had told him, like, hey, Universal has a script for this. And they're wanting to make a TV movie for it. And...

Eli Price (19:32.162)
Bill Volcker was like, I love this story. I really want to make this movie. And I think he kind of saw it as like a possible transition point out of TV because he did not want to direct for TV. He was like, he was done with it. And, uh, and so, yeah, so he,

Dave Lester (19:46.436)
Yeah. I remember you talking about that last episode. Yeah. It's, um, it's interesting to think about Spielberg in that way. Like he, he is a feature filmmaker. You know, he's almost probably what? 80 years old now. And like you said, you're looking through his tomography. It's daunting. Like he's made so many movies, but even what I was saying at the beginning, think about comparing him to George Lucas. George Lucas had the original Star Wars trilogy, which

Eli Price (19:51.906)
Yeah, um

Eli Price (19:59.62)
Mm -hmm.

Eli Price (20:03.684)
Yeah, I think he's, yeah.

Dave Lester (20:15.886)
I give him credit for amazing, genius, visionary. But he kind of just was, I don't want to say writing the coattails. I mean, I just think he, he realized that he completely changed the world and defined culture in a way and just kept trying to do that with what he had created. But Spielberg's like, I'm just going to keep making all different kinds of movies, you know? So he wanted to go in the movies. I, you know,

Eli Price (20:18.276)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Eli Price (20:40.93)
Mm -hmm.

Dave Lester (20:43.874)
Yeah, I listened to your previous episode of him being kind of, eh, TV, it's boring, I want to make movies. So that totally makes sense. He wanted to make the jump.

Eli Price (20:49.316)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. He definitely saw this as like his like his big chance, I guess. Maybe not a big chance, but like an opportunity like, OK, I'm going to make a feature film. It's going to be on TV, but it's a feature film nonetheless. And yeah, he he he kind of had when he read it, he imagined like a visual narrative like with very minimal character.

based plot and more just like a visual narrative. And he like, he had been, he also talked about like, he had these Arizona highways magazines when he was young. He grew up a lot in Phoenix, Arizona. And there were all these, these like beautiful, like pictures of these highways in Arizona that like disappeared into the vanishing point that he had like in his mind. And then also like it brought back memories of.

being bullied as a kid. He dealt a lot with bullying, um, just as, just as like, I guess a young creative and also, um, dealing with antisemitism too. Um, and so, yeah, I guess like it brought out, it just like excited the thought of making this excited him. So he calls up X Dean and he's like, Hey, I want to do this. And X Dean was not, not impressed with Spielberg. Uh, he kind of had this,

reputation as the avant -garde kid at Universal back then. And I even want to say, Eckstein had seen his short film Amblin and was just like not impressed with it. And yeah, and so Eckstein says, okay, I tell you what, you send me what you think is your best work and I'll watch it and then I'll get back to you. So Spielberg actually sent him, we,

Eli Price (22:51.524)
We're just talking about it. He sent him the, at that time, the unaired first draft of the Colombo episode, uh, murdered by the book. Um, so it hadn't aired at that point. It was like the first cut, um, of the show. And so he sent it to him and Eckstein watched it and he was like, okay, I'm going to give this kid a meeting. Um, I'm impressed with, with this work on this. Um, so yeah, he, he got.

Dave Lester (22:59.884)
Okay.

Eli Price (23:20.62)
the script, he, X team wouldn't even give him the script. He was like, I'm going to watch this first and then maybe I'll give you the script. So yeah.

Dave Lester (23:23.876)
Yeah.

Dave Lester (23:27.268)
He's like, ah, the kid's in the animal and I'm not going to wait. You know, you don't even want to waste your time reading the script, kid. So, okay. So for me and for other hardcore Steven Spielberg fans listening, I think we're going to have to see this Columbo episode because that is the reason why we have a Steven Spielberg that producers finally gave him a chance after watching this episode. So that's, that's pretty impressive.

Eli Price (23:43.652)
Yeah.

It is.

Mm -hmm.

Eli Price (23:52.868)
Yeah, yeah. And it is. I will say, too, take advantage of your local library, because that's what I did. I checked out the first season of Colombo from the library, and it's season one, episode one. And so I just watched that episode and then returned the set, because I didn't plan on watching the whole season. But yeah, the Colombo episode.

really did it. And it is it's it's a very good episode. For one, he got a hold of, like he said, a good script. It was it was a good story. And he really like put a lot of effort into the way he worked the camera for it. And Hexteen liked it. And so, yes, Spielberg met with him. He shared his vision of this visual narrative, like telling the story through the editing and.

the camera movement and the framing and the sound and how like he wanted the driver's monologues to be at a minimum. If at all, he wanted to remove all of them at first. Yeah, he did.

Dave Lester (25:05.732)
Steven Spielberg he had the right instincts because that, we'll come to this later, that's one of my big critiques probably of this film is I don't like the interior monologues but anyway sorry.

Eli Price (25:13.092)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, yeah, we'll definitely touch on that. Um, cause that's one of my critiques too. Um, yeah, he, he did that. And then, um, there was a ABC kind of head honcho named Barry Diller, um, who had w who had liked one of his episodes of the psychiatrist, which are unwatchable because you can't find it anywhere. I, I, I searched everywhere to try to find, you can't rent it or buy it. Um,

It's not, there's no physical copies. Um, I think it only ran six episodes and, and ABC canceled it or something. Um, and so, but yeah, he, in that episode, um, the thing people liked about it was the way he captured emotion. Um, and so I think that's probably what Diller, um, liked and Diller along with XTeen like gave him the job based off of that at work. So yeah.

Yeah, in the end, he mostly stuck with the script. He kind of added just a little bit. He added the opening sequence where David Mann is pulling out of his home and driving. It's kind of like the title sequence, I guess. He added that in, and then, yeah.

Dave Lester (26:33.26)
Yeah, it's over the credit. Let's put a pin on this one too, because I have something to say about that, and I think that was a good addition, actually. I have a whole lot about that, but we'll put a pin on that for later.

Eli Price (26:42.468)
Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Eli Price (26:46.884)
Yeah. Yeah. And even, um, just on, on what he did with the script, Mathis, which it was in a DVD extra where they were interviewing Mathis and the author of the story. He was like, yeah, he, uh, he mostly stuck with a good script and, um, and added his own brilliance, which I kind of thought was funny because it's like, he's patting himself on the back for like, yeah, he, he, you know,

Dave Lester (27:11.204)
I'm going to go ahead and close the video.

Eli Price (27:13.348)
He recognized a good script when he saw one. And really, what's funny is we just talked about how Spielberg wanted to take out all of the monologues. So it's kind of.

Dave Lester (27:25.828)
I mean, yeah, and Oh, man, Mappison, no disrespect, because I don't think I've read anything else that this guy wrote, but I mean, good script, I mean, sure, but it's a pretty basic story, okay? The real strength of this film that I think we'll get through is visual, and that's why you can see Steven Spielberg's early talent with

Eli Price (27:36.14)
Yeah.

Eli Price (27:43.662)
Yeah. Yeah.

It's visual.

Dave Lester (27:55.044)
the shot choices and the I don't want to get ahead of us, but yeah, just the way he visually approached this material is what really sold it.

Eli Price (28:03.776)
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, let's jump into the production. So he Universal gave him 11 days to shoot this 74 minute TV movie, which, you know, most of us that are familiar with movie shooting schedules are like, that is absolutely unbelievable. But for TV, that's actually like probably actually. Oh,

Dave Lester (28:04.586)
Thank you.

Eli Price (28:33.988)
more time than usual, I would think.

Dave Lester (28:36.036)
Yeah, isn't that why they yeah, many filmmakers say they don't necessarily like working TV or maybe it's different now But just kind of the speed that something needs to air at a certain point I mean now with streaming it seems like they just film a big long thing and then it's put into you know 10 episodes and got done Netflix it might be a little different now, but back then yeah, just the pace and the You know haven't done Yeah, great next week

Eli Price (28:48.548)
as well.

Eli Price (28:54.212)
Yeah.

Eli Price (29:00.1)
Oh yeah. Cause they're pumping them out. They're just like pumping them out one after the other. Yeah. Yeah. It's, um, it reminds me of like, uh, in Seinfeld, my wife and I are finishing up watching through Seinfeld again. And the, there's the period where they, you know, they're making the show, Jerry, the show about nothing. And, and, you know, there's, there's all the talk about, you know, like, you know, we have hundreds of shows on the docket.

Dave Lester (29:21.766)
Thank you.

Eli Price (29:29.924)
We don't they don't need your show. He's like trying to convince George like they don't need us. We got to take what they give us. But yeah, it's just like that pace. Like they're just pumping stuff out. But yeah, so so the the funny thing, this is another like just like testament to Spielberg's like just like how already smart he was at this young age. I want to say so this was.

71 so he would have been 24 25 somewhere in there when he made this because yeah, he was born in 46 so so yeah 24 25 and He wanted to shoot yeah, he wanted to shoot on location which makes sense. It's it's a road movie and Wallace Woolsey jr.

Dave Lester (30:15.428)
super

Eli Price (30:26.884)
was the production manager that was kind of like the middleman, like telling Spielberg what he needed to do basically. And he was like, no, that's not how we do things. You go out there, you get your shots that we're going to put up behind the actors on set. Go out to location, get your shots, come back to the studio, and we'll shoot it in studio. And Spielberg was like, no, I'm not making it that way. And so we'll.

