Jubilee of the world's highest-grossing director
Steven Spielberg celebrates his 75th birthday on 18 December.
Steven Allan Spielberg was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Arnold Spielberg, an electrical engineer, and his wife Leah Frances (nee Posner), a pianist. Stephen's parents came from Jewish families which emigrated from Ukraine, the Russian Empire, at the beginning of the 20th century.
Already at an early age, Stephen showed an extraordinary gift for filmmaking combined with entrepreneurship. At the age of 11, using his father's movie camera, he made his first film. Well, a lot of people do that. But Stephen began to sell tickets to watch his film and very soon "recaptured" the $ 50 spent on filming.
At the age of 13-15, Steven Spielberg made several short feature films in the genres of westerns and war films. At the age of 18, thanks to the $ 600 allocated by his father, he shot his first full-length sci-fi film "Firelight".
By his 75th anniversary, Steven Spielberg has 33 full-length feature films in his filmography, of which 9 pictures were included in the Golden Thousand. Thanks to this indicator, Steven Spielberg is included in the list of the 100 greatest directors of world cinema compiled by FilmGourmand.
Even 25 years ago, Roger Ebert, in his congratulatory article on the 50th anniversary of the director, noted that no other director was more successful at the box office, that very few other directors created more films included in various lists of the greatest films. But at the same time, only a few were able to bridge the gap between popularity and success with film critics.
According to Ebert, the greatest authority among American critics, "To make a good movie is very difficult. To make a popular movie is not easy. To make both, time after time, is the holy grail which Hollywood seeks with the same fervor that Indy Jones devoted to the ark of the covenant. Talking to Spielberg over the years, and particularly during a four- hour conversation in the spring of 1996, I got the feeling that his success is based on his ability to stay in touch with the sense of wonder he had as a teenager - about the world, and about movies."
Despite the fact that a quarter of a century has passed since the publication of the cited article, and during this time new directors, new film production technologies have appeared, a generation of moviegoers has changed, etc., etc., Steven Spielberg remains the most box-office successful film director on the planet. The films created by Spielberg, according to the Internet publication "The Numbers" (an analogue of Forbes, but only for cinema), earned more than $ 10.5 billion at the box office.
Steven Spielberg's film-making activity has been awarded with 194 film awards. The most prestigious among them are 2 Academy Awards, 2 Golden Globes, 2 British BAFTA Awards and 4 Italian David di Donatello Awards in the Best Film or Best Director categories, as well as one honorary Oscar, Golden Globe, Cesar, David di Donatello, Tokyo and Venice International Film Festivals.
On the day of the great Master's significant anniversary, I want to remind all fans of his work of the frames from his best films included in the Golden Thousand.
