Their Friendship Is a Long-Term Deal

One residual loyalty from Sidney Sheinberg’s TV days is his lasting (and, for MCA, lucrative) friendship with director Steven Spielberg.

“At this point, it won’t surprise anybody if I say I feel Sid is as close to (being) my family as my parents or my sisters,” Spielberg maintains.

By Spielberg’s account, Sheinberg offered the director, not yet 21, a seven-year contract to make Universal TV shows “in the first 10 minutes” of a meeting called after the executive saw Spielberg’s “Amblin’,” a 23-minute film made while he was a student.

Under the contract, Spielberg directed the first episodes of “Night Gallery” and “Columbo” and got other rich assignments largely because Sheinberg, never shy, “crammed” him “down the throat” of producers who would have preferred more experienced directors.

Sheinberg appears genuinely to believe that Spielberg’s phenomenal film and TV career is mystically rooted at Universal, where the director’s Amblin Entertainment company is headquartered in an adobe hacienda that reportedly cost the studio more than $3 million. “A Steven Spielberg project will always be handled better here. The very walls speak to Steven,” he says.

Spielberg, for his part, claims to treasure the earthiness of Sheinberg’s judgments--and to have consulted closely with him on such movies as “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” even though they were made for studios other than Universal.

Apparently, however, there is at least one point of contention between the two.

Spielberg claims he came up with the idea of directing “Jaws,” which became his first blockbuster movie when Universal released it in 1975. Yet Sheinberg insists it didn’t happen quite that way.

“I think Steven needed some serious persuading that it was a good idea to do a ‘big fish story’ at that stage of his career,” recalls Sheinberg. “And I think I had something to do with that.”