Dave Lester (30:54.788)
that 24 year old putting the split down. Good for him.

Eli Price (30:57.796)
Yeah. And so Woolsey said, well, I'll tell you what, go out there. I'll give you three days. Um, you shoot the way you want to shoot it on location, but you also need to get some, some location shots that we can project behind the, um, behind the actors and studio. But if you can stick to schedule in those three days, I'll let you finish shooting on location. And so, um, they get out there and, um, yeah. So he basically.

gets me he meets enough of willsies directives to to get to stay on location. And we'll get we'll actually get to that in a second but yeah he shot it was shot entirely in the San Fernando Valley on highway fourteen. Along says solid it's solid add a canyon road and fast was canyon road.

And then there's the man house, which is in Tallulah Lake, which is north of the universal studios. That's the really the kind of only other location. The rest of it is all in that San Fernando Valley. And it did end up being like a 12 to 13 day shoot. So he did go a little bit over. But yeah. So how did he stick to that schedule and get this whole thing shot? This is what's.

really impressive, I think is he, and what's funny is you see this and how he basically stuck to schedule this tight schedule for this movie. And then like when he started making feature films, he was known as the guy that goes over budget and over schedule. And, uh, and it's just funny because you see this and you're like, Oh, he does have the ability to like meticulously plan out everything. So what he did is.

Dave Lester (32:42.052)
Hahaha.

Eli Price (32:53.828)
Um, he w basically like he put maps, he got maps up on all the walls of his, um, motel that he was staying in taped to them, tacked them up, uh, a map for each day of where they were shooting. And he mapped out like, uh, drew on the maps, like where they were shooting, where the camera placements were going to be the movements of the cars. And it was just all planned out on all these maps for each day.

And yeah, and then on top of that, he used camera placement tricks to up the efficiency of the shooting. So what he would do is he would find locations where on one side of the road there was cliffs or rock faces or whatever. And then on the other side of the road, it was bare. And so they would just do two passes, one with the camera on one side of the road, the other on the other side.

other side of the road. So you basically get two locations in one look out of one location. Yeah. And then on top of that, he would play, he wouldn't just do one camera. He would place like five cameras with different angles and stuff. So with each pass by of the cars, you're getting like five different shots that you can use in editing. Um, which is just like, it's just like, how did this kid like,

Dave Lester (34:20.694)
All right, genius.

Eli Price (34:20.706)
He think up all of this stuff. Yeah. And then of course, like he would have like several cameras mounted on different places on the Plymouth, which was the car that that they drew that they used. David Weaver's the actor and he Dennis Weaver. Yeah, David, David Mann, Dennis Weaver.

Dave Lester (34:43.456)
Dennis Weaver, yeah. David May has the character.

Yes, there you go.

Eli Price (34:50.148)
David Mann is a character. I guess like that's maybe he was just such a good actor that he's melded both names into one for me. But yeah, it's just really impressive how efficient he was able to make that thing. Yeah, I don't know. I think of myself at 24 years old and I'm like, yeah, I would.

Dave Lester (34:58.532)
There you go.

Dave Lester (35:18.944)
No way Yeah, I might have thought that I could do it at 24, but once you get there, it's like yeah, no Absolutely not

Eli Price (35:18.98)
I would have been lost.

Oh man.

Eli Price (35:28.1)
Yeah. And, and I guess what it boils down to is this kid had been like behind a camera since he was like eight years old. So, I mean, like he's in the eyes of like universal and the act, like the, the veteran people on set and stuff, like, Oh, he's a kid. He's 24 years old. He's just a kid. But like in actuality, like if.

If he were to have had a resume with all of the stuff he'd done, I mean, he'd been making films for what would that be? 16 years. Um, so like in, in actuality, like he actually had a decent amount of experience. It just wasn't necessarily on a studio set. Um,

Dave Lester (36:03.94)
16 years. Yeah.

Dave Lester (36:16.292)
Yeah. And it wasn't official education experience. It was him doing his own thing, telling his own stories, incorporating his family and friends and scout troops, as you talked about last episode into, into what he was doing. So he was already, and it seemed like he was doing it all the time. I mean, he's a guy that it's like, you gotta love what you do. And when you love what you do.

Eli Price (36:21.506)
Mm -hmm.

experimenting.

Eli Price (36:29.732)
Mm -hmm.

Eli Price (36:36.226)
Mm -hmm.

Dave Lester (36:41.348)
You just automatically put so many hours into it, you don't even really think about it. You're just doing it all the time.

Eli Price (36:49.348)
Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's impressive. And, and, you know, it was his escape to from, from the kind of the, you know, the struggles at home and the struggles at school that it was, it was his escape. And that's why he loved it because it was a place for him to go and express himself. And, you know, you know, you were talking about, um, when you were talking about like growing up with Spielberg, how,

Some of his movies were scary and some of his movies were full of wonder and awe. And I feel like it's just because those are the two reasons he started making films is because he was scared to face the things that were going on around him. But he also had this imagination that would just run wild and he wanted a place to explore that too.

You know, it's just, I feel like it's for someone that like grew up watching him and sees that, um, it's really cool. And yeah, it's, it comes out when you're 24 years old and you already like are thinking on another level of how to like shoot this incredible feature TV film, like with great efficiency, um, and great quality too, really. Um,

But yeah, there's also the cars. The cars are major characters, I would say, in the movie. You have the red Plymouth. Yeah, the red Plymouth was a big deal. They did not want a red car. But as we'll see, as we work through Spielberg's career, he likes making things pop with the color red. And he was...

Dave Lester (38:29.324)
Especially the paper truck, yeah.

Eli Price (38:47.812)
He was like, nope, I'm using the red car. And they actually used something too. This wouldn't have been something you would see on camera. It would be something behind the camera. It was called the Hustus car. And it was invented by Pat Hustus just a few years earlier for the movie Bullet starring Steve McQueen. And it was basically a device.

that was mounted on the Hustas car for filming moving vehicles in close view. So basically, the biggest example in the movie that I can think of is there's the shot where it starts almost behind the tanker truck, and the camera moves past the tanker truck.

and then even past the Plymouth and kind of swings around to give the view of both of them together from the front. And the camera is pretty close to those vehicles as it's moving past. You feel like you're in a car right beside them. And that's that device. That's that Hustus car device, which is pretty cool and really allows for some really great shots, I think.

Dave Lester (40:13.892)
Yeah, I mean, this is a total visual movie, so you need something like that for sure.

Eli Price (40:18.5)
Mm -hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, the truck. I was telling my wife earlier a little bit, like sometimes I unload some of the information in my head on her. And she still loves me. And so that's a good sign that I married the right person. But.

But yeah, I was telling her, imagine like being like, I'm going to work today. Oh, what are you doing at work today? Well, I'm going to look at a bunch of trucks to decide what truck I want to be in, in my movie. Yeah, that's what, that's what Spielberg did one day in pre -production. And he, he ended up picking a 1955 Peterbilt 281, which means absolutely nothing to me other than I know what it looks like because it's in the movie.

Um, but maybe there's someone listening that knows about old, old tanker trucks and, uh, and they'll be like, Oh yeah, I know that truck. Um, but, uh, but yeah, he picked it, uh, because the cab had kind of looks like a face. Um, and yeah, it, it, it looks like a big menacing cartoon face. Um, yeah.

Dave Lester (41:32.708)
Probably.

Dave Lester (41:40.548)
Absolutely. Yeah the scene where David Mann, Dennis Weaver, stops to help the the bus that had broken down with all the kids outside, the truck comes back and is sitting at the beginning of a dark tunnel and you see the headlights turn on and it's like a monster in the dark looking at you. And there is another shot as well where I'm trying to remember where in the movie this was but Spielberg

Eli Price (41:46.212)
Mm -hmm.

Eli Price (41:50.468)
Yeah.

Eli Price (41:59.596)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Dave Lester (42:08.868)
does a zoom up of one of the truck's lights, almost like it's an eye. Like it zooms up to a really extreme close up of just the headlight of this truck. So definitely making it into a monstrous type of creature.

Eli Price (42:15.682)
Yeah.

Eli Price (42:20.236)
Mm -hmm.

Eli Price (42:26.34)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. And what's funny is in the extra features, whenever anyone, including Steven, was talking about the truck, they talked about it as like a character in the movie. Kind of like tongue in cheek, like as a joke, but also like very serious, like serious at the same time. But yeah, he.

And I even think at one point Spielberg's like, yeah, you know, they, they would go every day and give the truck its makeup while the actors were getting their makeup, add some more dust and grease and oil and crushed up bugs. And so, yeah, even, even though a tanker truck was getting its makeup done every day before shooting. And then it also has the license plates from different states.

Dave Lester (43:22.468)
I saw that, yeah.

Eli Price (43:23.172)
which he talked about. Yeah, he talked about it was kind of to give the impression that it was like a veteran of road crimes, which.

Dave Lester (43:32.58)
Whoa, like a serial killer claiming victims or something. Wow. Or trophies, trophies of the victims, yeah. Ooh, that makes it, I didn't know quite what to do with that other than like, oh, it's all these states, so it's like a universal type of monster or something, but that's very interesting to know.

Eli Price (43:35.908)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that was like the idea. Yeah. Yeah, which is.

