Age: 79
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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.
Francis, an intelligent and cynical cat, is moved to a gloomy, dilapidated house with his owner Gustav Löbel, an archaeologist and erotic novelist. During Francis' exploratory tour of the house, he discovers a chemical odor emanating from the topmost floor, as well as the fresh corpse of a cat who had been killed by a targeted bite. At the scene of this murder, Francis meets and befriends Bluebeard, a half-blinded, foul-mouthed Manx. Soon, Francis discovers another body and the fact that his house's top floor is the meeting site of a sect of cats led by Joker; the members of the sect worship an entity named Claudandus and perform ritualistic suicide by throwing themselves in an electric current. When Francis' cover is blown, he is chased through the city's rooftops. He escapes through a skylight and meets a blind cat named Felicity, who informs Francis that Claudandus was a cat who lived in their area years ago, and was tortured relentlessly by humans. He is hailed as a savior among the local cats, who to this day pray for him. Felicity also reveals that the victims of the murders have consistently been sexually-excited male cats who have conversed with an urgent, convicted and persuasive voice they were all acquainted with. The next day, Bluebeard takes Francis to Pascal, an elderly and tech-savvy cat who has taken to meticulously maintaining a list of feline deaths in the area, through which Francis learns that Felicity is the latest victim. That night, Francis is haunted by a nightmare in which Gregor Mendel leaves him with riddles. During a rodent hunt, Francis discovers a video recording that documents the top floor's previous use as an experimental laboratory that was devoted to the research and development of a tissue adhesive that would close wounds in an instant. The test subjects largely consisted of stray cats. However, the serums usually failed, causing the animals to suffer painful deaths. The one cat who survived the experiments was christened by the lab's technicians as "Claudandus", Latin for "He who should or must be sealed". The video recording ends with the lead researcher, Professor Julius Preterius, attempted to release Claudandus from his cage, believing to be able to speak to him. The murders seem to point to and are taken credit by a large and aggressive neighborhood cat named Kong. However, while escaping Kong and his goons, Francis comes across the disemboweled remains of a female pregnant cat named Solitaire. Kong, who had mated with Solitaire, is devastated over her and his unborn kittens' deaths, leaving the trail cold. Francis has another dream in which a brightly colored cat who calls himself "Felidae" persuades Francis to join him on a long, wonderful journey. Francis wakes to the calls of a female cat in heat, whose breed he doesn't recognize. She replies to the question of her breed with a cryptic answer, saying that it is "old and new". The query of her name is similarly stonewalled, so Francis unquestionably complies to the amorous female's insistence that they copulate. An exhausted Francis tells Bluebeard of the she-cat he met, and how she looked different from them. Bluebeard reveals awareness of her breed, and states that they are in many ways different from them. Not only have they been recently been taken in by humans as household pets (to which Bluebeard claims to be a death wish), but for some reason, they lack the same healthy trend to domestication found in most cats. This makes them more feral and more solitary, to which Bluebeard considers makes them "dangerous". Francis gradually traces the neighborhood cats who descended from the strays involved in the experiments and is confronted by Pascal, who reveals himself as Claudandus. He reveals that he killed Professor Preterius shortly after he released him from his cage and was taken by one of the researchers, during this time he learned about the Mendel Genetical Theory and plans to create a breed of genetically engineered cats to wipe out humanity. The murdered cats, now including Joker, were deemed unworthy of breeding with the pure females that Claudandus had engineered. An additional obstacle in Claudandus' plot is the fact that he is terminally ill with stomach cancer. Although Claudandus deems Francis an ideal successor, Francis defies Claudandus' ambition and attempts to delete the data that Claudandus had gathered. The ensuing fight between the two results in a fire, where Francis eventually disembowels and kills Claudandus and flees the scene with an injured Bluebeard. Following these events, Francis is reunited with Nhozemphtekh and they walk home.
