Steven Spielberg Biography
Steven Spielberg, American director and producer, was born in 1948 in Cincinnati, Ohio. From a young age he showed a strong inclination for cinema, making a series of amateur films in different formats, including 8mm and 16mm. In 1969 he made the 35mm short film "Amblin'," which caught the attention of Universal Pictures. The company subsequently offered Spielberg a seven-year contract for its MCA subsidiary's live television. In the two-year period 1971-1972, Spielberg directed three feature films for the small screen, including the famous 1971 "Duel", a surreal road adventure about the death of a duel involving a driver chased by a tractor-trailer.
In 1974, Spielberg directed "The Sugarland Express", a film about a young couple on the run determined to get their foster child back, who are followed by massive law enforcement agencies. However, his big commercial success came with 1975's "Jaws," a cleverly constructed thriller that grossed $130 million in the United States alone. From that moment, Spielberg specialized in the creation of spectacular and sophisticated science fiction and adventure films which promptly, despite the huge sums invested in the production, turned into profitable entertainment machines.
The theme of the encounter with extraterrestrial life forms returns in "ET the extra-terrestrial", another very successful film where the alien becomes the protagonist, with surprising identification effects. However, the following film "The Color Purple" from 1985, based on the novel by A. Walker, with which Spielberg addressed another significant theme of his filmography, that of racial segregation, had a disappointing outcome, from a commercial point of view.
In the 1990s, Spielberg directed 1991's "Hook," a big-screen adaptation of the Peter Pan tale. Then, with the enormous success of "Jurassic Park", the director inaugurated a saga that consolidated his position in the film industry. In 2001, with "AI Artificial Intelligence", born from a project by Stanley Kubrick, Spielberg returned to science fiction by exploring the disturbing dimension of technology, while in "Minority Report" in 2002, an adaptation of the story of the same name by Ph.K. Dick, described a future society in which preventive justice reigns, prophetically portraying the dark sides of the globalized world.
Spielberg significantly influenced the evolution of American cinema in the last twenty years of the 20th century and the first years of the 21st, both in terms of the metamorphosis of Hollywood imagery and the development of film promotion and marketing strategies.