Eli Price (43:51.62)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I think even, you know, now that you said that, I think you did say like serial killer, like sort of thing in the, um, in the extra, the extra features were fun on the DVD. Um, if you, I, another library shout out, I just checked it out at the library and, um, yeah, it's an interesting watch if you get your hands on that. But, um, but yeah, um,

The truck is awesome. Um, another fun fact about the truck, which this is kind of jumping to the end of the movie, which, um, which we will do. If this is your first time listening to, uh, do a, uh, episode where we talk about the movies, we kind of jump around. It's definitely a spoiler podcast. Um, but, uh, but yeah, when the truck, yes. Yeah. Um, yeah. Uh,

Dave Lester (44:41.218)
Let's give out mic to everyone. I mean, if you have not seen it yet, you know.

Eli Price (44:50.532)
Yeah. When the truck goes over the cliff at the end, um, he actually used like the Godzilla style, Godzilla. I don't know if it was like modeled after Godzilla or if he act, I can't remember if he actually used it. I seem to remember he actually like used sounds from Godzilla to like roaring as the truck goes over. It's kind of like this, right? Like a kind of thing. Um, and that was a, I thought that was a.

Dave Lester (45:15.426)
Yeah.

Eli Price (45:20.068)
a cool little like fun fact about the movie and the truck. And the fun fact that goes along with that is when he made Jaws, which I'm going to rewatch this in the near future. So I'm going to be listening for it. At the end of Jaws, when the shark is finally sinking, he reuses that same exact sound in that little sequence while the shark is sinking.

Dave Lester (45:36.484)
Nice.

Eli Price (45:48.868)
And he said, it's kind of like a, just a thank you to dual for getting him started in his filmmaking career, which I thought was cool. Um, but yeah, uh, as far as other production stuff goes, um, Dennis Weaver, um, which, uh, which, yeah, let's talk a little bit about, um, I'm going a little bit of out of order in my notes. Um, but I feel like it's appropriate.

Dennis Weaver, who played the main character, David Mann. He was cast. He he'd done a good bit of TV work with shows like Gunsmoke and Kugensbluff were two that I was, I recognize the names of. And but what Spielberg chose him from was he he in Hitchcock's. I mean, not Hitchcock's and Orson Welles movie, Touch of Evil.

Dennis Weaver plays this kind of like crazy hotel clerk. And that's like the role. Steven was like, I want that guy. And Universal got him to sign on. And he actually did like a lot of the driving stunt work in the movie, which is impressive. There was definitely like some stunt man work done as is necessary.

Dave Lester (46:53.142)
I'm

Dave Lester (47:04.804)
Right on.

Eli Price (47:15.268)
But yeah, he did a lot of it. And he even did the scene where the he's in the phone booth and the truck is like, come into like comes in like bust through that gas station ladies phone booth and reptiles. He actually was in the phone booth. They have like they choreographed it and timed it just right where he actually was in the phone booth and as the truck was coming and like dove out.

Dave Lester (47:28.484)
Oh, wow.

Eli Price (47:44.26)
at just the right time. Yeah. Like, I think they had, they... Go ahead.

Dave Lester (47:45.284)
Oh my fucking gosh. Wow. Well that's the uh...

I was going to say, yeah, so that's the, maybe the benefit of not having a huge star is some guys would come on set and just be like, you know what? I'm going to do all this stuff. I don't care. Like I'm going to drive the car. I'm going to, yeah, let's have this truck barrel down on me and all this dive out of the way. I mean, good for Dennis Weaver. And it's a great performance. I know you said earlier that, um, you know, there weren't any major stars attached to this. And I think Spielberg probably realized they weren't going to get a Steve McQueen.

Eli Price (48:00.068)
Yeah.

Eli Price (48:05.316)
Right.

Eli Price (48:09.892)
Yeah.

It is.

Eli Price (48:18.916)
No.

Dave Lester (48:22.102)
or a, you know, who else was big back then. You know, I mean, any of the major actors of the day, but Spielberg in his mind is like, you know what, I love Touch of Evil and this guy was incredible. Let's get him, he can do this. And so that's Dennis Weaver, that's really cool.

Eli Price (48:23.204)
Yeah.

Eli Price (48:29.38)
Mm -hmm.

Eli Price (48:35.684)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, he, I think he was like drawn to just the way that he carried emotion, like extreme and like not just emotion, but like extreme emotion, um, which like really comes out, um, and all those closeups of, of his face. Um, and, uh, yeah, he, so he did a lot of the driving. Um, they, the other, the other, so there's other.

Dave Lester (48:55.012)
Yeah.

Eli Price (49:08.548)
I didn't really like write a lot of them down there. It's mostly TV actors that are that I didn't really recognize. Like if you look at their IMDB or letterboxed profile, you'll you'll see a few movies that you'll like recognize for a few of them. But but even in those, they're just kind of like very low level roles like supporting roles.

Um, so, but the other important person is the truck driver who really all you see is like his arm and his hand and boot at one point. Um, and that, yep, yep. That was, uh, Carrie Lofton, um, who was a stunt truck driver. Um, he, uh, he had done a lot of good, like big stunt work for bullet that we mentioned. Um, and then the French connection.

Dave Lester (49:47.268)
She has some cowboy boots on.

Eli Price (50:07.14)
And also the movie Vanishing Point, or three of his big ones that he did stunt work for. And yeah, just he does some impressive stuff with that truck. It's super impressive. Because I mean, this is all just real. It's all real driving. It's all real. There's not any CGI. It's all real. And.

Dave Lester (50:35.118)
That's part of why it's so great. That's why it stands the test of time is just the look of it. Yeah.

Eli Price (50:38.372)
Yes.

Yes. Yeah. And I mean, like the guy, Woolsey Jr., the guy that told us Spielberg, like, no, you got to shoot on set. Like, I bet when he watched it, he felt so dumb. Like, like what? Because I mean, it's it. Yeah, it's incredible. Another thing they did for which will.

Dave Lester (50:54.596)
Oh yeah. It's like this totally water. Wow.

Eli Price (51:09.348)
OK, I'll save this for when we talk about the monologues. The score was done by a guy named Billy Goldenberg, who I thought I thought the score was actually like kind of sneakily pretty good in this movie. It's not like. It's not in your face like it's not playing all the time, it's it's played very like efficiently, it seems like. No.

Dave Lester (51:34.788)
Yeah, it's not one that gets stuck in your head at all. It's like you leave the, you know, you get up from watching the movie and you probably forget about it. But I think that's a good description. While it's there, it works.

Eli Price (51:47.876)
Mm -hmm. And I think you don't remember it because it's very experimental. It's a lot of weird drums and African instruments. And yeah, it's just kind of strange sound. It's almost like it's not so much music as sound that goes along with the tension of the moment. And yeah, it blends.

it blends right in with everything else, which is something Spielberg talks about as sound being a secret sauce when it comes to movies. It's like the thing where if you can get the hand of the movie to fit in the glove of the sound just right, then it takes it to the next level, which I think for like,

Just a small budget TV movie, like the sound in this is really good. Like really impressive.

Dave Lester (52:49.412)
Yes. I mean, yeah, there's so many moments that stick out of my mind, but there is one, especially where David Mann, Dennis Weaver is kind of hiding out by train tracks and he falls asleep and you hear just the roar of the train just coming right by him. I mean, you think it's the truck because you hear this horn and this rumble, but it's just the train and he's sitting there.

Eli Price (53:05.316)
Yeah.

Eli Price (53:14.628)
Yeah.

Dave Lester (53:16.324)
But then as the train goes on and he leaves, the movie goes to almost silence because the camera is like high up on a cliff or something. You see the car driving down below and just that contrast between really loud and in your face and then kind of silent. Like it's rolling you into, you know, kind of a peace and safety. But, oh, you know, you're the truck is just going to be down the road waiting for him or whatever. Really. I mean, you can.

Eli Price (53:25.38)
Yeah.

No.

Eli Price (53:32.228)
Mm -hmm.

Eli Price (53:41.764)
Yeah.

Dave Lester (53:43.748)
You see the thoughtfulness of how to really employ sound to get the overall thriller aspect of this film.

Eli Price (53:51.254)
Yeah. Yeah. And so it's funny you say that because actually it that sent the sound you hear right before the train blast by is actually the sound of the truck. So they took the sound of the truck and put it. It's like a mind trick that he pulls with the sound. And so because I did the same thing, I was like, I was like, when it when the train blares by, I was like, I could have swore that was the sound of the truck.

Dave Lester (54:08.172)
Yeah.

Eli Price (54:20.292)
But I guess my mind was playing tricks on me. And then I watched the extra features and they were like, oh yeah, we use the sound of the truck right up into the point where the train goes by to kind of play with your head, which is, yeah, which is something, which two things that I talked about in the overview that Spielberg does, one of which relates to that and one relates to what you were talking about.

Dave Lester (54:28.388)
Thank you.

Dave Lester (54:33.444)
messing with everybody's minds, including Dennis Weaver.

Eli Price (54:49.476)
So I talked about this. It was actually a StudioBinder YouTube video that I watched where the guy introduces this idea of Spielberg's point of thought instead of point of view. And that's a great example of that, where the sound you're hearing is actually not a point of view, but it's a point of thought. It's a thought in his head that this is the truck approaching. And it's putting you in the mind of the character so that in order to like,

give you his perspective, not necessarily his point of view visually, but in his mind what he's hearing, which I think is really cool. And then two, kind of something Spillwork does with sound that you mentioned. It's not just in this movie, but he does a lot of contrasting with loud and quiet, like all throughout his.

his filmmaking career, that's like kind of a sound motif that you'll see is that that contrast and it's used for narrative purposes and tension building, just like you were saying. And it's already there. Like all these things are like all these like Spielberg distinctives are like already there right here in this first movie. But yeah, he so he finishes the movie.

