Age: 79
male
Steven Allan Spielberg KBE (born December 18, 1946) is an American filmmaker. A major figure of the New Hollywood era and pioneer of the modern blockbuster, Spielberg is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema and is the highest-grossing film director of all time. Among other accolades, he has received three Academy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards and three BAFTA Awards, as well as the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1995, an honorary knighthood in 2001, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2006, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2009, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, and the National Medal of Arts in 2023. According to Forbes, he is the wealthiest celebrity. Spielberg was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. He moved to California and studied film in college. After directing several episodes for television, including Night Gallery and Columbo, he directed the television film Duel (1971), which Barry Diller approved. He made his theatrical debut with The Sugarland Express (1974), also beginning his decades-long collaboration with composer John Williams, with whom he has worked for all but five of his theatrical releases. He became a household name with the summer blockbuster Jaws (1975). He continued directing acclaimed escapist box-office hits with Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and the original Indiana Jones trilogy (1981–1989). He also explored drama in The Color Purple (1985) and Empire of the Sun (1987). In 1993, Spielberg directed back-to-back hits with the science fiction thriller Jurassic Park, the highest-grossing film at the time, and the epic historical drama Schindler's List, which has often been ranked among the greatest films ever made. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for the latter as well as for the World War II epic Saving Private Ryan (1998). Spielberg has since directed the science fiction films A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Minority Report (2002), War of the Worlds (2005) and Ready Player One (2018); the historical dramas Amistad (1997), Munich (2005), War Horse (2011), Lincoln (2012), Bridge of Spies (2015) and The Post (2017); the comedies Catch Me If You Can (2002) and The Terminal (2004); the animated film The Adventures of Tintin (2011); the musical West Side Story (2021); and the family drama The Fabelmans (2022). Spielberg co-founded Amblin Entertainment and DreamWorks Pictures, and he has served as a producer for many successful films and television series, among them Poltergeist (1982), Gremlins (1984), Back to the Future (1985), An American Tail (1986), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Animaniacs (1993), Freakazoid! (1995), Twister (1996), Band of Brothers (2001) and Transformers (2007). Several of Spielberg's works are considered among the greatest films in history, and some are among the highest-grossing films of all time. Seven of his films have been inducted into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant". In 2013, Time listed him among the 100 most influential people. In 2023, Spielberg was the recipient of the first-ever Time 100 Impact Award in the US. Description above from the Wikipedia article Steven Spielberg, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Steven Spielberg
Producer
for Producer in Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Suggested by guam2020
In the Sonoran Desert, French scientist, speaker at the Montsoreau conference, Claude Lacombe and his American interpreter, cartographer David Laughlin, along with other government scientific researchers, discover Flight 19, a squadron of Grumman TBM Avengers that went missing more than 30 years earlier. The planes are intact and operational, but there is no sign of the pilots. An old man who witnessed the event claimed "the sun came out at night, and sang to him". At an air traffic control center in Indianapolis, controllers listen as two airline flights narrowly avoid a mid-air collision with an unidentified flying object (UFO), which neither pilot chooses to report, even when invited to do so. In Muncie, Indiana, 3-year-old Barry Guiler is awakened in the night when his toys start operating on their own. Fascinated, he gets out of bed and discovers something or someone (off-screen) in the kitchen. He runs outside, forcing his mother, Jillian, to chase after him. Investigating one of a series of large-scale power outages, Indiana electrical lineman Roy Neary experiences a close encounter with a UFO, when it flies over his truck and lightly burns the side of his face with its bright lights. The UFO, joining a group of three other UFOs, is pursued by Neary and three police cars, but the spacecraft fly off into the night sky. Roy becomes fascinated by UFOs, much to the dismay of his wife, Ronnie. He also becomes increasingly obsessed with subliminal, mental images of a mountain-like shape and begins to make models of it. Jillian also becomes obsessed with sketching a unique-looking mountain. Soon after, she is terrorized in her home by a UFO which descends from the clouds. The presence of the UFO energy field makes every appliance in Jillian's house malfunction and Barry is abducted by unseen beings. Lacombe and Laughlin—along with a group of United Nations experts—continue to investigate increasing UFO activity and strange, related occurrences. Witnesses in Dharamshala, India report that the UFOs make distinctive sounds: a five-tone musical phrase (soft D', E', C', soft C, G) in a major scale. Scientists broadcast the phrase to outer space, but are mystified by the response: a seemingly meaningless series of numbers (104 44 30 40 36 10) repeated over and over until Laughlin, with his background in cartography, recognizes it as a set of geographical coordinates, which point to Devils Tower near Moorcroft, Wyoming. Lacombe and the U.S. military converge on Wyoming. The United States Army evacuates the area, planting false reports in the media that a train wreck has spilled a toxic nerve gas, all the while preparing a secret landing zone for the UFOs and their occupants. Meanwhile, Roy's increasingly erratic behavior causes Ronnie to become upset and leave him, taking their three children with her. When a despairing Roy inadvertently sees a television news program about the train wreck near Devils Tower, he realizes the mental image of a mountain plaguing him is real. Jillian sees the same broadcast, and she and Roy, as well as others with similar visions and experiences, travel to the site in spite of the public warnings about nerve gas. While most of the civilians who are drawn to the site are apprehended by the Army, Roy and Jillian persist and make it to their secret landing zone just as dozens of UFOs gradually appear in the night sky, while the government specialists at the site begin to try to communicate with the UFOs by use of light and sound on a large electrical billboard controlled by a multiple-manual synthesizer. Following this, an enormous mother ship lands at the site. After using light and sound to teach the specialists the aliens' basic vocabulary, it releases the missing pilots from Flight 19 and over a dozen other long-missing adults, children, even a few small animals, all from different past eras and all of whom have not aged since their abductions. Barry is also returned and reunited with a relieved Jillian. The government officials decide to include Roy in a group of people whom they have selected to be potential visitors to the mothership, and hastily prepare him. As the aliens finally emerge from the mothership, they select Roy to join them on their travels. As Roy enters the mothership, one of the aliens pauses for a few moments with the humans. Lacombe uses Curwen hand signs that correspond to the five-note alien tonal phrase. The alien replies with the same gestures, smiles, and returns to its ship, which ascends into space, as Barry bids Roy goodbye.
