I had heard about Spielberg's first movie for years but never saw it until now. It's on Youtube if anyone wants to watch it. You can absolutely see what Universal saw in him to sign him up for Jaws. This is so much better than his "grown up" material in his later years. I only wish we got to see a glimpse of the driver's dead body at the end.

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Posted by SG_Geaux

Beautiful St George

Member since Aug 2004

77976 posts

Posted on 2/2/17 at 8:23 pm to JabarkusRussell

That movie is awesome

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Posted by Jake88

Member since Apr 2005

68226 posts

Posted on 2/2/17 at 8:29 pm to JabarkusRussell

Saw it years ago. Doesn't the truck make the 1976 Kink Kong yell at the end? I realize it as made in 1972.

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Posted by Oswald

South of the St. George Buffer Zone

Member since Aug 2011

3471 posts

Posted on 2/2/17 at 9:15 pm to JabarkusRussell

Great film. First saw it on cable in the early '80s and it instilled within me a permanent driving-related trepidation: Each time I see a driver trying to signal other drivers by waving his/her arm out the window, I assume that driver is a murderous psychopath. Granted, it doesn't happen often but, when it does...

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Posted by Kafka

I am the moral conscience of TD

Member since Jul 2007

141926 posts

Posted on 2/2/17 at 9:36 pm to JabarkusRussell

Just a few days ago I was able to find a copy of this:

quote:
"L.A. 2017" is a 1971 episode of the NBC television series The Name of the Game. Sometimes referred to as "Los Angeles: AD 2017" (the name of Philip Wylie's subsequent novel based on his script) or "Los Angeles 2017", this was a science fiction piece, shot for only $375,000, about a publisher, Glenn Howard (Gene Barry), who finds himself suddenly plunged 46 years into the future only to learn that the people of Los Angeles are living underground to escape the pollution and under the thumb of a fascist government run by psychiatrists. Its director, the 24-year-old Steven Spielberg, used imaginative camera angles to drive his first movie-length television episode across and remarked in later years that the show "opened a lot of doors for me".

The script, by celebrated scifi novelist Wylie (When Worlds Collide), is an environmentalist satire on 1971 America ('17='71 -- get it?) in the manner of Planet Of The Apes or The Omega Man. I expected it to be badly dated but it actually holds up quite well. There is a classic scene lampooning hippies.