Individual Entry Archive: Consider This

Happy Birthday, Steven Spielberg

US Navy photo PHAN Leah Gaines

A Fine Navy Day? STENNIS (CVN-74) Underway ASTERN!

(Dec. 14, 2005) – The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS JOHN C. STENNIS (CVN 74) steams Full Astern during a scheduled maneuver designed to test the ships rudders. STENNIS is undergoing sea trials in the Pacific Ocean after an 11-month overhaul at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. Go snipes, and it's great this maneuver was completed during daylight. These evolutions almost always are conducted in the wee small hours of the morning!

It's the birthday [December 18^th]of the filmmaker Steven Spielberg, born in Cincinnati, Ohio (1946). His parents had a difficult marriage and eventually got separated. Spielberg escaped from all the tension in the house by making amateur movies with his father's super-8 camera. He made two movies about World War II, and a movie about a UFO invasion, starring his sisters as victims. His mother helped with special effects. He got a local movie house to show one of his films when he was eighteen, and he made $500 in one night.

Though he applied twice to the film program at the University of Southern California, he didn't get in, and he ended up going for a degree in English from California State University at Long Beach. One day, he was taking a tour of Universal Studios when he slipped by security, found an abandoned janitors' closet, cleaned it up, and turned it into an office. He discovered that if he wore a suit and tie he could walk right past the security guards at the front gate, and he began coming in to his office every day. He made a short silent movie that caught the attention of some executives, and that got him a contract to make TV movies. He was only twenty-one years old.

Spielberg's first feature length movie The Sugarland Express (1974) got good reviews, but it was a box office disappointment. For his next project, he started working on a movie about a seaside town being terrorized by a man-eating shark. It was an incredibly difficult movie to make. The robot shark they used kept breaking down. They had to shoot almost half the movie on a boat. They went over schedule and over budget. The producers of the film had worried about hiring such a young director, and their fears seemed to be coming true. As the work on the film dragged on and on, Spielberg began to worry that his career as a filmmaker might be over.

But when it finally came out in 1975, Jaws made more money than any other movie had ever made up to that point in history. It's often been called the first blockbuster, because it was the first summer movie that teenagers went back to see again and again throughout the whole summer that it was released. Ever since Jaws, Hollywood studios have been releasing action packed movies every summer, trying to duplicate Spielberg's success.

Seven years later, Spielberg topped the success of Jaws with his movie, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) about a young boy who's recovering from the breakup of his parents' marriage when he befriends an alien that has been left behind by his spaceship. Spielberg has called E.T. his most personal movie. He said, "It's about how I felt when my parents broke up... I responded by escaping into my imagination to shut down all my nerve endings... I dreamed about going to space or having space come to me."

Today Steven Spielberg is arguably one of the most popular entertainers in history. Three of his movies are among the top ten highest grossing films of all time.
—Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac for Sunday, Dec. 18, 2005

Source: Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac for Sunday, Dec. 18, 2005
See also: All Movide Guide: Steven Spielberg