We'll, uh, we'll, we'll talk about the finale later, but he finishes shooting, uh, and then he only had three and a half weeks to edit. And so he actually had like five different editors editing different parts of the movie at the simultaneously. So he was kind of like, he says, like, and he talked about how in those three weeks, like he basically like didn't sleep. He was like constantly going back and forth between all the editors, like giving input, like seeing things they had put together and.

Dave Lester (56:31.584)
Wow.

Eli Price (56:45.188)
Um, yeah, just like, man, I can't imagine. Um, but it was all worth it. He, um, it came out on TV in 1971, um, on ABC and, um, uh, uh, Barry Diller, who was the, the ABC kind of head honcho that I talked, touched on earlier, he saw it and he was like, Oh, this is a real movie. Like, I guess.

Dave Lester (56:45.89)
Yeah.

Eli Price (57:13.604)
I guess it stuck out because a lot of the TV movies they were putting out for this movie of the weekend, like you kind of tell where TV movies. Um, but he saw this and he was like, Oh, we, we have a real movie on our hands. Um, and so he, the, the kind of like, um, audience reception was like really good, but not like record breaking. So it's basically like it did what.

they would want it to do. Like it did really good, but like didn't blow the views out of the water or anything. Um, which I guess makes sense. It's, it's on, it's a TV movie. Like, um,

Dave Lester (57:52.836)
Well, no one knew who Spielberg was at this point. Dennis Weaver was not a huge bar. So when you think of what's going to draw somebody to this, they probably, yeah, I mean, it makes sense. They got what they're looking for, I guess.

Eli Price (57:56.356)
Yeah, exactly.

Eli Price (58:07.46)
Oh yeah. Yeah. But what, who, the people that were blown away were the critics. Um, which makes total sense. They were, um, I wrote down like a few things that I read. They were impressed with the audacity of the concept. They were impressed with the mastery of suspense. Um, the kind of Western worthy wide shots that he pulls off, um, the experimental score, which we talked about, they, they enjoyed.

Uh, and then they even talked about the lack of an explosion at the end, the avoiding that, that cliche as something that was like really impressive. And we can probably bunny trail off and talk about that. Um, the executives, the, the universal executives, they, they saw the, the first draft of this movie and they were like, okay. Um, our only note is basically we want you to go back and reshoot.

the truck exploding and Spielberg was like, he was like, it's just another, like, I'm putting my foot down. Like, no, like I shot that for the raw, like sound that you get the quietness, the feeling of like a beast has been killed and now everything is now everything is calm and silent. And you, you know, you get that.

Dave Lester (59:10.244)
Ha ha.

Dave Lester (59:17.412)
Good for you.

Dave Lester (59:29.092)
Sorry, yeah, that's it.

Eli Price (59:36.1)
quiet effect of the oil dripping off the steering wheel like the blood of a beast, which is just an incredible visual image.

Dave Lester (59:44.74)
I love the style of the cameras kind of down maybe toward the ground at an up angle. And it's like you're looking through the gap of the truck cab and the tanker and there's that wheel that's spinning and it slowly stops spinning. But you're looking through like a gap in the cab and you see Dennis Weaver up on the cliff like really far away. It's super, super impressive. And it does give the feeling of a, like you said, a beast being slayed.

Eli Price (59:51.844)
Mhm.

Eli Price (59:56.74)
Yeah. Yeah.

Eli Price (01:00:03.268)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Eli Price (01:00:10.436)
It's.

Dave Lester (01:00:14.372)
And I think, you know, going into a theme of the movie, which we may get to later, but, you know, Spielberg has said this is about the mechanics of society, like, you know, a machine's almost overtaking human beings. And this was the early seventies and this was before James Cameron did the Terminator movies. So I think super impressive with what he was seeking to even thematically communicate with some of those shots.

Eli Price (01:00:15.204)
Mm -hmm.

Eli Price (01:00:34.052)
Mm -hmm.

Eli Price (01:00:42.5)
Oh yeah. And that the, the composite, like just like the grasp on how to frame and compose a shot like that at that age is just like incredible. Like, cause that is, um, I mean, that's like, that's the sort of shot you would expect any great filmmaker to like having their movie. It's like one of those shots where like, Oh, the latest Scorsese movie comes out and there's a shot like that. And you're like, Oh yeah.

Like this is this is the man doing his like knocking it out of the park. And it's like that level of like composition in the shot at 24. Just super impressive. Yeah. Yeah, he he definitely was 24 because his birthday was in December, so he wouldn't have been turned 25 yet. Yeah, the other the other cool thing about that truck that like.

Dave Lester (01:01:19.748)
Yeah. Only 24.

Eli Price (01:01:40.644)
Climax of the truck dying is he had like seven cameras. I want to say set up Because it was like a one take Basically like I mean you can't re wreck the truck you only get one shot So he had seven cameras capturing it which was like unheard of in TV to have seven cameras capturing one shot But when they were editing He actually only used one of the cameras

So there's that when you watch the movie, you'll you'll notice like there's it's a one shot take of it going down like it, it follows the truck going down and then it stays on it. There's like some dust that like obviously billows up a whole lot of dust and the camera stays on it and then the dust clears and you see the truck and that was just one camera that he used for that. So out of the seven cameras, he actually only used one.

Dave Lester (01:02:27.202)
whole lot of them.

Eli Price (01:02:41.08)
of the shots for that final thing. It was just like it captured it perfectly. So big props to whoever was operating that camera. I don't know if it was the DP or some just podunk camera operator, but big shout out to that guy. We may never know, because they didn't really say who it was in the extra features.

Um, yeah, the, the DP was, I had it in my notes somewhere, but, um, I don't know where it is. Um, I don't, I don't have the DP's name or I might be thinking of something else anyways. Uh, yeah, it, it's an, it really is an incredible shot. Um, that, that final climactic sequence, um, and the critics loved it.

Um, in fact, like I noted that several top publications of the time were like musing on this being whether or not this was the best TV movie of all time. Um, which I don't think I've seen that many like made for TV movies. Um, but it's probably the best of all the ones I've seen. Um, I grew up in the Disney channel, original movie era. And so that's.

Dave Lester (01:04:06.092)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:04:10.692)
Those are probably most of the TV movies I've seen are probably those. And it's definitely better than all those.

Dave Lester (01:04:15.108)
It's safe to say it would probably compete for the top slot of best TV movie prior to streaming. Now that we have streaming and stuff gets directly released. But the whole industry has really changed. But as far as, I think in the 80s and 90s, they still kind of had ABC movies of the week and stuff on Sunday nights.

Eli Price (01:04:25.572)
Sure. Yeah. It's a different game. Yeah.

Eli Price (01:04:39.394)
Yeah.

Dave Lester (01:04:40.356)
Yeah, I don't think I've seen a lot of them either because the bits and pieces of them I've seen have never been too good for me to keep watching it. But Duel is definitely something where you start and you're like, oh, man, let me keep going. Let me keep this on.

Eli Price (01:04:54.212)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And so the TV release was actually 74 minutes. And Universal was like, like I said, they were like, this is a real movie. We've got to do something with this. And so they decided that they wanted to give it a theatrical release in Europe. But at that time, apparently, if you had like, it

It was like 90 minutes or bust. So if your movie wasn't 90 minutes, then they weren't going to run it theatrically, I guess, over in Europe. So yeah, so in March of 72, they had Spielberg go shoot 15 extra minutes of footage for the movie. So they added three, they really just kind of added three sequences.

Dave Lester (01:05:31.882)
Interesting.

Eli Price (01:05:53.156)
One of which you already mentioned, which is the school bus sequence, that was added for the 90 minute version, which I didn't watch the 74 minute version. I watched the theatrical version, which is like 89 or 90 minutes. And yeah. And really like, but I was already aware of which sequences were added.

Dave Lester (01:06:12.13)
Me too. I've only ever seen that one.

Eli Price (01:06:22.596)
So I was kind of thinking about that while I was watching. I was like, does this really like the scenes that are added or just kind of like extra tension scenes? They're just another scene of tension. It was that bus scene, the scene where the truck is like pushing him towards a train that's passing in front of them. That was added for the theatrical run. And then.

There's the scene kind of, it's kind of towards the beginning where he stops, where he goes into the, um, the gas station and calls his wife, um, and has a conversation with his wife. That was the one that like Spielberg didn't really want to add. Um, but like Eckstein, the, the, the producer was kind of like pushing him to like add something like that. And so those were the three sequences that they added to get the 15 extra minutes for the theatrical run.

So I thought that was interesting, because two of the scenes are actually really good tension building scenes. And then one of them, the one that Spielberg didn't really want to do, was probably the most unnecessary one.

Dave Lester (01:07:38.212)
Well, yeah, I think that one I could see for like building Dennis Weaver's character out a little bit more, just that he and his wife had had a fight the night before and now he's taking this long sales trip. So I guess it adds, because the story itself is just so bare bones, I think that scene just adds more to the audience relating with David Mann, with Dennis Weaver's character maybe. I mean,

Eli Price (01:07:43.3)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:07:47.524)
For sure, yeah.

