Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #865130 in Books
• Published on: 1999-05-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

Amazon.com Review
Writing a biography is tough enough when the subject is dead and the biographer must rely on a paper trail and recollections of contemporaries to relate the essence of the man or woman's life. When the subject still lives--and especially when he is as powerful as Steven Spielberg--a whole new set of problems emerge. For one thing, it's difficult to find anyone willing to criticize a man who pulls as many strings in the film industry as Spielberg; for another, how does one evaluate a career that is still in progress? If the definitive Spielberg biography cannot yet be written, Joseph McBride's Steven Spielberg: A Biography will suffice in the interim. Though certainly affected by the aforementioned constraints, McBride still creates an impressive portrait of the man behind Schindler's List, E.T., Jurassic Park, and many, many more.

McBride is especially effective at limning the contours of Spielberg's childhood. Born in 1946 to Arnold and Leah Spielberg, the young Steven endured both frequent moves and his parents' unhappy domestic life. These factors, combined with the anti-Semitism he encountered as a teenager, drove the introverted Spielberg to seek approval through filmmaking. In addition to exploring Spielberg's private life, McBride offers some perceptive criticism of his work. Anyone interested in the film industry and Spielberg's place in it will find Joseph McBride's Steven Spielberg a valuable resource.

From Library Journal
This is the first in-depth biography of the film director whose works?E.T., Jaws, Jurassic Park, and Schindler's List among them?need no introduction to anyone with the slightest awareness of popular culture. Veteran Hollywood observer McBride (Frank Capra, LJ 5/1/91) has interviewed hundreds of the subject's colleagues, relatives, and friends, though Spielberg and most of his inner circle declined to cooperate. McBride attempts to correct what he sees as a strong bias among many film critics against Spielberg as a "child-man...incapable of dealing with the darker side of life." This leads to more analysis and defense of Spielberg's work than seems necessary, but, overall, this is a solid book that should be in every collection.?Thomas J. Wiener, "Satellite DIRECT"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
McBride's biography of the most successful filmmaker of all time is not as revelatory as his shocking Frank Capra (1992), because, unlike Capra, whose personal racism and anti-Semitism belied his films' sanguinity, Spielberg seems as straightforward, uncomplicated, and benign as his movies. By all accounts, from an early age Spielberg has been devoted to nearly nothing but filmmaking--which unfortunately makes for a rather dull biography. Still, drawing on interviews with the director-producer's family and friends, McBride gamely recounts the suburban childhood, including the feature-length film he directed while a high-school junior, that has informed Spielberg's work. ... Spielberg's 20 years of box-office triumph have made him overdue for the substantive biography that McBride delivers. Gordon Flagg

Customer Reviews

Doesn't do justice to its impressive research
I want to give this book 4 stars, but I just can't bring myself to do it. This book is certainly an impressive scholarly work - well researched, reasonably well referenced, and when there is analysis offered, it is thorough and insightful.

Unfortunately, the analysis is also my major complaint with the book. McBride seems to haphazardly pick pictures to analyse, while ignoring others. What possessed him to give devote more pages to 1941 than all the Indiana Jones movies combined? Further, he has a tendency to focus too much on the story of the movie - I submit that most people reading this book have seen these movies and can draw their own conclusions about the significance of the story. We'd rather hear about how they were made, etc. That is, more facts and less analysis would would make this a better book.

The first half of the book is very good, because the author takes his time explaining family connections, his amateur films, etc. It is a little repetitive (how often does McBride feel he has to tell us that Spielberg felt like an outsider growing up?), but the detail and narrative flow are very good, telling us a lot about the man behind the movies. Especially interesting is the information on S's TV work.

The second half of the book rapidly degenerates into a shallow overview of things we already know about Spielberg, and is very disappointing. It's almost like McBride had a page limit, and after spending so much time on S's childhood, he had to rush through the remaining material, save for sections on Schindler's List and Colour Purple (both deserving movies, of course). Even Jurassic Park is little more than a sideshow, wherein McBride denegrates Crichton's novel (a fate that Peter Benchley's Jaws seems to avoid, even though in my opinion JP is a work far superior to Jaws) and comments on how Spielberg worked on the effects in Poland while shooting Schindler's List. Even his fine analytical powers seem to break down. What else could possess him to comment that Raider of the Lost ark is racist and "a soulless and impersonal film", while praising Last Crusade as "a graceful piece of popular filmaking...gratifyingly free of racist overtones that blighted the two previous films." Huh? Has McBride actually watched these three movies together? Or does he really think it's okay to portray stereotyped Arabs, but not stereotyped Indians or Nepalese?

At any rate, this is an important work, recommended for anyone that wants to learn more about the early life and works of Spielberg. But I would suggest putting it down without reading the last 5 chapters.

So far, the definitive account of Spielberg's life.
I've now read about five or six biographies of Steven Spielberg and all vary in depth and quality. However Joseph McBride book can only be described as THE most in-depth account of Spielberg's fascinating life. You simply won't read a more well-researched account of Spielberg's life unless the great man writes his autobiography. Don't be put off by the fact that Spielberg didn't co-operate with this book, virtually everyone else did including, most surprisingly, his father. A terrific read from start to finish.

Being Steven Spielbeg....
This book taps into the mind of the master himself, Steven Spielberg. The genious that brought us great movies like E.T. and Jaws was actually a quite interesting kid. He was a "nerd" so he called himself. But in reality, Steven Spielberg was always a genious. A control freak. He is a role model for any future film maker.