Steven Spielberg

Abstract

Until the first edition of this book was published in 1997, much about Steven Spielberg's personality and the forces that shaped it had remained enigmatic, in large part because of his tendency to obscure and mythologize his own past. But this full-scale, in-depth biography of Spielberg reveals hidden dimensions of the filmmaker's personality and shows how deeply personal even his most commercial work has been. This new edition adds four chapters to Spielberg's life story, chronicling his extraordinarily active and creative period from 1997 to the present, a period in which he has balanced his executive duties as one of the partners in the film studio DreamWorks SKG with a remarkable string of films as a director. Spielberg's ambitious recent work—including Amistad, Saving Private Ryan, A. I. Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, The Terminal, and Munich—has continually expanded his range both stylistically and in terms of adventurous, often controversial, subject matter. The previous edition of this book brought about a reevaluation of the great filmmaker's life and work by those who viewed him as merely a facile entertainer. This new edition guides readers through the mature artistry of Spielberg's later period, in which he has managed, against considerable odds, to run a successful studio while maintaining and enlarging his high artistic standards as one of America's most thoughtful, sophisticated, and popular filmmakers.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 24 citations exist upstream.