Legendary American director and producer Steven Spielberg was born in 1946 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Spielberg’s parents – an electrical engineer and a concert pianist – moved the family to Phoenix when Steven was in elementary school, where he began to experiment with 8mm cameras in his spare time. Spielberg’s earliest short films shot as a child earned him a few competition awards, and it became clear by the time he had graduated high school that he was a gifted filmmaker in the making.

After high school, Steven Spielberg moved to Los Angeles and attempted to gain admission to the University of Southern California, but his high school GPA wasn’t high enough for admission. He instead attended California State University in Long Beach, where he began working for Universal Studios in a small unpaid intern position, where he had even greater opportunity to learn the craft of filming and editing. His short film, Amblin’, so impressed the studio executives that they offered the young filmmaker a multi-year directing contract. Spielberg dropped out of school and began work with Universal.

With Universal, Steven Spielberg began directing various television episodes, each time impressing the studio executives even more. Universal assigned him to a four-film directing contract, and Spielberg made his first feature, The Sugarland Express, which earned him accolades for his cinematography and strong character-driven storytelling. But his big breakthrough would come with his second film, a thriller-horror about a great white shark.

To this day, Steven Spielberg cites the film Jaws as the project which truly made him into the director we know and respect today. Spielberg’s persistence through the often grueling shoot led to three Academy Awards, box-offices grosses near the five hundred million mark, and a film which has since stood the test of time for its captivating storytelling and brilliant cinematography.

Since Jaws, Spielberg has gone on to write, direct, or produce many of the era’s most endearing and impactful films. Spanning multiple genres and subjects, some of Steven’s most critically acclaimed films include: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), The Color Purple (1985), Schindler’s List (1993), Amistad (1997), Munich (2005), and Lincoln (2012.) Spielberg’s films are estimated to have grossed nearly ten billion dollars worldwide, making Spielberg one of the most financially successful directors of all time.

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