LIFE Steven Spielberg

As a boy, Steven Spielberg was fascinated by the night sky, by the moon and stars common to us all, and his life’s work is a kind of constellation all its own, full of fixed images we all recognize, from anywhere on earth. Just gaze up at them in the dark. The light of these stars first shone from movie screens, starting nearly 50 years ago: a shark fin scything through the waters off Amity Island. An airborne boy with an alien in his basket, bicycling by moonlight. Somewhere in that firmament is an archaeologist fond of bullwhips and fedoras, and a velociraptor running rampant through his jungle theme park. These images are set, in the multiplex of your mind’s eye, to composer John Williams’s dread-inducing theme from Jaws, or his soaring…

1964 Firelight 1971 Duel 1974 The Sugarland Express 1975 Jaws 1977 Close Encounters of the Third Kind 1979 1941 1981 Raiders of the Lost Ark 1982 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial 1983 Twilight Zone: The Movie 1984 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom 1985 The Color Purple 1987 Empire of the Sun 1989 Always 1989 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade 1991 Hook 1993 Jurassic Park 1993 Schindler’s List 1997 The Lost World: Jurassic Park 1997 Amistad 1998 Saving Private Ryan 2001 A.I. Artificial Intelligence 2002 Minority Report 2002 Catch Me If You Can 2004 The Terminal 2005 War of the Worlds 2005 Munich 2008 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull 2011 The Adventures of Tintin 2011 War Horse 2012 Lincoln 2015 Bridge of Spies 2016 The BFG 2017 The Post 2018 Ready Player One 2021 West Side Story…

1975 Jaws The mechanical sharks proved chaotic during the filming of Jaws, but the opening scene was one of the most difficult. To simulate the jolting movements of the shark attacking the swimmer (Susan Backlinie), Spielberg instructed crew members to attach a harness with cables to her legs and manually pull them back and forth. Spielberg also told the crew not to warn Backlinie about this. 1984 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom The bridge-collapse scene, though one of the most complex in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, was filmed in just one take. The crew used every available camera and arranged them across the valley, with Spielberg and George Lucas each manning one. 1993 Schindler’s List For the role of Schindler, Spielberg wanted to cast someone relatively unknown. At the time,…

Steven Allan Spielberg was born in Cincinnati on December 18, 1946, two days before the world premiere of It’s a Wonderful Life, directed by Frank Capra, at the time the foremost director of quintessentially American classics. Spielberg’s mother, Leah Posner, was a concert pianist who had studied at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. His father, Arnold—the son of Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine—had been a radio operator for the 490th Bomb Squadron in Burma during World War II when several members of his extended family were murdered in the Holocaust. “The Holocaust had been part of my life, just based on what my parents would say at the dinner table,” Steven would tell the New York Times decades later. “We lost cousins, aunts, uncles.” Almost from birth, the seeds of Steven…

It was Sidney Sheinberg who brought Jaws to Spielberg, giving him a modest budget of $3.5 million but also that priceless promise he’d made to stick with the director through failure. And almost everything failed during the endless shooting of the picture. The making of Jaws, on Martha’s Vineyard in 1974, has become almost as familiar and legendary as the movie itself. The failure of the mechanical shark, nicknamed Bruce, to work properly meant Spielberg had to withhold it from viewers for as long as he possibly could, which had the effect of creating more tension, like being on a roller coaster ratcheting up a steep incline. There were several fake shark components, ranging from a single fin pulled through the water to an entire replica of a great white shark,…

It was a big-budget comedy about Californians fearing a Japanese attack just after Pearl Harbor. 1941 opened with a skinny-dipper running into the ocean. It was the same actress (and animal trainer), Susan Backlinie, who ran naked into the sea at the start of Jaws, becoming the shark’s first victim. In 1941, however, as the water roils around her and John Williams’s theme from Jaws plays on the soundtrack, Backlinie is not dragged under by a great white but rather lifted out of the water by the periscope of a Japanese submarine. For a film with a budget of $35 million and perhaps the two hottest stars in comedy at the time—John Belushi (above) and Dan Aykroyd, during their white-hot prime on Saturday Night Live—1941 was bereft of laughs. After it…