THE MAN WHO TAUGHT THE WORLD TO FEEL

Table of Contents

STEVEN SPIELBERG

There is a before and after in the history of popular cinema, and the dividing line is the summer of 1975. Before Jaws, movies were released quietly, seasonally, into a world that did not yet know what a blockbuster was. After it, Hollywood, and the entire global entertainment industry was organised around a single, Spielberg-shaped idea, that a film could be an event, a cultural convulsion, something you had to see.

Spielberg was born in Cincinnati in 1946, he was the restless, slightly awkward son of a computer engineer and a concert pianist. He was making 8 minutes films at twelve, charging neighbourhood kids a quarter to watch them in the family garage. By eighteen he was hanging around Universal Studios, teaching himself the grammar of professional filmmaking by watching it happen.

He never attended film school. He was admitted to Cal State Long Beach for English, dropped in and out, and eventually received an honorary degree from USC decades later, after he had already changed the world. The standard educational pipeline could not contain what he was doing. He learned by doing, obsessively, restlessly, in the dark.

Before 1975, Hollywood's prestige films opened in a handful of cities and expanded slowly, the way serious literature worked. Jaws opened simultaneously in over 400 theatres, backed by a saturated television advertisement campaign, a strategy that had never been tried at scale. It became the highest-grossing film of all time overnight, and it did not stay there long only because two years later, George Lucas, a filmmaker Spielberg had encouraged and collaborated with, released Star Wars.

Together, they had not merely made popular films. They had invented the modern entertainment economy, the wide release, the merchandising apparatus, the franchise machine, the summer movie season. Every Marvel film, every billion-dollar opening weekend, every piece of movie merchandise ever sold, all of it flows directly from that summer.

In 1993, Spielberg did something nobody in Hollywood thought was ready, he put fully digital, photo-realistic animals on screen in Jurassic Park. The film's visual effects team at Industrial Light and Magic, a company Spielberg's friend George Lucas had founded, produced just a few minutes of Computer Generated dinosaur footage; those minutes changed the film industry permanently.

Every computer-generated image you have seen in a film since, every superhero, every digital world, every creature descends from the technical and creative leap Spielberg authorised in 1993. He did not invent CGI, but he was the first director willing to bet a major film on it, and he won.

In a world of fragmented media, personalised feeds, and solitary screens, what Spielberg built and what he still practises is a defence of the communal. His films argue, by their very existence, that stories told at scale still matter; that spectacle and seriousness can coexist; that the dark room, the silver screen; and the person sitting next to you whom you don't know is all worth it in the end.

365 men who changed the world.

Kamikun John, Author 366 days of wisdom.