Word: steven
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Steven Spielberg did grow up. He became rich and famous as the director who enjoyed playing with sharks, spacemen and snakes-and turning these fearsome critters into the stuff of blockbusters. Jaws, which Spielberg and Producer Richard Zanuck had feared might prove to be "a shark with turkey feathers," terrified moviegoers to the tune of $410 million. Close Encounters of the Third Kind built a sense of biblical awe around man's first meeting with beings from outer space and put another $250 million into the till. Last year Raiders of the Lost Ark sent Saturday-matinee chills down...
...told: inside Spielberg, the machine that built the machines, was little Steven and his suburban child's pulsing heart. Look into the mouth of Jaws, and you will find the infant fear of things that go chomp in the night. Search the skies for a Close Encounter, and you can chart a child's hope that whoever is out there will be just like him: small and smooth and smart and cuddly. Track the Lost Ark's Raiders, and you will discover the thrill of escape that whets the imagination of every fifth-grade Indiana Jones...
...working title for E.T. was A Boy's Life. And as surely as any work of science fiction can be its author's autobiography, the boy here is Steven Spielberg. His parents seeded the mix of science and art that would surface in Spielberg's films: his father Arnold was a computer engineer, his mother Leah a former classical pianist. (They were divorced when Steven was 17.) In many ways, he was a typical boy. He loved animals, especially cocker spaniels-and parakeets, which he kept in his bedroom, flying free. "There would be birds flying around...
...house he had to share with three mischievous younger sisters, Steven would take the standard boy's revenge: lock them in the closet and then throw in the thing they feared most. "He used to scare the hell out of them," Leah says. "When they were going to sleep, he would creep under their window and whisper, 'I'm the moon!' " But the fraternal bogeyman was also a small festival of phobias. "My biggest fear was a clown doll," he says. "Also the tree I could see outside my room. Also anything that might be under...
...might have hatched that plot in the nursery, for by then Steven had discovered his life's passion. Leah recalls, "One day Arnold bought a movie camera and started taking pictures of Steven. He was still a baby, but he got up and walked straight for the camera." At twelve, he got his own movie camera, an inexpensive Kodak, and would spend hours alone writing scripts, drawing shots on sheets of paper that piled up in his room, making movies. He would film head-on crashes of his Lionel trains. He would go on camping trips with his family...