Steven Spielberg Directed A Movie Star And Sitcom Legend For Rod Serling's Night Gallery

Only a few years after the cancellation of "The Twilight Zone," creator Rod Serling returned to network television to revisit the strange and macabre with "Night Gallery." The NBC series began with a made-for-TV pilot film comprising three separate tales, all penned by Serling and helmed by different directors. One of them was Steven Spielberg.

Spielberg tackled the second segment, "Eyes," which starred Joan Crawford and future "Happy Days" legend Tom Bosley. Crawford played the callous and self-centered aristocrat Claudia Menlo, who had been blind since birth. After blackmailing a surgeon into performing an experimental procedure, she demands her eyes be replaced with those of a down-on-his-luck gambler (Bosley), who has agreed in exchange for having his debts paid.

"[Crawford] was kind and she was understanding, and she forgave my acne," Spielberg recalled at the TCM Classic Film Festival in 2022. He added, "I did not know what I was doing half the time because it was intimidating. I had never worked with a crew that size before." It was Spielberg's first television directing job, and Crawford was the first major movie star he directed. He was only 22 years old.

Steven Spielberg first met the Old Hollywood icon prior to filming. "We were supposed to go out to dinner," the director explained on "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert" in 2023. "We walked into the front door, and Joan [Crawford] took one look at me and said, 'We can't go out to dinner now. People will think you're my son.' That was the first thing she said to me." Spielberg remembered working with Crawford fondly, but Tom Bosley offered a different perspective.

"It was one of the strangest shooting experiences I've ever been involved in," Bosley recounted to "Rod Serling's Night Gallery: An After-hours Tour" authors Jim Benson and Scott Skelton. "[Crawford] was in her dressing room and she never came out, and poor Steven was reduced to shooting lots of close-ups of Barry Sullivan without a master [shot]." According to the "Happy Days" star, most of the production on "Eyes" was committed to shooting around its absent star.

Nevertheless, Bosley remembered "Night Gallery" fondly. "It was a wonderful experience and a very successful show," he told the Television Academy in 2000, after praising Spielberg's efforts. The assignment came near the beginning of a career that would eventually include work as a successful television producer as well. Soon after, Spielberg would go on to direct the first official episode of "Columbo."