Eli Price (01:07:59.202)
Hmm.

Eli Price (01:08:05.572)
Yeah.

Dave Lester (01:08:07.236)
I guess maybe in Spielberg's mind, I don't know for sure. I guess I can speculate that maybe Spielberg literally just wanted a nonstop thriller. I mean, not even bothering with this kind of stuff. Like he looks at the material and he's like, none of this is necessary. I just want like car chase, truck chase, and that's it. But I, you know, my main problem, as I mentioned before, is mostly just with the interior monologue stuff. I wouldn't mind that scene at all with his wife.

Eli Price (01:08:17.444)
right.

Eli Price (01:08:27.076)
Mhm.

Eli Price (01:08:33.508)
Right.

Eli Price (01:08:37.124)
Yeah, I guess I feel similarly. It kind of adds a little bit of like relatability for sure of like, oh yeah, this guy has problems at home, you know, kind of, you know, oh yeah, everybody's had those times sort of thing. But yeah, so it got released in the UK in October of 72. That kind of kicked off its theatrical run in Europe and then ended up playing kind of all over.

Dave Lester (01:08:51.524)
Yeah, for sure.

Eli Price (01:09:06.276)
It actually won the grand prix at the first ever of Orias international film festival in France. Um, and it also won best first film at the, uh, Terra Mina film festival in Italy. Um, I'm probably pronouncing both of those wrong, but that's okay. Um, and, uh, so yeah, it won, won some European, uh, prizes at some film festivals, which is impressive.

Um, and then Spielberg actually got to go to Rome to present, uh, the movie, um, at when it was released there in Rome and it was his first time out of the country. This, uh, at this point, I guess he was probably, he would have been like 20, he was probably 26 at this point. Um, but yeah, first time out of the country, you get to go to Rome and present your feature film, you know, at a premiere or whatever, just like.

It's gotta be, I just can't imagine like I'm 32 and I just feel like if that happened to me now, I would be like just swimming. I wouldn't know what to do, just be surreal. And I'm sure it was. And then on top of that, one morning when he was in Rome,

Dave Lester (01:10:23.106)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:10:29.796)
Um, he was dragged out of bed and someone, you know, came in, came and got him and woke him up and was like, Hey, there's, there's someone that wants to see you. And it's Frederico Fellini who wants to congratulate him on the film. Um, and, uh, just like, you know, the Italian filmmaker, Frederico Fellini. Um,

Dave Lester (01:10:40.484)
Oh my lord.

this.

Dave Lester (01:10:51.556)
Yeah, and he came, he wanted to congratulate the guy who made Duel, which, you know, Duel is a really fun movie, don't get me wrong, but, you know, Fellini's making stuff like Eight and a Half or what is, well, Dulce Vita, that's one of Roger Ebert's favorite films, I think, when he was here with us. That's great. I mean, I think Fellini.

Eli Price (01:10:58.306)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:11:06.692)
Exactly.

Eli Price (01:11:15.394)
Yeah.

Dave Lester (01:11:17.036)
you know, recognizing talent or young filmmakers or encouraging young filmmakers. That's, I think that's a cool aspect of them.

Eli Price (01:11:19.78)
Mm -mm.

Eli Price (01:11:24.772)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And it's just like really cool. Like, I mean, you've it's got to be so surreal, surreal to like get woken up and be like, who, wait, who's here to see me? Fellini? No, whatever. And going downstairs and it's like, oh, it's fresh. We go Fellini. I'm just some kid. Yeah. Yeah. Is this am I in eight and a half in a dream sequence? What's going on? But yeah, he yeah, he it's got to be crazy.

Dave Lester (01:11:34.788)
Thank you.

Dave Lester (01:11:39.812)
Am I still dreaming? What's happening?

Eli Price (01:11:55.332)
But yeah, one crazy, another crazy thing that happened in Rome was he was doing like a press conference with journalists and stuff. And they were basically like trying to read this kind of socio -political interpretation into the film. And Spielberg was like adamant that they were wrong, that that was not what the film was about. And they got mad and left.

Dave Lester (01:12:19.332)
Ha ha ha.

Eli Price (01:12:24.676)
They just like caught up with me.

Dave Lester (01:12:24.772)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Eli Price (01:12:28.26)
And it's, I thought that was hilarious. He, I think it was, yeah, I think it was like they were reading this like class war, American class warfare into it. And Spielberg, Spielberg was like, I learned that not everyone sees the same movie in the same way. And then to.

And I remember in the extra features, he talked about how it kind of haunted him because he went on to make the Sugarland Express, which is another kind of like road movie with some down on their luck people and, um, and goes to Europe and they're doing the same thing. They're like reading the same like class warfare thing into it. And he's like, no, that's not, that's not what I'm making movies about. Um, so yeah, I just thought that was really funny. Um,

Um, one, one more fun fact before we move into some, some key points, um, that I thought people might think is interesting is, um, that there were in 1978, they reused some shots from dual and the incredible, the show, the incredible Hulk. And yeah, in 1978. So this is, I mean, Jaws is out, close encounters is out. Um,

So I mean, Spielberg's like the guy now. And they're like, yeah, we're going to use shots of duel in Incredible Hulk. And I think, I want to say, like, he tried, him and his people tried to, like, put it into it, but they couldn't because it was in his universal contract that they could do whatever they want with it.

Dave Lester (01:14:18.98)
That's a so cheap man, like.

Eli Price (01:14:22.468)
Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, that's a fun fact. So maybe you can, if you're a fan of the Incredible Hulk, maybe you can go find that 1978 episode with shots of Duel in it. I didn't have time to do that. But if you're out there listening and you find it, establishingshotpod .gmail .com, email me the link and I'll go check it out.

Dave Lester (01:14:24.3)
I'm out.

Dave Lester (01:14:38.532)
Yeah. Yeah. And I don't.

Dave Lester (01:14:50.976)
There you go. I never I never saw that show but it is I guess kind of famous I hear about it all the time Yeah, I guess the whole versus a big taker truck there you go

Eli Price (01:14:57.796)
Sure, yeah.

Eli Price (01:15:03.556)
Yeah, I don't know. I was trying to imagine like what shots do they use? Is it just like a chase sequence they like kind of cut in or I was just like, I don't know. Yeah.

Dave Lester (01:15:12.258)
weird man.

Eli Price (01:15:18.212)
But yeah, man, this launched his career, which is really impressive. Let's jump into just some key points and just Spielberg's techniques and themes. What were the main things that stood out to you watching this, of the camera work and what Spielberg was doing?

filmmaking wise that you that you notice like, oh, this is very spillbergy the way this is shot.

Dave Lester (01:15:54.468)
Oh.

Dave Lester (01:15:57.86)
Yeah, I think Well, I think he loved John Ford and it's impossible to get away from the Western motif of this movie even in the title duel And I think there's I think there's maybe off the top of my head. I mean I Just I just rewatched the film actually today There's two different

Eli Price (01:16:04.74)
Mm -hmm.

Eli Price (01:16:10.468)
Yeah.

Dave Lester (01:16:23.652)
shots that, well, maybe three that kind of conjure that Western type of genre for me. And a couple of them are at the very end. One of them is, sorry, this is another impressive shot where I think it might be right after the train track episode that happens in the movie. And David Mann is driving and he sees the truck.

Eli Price (01:16:32.58)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:16:48.1)
Mm.

Dave Lester (01:16:52.074)
He is pulling his car up to a stop and the camera again is at this You know upward angle. It's down low below almost the the hood of the car and you see David man like staring down the tanker truck and It is one of those western motifs of like the good guy is Surveying the bad guy surveying the scene and okay. We're gonna have a showdown soon

Eli Price (01:17:13.828)
Yeah.

Dave Lester (01:17:19.908)
He's realizing he is not going to escape this truck unless he takes it directly on. And then the other shot, I think, is literally toward the end once he gets up at, I think it's Mystery Mesa off the Vasquez Highway Road you were talking about earlier. And he's waiting for the truck to come through this little farm gate to get out toward where the cliff is. And there's a shot and it's editing as well.

Eli Price (01:17:20.772)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:17:27.778)
Mm -hmm.

Eli Price (01:17:38.052)
Yeah, yeah.

Dave Lester (01:17:49.732)
where you have like three quick cuts as it zooms quickly up to David Mann's face, Dennis Weaver's face. And that's, I another kind of Western motif where the zoom up comes close on his face as they're staring down. They're about to have this duel at the end. The truck is coming up, coming headlong to the Plymouth. They're having that big showdown and you know, we're reaching like the climax of the movie. So that's another Western.

Eli Price (01:17:57.732)
Yeah.

Dave Lester (01:18:19.33)
Motif and then also after the truck has cascaded over the cliff and victory has been secured by our protagonist There's a sunset over a western looking this where mystery Mesa office highway road where they filmed it so all of that Probably, you know, I don't know if I know enough about John Ford's career and stuff like that, but John Ford was so huge

Eli Price (01:18:29.38)
Mm -hmm.

Yes.

Dave Lester (01:18:46.742)
instead of a history just like Spielberg making westerns that I'm sure a lot of that is homage to stuff that John Ford was doing with his actors or sometimes mostly with John Wayne. So Spielberg was into that. Sure.

Eli Price (01:18:51.044)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:18:54.916)
Oh yeah.

