For more than four decades, Steven Spielberg has created inspiring, exciting and unforgettable movie magic. Jaws, E.T., the Indiana Jones series, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan and War Horse some of the highest-grossing, most captivating and enduring films of all time – contemporary classics that indelibly remain part of our lives.

Richard Schickel provides unique insight on every one of Spielberg’s twenty-eight major movies. Featuring many first-person observations drawn from Schickel’s interviews, as well as a personal foreword by the director himself, this is an insider’s perspective on Spielberg’s legendary achievements.

Steven Spielberg’s own story is itself the stuff of dreams. In 1959, he made a mini-movie to earn his Boy Scout photography merit badge. By the time he was a teenager he was charging his friends admission to his home movies and won his first prize at the age of thirteen for a short war film. Soon he took to wandering the lot at Universal Studios, hoping not to get caught, and eventually was taken on there as an intern. The rest, as they say, is history.

Richard Schickel, a film critic for Life magazine and Time magazine for forty-three years, is the author, co-author or editor of thirty-six books and the writer-director-producer of a similar number of television documentaries.
Among his best known books are Elia Kazan: A Biography, D.W. Griffith: An American Life, The Disney Version, Brando: A Life in Our Times, Clint: A Retrospective, his memoir, Good Morning Mr. Zip Zip Zip and, most recently, Conversations with Scorsese.
His films include You Must Remember This, the epic five-hour history of Warner Bros. Studio, Charlie: The Art and Life of Charles Chaplin, a reconstruction of Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One and, in 2010, The Eastwood Factor, a documentary biography of Clint Eastwood. Central to his filmography are twenty other profiles of major American directors, beginning with Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and Elia Kazan, and including, more recently, Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. Taken together, these films constitute an unprecedented history of film authorship for which he has won many prestigious awards.