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It did indeed. The boy who was last to be chosen for any pickup baseball team, who was labeled "the retard" by the boys in his phys.-ed. class, who was sickened by having to dissect a frog in junior high and ran outside to vomit with the others—"and the others were all girls"— found he could win friends and influence people with his movies. He enrolled in a Boy Scout photography program, where his success made him at 13 one of the youngest Eagle Scouts ever. ("If I hadn't been a Scout," Spielberg cheerfully admits today, "I'd probably have ended up as an ax murderer or a butcher in a Jewish deli.") One high school jock who used to taunt Steven was won over when the young director cast him in an 8-mm movie called Battle Squad. At Phoenix's Arcadia High School, Spielberg found fellow spirits in the theater-arts program—"my leper colony. That's when I realized there were options besides being a jock or a wimp."
After a couple of years at California State University at Long Beach, he slick-talked his way into an interview with Sid Sheinberg, then president of Universal television, and on the strength of his short film Amblin', became the youngest director ever signed to a long-term Hollywood studio contract. At 21, he was putting Joan Crawford through the paces of a Night Gallery tale. He directed eleven episodes of various Universal series: a The Name of the Game here, a Columbo or The Psychiatrist there, displaying his tyro talent, learning the business. "TV taught me to think on my feet," he says. "You have six days to shoot 50 pages of script. TV is a well-oiled machine. Either you roll with it or it rolls over you." He rolled, all right: within three years he had directed his first TV movie, Duel, about an evil driverless truck bent on crushing a mild motorist on the endless blacktop of the Southwest. Shot in twelve days for $300,000, Duel went on to earn Universal $9 million when it was released to theaters in Europe.
Now the big leagues were calling. After his debut feature film The Sugarland Express, an eccentric car-chase comedy starring Goldie Hawn, Spielberg found himself off the coast of Martha's Vineyard directing a huge cast and crew—and one wayward mechanical shark—in Jaws. A 55-day shooting schedule ballooned to 155 days; the $4 million budget soared to $8 million. Studio executives were threatening to close down the film and put "Bruce," the shark, on exhibit as part of the Universal City tour. The crew was wavering daily between seasickness and shell shock. "It was almost Mutiny on the Bounty," Spielberg recalls, gleefully mixing his analogies, "with me tied to Moby Dick." But audiences responded to the film with the same question that Steven's mentor, Sid Sheinberg, asked when he first saw it: "Isn't there any more?" For Universal there was: Jaws set a new record for film grosses. And Close Encounters solidified Spielberg's reputation for touching minds and pocketbooks with equal acuity.