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I FIRST BECAME AWARE of Steven Spielberg's prodigious filmmaking gifts in 1972, when I saw his TVmovie Something Evil.In the twenty years that followed, I watched with bemusement as his enormous popularity left him largely without honor from his Hollywood colleagues and the criticalcommunity. As early as 1982, when E.T. appeared, I began thinking, Here is a good story for a biographer. The disdain of the self-styled intellectual elite for this great popular artist reminded me of the condescension with which such Golden Age directors as Hitchcock, Hawks, and Capra were treated in the prime of their careers. I reluctantly put aside the notion of a Spielberg biography at the time, realizing that it was a bit premature (he was, after all, only thirty-five), but I waited in vain during the intervening years to read a serious, in-depth biography, or even a critical study with any insight or originality.It seemed thatfirst-rate writers on film and academic scholars were shunning Spielberg as if he were unworthy of sustained attention. Ironically, another factor in this undervaluation of Spielberg has been his desire to control the telling of his own life story. Even writers who have approached him with the proposal of an authorized biography or an authorized book about his films have been discouraged; he was said to be planning to write his autobiography at some time in the future. Evidently the idea of writing an unauthorized biography of Hollywood's most powerful figure was out of the question for many writers. I am constantly surprised by how many people, including some in the literary world, react with automatic suspicion when they hear the phrase "unauthorized biography," as if there were something inherently dubious about a book not having the subject's seal of approval. On the contrary, what should arouse the reader's suspicions are the inevitable constraints placed on an author's integrity by the decision to allow his subject to authorize and thereby to control the writing of the book. By talking endlessly about his life in press and television interviews to promote his movies, Spielberg already has given us an autobiography of sorts, albeit a scattered, fragmentary, and sometimes misleading one; what largely has been missing from the picture is an independent examination of his character, seen not simply through his eyes alone but also through the perspectives of the people who have known and worked with him throughout hislifetime. What finally convinced me in 1993 to write this book was the news that Spielberg finallyhad decided to make Schindler's List. Once he mustered the courage to confront the Holocaust and his own Jewish heritage, the conflictingimpulses of his life and work began to resolve themselves in a way that provided dramaticshape and resolution for a biography, even if the subject still was only a middle-aged man with (one hopes) another twenty or thirtyyears of productivity ahead of him. There are major advantages in writing a biography when the subject is in the prime of his life. The subject and his surroundings have a vital immediacy, and if the benefit of distant perspective is somewhat lacking, it is not entirely absent. Spielberg has been makingfilms,as boy and man, for forty years now, and if he were to stop tomorrow, his career would stand as one of the most important in the history of film. But the foremost advantage for a biographer A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S of the fifty-year-old Steven Spielberg is being able to interview the people who knew him during his formative years—his family, friends, and neighbors, his playmates, classmates , and teachers, the people who shaped him into the man he would become—and the opportunity to hear their accounts when their memories still are relatively fresh. Even more than for most human beings, it is true of Spielberg what Wordsworth wrote, that "The Child is father of the Man."Following the trail of Spielberg's unconventional childhood from Cincinnati to Haddon Township to Phoenix to Saratoga was a fascinating and revelatory experience; very few of the scores of people I interviewed from those years had ever before talked about him to a writer. In all, I interviewed 327 people for this book, including many of Spielberg's Hollywood coworkers, friends, and colleagues (see the list in the following section). Spielberg himself declined to be interviewed. During my years as a reporter...

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