Steven Spielberg

• 1. Introduction

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  Steven Spielberg was born on the 18th of December 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and by the time he was twelve years old, he had already staged and filmed a train wreck with his Lionel set. That eight-millimeter camera, borrowed from his father, was the beginning of something that would reshape popular cinema. What drives a filmmaker who is simultaneously the highest-grossing director in history and the man behind Schindler's List? How did a boy who was kicked and given bloody noses for being Jewish in high school come to direct the most celebrated film about the Holocaust? And how did someone twice rejected by film school end up receiving the AFI Life Achievement Award, an honorary knighthood, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom? The answers live in a life that runs from a kosher dairy restaurant in Ohio to the beaches of Normandy, from the open ocean off Martha's Vineyard to the killing fields of Krakow.

• 2. Childhood and the Camera

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  At their home in Cincinnati, Spielberg's grandmother taught English to Holocaust survivors, and one man in particular taught the young boy his numbers by pointing to the tattoo on his forearm, inverting his arm so a nine became a six, a six became a nine, calling it magic. Spielberg recalled that the irony and the gift of that lesson did not dawn on him until much later. His mother Leah Adler, a concert pianist who later ran a kosher dairy restaurant, and his father Arnold, an electrical engineer involved in computer development, gave him a family steeped in both art and science. His father's stories about World War II were constant. Spielberg recalled hearing that there was no glory in war, that it was ugly and cruel and visually devastating, and he promised himself that if he ever made a war film, it would have to tell the truth about what those young seventeen-, eighteen-, and nineteen-year-old boys experienced storming Omaha Beach. In 1958 he became a Boy Scout, and he fulfilled the photography merit badge by shooting a nine-minute Western called The Last Gunfight. At thirteen, he made a forty-minute war film called Escape to Nowhere with a cast of classmates, and it won first prize in a statewide competition. By his mid-teens he had made roughly fifteen to twenty adventure films on eight-millimeter stock. In 1963, he wrote and directed a 140-minute science fiction film called Firelight, funded mainly by his father, shown for one evening in a local theater, and it grossed $501 against its $500 budget. That film would later become the basis for Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

• 3. Breaking Into Hollywood

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  After a tour bus visit to Universal Studios, a chance conversation with an executive led to Spielberg receiving a three-day pass. On the fourth day, he walked through the studio gates without one, and the guard waved him in. He spent the next two months there as an unofficial apprentice. Universal vice president Sidney Sheinberg saw Spielberg's twenty-six-minute short film Amblin' in 1968 and offered him a seven-year directing contract, making him the youngest director signed to a long-term deal with a major Hollywood studio. He dropped out of California State University, Long Beach to accept. His professional debut came with "Eyes," a segment of Night Gallery in 1969, scripted by Rod Serling and starring Joan Crawford. Crawford was initially skeptical about his inexperience, but she recognized his intuitive talent and sent him a note expressing her appreciation, then communicated her approval to Serling as well. Spielberg directed the inaugural non-pilot episode of Columbo, "Murder by the Book," and several other television works before Universal signed him to make four television films. The first was Duel in 1971, adapted from a Richard Matheson story about a salesman chased by a psychotic tanker truck driver. Reviews were so positive that Universal asked Spielberg to shoot additional scenes for international theatrical release. Critic David Thomson later wrote of it that the ordinariness of the Dennis Weaver character and the monstrous malignance of the truck confront each other with a narrative assurance that never needs to remind the viewer of the element of fable. His official theatrical debut came with The Sugarland Express in 1974, based on a true story, starring Goldie Hawn. The Hollywood Reporter declared that a major new director was on the horizon. Critic Pauline Kael wrote that Spielberg used his gifts in a very free-and-easy American way for humor and physical response to action, and called him perhaps a new generation's Howard Hawks.

• 4. The Blockbuster Machine

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  Producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown gave Spielberg the chance to direct Jaws in 1975, a thriller based on Peter Benchley's bestseller. It was the first film shot on the open ocean, and the mechanical shark malfunctioned repeatedly, forcing Spielberg to suggest the creature's presence through other means rather than show it directly. The shooting schedule overran by a hundred days. Against every expectation, the film set the domestic box-office record and made Spielberg a household name. Alfred Hitchcock, after seeing Jaws, praised what he called young Spielberg for being the first director who did not see the proscenium arch. Spielberg declined an offer to make Jaws 2 and reunited with actor Richard Dreyfuss for Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977, a film both written and directed by Spielberg. He cast one of his favorite directors, Francois Truffaut, as the scientist Claude Lacombe. Critic Stanley Kauffmann recalled that most of the audience at its first public showing in New York stayed to watch the credits crawl because they simply did not want to leave the picture. Kael called Spielberg a magician in the age of movies. Then came Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, a homage to serials of the 1930s and 1940s, written by Lawrence Kasdan from a story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman, filmed in La Rochelle, Hawaii, Tunisia, and Elstree Studios in England. Roger Ebert wrote that it grabs you in the first shot, hurtles you through incredible adventures, and deposits you back in reality breathless, dizzy, and with a silly grin on your face. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial arrived in 1982 and grossed $700 million worldwide. A special screening was organized for Ronald and Nancy Reagan, who were emotional by the end. Kael wrote that genuinely entrancing movies are almost as rare as extraterrestrial visitors. Spielberg met his future wife Kate Capshaw while making Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984; the film's darkness also led directly to the creation of the PG-13 rating.

