Why Steven Spielberg wanted his first film credit erased from existence: “They should bury it”

It’s incredibly rare for a filmmaker to explode onto the scene and maintain that momentum throughout their career, but Steven Spielberg came pretty damn close, which is fitting considering that he’s now the single most commercially successful director in cinema history.

After cutting his teeth on television helming episodes of several different shows, which wasn’t an entirely pleasant experience, Spielberg instantly captured attention and imaginations when he first dipped his toes into feature-length waters with the made-for-TV movie Duel.

The 74-minute chase thriller featured several tricks, techniques, and motifs that would soon become hallmarks, and it was clear that despite only being in his early 20s, he’d outgrown the small screen. The next step was to helm his first movie to debut exclusively in theatres, which is exactly what he did.

1974’s crime caper The Sugarland Express was the first time Spielberg made a film for the silver screen, and while it earned its budget back four times over in ticket sales and garnered an enthusiastic response from critics and audiences, Ace Eli and Rodgers of the Skies typically goes completely unmentioned.

The adventure comedy, following Cliff Robertson’s World War I veteran pilot getting roped into a series of misadventures, was directed by John Erman with a screenplay credited to Claudia Salter, but it was Spielberg who originated and developed the story with an eye on directing it himself.

20th Century Fox president Richard D Zanuck refused to hire him for the job, likely due to his inexperience, and his story was put through the wringer. Ace Eli initially ended with the title character dying by suicide, but the studio decided to shoot a different and more positive ending.

Spielberg was horrified by what had happened to the project, blasting Fox for how it had been “turned into a really sick film” and insisting it should be locked away in the vault, never to see the light of day: “They should bury it.” Whether it’s a coincidence or not, it would be almost three decades before he worked with the studio again when Fox partnered with his DreamWorks outfit for Minority Report.

It wasn’t a particularly successful or popular flick, but Spielberg was stewing nonetheless. He’d learned the hard way that just because he’d written an outline and steered it towards shooting shape, it didn’t give him any benefits or strengthen his position when he pitched himself for the director’s job.

Over half a century later, and it’s one of only three projects in which Spielberg received a writing or story acknowledgement in a movie he didn’t direct, with the others being Poltergeist and The Goonies, although debate rages as to whether or not Tobe Hooper was really in charge of the supernatural horror.

It’s common knowledge that Duel was Spielberg’s first feature-length undertaking and The Sugarland Express was his first movie to be released in cinemas, but what often goes overlooked and unmentioned is that Ace Eli and Rodger of the Skies premiered 11 months before the latter.

With a ‘story by’ credit, that makes Ace Eli the first theatrical film in which his name appeared, and he despised what became of it.

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