Steven Spielberg (Text Only)
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- 6,99 €
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- 6,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
First published in 1996 and now available as an ebook. Please note that this edition does not include illustrations.
Steven Spielberg dominated the cinema of the nineties. He is one of the screen's greatest enchanters, with a spellbinding capacity – and a box-office record – matched by very few.
His power now exceeds that of the greatest moguls of Hollywood's golden era, and films like 'Jaws, ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind' and 'Jurassic Park' have been seen by billions around the world, and have changed forever the way movies are made. How was it that this 'movie brat', from an unhappy and rootless adolescence on the fringes of American society, became one of the most formidable players on the global entertainment scene?.
From 'Duel', which suggested the innate 'film sense' Spielberg would bring to movie-making, to the Oscar-winning 'Schindler's List 'and beyond…
About the author
John Baxter is a film critic, novelist, biographer and broadcaster, whose books on the cinema include ‘The Hollywood Exiles’, ‘The Cinema of John Ford’, and highly praised biographies of Ken Russell, Fellini, Bunuel, ‘Steven Spielberg’ and ‘Stanley Kubrick’. His biography of ‘Woody Allen’ was published by HarperCollins in November 1998.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Prolific film biographer and historian Baxter (Fellini) bases this unauthorized biography of the superstar filmmaker largely on press accounts and other people's interviews. This isn't a major handicap, for, he says, Spielberg is "almost obsessive about revealing himself to the public" in interviews and his films. So while there are no startling revelations in this book, it remains a comprehensive account of Spielberg's well-known story: his lonely, fatherless suburban childhood; his early career directing TV; his breathtaking arrival on the national scene with features like The Sugarland Express and Jaws; his marriages to Amy Irving and Kate Capshaw; his ascension from hot young director to "icon of the mass market." This is a critical biography, informed by the author's wide knowledge of the history of film as an art and a business. Spielberg is depicted as a brilliant craftsman with acute commercial instincts and as a complicated man who is never one to put friendship before career. Under Baxter's gimlet-eyed gaze, the young hustler who bluffed his way on to the Universal lot with an empty briefcase becomes the sometimes heedlessly powerful business titan. Baxter's judgments of Spielberg's films, especially his "serious films" like The Color Purple and Schindler's List, are shrewd and on target, crediting their technical brilliance while casting a bright light on Spielberg's mixed motives for making them and on the sensibility that defines his films, which, Baxter makes clear, is rooted in comic books and old Hollywood adventure stories. This volume is liable to be the definitive account of Spielberg for some time, with its brisk pace and its often sardonic take on a very talented boy wonder who is-still-growing up in public. Photos.
