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S E E M T E E M M O G U L A N D D I R E C T O R T U R N I N G their new multimedia company, DreamWorks SKG, from a dream into a reality proved far more difficult than Steven Spielberg and his partners imagined. The grand vision Spielberg laid out in 1994 of "a place driven by ideas and the people who have them," an innovative twenty-first-centurystudio encompassing all forms of moving imagery on a high-tech, cutting-edge "campus," collided with some of the oldest obstacles in the business. Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen found their goal of total independence from the Hollywood system frustratingly elusive, but as Spielberg juggled his responsibilities as a mogul with his primary career as a director over the following years, he still managed to maintain a remarkable degree of filmmaking autonomy. Did the myriad problems of running a studio, and the growing complications of life as a billionaire celebrity, impact the quality of his work as a director ? If so, the effect, paradoxically enough, seemed largely positive. Spielberg's penchant for multitasking, which he finds vital to keeping himself creatively stimulated, stood him in good stead as he took on responsibilities that would give most people vertigo. "He is a workaholic and likes to do many things at the same time," Geffen has said of him. "I have multitasked my whole life," Spielberg told Variety in 2009- "I think the past has shown that I can direct a picture and still supervise a robust slate of development and production with 450 S T E V E N S P I E L B E R G my partners." He added that his busy home life as the father of seven children "shapes your work ethic and arranges your priorities, and there is no better training than that." And he said on another occasion, "I've been doing this long enough to know how I work best. When I focus on one project to the exclusion of all else, I lose my objectivity. . . . I fall in love with every scene that I shoot. I think something is wonderful when it isn't." His antidote for monomania is to read scripts for other projects and help colleagues with their films and TV shows. Running a studio may be an extreme form of multitasking —very few other filmmakers have tried to do so, and even the great Ernst Lubitsch couldn't make a go of it in the 1930s—but Spielberg thrives on what most people would consider chaos. He took a three-year hiatus from directing to concentrate on building up DreamWorks, which proved to be one of the busiest periods of his life, but one that made him anxious over his new responsibilities and the resulting distraction from his major focus as a filmmaker. After a somewhat bumpy return to his craft in 1997, he showed a new rush of creative energy that he managed to sustain over the following decade and beyond. He continually explored fresh artistic terrain as a director in one of the most creatively fecund, versatile, and adventurous periods in his career. In the process, he made a series of films in various genres reflecting and examining the traumatic effects of the September 11, 2001, attacks and the repression of civil liberties in the United States during the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney regime. Those films, which address contemporary issues either directly or obliquely, include Minority Report, The Terminal, War of the Worlds, and Munich. No other major American artist confronted the key events of the first decade of the century with such sustained and ambitious treatment. In those films as well as in such unjustly maligned works as Amistad and A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Spielberg put his reputation on the line time and again by taking artistic risks and defying predictable attacks to make highly personal and passionate films. He said in 2002: "Right now in my life I'm in a period where I'm experimenting, and I'm trying things that challenge me. And as I challenge myself, I in turn challenge the audience. And now I feel like I'm just striking out in all directions trying to find myself, trying to discover myself in my mid-fifties. Which is why I think films like A.I. and Minority Report are a little bit experimental for me." Spielberg's willingness to risk his...

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