A New England beach town refuses to close for the Fourth of July, and a mechanical fish keeps sinking (1975)
Jaws — the first film to take $100 million at the US box office, and the start of the summer blockbuster.
Film · Hollywood
Steven Spielberg
born 1946 · American
New Hollywood; the modern blockbuster
Steven Spielberg invented the summer blockbuster with a broken mechanical shark and then spent fifty years alternating popular spectacle with sober historical drama. He is the most commercially successful director in history and has twice won the Academy Award for Best Director. His recurring subject is the American family — usually a suburban one, usually missing a father — confronted by something enormous.
How to spot them
- ▸The 'Spielberg face': a slow push in on a character staring up in wonder or terror at something off-screen
- ▸Suburban ordinariness invaded by the extraordinary; absent or failing fathers
- ▸A John Williams score, on nearly every film since 1974
- ▸Light used as a substance — beams through doorways, fog and dust
- ▸A withheld monster: the threat kept off screen far longer than the budget intended
Key films
Five musical notes, and a mountain sculpted out of mashed potato on a kitchen table (1977)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind — Devils Tower in Wyoming is the mountain.
An archaeologist outruns a rolling boulder, and the Nazis get to the dig first (1981)
Raiders of the Lost Ark — from a story by George Lucas, with Harrison Ford.
A boy and a stranded creature silhouetted against the moon on a flying bicycle (1982)
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial — the highest-grossing film of the decade.
Mosquitoes trapped in amber, and a glass of water rippling on a dashboard (1993)
Jurassic Park — from Michael Crichton; it overtook his own earlier record as the biggest film ever.
A girl in a red coat in a black-and-white Kraków, and a factory owner typing out names to buy (1993)
Schindler's List — seven Oscars including Best Picture and his first Best Director.
Twenty-four minutes of handheld carnage on Omaha Beach, then a squad sent to find one paratrooper (1998)
Saving Private Ryan — his second Best Director Oscar.
A New Jersey boyhood, a model train crash filmed again and again, and an editing bench that reveals a family secret (2022)
The Fabelmans — his semi-autobiographical film, nominated for seven Academy Awards.
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Cincinnati on 18 December 1946 and raised in New Jersey, Arizona and California; he was rejected by the USC film school
- •The television film Duel (1971), about a driver menaced by a tanker, got him his break
- •He has won two Academy Awards for Best Director, for Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, and a third Oscar as producer of Schindler's List when it won Best Picture
- •He took the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1987 and an honorary KBE in 2001
- •He founded Amblin Entertainment and co-founded DreamWorks in 1994 with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen
- •John Williams has scored almost all his features since The Sugarland Express (1974), including the two-note Jaws theme
- •He took no fee for Schindler's List and used its profits to found the Shoah Foundation in 1994
- •He has been nominated for Best Director nine times, most recently for West Side Story (2021) and The Fabelmans (2022)
- •His UFO film Disclosure Day, with Emily Blunt and Josh O'Connor, opened in June 2026, his first feature since 2022
Drill it — 10 cards
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Sources
- Deadline — Disclosure Day review: Spielberg returns to the skies
- Joseph McBride — Steven Spielberg: A Biography