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S E Y E M BIG BREAK MY FIRST LOVE, MY MAIN OBJECTIVE IN LIFE, IS MAKING MOVIES. THAT'S MY WHOLE LIFE. EVERYTHING ELSE is SECONDARY. RIGHT NOW I NEED BOTH FILM EXPERIENCE AND EDUCATION . AND I'M GETTING BOTH. — S T E V E N S P I E L B E R G , 1 9 6 7 A L T H O u G H he often has been described as part of "The Film School Generation," Spielberg never attended film school. Unlike such contemporaries as George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Brian De Palma, who learned their craft at prestigious film schools in the 1960s, Spielberg remained essentially an autodidact. He took the few rudimentary film and television courses then available at California State College at Long Beach, but as he had done from his boyhood beginnings as a maker of 8mm films, Spielberg followed his own eccentric path to a professional directing career. Universal Studios, in effect, was Spielberg's film school. But itwas atraining ground much different from the film schools of USC, UCLA, and New York University, giving him an education that, paradoxically, was both more personal and more conventional than he would have received in an academic environment. Spielberg devised what amounted to his own private tutorial program at Universal, immersing himself in the aspects of filmmaking he found most crucialto his development, both as an observer and, later, as a TV director. Universalhad as manyas twenty-two series in production duringthat period, a phenomenal amount of activity, enough to give even a youngster a chance to direct—if that youngster was as promising as Steven Spielberg. " A H E L L OF A 1 3 6 S T E V E N S P I E L B E R G Unusual though Spielberg's apprenticeship was in the Hollywood of the 1960s, it resembled the kind of training he might have received if he had worked his way up through the studio system in the 1930s. Universal was the one studio in the late sixties that still functioned like a studio factory from the "Golden Age" of Hollywood. Both in its production methods and in its choice of material,Universaltended to be a conservative place,institutionally resistant to the cultural and political upheavals that were tearing the country apart. Spielberg's solid grounding in the classical studio system set him apart from most of his contemporaries. While other young filmmakers were trying to change the system, Spielberg was learning to work within it. Spielberg's early years at Universal did much to shape his distinctive personality as a filmmaker, not only by honing his organizational skills and technical expertise , but also by strengthening his instinctiveaffinity for popular filmmaking. A 1968 Time magazine article on "The Student Movie Makers" observed that students all over the country were "turning to films as a form of artistic expression. . . . The reason for this celluloid explosion is the widespread conviction among young people that film is the most vital modern art form. Jean Cocteau believed that movies could never become a true art until the materials to make them were as inexpensive as pencil and paper. The era he predicted is rapidly arriving." Spielberg began making films earlier than any of the other famous directors who would emerge from his generation. But he was so far out of the trendy film school loop that he was not mentioned in the otherwise remarkably prescient article, which highlighted the student work of Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas, and John Milius. At the time "The Film School Generation" came to Hollywood, generations of nepotism had made the studios terminallyinbred and unwelcoming to newcomers. The average age of the Hollywood labor force wasfifty-five. There was no organized apprenticeship program to train their replacements in an industry that appeared moribund. The studio system, long under siege from television, falling box-office receipts, and skyrocketing costs, was in a state of impending collapse. The movies Hollywood made in the late sixties tended to be bloated, soulless, and increasingly out of step with the cultural and political views of youthful moviegoers. The future seemed daunting for the determined young movie fanatics who came of age in the sixties and for whom film historians Michael Pye and Lynda Myles coined the phrase "The Movie Brats." Spielberg vividly remembers how he and such other "selfstarters " as Lucas and Scorsese "had to chisel and dynamite their way into a profession that really never looked...

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