How powerfull is Steven Spielberg?

Wow, for a second there, I thought the Gemini Killer started posting at CHUD...

Yes. Much of your post, actually. But in response...

1. Who is "SB?" Or do you mean "SS?"

2. Yes, DreamWorks is a proper studio like WB or Paramount.

3. Several studios co-finance films together, to share the risk. Like Fox and Paramount did on TITANIC. It's not uncommon.

4. WAR OF THE WORLDS is a co-production between DreamWorks and Paramount.

5. Steven Spielberg has a 30-year-long track record that's second to none. He's also incredibly adept at Hollywood politics. He's also amazingly rich. And he's very respected and/or feared. Those are but a few reasons why he's so powerful.

Or powerfull, if you're James Venamun.

How powerful is Spielberg? Let's put it this way: he gets the first look at pretty much every new project in Hollywood. That means that for about 99% of the films in production, Spielberg had a chance to direct and chose to pass.

I saw Steven Spielberg once. Sequoia National Forest. He made a sound I would not want to hear twice in my life.

Was he naturally blurry?

And yet he makes a lot of ordinary movies.

Stephen Spielberg could kill you and your entire family, and no one would ever know.

Which makes his current career track all the more depressing.

Speilberg' power is probably based more on his position at Dreamworks then his record as a director...though that record is what got him the backing to start Dreamworks.
Fact is that Speilberg can pretty much get backing for anything he wants to make..even a lot of his perceived Box Office "Failures" like "Minority Report" and "AI" were very profitable when international grosses are taken into account.
If WOTW is as a big as hit as expected, and with Indy 4 apparently in the near future...Speilberg's will continute to be the 800 pound Gorilla in Hollywood.
Lucas was not able to pull off in the 80's with Lucasfilms what Speilberg did with Dreamworks...make a major studio. Granted, Speilberg had the help of Geffen and Katzanberg, but both to them credit Speilberg with making the decisons that put Dreamworks over the top.

Not everyone can be at the top of their game at all times.

Good point. I haven't liked a Steven Speilberg movie since Jurassic Park.

Quite true. But still, Spielberg gets first look at almost all film projects in Hollywood. Add to that the fact he makes more than one movie a year. It seems to me it's his fault if he doesn't make many good movies.

Anyway, his commercial record speaks for itself. His artistic record I believe is overrated. Jaws, Raiders and Schindler's List are great movies. The rest, I not a big fan of.

Again, this is all going to come down to opinions, so I respectfully disagree, both in his classic period (E.T., CE3K, EMPIRE OF THE SUN) and his new period (A.I.). But, this is an age-old discussion that I guess will continue to go on as long as the man's movies exist.

Stephen Spielberg's beard is actually a protected wildlife reserve.

How powerful is Steven Spielberg? The only film Amy Irving has made in the last 3 years is HIDE AND SEEK.

It's not a matter of being at the top of his game. His films work on every level except story. A director like him doesn't have to make films that are as safe as those of Adam Shankman.

I guess Steven Spielberg isn't that powerful after all, considering how many know-it-alls around here don't even know how to spell the man's name. (Stephen Speilberg should work with Tom Crooze on something for the MTV Movie Awards.)

I would love to see a list of directors alive today more naturally-talented and consistently successful over three decades than Spielberg. I'm not saying that automatically makes him "the best filmmaker working today," whatever that means. I'm just saying that's the foundation of his power and success. And justifiably so.

Aside from the Rodriguez comparison, very nice first post, Sin.

Stephen Spielberg produces a magnetic field 1,000,000,000,000 times stronger than Earth's own field. He is so dense that a thimble full of him would weigh about 90,000,000 tons. He produces enough light and heat to power a generating station for 2 billion years.

How powerful is Steven Spielberg, you ask?

He wears a live rattlesnake as a condom.

He got his wife pregnant, and she gave birth to a delicious sixteen ounce steak. The afterbirth was sautéed mushrooms.

He still believes in Santa Claus, and he wants to put him in porno films.


Ahhh, good ole Bill Bras...umm, Steven Spielberg.

I guess he's a SIN CITY fan then.

Man, Sin City better than Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, E.T.?

Wow.

Just.. wow.

I mean...

Wow.

It can't be as good as TEMPLE OF DOOM. Frank Miller never included any chilled monkey brains in the comic.