• 5. The Turn Toward Drama

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  The Color Purple in 1985 marked the first time Spielberg tackled dramatic subject matter. An adaptation of Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, starring Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey, the film drew eleven Academy Award nominations and won Spielberg the Best Director award from the Directors Guild of America. Roger Ebert named it the best film of the year. Empire of the Sun followed in 1987, written by Tom Stoppard, starring a young Christian Bale, and it was the first American film shot in Shanghai since the 1930s. David Lean had originally been set to direct it. Andrew Sarris named it the best film of the year, and David Thomson later called it the first clear sign that Spielberg the showman was also an artist. Then in 1993, Spielberg directed both Jurassic Park and Schindler's List in the same year. Principal photography for Schindler's List began on the 1st of March 1993, in Krakow, Poland, while Spielberg was simultaneously supervising Jurassic Park's post-production. He had waited ten years to make Schindler's List because he did not feel mature enough. After the birth of his son Max, he said a spirit ignited in him and he became a Jewish dad. The film depicts Oskar Schindler, a businessman who helped save 1,100 Jews from the Holocaust. Schindler's List won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and Spielberg's first as Best Director. Thomson called it the most moving film he had ever seen. Filmmaker Claude Lanzmann criticized the film for what he saw as a weak representation of the Holocaust, and concentration camp survivor Imre Kertesz called any Holocaust representation he deemed kitsch as incapable of understanding the organic connection between deformed modern life and the possibility of the Holocaust. In response to meeting survivors during filming, Spielberg used proceeds to establish the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1994, with the goal of recording testimonies before it was too late. Over 50,000 survivors were ultimately recorded. Saving Private Ryan in 1998 completed his trilogy of confrontations with the war his father had described. The film grossed $481 million worldwide and Spielberg won his second Academy Award for Best Director. In August 1999, he and Tom Hanks received the Distinguished Public Service Medal from Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen.

• 6. The Producer and Studio Builder

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  In 1994, Spielberg co-founded DreamWorks with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, citing greater creative control and distribution improvements. He and his partners compared themselves to the founders of United Artists in 1919. DreamWorks' investors included Microsoft founders Paul Allen and Bill Gates. Between 1984 and 1990 alone, Spielberg had served as producer or executive producer on nineteen feature films for Amblin Entertainment, including Gremlins, Back to the Future, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In 1985, NBC offered him a two-year contract for the anthology series Amazing Stories, giving him creative control and a budget of one million dollars per episode. After two seasons and disappointing ratings, the show was not renewed. DreamWorks Animation's Shrek in 2001 became the first winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Spielberg and Tom Hanks co-produced Band of Brothers for HBO in 2001, a ten-part miniseries that won a Golden Globe for Best Miniseries. He helped design Jurassic Park: The Ride at Universal Studios Florida. By December 2005, he and his partners sold DreamWorks to Viacom. On the 21st of June 2021, Amblin Entertainment signed a deal with Netflix to produce at least two films per year for an unspecified number of years. On the 18th of January 2023, Spielberg announced he was executive producing a documentary about composer John Williams, directed by Laurent Bouzereau. The announcement came days after Williams had suggested he might not retire from film scoring after all.

• 7. Late Career and Personal Reckoning

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  The Fabelmans in 2022 brought Spielberg's filmmaking full circle. It is a fictionalized account of his own adolescence, which he wrote with Tony Kushner. Gabriel LaBelle plays Sammy Fabelman, the character based on Spielberg himself. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on the 10th of September 2022, Spielberg's first appearance at that festival, and it won the People's Choice Award. Cahiers du Cinema wrote that Spielberg, at age 76, had come to represent like no other the idea of cinema as wonder, and declared the film would undoubtedly remain the most important and singular work of his career. Despite widespread critical acclaim, The Fabelmans and West Side Story both underperformed at the box office. Variety suggested this could reflect a decline in Spielberg's popularity in a film-going environment altered by the COVID-19 pandemic and a loss of public interest in prestige films. In France, however, The Fabelmans became the highest-rated film of the twenty-first century in that country, earning a 4.9 average from critics on Allocine from 43 reviews, with all but six giving it five stars. In February 2025, Spielberg began shooting Disclosure Day, reportedly about UFOs, with a screenplay by David Koepp, starring Emily Blunt, Josh O'Connor, Colman Domingo, Colin Firth, Wyatt Russell, and Eve Hewson. The film is set for release on the 12th of June 2026, by Universal Pictures. He also returned to Long Beach in 2002 to present Schindler's List and complete the Bachelor of Arts in Film and Electronic Media he had abandoned decades earlier, the same degree program he had dropped out of to accept Sidney Sheinberg's seven-year directing contract.