See the Climactic Ending of Steven Spielberg’s Breakout Duel Recreated Entirely with 3D-Printed Models

With his last pic­ture The Fabel­mans, Steven Spiel­berg told a sto­ry of his own. Giv­en his long-held stature as more or less the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of big-screen Hol­ly­wood enter­tain­ment, there’s only one such sto­ry he could have told: that of how he became a film­mak­er. The most mem­o­rable of The Fabel­mans depicts the young direc­to­r­i­al sur­ro­gate alone in the base­ment of his fam­i­ly home, re-cre­at­ing the train crash scene from The Great­est Show on Earth with an eight-mil­lime­ter cam­era and a Lionel set. Today, on the brink of his ninth decade with his famous pro­duc­tiv­i­ty hard­ly slow­ing, Spiel­berg remains, on some lev­el, the wide-eyed boy smash­ing his toys togeth­er at just the right angle. What bet­ter way to pay him trib­ute than to repli­cate his cin­e­mat­ic achieve­ments in minia­ture?

The Fabel­mans ends with its pro­tag­o­nist a col­lege stu­dent, eager to drop out and go straight to Hol­ly­wood. At the same point in life, the real Spiel­berg was about to receive an offer from Uni­ver­sal Pic­tures to write and direct the short film that became Amblin’, which itself led to a con­tract to direct tele­vi­sion pro­duc­tions.

He showed what he could do with episodes of Mar­cus Wel­by, M.D., The Name of the Game, and Colum­bo, among oth­er series. Then he stepped up to TV movies, a form regard­ed as infe­ri­or in all respects to the­atri­cal releas­es, but one he man­aged to tran­scend on the first try. When it first aired in 1971 as an ABC Movie of the Week, Duel pre­sent­ed its view­ers with a har­row­ing, near-mytho­log­i­cal con­fronta­tion between a mid­dle-aged trav­el­ing sales­man in a Ply­mouth Valiant and an unseen truck­er in a hulk­ing, smoke-belch­ing big rig who seems bent on destroy­ing him.

Giv­en that its direc­tor was just 24 years old at the time, Duel very much counts as ear­ly Spiel­berg. Yet it’s also dis­tilled Spiel­berg, a head-on treat­ment of mid­dle-class nor­mal­i­ty’s sud­den encounter with a force of incom­pre­hen­si­ble men­ace — a theme much revis­it­ed in his work since — with cin­e­mat­ic rhythms pre­cise­ly cal­cu­lat­ed for opti­mal ten­sion and release. An aspir­ing film­mak­er could learn much from re-cre­at­ing its sequences shot-for-shot. The YouTube chan­nel Movies Minia­tures Effects does just that in the video above, which doc­u­ments a remak­ing with 3D-print­ed maque­ttes of the final crash, after Den­nis Weaver’s des­per­ate every­man man­ages to out­wit his pur­suer. “Sheer skill need­ed more phi­los­o­phy for a fit­ting res­o­lu­tion,” wrote David Thom­son of this end­ing. Per­haps so, but the more than 18 mil­lion views so far racked up by its minia­ture ver­sion do sug­gest a film that more than retains its pow­er after 45 years.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Steven Spielberg’s Rarely Seen 1968 Film Amblin’

Watch Steven Spielberg’s Debut: Two Films He Direct­ed as a Teenag­er

Shot-By-Shot Break­downs of Spielberg’s Film­mak­ing in Jaws, Scorsese’s in Cape Fear, and De Palma’s in The Untouch­ables

How Movies Cre­at­ed Their Spe­cial Effects Before CGI: Metrop­o­lis, 2001: A Space Odyssey & More

How Wes Ander­son Uses Minia­tures to Cre­ate His Aes­thet­ic: A Primer from His Mod­el Mak­er & Prop Painter

How Car Chase Scenes Have Evolved Over 100 Years

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.