--Steven Spielberg--
         Biography

Beginning to be a film director

• He turned out his first production, with script and actors, at the age of 12, and a year later he won a prize for a forty-minute war movie titled Escape to Nowhere.
• At the age of 16, his 140-minute production, Firelight, was shown in a local movie theatre.
•  In college, his short film Amblin' was shown at the Atlanta Film Festival and led to the Boy Wonder's Universal directing contract at the tender age of 20.

•   Spielberg cut his teeth doing television work, which included an episode of the Rod Serling series Night Gallery and the classic cult movie Duel.
•  His first feature,The Sugarland Express, was released in 1974.
•  He was soon offered the chance the direct a thriller about agreat white shark terrorizing a small New England beach town. Jaws cost $8.5 million and grossed $260 million.

•  Spielberg followed it up two years later with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, earning a Best Director Oscar nomination and cementing his reputation as a visionary of pure cinematic technique.
•       But he followed Close Encounters with the disastrous 1941, which was his first attempt at comedy and his first bona fide failure. He didn't take long to regain his form, both commercially and artistically.

• Teaming up with his pal George Lucas (whose Star Wars came out the same year as Close Encounters, and made even more money), Spielberg concocted an action-adventure picture based on the old serials they both loved as kids. Called Raiders of the Lost Ark and detailing the adventures of an archaeologist named Indiana Jones, it earned him another Best Director nomination and made another mint at the box office.

• A year later, Spielberg surpassed not only himself but Lucas's Star Wars--his E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial was one of the biggest domestic moneymaker of all time.

• Further profiting as a producer of other directors' hits (including Poltergeist and Back to the Future), Spielberg became one of the richest men in Hollywood.
• In 1984, he created his own independent company, Amblin Entertainment.
• The following year, reacting to criticism that he couldn't make an adult picture, he attempted The Color Purple. Criticized for sentimentalizing the material, he was publicly embarrassed when the film pulled down eleven Oscar nominations, but not one for its direction. In a goodwill gesture, though, the Academy came through for Spielberg with the Irving G. Thalberg Award in 1987.
• Over the next few years, with Always, Empire of the Sun and Hook, Spielberg's golden touch seemed to be failing him.

• His personal life was also in turmoil: he and actress Amy Irving divorced, and he married his Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom leading lady Kate Capshaw.

• Professionally, he came back with a double-whammy in 1993, as Jurassic Park and Schindler's List fully sated the needs of commerce and art. The dinosaurs grossed $100 million in nine days on its way to shattering E.T. 's box-office record, and his look at the good-hearted Nazi Party member Oskar Schindler finally earned Spielberg his long-awaited 7 Oscars for Schindler's List, including Best Director and Best Picture.

• Buoyed by this unprecedented success, he joined forces in 1994 with record mogul David Geffen and movie mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg to form DreamWorks, a multimedia entertainment studio.

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