In some ways we owe Hugh Hefner for Steven Spielberg's film career.

In 1971, Spielberg's studio assistant Nona Tyson gave him a copy of Playboy Magazine. "Don't look at the girls," she told the 24-year-old TV director, "read the short story."

The story in question was by the veteran writer Richard Matheson and became the basis of the TV movie that was to make Spielberg's name: Duel, a man-against-machine thriller starring Dennis Weaver being chased by a mysterious 18-wheeler truck. Until then Spielberg had been a journeyman director for Universal studios, making episodes of shows such as Marcus Welby, M.D. and Columbo.

Shot in 13 days north of Los Angeles, "Duel marked the culmination of my work on the small screen and required all the tricks one can learn directing episodic television on limited time and money," Spielberg later told Zoetrope All-Story magazine. Watching it now it remains a remarkably effective exercise in paranoia, a possible comment on emasculation and a genuinely striking work, both visually and sonically (it's there from the start with an opening sequence that combines low shots from a travelling camera accompanied by talk radio rather than a musical soundtrack).

Duel proved an impressive calling card. Soon, Spielberg was making films for the cinema rather than TV's Movie of the Week slot, first The Sugarland Express and then, of course, Jaws. In fact there are parallels between his blockbuster film about a Great White Shark and Duel, which frames the 18-wheeler as a kind of monster. But Duel wasn't a mere dry run. Helped by a remarkable performance from Weaver, it is an impressive film in and of itself .

It's welcome then that Spielberg's calling card should be at the heart of Little Big Screen, one of this year's EIFF retrospectives. Drawing on the festival's long interest in American independent filmmaking, Little Big Screen looks back at the "Movie of the Week" era on American TV at the end of the 1960s and 1970s.

Of course the rise of the long-form TV series in the HBO era has always made much of the fact that it can attract already established film directors to work on them, from Martin Scorsese on Boardwalk Empire to Cary (Sin Nombre) Fukunaga's work on True Detective and Jane Campion's Top Of The Lake. But the migration between TV and film has long been a feature of screen ecology. Robert Altman and, in the UK, Ken Russell both famously cut their teeth on TV before establishing themselves as filmmakers. What's intriguing about the period covered by Little Big Screen, however, EIFF senior programmer Niall Greig Fulton suggests, is that the migration went both ways.

As well as the likes of Spielberg and Michael Mann making their names on TV, there were already established filmmakers finding their way onto the small screen as well. Directors such as Sam Pekinpah. Having made Major Dundee the volatile, boozy director was then replaced on The Cincinnati Kid by Norman Jewison in 1965. "Pekinpah finds himself effectively blackballed," explains Fulton. And it was TV that provided an escape route via Noon Wine, made for ABC and starring Jason Robards and Olivia de Havilland.

Based on a short story by Katherine Anne Porter, the result is, Fulton reckons "what I consider one the most interesting things in his whole catalogue". The drama's success on the small screen then facilitated Pekinpah's return to the big screen. Some movie called The Wild Bunch.

Noon Wine might be one of the retrospective's more unfamiliar pleasures on offer, alongside Fred Wolf's animated film The Point, featuring the voice of Dustin Hoffman and based on a Harry Nilsson album.

Unfortunately rights issues mean we won't get to see The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash, but Neil Innes is coming to talk about the classic Beatles spoof.

A number of the films scheduled, Fulton suggests, can be classed as "genre classics", including John Llewellyn Moxey's TV horror The Night Stalker, the highest-rated American TV film of the time and one which spawned a TV series starring Darren McGavin as the dogged reporter tracking down supernatural horrors every week.

And then there is Salem's Lot, directed by another filmmaker-turned-TV director, Tobe (Texas Chainsaw Massacre) Hooper. "I'm hard pressed to talk to anybody without them mentioning the boy scratching at the window," Fulton admits.

But it's Michael Mann's TV movie The Jericho Mile that he is particularly hopeful will attract attention. The story of a lifer in Folsom Prison, played by Peter Strauss, who tries to escape the reality of his surroundings by running, it's a surprisingly tough vision of life inside given its TV origins. It also features some amusingly dated dialogue and a meaty early performance from Brian Dennehy.

"It blew me away," admits Fulton. "When you look at that film, not only can you see the signals of Mann emerging as somebody who's going to be massive, but it's also one of the definitive American prison films of the era. Mann integrated real inmates from Folsom into the action. When you see it, you can just feel the authenticity. That can't have been an easy film to make. I genuinely hope that film gets a healthy audience because I think it's an absolute gem that's criminally under-seen."

Mann, of course, has always gravitated back and forth between television and film. Indeed, his 1980s series Miami Vice later gave him material for his 2006 film of the same name. And in the end, Mann's ease of movement back and forth may be the key here. When it comes down to it, directors just direct. And we watch it how we may. The medium isn't the message after all.

The Little Big Season opens with Noon Wine next Sunday at 4.30pm at Filmhouse 1, Edinburgh. For details visit edfilmfest.org.uk