Film as LitEssay title: Film as LitPerhaps one of the greatest if not the greatest director/producer in American film history is Steven Allan Spielberg. Spielberg is a three-time Academy Award winner and is the highest grossing filmmaker of all time; his films having made nearly $8 billion internationally. As of 2006, Premiere listed him as the most powerful and influential figure in the motion picture industry. TIME magazine named him in the 100 Greatest People of the Century. At the end of the 20th century LIFE named him the most influential person of his generation.
In a career that spans almost four decades, Spielbergs films have touched many themes and genres. During the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, three of his films, Jaws, E.T., and Jurassic Park became the highest grossing films for their time. During his early years as a director, his sci-fi and adventure films were often seen as the archetype of modern Hollywood blockbuster film-making. In recent years, he has tackled emotionally powerful issues such as the Holocaust, slavery, war, and terrorism.
Spielberg was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Leah Adler a restaurateur and concert pianist, and Arnold Spielberg, a computer engineer. Throughout his early teens, Spielberg made amateur 8 mm “adventure” movies with his friends, the first of which he shot at a restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona. He charged admission (25 cents) to his home movies (which involved the wrecks he staged with his Lionel train set) while his sister sold popcorn.
Spielberg became a boy scout and in 1958, he fulfilled a requirement for photography merit badge by making a 9 minute 8 mm film entitled The Last Gunfight. At age 13, Spielberg won a prize for a 40-minute war movie he titled Escape to Nowhere. At 16 years old wrote and directed his first independent movie, a 140-minute science fiction adventure called Firelight . The movie, which had a budget of $400, was shown in his local movie theater and generated a profit of $100. A writer for the local Phoenix press wrote that he could expect great things to come. He attended California State University, Long Beach, to avoid the draft for the Vietnam War. His actual career began when he returned to Universal studios as an unpaid, three-day-a-week intern and guest of the editing department. As an intern and guest of Universal Studios, Spielberg made his first
s. He completed a short script for The Last Gunfight, a 15-minute movie, that he called his “second film at Pixar.” In 1962, he scored a screenplay and, after that, he composed and wrote his first film. Spielberg had no idea he would be a movie director and the best way to be considered for director was to develop a script and star in it. After he landed a film directing job at Paramount, the director would pick him. He then wrote a script and told an assistant director to be his assistant director. Spielberg’s film, which was named The Last Gunfight, was named Best Picture, as was a script he had written and co-written. According to The Hollywood Reporter, there were two of Spielberg’s three working partners for The Last Gunfight. He had an assistant director, Tom Gagner, who was later convicted of securities fraud and fired with no warning.
• On April 6 of that year, at a news conference for the film’s first ever theatrical release, Steven Spielberg confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that he was working on the script. Spielberg signed a contract of convenience with Sony Pictures Entertainment for 12 months. (He had been promised a free film in a few weeks, but declined.)
At the same briefing, the New York Times informed Spielberg that he could do what he wanted with the script. At the conference, the Los Angeles Times reported that, at that June, “Schumer, who worked with Spielberg for 15 years on a slew of feature films, said he was happy with Spielberg’s direction. ‘He has always felt like he belonged at Hollywood,’ Spielberg said.”
Schumer’s involvement was well-known. He was the president of the film and was on the board of directors for the Sony Pictures Television. On his way to see the Oscars, he made a comment about Spielberg: “I don’t know what makes me feel. I can’t imagine what makes the president of a major movie feel like that.” Spielberg and Sony gave the film the film treatment and the movie was nominated for Best Picture.
As recently as October 2005, in an interview with New York City publication The Guardian, when asked what the future was for Spielberg, he said, “It depends on who you talk to, the person. Every decision you make has repercussions. And I think Spielberg will feel the same way. He will probably feel the same way that every director does. He’ll probably feel the same way that any other director does.” Also, he declined to say where he was heading tomorrow. “I’ll have left this up in the air. I’m just not going to take the blame for that.”
At the Oscars, Spielberg and Michael Caine shared a brief conversation, in which Caine said to Spielberg, “Oh, I should start making movies. I mean, the movies look different. I mean, the films are different. They’re better. It’s kind of like the movie business. I think if I don’t want to make movie, then it will be OK to do it.” Spielberg said that Caine took on the role of an agent, too. In his new role, Spielberg took a director’s seat in the acting squad and told L.A. newspapers they needed to get rid of bad actors or they would not make the film. He made