(2)Discusses the personal life and professional career of successful filmmaker, Steven Spielberg.
(6)Steven Spielberg has become a brand name and a force that extends far beyond the movie screen. Phrases like "phone home" and the music score from Jaws are now part of our cultural script, appearing in commercials, comedy routines, and common conversation.
Yet few scholars have devoted time to studying Spielberg's vast output of popular films despite the director's financial and aesthetic achievements. Spanning twenty-five years of Spielberg's career, Steven Spielberg: Interviews explores the issues, the themes, and the financial considerations surrounding his work. The blockbuster creator of E.T., Jaws, and Schindler's List talks about dreams and the almighty dollar.
"I'm not really interested in making money," he says. "That's always come as the result of success, but it's not been my goal, and I've had a tough time proving that to people."
Ranging from Spielberg's twenties to his mid-fifties, the interviews chart his evolution from a brash young filmmaker trying to make his way in Hollywood, to his spectacular blockbuster triumphs, to his maturation as a director seeking to inspire the imagination with meaningful subjects.
The Steven Spielberg who emerges in these talks is a complex mix of businessman and artist, of arrogance and insecurity, of shallowness and substance. Often interviewers will uncover the director's human side, noting how changes in Spielberg's personal life -- marriage, divorce, fatherhood, remarriage -- affect his movies. But always the interviewers find keys to the story-telling and filmmaking talent that have made Spielberg's characters and themes shape our times and inhabit our dreams.
"Every time I go to a movie, it's magic, no matter what the movie's about," he says. "Whether you watch eight hours of Shoah or whether it's Ghostbusters, when the lights go down in the theater and the movie fades in, it's magic."
Lester D. Friedman teaches medical humanities and bioethics at Upstate Medical University and cinema studies in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University. Brent Notbohm of Spring Green, Wisconsin, is a freelance instructor of film production and media studies. He has written and directed several films and videos independently and as a graduate student at Syracuse University's College of Visual and Performing Arts.
Has any film director had a greater impact on popular culture than Steven Spielberg? Whether filming Holocaust heroes and villains, soldiers, dinosaurs, extraterrestrials, or explorers in search of the Holy Grail, Spielberg has given filmgoers some of the most memorable characters and wrenching moments in the history of cinema. Whatever his subject -- war, cloning, slavery, terrorism, or adventure -- all of Spielberg's films have one aspect in common: a unique view of the moral fabric of humanity. Dean A. Kowalski's Steven Spielberg and Philosophy is like a remarkable conversation after a night at the movie theater, offering new insights and unexpected observations about the director's most admired films. Some of the nation's most respected philosophers investigate Spielberg's art, asking fundamental questions about the nature of humanity, cinema, and Spielberg's expression of his chosen themes. Applying various philosophical principles to the movies, the book explores such topics as the moral demands of parenthood in War of the Worlds; the ultimate unknowability of the "other" in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Schindler's List; the relationship between nature and morality in Jurassic Park; the notion of consciousness in A.I.: Artificial Intelligence; issues of war theory and ethics in Munich; and the foundation of human rights in Amistad. Impressive in scope, this volume illustrates the philosophical tenets of a wide variety of thinkers from Plato to Aquinas, Locke, and Levinas. Contributors introduce readers to philosophy while simultaneously providing deeper insight into Spielberg's approach to filmmaking. The essays consider Spielberg's movies using key philosophical cornerstones: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, axiology, aesthetics, and political philosophy, among others. At the same time, Steven Spielberg and Philosophy is accessible to those new to philosophy, using the philosophical platform to ponder larger issues embedded in film and asking fundamental questions about the nature of cinema and how meanings are negotiated. The authors contend that movies do not present philosophy -- rather philosophy is something viewers do while watching and thinking about films. Using Spielberg's films as a platform for discussing these concepts, the authors contemplate questions that genuinely surprise the reader, offering penetrating insights that will be welcomed by film critics, philosophers, and fans alike.
(16)In this full-scale, in-depth biography of Steven Spielberg, Joseph McBride reveals hidden dimensions of the filmmaker's personality and shows how deeply personal even his most commercial work has been. With the same breadth of research and clarity of insight that characterized his acclaimed biography of Frank Capra, McBride has gone in search of the true Steven Spielberg, interviewing more than 325 of the director's friends and associates, many of whom had never spoken about him before. Drawing a vivid and highly detailed portrait of Spielberg's extraordinary childhood and his early amateur filmmaking, McBride uncovers the cultural and personal influences that came together to form Spielberg's artistic personality. McBride traces Spielberg's evolution from an introverted social outcast into the precocious talent who won a contract with Universal at age twenty-one. "Steven Spielberg: A Biography" explains how Spielberg's ambivalent attitude toward his Jewish heritage and painful experiences with anti-Semitism during adolescence turned him toward popular filmmaking by impelling him to seek approval from the widest possible audience. Perceptively analyzing Spielberg's work, McBride shows how the filmmaker transformed his own fears and obsessions into films that have entertained millions of people throughout the world. Eventually, Spielberg's artistic ambitions became unmistakable in such powerful but uneven films as "The Color Purple" and "Empire of the Sun," until finally, with "Schindler's List," Spielberg's emotional candor and courage yielded what is widely acknowledged as a cinematic masterpiece.