Eli Price (01:18:58.82)
Yep. Yeah. Yeah. And I know John Ford was a huge influence on Spielberg for sure. Um, and, uh, yeah, that I love that, um, sunset shot. And am I, am I remembering cause it's been a couple of weeks actually since, since I watched it. Am I remembering correctly that, um, they have, uh, Dennis Weaver like silhouetted in the sunset or am I imagining that?

Dave Lester (01:19:25.348)
Yeah, I think, yeah, I think it's, if I remember right, gosh, I just watched it today. I think he is, yeah, silhouetted or it's heavily shadowed. The high contrast lighting that Spielberg often does there. And there's another, you know, it's very red with the sunset. And later on in Spielberg's career, when he does War Horse, which...

Eli Price (01:19:37.442)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:19:45.092)
Yeah.

Dave Lester (01:19:50.628)
I think people are kind of mixed as to whether they like that movie or not. But at the very, at the very end, I remember seeing an interview with Steven Spielberg where he said, I did this ending scene in War Horse to basically pay homage to John Ford. And it's a very red scene where the horse is coming back to the stable or the farm, I think, where, um, where he at once found his home. And so it's kind of like that Western homecoming. So these motifs are all throughout.

Eli Price (01:20:15.556)
Yeah.

Dave Lester (01:20:19.684)
Spielberg's movies.

Eli Price (01:20:21.956)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, I love that shot. It it it reminds you of like the iconic Indiana Jones shot when they're digging and Raiders love. That's one of my favorite like Indiana Jones shots. And so, yeah, it reminded me of that a bit. I guess just the landscape and the sunset and the and all that. But yeah.

Dave Lester (01:20:37.346)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:20:51.876)
It's I like that you mentioned that because that wasn't something that I had noted. Um, I didn't, I didn't really like think a whole lot about the Western aspect, but that's definitely, um, a huge influence here. Um, the other big one I think is Hitchcock. Um, and, um, it's almost like John Ford meets hits. This movie is John Ford meets Hitchcock. Um, it's, it's a Western, um, with.

Dave Lester (01:21:16.26)
There you go.

Eli Price (01:21:21.604)
with the dual aspect, but then you have the Hitchcock aspect of the way that tension is built and the mystery of the truck driver. You never see the truck driver, only giving as much information as that's needed at that time, keeping as much from the viewer as possible.

until the very last second. It's just like all of those are like very Hitchcock things that the kind of like holding the bomb under the table idea that Hitchcock talks about. And yeah, it's impressive. The scene that like I think about is actually a scene out of the car when he's in the little cafe and he's sitting there like looking at all the people like that is such an intense.

sequence. And I would say like Spielberg might, it might just be like, it's kind of just a nitpick because I do love the sequence, but he might, there's that sequence and maybe one or two car chases that he might drag a little bit too far, drag on the tension a little too far where you kind of like lose the momentum. And I think that might be just an aspect of an early career like.

Not knowing exactly when is the point to like break the tension. Um, that's one thing that I noted, like thinking about it kind of critically. Um, but yeah, it, it, it really is like it's John Ford meets Hitchcock in a, in a movie. Um, yeah. And I think, um, I think Spielberg even mentioned, uh, thinking about Hitchcock's the birds and psycho when he was making this, which.

Dave Lester (01:23:03.684)
There you go.

Eli Price (01:23:17.828)
You can totally see, except for the really bad bird effects. There's another that here. I don't know when the last time you watched the birds is, but I actually watched it a few months ago. And any time there was a bunch of birds flying around, it made me laugh. And I was like, I'm not supposed to be laughing at this, but the bird effects.

Dave Lester (01:23:19.116)
Yes.

Dave Lester (01:23:26.916)
Right.

Dave Lester (01:23:43.108)
supposed to be terrified. Oh, it's been checking.

Eli Price (01:23:45.366)
Yeah, the bird effects were comical to me. Yeah. Yeah, it's a good movie, but the special effects have not aged well. Yeah. I wrote down some like intriguing images that kind of like are I guess you could say foreshadowing of.

Dave Lester (01:23:47.94)
It's been decades since I've seen that Hitchcock movie. I should revisit it.

Eli Price (01:24:12.708)
the sorts of images that Spielberg creates. You mentioned one earlier with that composition of the shot, with the wheels turning and man in the background, really good. I think you even mentioned some of the low angle stuff that he did. He does a lot of low angle shots, which are... Oh, I feel like... Yeah.

Dave Lester (01:24:30.468)
Yes.

Dave Lester (01:24:36.164)
to communicate something so big coming at you, like something, yeah.

Eli Price (01:24:41.22)
Mm hmm. It, it may, it amplifies, I guess, the, the stakes, um, the, those low angle shots and even like, he even used low angle shots of, um, with close mixed with closeups. There's the shots that are almost like from the steering wheel, uh, kind of like looking up at man's face, um, which there, there was one time where it was like sitting on him and I'm like, man, I'm, I'm glad the makeup people like cleaned out his nose cause.

You're like basically like looking up his nostrils. But yeah, he does those. The close ups are a big thing. That dude knows how to like build character with a close up. And I even like I talked about he does that really well, even in some of his TV stuff. His episode of Colombo.

Um, has some of that, even if you go all the way back to his very first work, which it was on night gallery, um, and the pilot episode, um, he did one of the segments and it's called eyes and there's like these closeups of, um, Joan Crawford that are like really good, like really well done closeups. Um, and, uh, yeah, those are, those are definitely in here.

all throughout. Yeah, you have.

Eli Price (01:26:19.812)
One of the things that I thought was kind of just funny, like a funny fun fact was Spielberg himself actually operated the camera in the backseat of the car. So you have those shots, you know, looking up through. And when they went to start doing the theatrical run, they were, you know, they were obviously adding the extra sequences and, you know, kind of re -looking at the film.

Dave Lester (01:26:34.754)
Thanks for your time.

Eli Price (01:26:48.932)
And because they were going to be projecting this in wider aspect ratios, there was actually a couple of shots where Spielberg, you could see him a little bit in the back seat from one of the angles outside the driver window. And so they had to take those segments and blow up the film so that it could fit the format and cut Spielberg out of the shot.

Dave Lester (01:27:05.828)
level.

Dave Lester (01:27:17.38)
I'm going to go ahead and close the video.

Eli Price (01:27:18.948)
But there is still one spot in the movie where you can see Spielberg and it's in the reflection of the phone booth. So Spielberg is standing outside of this phone booth, kind of giving man notes as he's like on the phone in the phone booth. And you can like, if you look closely, I didn't notice it while I was watching, but I saw it in like the special features. They kind of showed it and talked about it.

Dave Lester (01:27:47.428)
I didn't notice it either.

Eli Price (01:27:48.292)
Um, you can, you can faintly see like his reflection, um, of him like standing there, like giving man, uh, Dennis Weaver notes, um, which I thought was great.

And then we already kind of talked about sound. The sound in this is phenomenal. That climactic sequence, the sound is just vital and important. And then I wanted to talk a little bit about character motifs. I don't know if you've looked in my notes.

But was there anything, so I think there was a couple of things that I noticed as far as like character motifs that you see here that kind of follow him through a lot of his films. And I was wondering if you, you might have seen something different than me, so I was wondering what kind of motifs you saw as far as like character and even maybe storytelling.

Um, that, that felt like very close to Spielberg.

Dave Lester (01:29:03.012)
Cool, yeah.

Dave Lester (01:29:09.124)
Yeah, I think the character's name is David Mann, and Mann kind of versus a machine, even though this is definitely not a science fiction type of movie at all. I think the theme of a man versus a bigger machine of some sort is in other Spielberg films as well. Even if you want to go like super...

Eli Price (01:29:15.076)
Mm -hmm.

Dave Lester (01:29:36.608)
metaphor to Schindler's List, you know, one guy versus a a cruel sadistic machine of Nazi Germany and what Nazi Germany was doing. So I think Spielberg's always had the hero that's trying to be righteous and make righteous decisions under extraordinary circumstances. You kind of have that here in your notes. That's a common theme.

Eli Price (01:29:58.948)
Yeah.

Dave Lester (01:30:03.044)
I mean, maybe going outside of common theme a little bit and circling back around to that opening shot, which Spielberg apparently put it in the movie and it was his idea kind of as the credits are going. And some people may be like, you know, why is that in there? Because it's essentially a camera attached to the front of Dennis Weaver's car. And we don't even see the car. We just see what the driver sees as he.

Eli Price (01:30:11.844)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:30:15.94)
Yeah.

Dave Lester (01:30:28.772)
You know, it's dark. We hear the car start, the car comes out of the garage and then it's in this suburban type of neighborhood. And then eventually driving through downtown Los Angeles and then out into the Mojave desert. And I got to thinking, you know, why would, why would Spielberg put a shot like this in here? And it's totally obviously just setting the scene. This is going to be a car chase movie. This is a car movie. Um, but.

Eli Price (01:30:37.54)
Mm -hmm.

Eli Price (01:30:58.594)
Mm -hmm.

Dave Lester (01:30:58.756)
I started thinking about it as I do sometimes, because I just kind of nerd out. I started thinking about this in a deeper kind of way. And I don't know if all of this was on Spielberg's mind, but I have to think that maybe some of it was. And it's kind of the idea of what this open road represents to Americans, right? So the camera's on the front of the car. You see this open road.

