Famous Creative Thinkers
PHL/458

Famous Creative Thinkers Steven Spielberg is one of the most influential and successful director, producer, innovator and writer of film in the 20th and, so far, the 21st centuries with countless big-grossing, critically acclaimed credits to his name. His films have touched on primeval fears with the film Jaws (1975) or looked at the marvels of this world and beyond with childlike wonder in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and ET (1982). Other highlights of his career include the literary adaptations, The Color Purple (1985) and Empire of the Sun (1987), adventure films Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), featuring the adventures of his daredevil hero, Indiana Jones. He tackled fantasy in versions of Peter Pan, Hook (1991), Jurassic Park (1993), and its sequel The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) ("Biography.com", 2014). Spielberg’s Jewish upbringing and his lifelong interest in WW II has made for some impressive historical films such as the Holocaust drama Schindler's List (1993) about a businessman who helps save Jews from the Nazis. The highly praised film won seven Academy Awards, including Spielberg’s first win as Best Director. In 1998 his classic film of World War II as seen through the perspective of American soldiers in Europe, Saving Private Ryan (1998), earned him another Academy Award for Best Director. Other successful films, most notably Back to the Future (1985) and its two sequels, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), were produced by Amblin Entertainment, his first film company which was founded in 1982 ("Biography.com", 2014).
He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1946 to Jewish parents and raised within the tradition, affecting his later films. His mother Leah studied at the Cincinnati Conservatory of music and was considered a talented pianist. She was undoubtedly responsible for fueling Spielberg’s love of the arts (Hook, 2010). The biography by author Hook (2010) stated “If I weren’t a filmmaker I’d probably be in music. I’d play piano or I’d compose.” (p. 15). As Spielberg progressed as a filmmaker, he saw his primary problem as being able to bring to the big screen, as he had imagined, all the 1950’s and 1960’s television programs, science fiction and fantasy films, science fiction pulp magazines, cartoons, and comic books that he grew up on and had become an integral part of his imagination.
It is no surprise that Spielberg, who was always adept at special effects, opted to solve the problem with, not only first rate storytelling, but the latest cutting edge special effects technology available in filmmaking. In the decade after Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and before the 1997 release of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and fellow baby boomer and future collaborator George Lucas’ release of Star Wars (1977), as Gordon (2008) stated,“ sparked a renaissance in American science fiction and fantasy film” (p. 2), between the years 1968 and 1977, American science fiction films were, Gordon (2008) stated, “cool and detached in their vision, or cautionary and pessimistic in their tone” (p. 2).
I think if Steven Spielberg should have done anything different, it would only be in some of the sequels he made, however that is in hind sight. I believe he was and is a true creative thinker and artistic visionary.

References Hook, S. V. (2010). Steven Spielberg groundbreaking director. Edina, Minnesota: ABDO Group. Biography.com. (2014). Retrieved from http://www.biography.com/people/steven-spielberg-9490621#awesm=~oGWmIhNPjYLZJC Gordon, A. M. (2008). Empire of dreams: The Science fiction and fantasy films of Steven Spielberg. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.