After reviewing the Star Wars DVD set several weeks ago, I took the opportunity to delve in to George Lucas' directorial infancy, and the new DVD release of his first feature, THX 1138. Following a trend of sorts, Steven Spielberg, whose decades of achievement include everything from Jaws to Schindler's List, recently released several DVDs of his earlier work. Of particular note are Duel and The Sugarland Express, Spielberg's first feature-length movie and first theatrical feature, respectively. The DVD of Sugarland will be reviewed next week.I remember Duel being very hard to find. Several years ago, the only copies of it that I could get my hands on were well-worn library copies, and the rare bootlegs on the fledgling eBay were going for upwards of $30 for a used video tape. Today, it is readily available in a Collector's Edition DVD, released by Universal.

The story is commonly called deceptively simple. An everyman-type salesman sets out across the California desert to reach an important business meeting. Without warning or reason, this salesman (Dennis Weaver, Touch of Evil) gets first harassed, then threatened by the unseen driver of a large, dirty, menacing truck. Remarkably, that is all. In retrospect, it is the sort of story that only Spielberg, a master storyteller, could tell without letting it induce copious amounts of boredom. But at the time, it was Paramount's gamble on a relatively unknown college dropout named Steve.

In 1971, Steven Spielberg, a young brat of a college dropout, was given an opportunity to direct a made-for-TV movie. He had already begun a reluctant career in television-Spielberg admits in a bonus-feature interview that he was a bit of a snob regarding television work, but discovered that he rather enjoyed it when he had to take TV directing jobs to put food on the table. Some of his credits include episodes of Rod Serling's Night Gallery, Marcus Welby, M.D., and the pilot episode of the hit show, Columbo. Spielberg began to make a name for himself in the television world by daring to defy television conventions-he used severe angles, varied lenses and, in that way, made the television episodes he worked on seem more "cinematic" than the rest of TV at the time. Despite these early hints of success, Spielberg did not want to continue making short half-hour or one-hour TV episodes. When a friend mentioned that a well-crafted short story by Richard Matheson was being considered by Paramount, Spielberg jumped the opportunity instantly, and the reluctant-but-generous studio gave him the job.

Matheson, whose writing credits include 16 episodes of The Twilight Zone (one of which is "Nightmare at 20,000 Ft.," the episode that launched William Shatner's career.) had published the novelette-the last short narrative in his career-in Playboy magazine, and when Paramount optioned the story, he also wrote the screenplay for the film.

When shooting began on Duel, Spielberg was given only 10 days to get all of the footage. Instead of taking the sane route and shooting most of the close shots in a studio with less-than-perfect special effect techniques to make it look like Weaver was in his car on a desert road, Spielberg chose to shoot the entire movie on-location. Wallace Worsley Jr., the unit production manager on the film, whose credits range from The Wizard of Oz to Earthquake, was especially pessimistic.

There was no way that Spielberg would be able to shoot the entire film on location in time. Spielberg and Worsley came to an arrangement-the footage that necessarily called for shooting on location would be shot first, and if Spielberg could get that footage quickly, Worsley, whose job involved logistics and planning, would not complain about Spielberg's on-location-only decision. After the first few days of production rolled by, Spielberg had proven that he could shoot quickly on-location, and was permitted to continue to shoot the rest of the film outside of the studio. In the end, Worsley was right -the shoot wrapped two days behind schedule-but by that point, Worsley had developed an admiration for Spielberg and a respect for his talents. The director would later reciprocate the respect by giving Worsley the difficult job of production manager for the blockbuster fantasy, E.T.

The DVD does not come with many bonus features, but it does include two short interviews with Spielberg himself, who speaks animatedly about his early television career, about Duel and the filmmaking process. In the interview on Duel, Spielberg sheds more light on his approach to telling stories on screen than in any other interview of his that I can remember. I only wish that he would start recording running commentary tracks-these are tracks that are missing from all of his DVD releases.

There is also a short interview with Matheson, now an aging novelist with five decades of industry experience. His interview tends to be more anecdotal, and although he mentions his writing process a little, he does not delve in to it much. Matheson stopped writing short fiction after Duel.

For a movie that took only about five weeks to get from the first day of production to its television premiere, Duel is a remarkable technical achievement. It is one of very few films that received theatrical distribution after being shown on television. That it is Spielberg's first commercially-funded feature-length movie adds to its intrigue, and that it holds up more than three decades later is to the director's credit. Spielberg's techniques have gotten increasingly refined over the years, but their roughest, earliest manifestations are very present in Duel.