David Mann is driving to a sales meeting or whatever he's going to. And the sense of freedom that gets invoked in our minds when we talk about an open road type of scenario, right? Like we had the GI Bill in the 1940s, the suburbs are expanding. Eisenhower comes into the office and I think it was like 1956, he does the Interstate Highway Act where now there's freeways and highways going everywhere. So we all can travel better. We can have our goods.

Eli Price (01:31:37.634)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:31:50.434)
Yeah.

Dave Lester (01:31:53.636)
more efficiently delivered. And, you know, Jack Kerouac is writing On the Road, the great all -time American classic book. And so people just think of this, this is good. This is freedom. We can go and drive and do whatever we want. And it's just this wonderful thing. And it is those things. But Spielberg is here to remind us there's also a dark side to this and there's potentially.

Eli Price (01:32:07.778)
Yeah.

Dave Lester (01:32:19.854)
you know, terror out there. There's potentially evil out there as well. And I think that's what really can get under someone's skin watching this movie. Cause now several decades removed, we've all heard of the nasty road rage incidents. We've all heard of evil with, with good things often comes a dark underside. And that's where Spielberg is playing on those motifs and, and going back to Hitchcock, that's where he's getting that inspiration.

Eli Price (01:32:36.58)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:32:47.204)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:32:51.14)
Yeah, for sure. And it also reminds me too of, you know, just hearing about how he read the script and it brought memories of like being bullied and how like, yeah, the open road represents freedom, but also like not everyone, it doesn't represent the same kind of freedom for everyone for him as a Jewish boy growing up in like,

post -World War II America, like, yes, he had a nice suburban home and a nice suburban neighborhood, but he was the only person like himself in a lot of these suburban neighborhoods that he lived in. And the freedom that most people were enjoying in the suburbs was not afforded to him because...

people saw him as other, as different. And I can't help but think that maybe that's part of what is kind of ingrained in what you're talking about. The open road also, that freedom that this expanding America is supposed to represent is also like, it's maybe not for everyone. And I think even today, you know,

In our modern times, we're, we're coming to terms with how like freedoms and privileges that a lot of us, you know, you and I are, are both, um, you know, white American males, like privileges that we've enjoyed, aren't necessarily enjoyed by everyone in America, even today. Um, and, um, and, you know, that's something you have to reckon with. And that's, that's something that was very real for, you know, for this.

Jewish kid in post -World War II America. And so, yeah, that stuff is all under the surface for sure. I mean, who knows? We might go to a press conference in Europe and express those ideas. And Spielberg might tell us, like, no, it's just a Car chase movie. But you can't help but think about that stuff when you're watching a movie like this, especially in hindsight.

Dave Lester (01:35:07.436)
I'm sorry.

Dave Lester (01:35:13.668)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:35:15.684)
thinking about one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. But yeah, and.

Dave Lester (01:35:20.132)
Yeah, I think he has come out and has said, yeah, it's a man against machine. I think he has allowed at least that aspect of it. But I don't, you know, there's a lot of filmmakers who are very, they don't want to make a big pretentiousness out of it, I guess. I think of Peter Weir with the Truman Show, and I do think there's a lot of deeper things going on with the Truman Show, but I think Peter Weir was on record of saying, hey, it's about a guy trapped in a TV show. That's it.

Eli Price (01:35:28.332)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:35:37.54)
Yeah. Yeah.

Eli Price (01:35:45.412)
Sure.

Eli Price (01:35:49.38)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and Spielberg is very like, I kind of talked about it in the overview. He's like very much like against being pretentious about your films, um, which I appreciate. Uh, and so, you know, but then there's also the aspect of like, well, when you make, when you make art and you put it out in the world, like people, it's kind of out of your hands at that point. So it's left to.

guys like you and me sitting on a podcast musing about it to decide what it's about, I guess. But yeah. Yeah. And you kind of mentioned it, and we've hit on it. But just like that motif of ordinary sort of man, which I think that opening sequence also puts us in the mindset of, like, oh, this is just a guy that lives in a house in the suburbs.

And like the phone call, oh, like you see his wife and kids, it's just a normal guy on the road. It's an ordinary man that's put in an extraordinary circumstance. And what is he going to do with, what is he going to do as an ordinary man once he's put in this situation? And that's, that's just like, if you, if you want to put his, his, the

career in a thematic nutshell, that's pretty much it. Like ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Like that's what Spielberg makes. And you got to love it, you know? But you, yeah. And the other thing I had noted was just like, he did add those kind of key, some key details to the character. And it provokes both like,

Dave Lester (01:37:28.9)
I do. I have a whole lot.

Eli Price (01:37:43.94)
professional and familial, familial insecurities, which are definitely like things that Spielberg deals a lot with in his films in the future, just kind of those families that are fractured in some way. And then, you know, just kind of like the insecurities that you deal with and in your press professional and personal life are definitely like kind of under the surface in this.

Um, for sure. But yeah, that's, that's pretty much dual. I didn't mention, um, one, let's, let's touch briefly on the monologues because you mentioned that was your big critique. Um, I thought, um, personally, some of them were fine. And then some of them were just like, man, this is, it's too on the nose. It's dragging on for too long. Um, but yeah, what were your thoughts on them?

Dave Lester (01:38:44.222)
I guess I don't have it in in my mind if there was

Well, yeah, let's back up. I just wonder if any of them were necessary. And I wonder if, you know, Spielberg being a first -time filmmaker, with monologues, there's always the question of, do you have to have a monologue, or is it something you can show with the camera? And I'm wondering how much of the lines in the monologue could have actually just been shown with the camera, and or how you edit the movie. I think that's my...

Eli Price (01:38:57.86)
Sure.

Eli Price (01:39:21.316)
Mm -hmm.

Dave Lester (01:39:22.66)
That was my critique of it. Yeah, I think you're right. Some of the stuff, especially the diner is on the nose. You can show Dennis Weaver sweating and like looking at people and cut it like really quickly to kind of give that anxiety type of feeling, you know, I just, um, yes, a lot of it is.

Eli Price (01:39:29.892)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Eli Price (01:39:40.132)
Yeah, it's kind of redundant in that cafe sequence because it is, like you said, you can show some of that stuff visually. And actually, if you turn off the sound, he is showing it visually. And then you're getting it in the inner monologue at the same time. And it's kind of redundant. And it's just one of those things like.

Dave Lester (01:39:57.06)
Yes.

Eli Price (01:40:09.732)
It might be, it might just be like, it's his first TV movie. There's only so much that he can get away with. Um, and you know, he, you kind of have to like satisfy someone at some point, um, which, you know, he's not Steven Spielberg yet. He's just some kid.

Dave Lester (01:40:24.1)
Yeah. Well, you said he wanted, yeah, you said he wanted to cut the monologues. So I think he wanted maybe to show, he's like, Oh, I can just show this stuff with the camera. This is ridiculous. But Matheson had wrote the script and the executives were like, Nope, you got to have that in there. So must've been one of the arguments he lost.

Eli Price (01:40:32.546)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:40:37.7)
Right.

Eli Price (01:40:43.748)
Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that's, um, that's really all I had. I mentioned another critique was, you know, some of the tension building goes on a little bit too long, but really those are the only critiques I had and just kind of like, they're just kind of like nitpicks, I guess. And, um, it's a really enjoyable movie. Um, yeah. Uh, I'll touch very briefly on his other two TV movies. Um,

Dave Lester (01:41:07.716)
I agree.

Dave Lester (01:41:15.172)
Okay, I've not seen either one.

Eli Price (01:41:16.74)
So yeah, yeah, so something, so Duel came out in 71 and then the next year it was kind of like in the contemporary horror movie craze of the early 70s. You had Rosemary's Baby come out and then The Exorcist kind of like put a stamp on horror movies are the way to go if you want to do well commercially. And.

Yeah. He, he made something evil. Um, it was something that, uh, he wasn't like super interested in. Um, but they did, they pulled them in for it. Um, and yeah, he, he, you kind of get a few, uh, Spielberg distinctives with like, you know, just his unusual kind of shots for TV, like the handheld stuff, the low angle stuff.

the wide shots that he captures of this kind of like house in the middle of nowhere. And, and then like some recurring motif themes like preadolescent rebellion and absent father, a loving mother, you know, all those kind of like Spielberg motifs are in there. And really like it's, it's not that great of a movie.

It wasn't very successful. Spielberg even came out later and said in his career and said that he didn't care much for himself. Um, but this was just another example of he, he loved, uh, the critics loved his technique. Um, and, um, yeah, you can go watch it on YouTube. Um, something evil and Savage are both on YouTube and you can just, you can just pull them up and watch them. They're not like.

super high quality, but they are there. That's how I watched it.

Eli Price (01:43:20.868)
Um, give me a second. My son is at his door and I think my wife already went to sleep. Let me go.

Dave Lester (01:43:26.434)
I hear some singing.

Eli Price (01:43:33.892)
I'll be right back.

Dave Lester (01:43:34.948)
Okay, no worries.

Eli Price (01:45:42.788)
Sorry about that.

Dave Lester (01:45:43.82)
No worries.

Eli Price (01:45:45.828)
Yeah, I heard, I started hearing, uh, mommy, mommy. And I was like, Oh no, she's already in bed. Um, yeah, he, he was like, I didn't get a bedtime story. And I was like, buddy, you did. We, we read your story and your Bible story on the couch three hours ago. And he said, Oh.

