Speilvogel's early experience covers work with famous documentarian Robert Flaherty and the original Cinerama group.
Along with Richard Leacock, he was cinematographer on Flaherty's Louisiana Story, which received an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing Motion Picture Story in 1949 and has been selected for the National Film Registry.
He was an instructor in Cinematography at the American University in Washington, DC.
[6] In New York, he was part of the dynamic art scene around 98 Greene Street, where, according to one scholar, he "supervised the film program and tended the machinery, produced Ads, a chain of television commercials documenting the history of this genre from its beginning-a history that Spielvogel in his days as a pioneering maker of TV commercials had significantly shaped.
[8] Dirtymouth, a biopic of Lenny Bruce, was described by New York Times reviewer in 1971 as a "very bad movie.