Steven Spielberg Born: Cinema's Master Storyteller

Steven Spielberg redefined American cinema twice: once as the architect of the modern blockbuster and once as the most commercially successful director of serious dramatic films. His career spans from Duel in 1971 to the present, a run of over five decades during which he directed or produced many of the highest-grossing and most critically acclaimed films in Hollywood history. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio on December 18, 1946, and raised in various suburbs as his father, an electrical engineer, moved the family for work, Spielberg was making amateur films with his family's 8mm camera as a child. He was rejected from the University of Southern California's film school twice and attended California State University, Long Beach instead, before dropping out to take a television directing contract at Universal Studios. Jaws, released in 1975, invented the modern summer blockbuster and the wide-release marketing strategy that the film industry still uses. The mechanical shark malfunctioned constantly during production, forcing Spielberg to suggest the shark's presence through camera angles and John Williams's score rather than showing it directly. The result was more terrifying than any rubber prop could have been. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial followed in rapid succession. E.T. became the highest-grossing film of all time in 1982 and held the record for over a decade. The Indiana Jones franchise, created with George Lucas, became one of the most profitable in cinema history. He then turned to serious dramatic filmmaking. Schindler's List, released in 1993, won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director. He shot it in black and white, worked without a fee, and donated his profits to the Shoah Foundation, which he established to record video testimonies of Holocaust survivors. Saving Private Ryan in 1998 won him a second Best Director Oscar. Its opening Omaha Beach sequence changed how war films depicted combat. He co-founded DreamWorks SKG in 1994 with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, the first new major Hollywood studio in decades. He has won three Academy Awards and directed films that have collectively grossed over $10 billion worldwide.