Dave Lester (01:45:55.46)
Let's lay it out there.

Eli Price (01:46:13.196)
Oh man. Yeah. OK, I'm trying to jump back in. I guess I can just jump in with Savage. Yeah.

Dave Lester (01:46:14.464)
Rock it.

Dave Lester (01:46:24.068)
I think you were saying the savage, right? Yeah.

Eli Price (01:46:31.94)
Yeah, with his second one, well, actually a third TV movie was Savage after dual and something evil and in 73, he put out Savage. This was like this was like his last straw guest movie TV movie. It's the guys that made Colombo wrote this.

And Sid Sheinberg, who was the guy that hired him originally, um, was kind of like the guy behind it along with Lincoln Levison, the script writers and the guys that wrote the script, um, who, I guess they really liked Spielberg because he did so well with that Colombo episode. They really wanted him to direct this and Sheinberg kind of saw it as like, Oh, this is a potential pilot for a great new show.

Um, and so they pulled Spielberg in and Spielberg was like, I'm not doing another TV movie. I'm done with all this. Um, at this point, dual was like, had started its, um, it's run in Europe. It was really successful. He was like, I'm on, I'm on my way out of here. And Schomburg basically was like, I'm going to suspend you if you don't do this movie. And, um, and so Spielberg was like, fine. And he made it.

Um, it's, it's fine. It's, um, it has, uh, Martin Landau was the, is the main guy in it. And, um, he made appearances in movies, like, uh, probably the biggest one would be like North by Northwest. Um, he was in, and then he was one of the agents in the mission impossible show. And so he's a pretty well known guy. Um, but yeah, Spielberg, I will say this about it. Spielberg really like.

had fun with the camera. He did a lot of like, it's set like on a TV set. So this guy Savage is, he basically has like a TV show, a journalistic TV show. And so he like is chasing stories and whatnot. And, and yeah, it's, it's interesting. He, he does like the intro is like on this TV set. And so it's like,

Eli Price (01:48:58.66)
going through the set and it's like going through cables and like you see like all the monitors and people moving around and rushing to get everything ready. And it's kind of like it's almost like this behind the scenes of a TV set shot. And it's actually like I think I wrote my notes like he's doing a little too much because there's like there's a ton of cuts and it's just like it's like a whirlwind of like.

Dave Lester (01:49:19.552)
Thank you.

Eli Price (01:49:26.308)
all of the possible camera movements and stuff he could possibly fit in this one little intro sequence. But I want to, with the context of him like knowing that this is probably the last TV movie he's going to make, I think he was just like, I'm going to do as many like shots that I think are interesting and that I want to do as possible. But yeah, it, yeah. And you know, he,

Dave Lester (01:49:30.34)
Oh god.

Dave Lester (01:49:50.18)
Just experiment, man. Get it out of the way. Yeah.

Eli Price (01:49:56.036)
He does some of the big Spielberg distinctives that he's really at this point, he's like is actually really doing well with is one thing called rack focus, which is basically like playing with background and foreground. So he has these like shots that are composed with all the characters in the field of view. And he'll change the focus from the person in the foreground.

to the background and vice versa and stuff, which is something that you kind of see throughout his career that he does really well. And then in the climax of it, there's a killer and the person he's trying to kill kind of silhouetted against in this dark TV set room. It feels very much like Hitchcock.

You can see both of them. It's a wide shot, silhouetted, and it's a pretty good climactic shot. But again, wasn't received well, critically, as a show or a TV movie. But again, they were like, this Spielberg guy, he's got something with his camera work. And he was actually in Europe at the time that it was released for the dual premiere.

Dave Lester (01:51:20.984)
These avid dogs, man. I'm going to my first feature, my real one.

Eli Price (01:51:22.628)
So he's gone.

Eli Price (01:51:29.028)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, just just kind of wrapping all of it up. I wrote down this quote that Spielberg had said, and he said it was around this time, I guess, like thinking back on this this point of his career. And he just said, I take all my movies seriously. And he goes on and talks like fleshes that out. And he's kind of making the point that.

If you can't make like popcorn, he, he calls them popcorn movies. Um, so he, he does know the sorts of movies he's making. He's not like unaware of that. And he says, you can't make good popcorn movies unless you believe the stories you're telling. And I just love that because it's so vital for the rest of his career, the success of his career. He, he believes the stories he's telling and it comes across.

It's that genuineness that I talked about in the overview episode that comes bursting through the screen. He believes these stories. And it's genuineness in the visuals and the motion. And yeah, it's just what makes Spielberg Spielberg. I believe these stories. And you got to love it. But yeah, did you have any final thoughts?

Dave Lester (01:52:58.02)
I like the movie. I think it is, I mean, if that is a first film of a 24 year old, I think it is absolutely super impressive. And it still holds up today because they didn't use special effects or studio lots. They actually filmed it out on these highways or most of it out there. So yeah, I mean, you see that if you're a studio exec or anything back in that time, I think you know that you have serious talent.

Eli Price (01:53:09.924)
Yeah.

Dave Lester (01:53:27.3)
You know, and it's only, you know, he's only a couple of movies away from making Jaws. And this was maybe kind of a precursor to Jaws in some ways, because it's another cat and mouse type of thriller. So he's, he's cutting his teeth here. And while he's cutting his teeth, he's making a pretty darn good movie. And yeah, I think you just, for any Spielberg fan, or really any fan of movies just watching this, I think you.

Eli Price (01:53:27.78)
Oh yeah.

Eli Price (01:53:33.506)
Mm -hmm.

Eli Price (01:53:46.372)
Mm -hmm.

Dave Lester (01:53:53.112)
I think you just enjoy this. It's a good thriller. It's it's right about the right length. It's not too long It just keeps you going this is there And yeah a lot of fun

Eli Price (01:53:59.684)
Mm -hmm.

Eli Price (01:54:05.252)
Yeah, yeah, I agree. It's a great tension. It's a lot of fun. It's interesting. I don't think I've seen any other movie like it as far as like the concept. And so, yeah, I really enjoyed it. It's like a, it does have its, it's like.

early career, director career flaws that we kind of touched on. Um, but yeah, it's, I'm still very much positive on it. I think I gave it, um, uh, like three and a half stars on letterboxed, um, which yeah, cool. Um, and, uh, it's, it's a little too early for me to say like where it falls with Spielberg for me. Cause I do have a good bit of blind spots. Um,

Dave Lester (01:54:44.772)
Same, same for me.

Eli Price (01:54:59.364)
But I would imagine it'll probably still be towards the lower end, just because he has so many great movies. But yeah. Yeah.

Dave Lester (01:55:10.996)
Exactly. Yeah, saying it is in the lower end does not by any means say that this is a bad movie. It's a good movie. But yeah, I think it's, I've seen every single one of Spielberg's movies except for some of the TV stuff and The Evil and Savage. But this is, yeah, it's below average for him. But, you know, for me, like,

Eli Price (01:55:16.344)
For Spielberg, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Eli Price (01:55:26.788)
Those two TP ones, yeah.

Yeah.

Eli Price (01:55:36.61)
Yeah.

Dave Lester (01:55:38.532)
The amount of five star movies that Spielberg has made takes up a little bit of his filmography, honestly. So, yeah.

Eli Price (01:55:46.084)
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Well, that's, that's it for, for dual and, and Spielberg's TV career. Um, we're actually, um, I don't, I don't think I told Dave this, but the way I'm, I have things worked out scheduling wise, um, I'm, we're actually about to do a car, a quick car chase draft of car chases in movies. Um, that's actually going to be already released. Um,

while you're listening to this. I'm going to release the draft before we do the talk on the dual. So I hope that turns out good. If you're listening, you already know. We're kind of pulling a Christopher Nolan and going out of time sequence with the release schedule. But yeah, and the reason for that is because next week,

It just falls perfectly for me to do kind of a Oscars preview slash an excuse for me to finally like talk about my favorite movies of last year. So that's what I'm going to do next week. Kind of like an Oscars preview slash best of twenty twenty three show. And so I'm looking forward to putting that together and.

I hope it turns out well. But yeah, so I'll be looking forward to that next week. And then obviously we'll be covering the Sugarland Express after that, his first theatrical released movie. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I'm going to be watching that very, very soon. And I'm excited to see that one. So yeah, that's pretty much it for Duel.

David, did you wanna share real quick where people can kind of follow you and your work? Yeah.

Dave Lester (01:57:51.012)
Yeah, absolutely. So you can find me on what is formerly known as Twitter X. I am at the AJ Lester. I'm also on blue sky. If any of you are on there and you can listen to my two podcasts. I mentioned one at the top of this show. Does the Bible say that where I go through books in the Bible verse by verse. And then I have another podcast veterans of culture wars with my cohost Zach Malm, if you want to check me on Spotify, Apple for both of those or some other places as well.

Eli Price (01:58:01.828)
Okay.

Eli Price (01:58:20.356)
Yeah. Yeah. And I'll definitely link those in the episode description so you can find that there, click the links. But yeah, that's going to do it for the dual episode. And I just a quick reminder to go rate and review the show. If you haven't done that helps with the visibility and you can find everything you need to know about the show at establishing shot pod .com.

Uh, but yeah, that's it. Uh, had a great time talking dual. Um, and yeah, I've been Eli price and for Dave lesser, you've been listening to the establishing shot. See you next time.