Now well into his fifth decade as a film director, Steven Spielberg has established himself as the world’s most popular and financially successful feature filmmaker and various box office statistics illustrate this dominance. Six of the films he has directed feature in the all-time top 100 box office revenue list including two in the top ten (Box Office Mojo 2017). Jaws (1975), his second feature as director, was the first film to make 100 million dollars at the United States box office in its initial release while the huge profits from his next film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), literally rescued Columbia Pictures from bankruptcy (Phillips 1991).1 Overall, the films he has directed have earned almost 10 billion dollars at the box office (Forbes 2017).
Published at the end of the 1970s, Michael Pye and Lynda Myles’ The Movie Brats identified six directors—Francis Coppola , Martin Scorsese , George Lucas , Brian De Palma , John Milius and Spielberg—and characterised them as the new heirs to Hollywood. The label arose from their collective youth, box office successes and high degree of cine-literacy. The authors also suggested that these six were ‘pure’ filmmakers, from film schools (except Spielberg) and not sullied by a previous career in television like many of the other directors working in Hollywood at the time.2 Together with his movie brat , ‘New Hollywood’ contemporaries, Spielberg’s unprecedented early box office success helped to financially reinvigorate Hollywood after its decline in the late 1960s, when the recession of 1969 had precipitated some 200 million dollars in losses and widespread retrenchments. This deterioration continued into the following decade with 1971 recording the industry’s all-time lowest box office revenue while Universal and Columbia teetered on the edge of insolvency, and MGM , Warner Brothers and United Artists all changed management (Cook 2000, pp. 9–14).
Spielberg’s early popularity was so spectacular that it has evolved into almost mythical status. With Jaws (1975), Spielberg is widely perceived to have initiated the blockbuster phenomenon that now dominates the American industry (Shone 2004). Yet Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale (2010) claim that while Jaws was the most successful blockbuster, it was not the first. Box office takings for 1974—the year before Jaws —set an all-time record with the strong performance of The Exorcist , Chinatown , That’s Entertainment and the disaster films Earthquake , The Towering Inferno and Juggernaut (all 1974). The year 1974 also saw the highest average weekly attendances in ten years: ‘Variety [the Hollywood trade paper] referred to the industry as now being “devoted to the blockbuster business” with “blockbuster pictures” and “blockbuster advertising campaigns”’ (Hall and Neale 2010, p. 212). Ironically, Spielberg’s first feature, The Sugarland Express (1974), had been released in the middle of this period. Minimal marketing and other factors3 meant that it was quickly overwhelmed by the blockbusters and other hits such as Serpico (1973), The Exorcist (1974), The Sting (1974), Papillion (1974) and American Graffiti (1974). Jaws had originally been budgeted at 3.5 million dollars, approximately the average for a studio feature during this period, but the cost tripled (Bart 1999, p. 124) because of the often-reported production difficulties generally attributed to a combination of the added difficulty of shooting at sea and the malfunctioning special effects sharks. The decision to open the film in wide release backed by an aggressive television advertising campaign rather than the then-customary practice of gradually increasing the number of cinemas showing the film was made by Universal Studio’s then owner, Lew Wasserman, not Spielberg (Shone 2004, p. 26). This pattern of wide release coupled with a saturation advertising campaign had already been used the year before for the re-release of Billy Jack (1974). David Cook (2000, p. 42) notes that this kind of saturation booking had actually been applied since the 1940s on ‘stiffs’, films that were expected to perform poorly and so were quickly given wide release to recoup as much revenue as possible before word-of-mouth and poor reviews compromised admissions.
Further colouring the perception of the movie brats and Spielberg as all-conquering, Peter Kramer (1998) notes some inconsistency over which period ‘New Hollywood’ actually represents:
…in different critical contexts ‘New Hollywood’ may refer to the period 1967–75 as well as to the post-1975 period, to the aesthetic and political progressivism of the liberal cycles of the earlier period as well as to the regressiveness of the blockbusters of the later period. (p. 303)
He also queries the ‘newness’ of the ‘New Hollywood’ era by pointing out that ‘juvenilzation’, the role of technology in enhancing cinematic presentation, and the emphasising of spectacle over narrative had all been going on since the 1950s and were as such part of a longer term cycle that predated the 1970s revival. Geoff King (2002, pp. 12–13) isolates the period in Hollywood from 1967 to the mid to late 1970s as the ‘Hollywood Renaissance’ period that arose due to a conjunction of social, industrial and stylistic change. Thomas Schatz (1993, p. 9) argues that the ‘sustained economic vitality’ of the ‘blockbuster syndrome’ since the mid-1970s justifies the ‘New Hollywood’ label. Thomas Elsaesser (1998, p. 191) identifies three elements that defined the ‘New Hollywood’ , namely, a new generation of movie directors that included the movie brats , new marketing strategies relating to distribution and exhibition of the ‘high concept’ blockbuster , and the corporate takeover of the studios and the rise of the star/film packaging system. Noël Carroll (1998a, p. 257) adds that the conditions that enabled the rise of the New Hollywood as a phenomenon had begun with the decline of the audience from the mid-1940s, the theatre-antitrust action, the multiple box-office failures of expensive films in the mid-1960s and the passing of the studio moguls.
Yet there is no denying that as each of his contemporaries has fallen by the wayside, Spielberg’s critical esteem, power and influence within the film industry have continued to grow. Of the original movie brats , only Scorsese and Spielberg are still releasing features regularly. Despite the enormous impact of the Star Wars films on popular culture, Lucas has directed only six features and in 2013 announced his retirement from directing. Other contemporaries who enjoyed popular success during the 1970s such as Peter Bogdanovich (his recent work is mostly in television ) and William Friedkin (he has directed two features in the past ten years) failed to preserve their popular success beyond that decade. Even Robert Zemeckis —considered a Spielberg protégé and the nearest rival in all-time box office earnings—has failed to sustain the popularity he enjoyed with a string of box office hits during the 1980s and 1990s. Though not considered part of the mainstream industry, only Woody Allen 4 surpasses Spielberg in terms of volume as a director, managing to consistently release a low-budget feature almost every year since the 1970s.
If we go beyond Spielberg’s work as a director and consider all of the film industry production in which he has had some kind of involvement, his output can only be described as prolific. In addition to the 305 features he has directed, he has amassed more than 150 producing or executive producing credits for features, television series, documentaries and video games; has written three produced feature screenplays6 and receiv...