He once said “I dream for a living”, but Steven Spielberg demonstrated a hard-headed entrepreneurial instinct before he could even grow a beard.
Born 18 December 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the man voted best-ever film director in an online Empire magazine poll financed his first amateur film with proceeds from a tree-planting business – aged 12. He charged admission to the adolescent films he screened at home, even persuading his younger sister to sell popcorn.
A prolific director and producer, Spielberg is credited with ushering in the ‘blockbuster’ era with the seminal 1975 film Jaws, which made $260m from an $8.5m budget. The three-time Oscar winner has also been at the helm of, among others, Poltergeist, Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List.
With a $2.6bn personal fortune, Spielberg ploughed loose change from the back of his sofa into DreamWorks, the multimedia company he founded with David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg. The company was responsible for a number of critical and commercial successes, such as Shrek, American Beauty and Saving Private Ryan. But despite the huge box-office success of such blockbusters, the company ran into debt and has since been sold to Paramount.
Unstinting dedication to filmmaking has given rise to rumours that Spielberg suffers – probably not the appropriate word in this context – from a mild form of asperger’s syndrome, an autistic disorder that causes obsessive attention to narrow interests.
The Spielberg name adds value to a film like the Gucci name does to a shirt. His recent effort, The War of the Worlds, is a case in point: it drew a critical mauling, yet still took £30.5m at the box office. The man could have rescued Eldorado.
Strange then that he was turned him down for the prestigious film course at the University of Southern California – twice.
Aged 59, Spielberg shows little sign of directorial fatigue. Though productive as ever, however, he is, he insists, always home in time for dinner with his wife and three kids. Ah!