Nothing trumps chilled monkey brains.

I hear Steven Spielberg has a toenail at the end of his penis!

I'm wearing a diaper!

Also, I have it on good authority that he can shoot lightning bolts from the tips of his fingers.

Spielberg is so powerful that he obtained Vic Morrow's head and uses it as a good luck charm/loose change dish.

How come with all his power he can't get that episode of "Amazing Stories" he directed with Kevin Costner and Kiefer Sutherland as WW2 pilots out on DVD?

...

It's far and away known Jackson is the #1 reason why LOTR was so good. He took a middling book and turned it into one of the greatest, if not greatest film trilogies ever made. He didn't get a best director oscar for nothing, y'know. Christ, it took Spielberg about eighteen years to win his.

He brought his style and vision to LOTR 100%. Just as Spielberg brought his style to JAWS, which like LOTR, was based on a not particularly well-written book.

Aside from LOTR actually being great, I agree.

Yeah, Fett. The books were great, too. Veeeeeeeeeery slow paced, but great nonetheless.

Still, that trilogy was in no way a no brainer. It took a director with vision, like Jackson, to make those books into great movies.

Don't get me wrong, I have great love for the books, I just think the style is too middling. I think they're more an example of great ideas than writing. And yeah, the pacing is painful sometimes.

Last year the director and some of the producers for Ghost Rider had a meet-and-chat here in Melbourne to yak about the production. At one point, i cant remeber what the guy actually said, but the director made a funny slight put down about Spielberg. Everyone giggled and then the producer stopped and said:
"Hey, we shouldnt make fun of steven. We wont ever work again"
Everyone laughed again until he said "No...im serious"
....a chilling hush fell over the crowd as if the Eye of Steven had fixed upon us.
I think the man is just fantastic. I think his later films are smarter than people give him credit for and ive got my plastic strap ons ready for War of the Worlds.
Yeah Hook sucked.

It does happen, I guess. Legend has it JAWS 3, PEOPLE 0 which was going to be directed by Joe Dante and written by John Hughes didn't happen because Spielberg said he'd walk from Universal if it was ever made.

Spielberg's success can be traced to Deep 13 funding, thanks to Dr. F's unholy obsession with Irving.

Robert Rodriguez hasn't come close to being as good a director as Steven Spielberg. Thats one of the silliest things said on these boards since i've been a member here.

OUATIM is worse than any bad Spielberg film. Saying that I haven't seen Sin City so i'll reserve judgement on that film until I do so.

But he wasn't fazed by Jaws 3-D? And obviously he didn't hold a grudge against Dante, who was an Amblin regular for most of the second half of the '80s.

Lately, I've been wondering what Billy Wilder's Schindler's List would have been like.

That was right after JAWS 2, so maybe he'd already left Universal by the time 3-D was in production, after E.T. was finished, and he went to WB to produce GREMLINS and direct TWILIGHT ZONE, COLOR PURPLE and EMPIRE OF THE SUN. I guess E.T. is what Universal would've lost had he gone.

The history of the third Jaws is littered with stuff like that, apparently.

...

Actually, I remember reading in the McBride bio that E.T. was Columbia's loss; they lost interest in the project when Spielberg opted to do it as a friendly alien story, versus the original Night Skies concept, which would have been more like Signs.

I'd imagine that Spielberg would have stayed with Univeral as long as Sid Sheinberg was around.

Um, I think Heavenly Creatures confirmed that Jackson was definitely not a flash in the pan, well over ten years ago. If he'd ended up failing in Hollywood, he'd still be making weird and zany low-budget movies in NZ.

Frankly, I think most of the projects released under the "Steven Spielberg Presents" imprimatur were just fucking awful, and probably did more to harm his reputation as a creative force than Hook, or the other mediocre movies he made between E.T. and Schindler's List. (Much love for Empire of the Sun, though.) That period has always made me skeptical about his "greatness" as a director. From about '82 on, he could have gotten just about anything produced, and opted out for slick, infantile cartoons. Gremlins. Goonies. Harry and the Hendersons. *batteries not included. Amazing Stories still makes me want to vomit. Here was an opportunity to revive the great TV anthologies of the '50s and '60s, to do smart SF and fantasy adaptations for a mass audience, but it ended up being Twilight Zone as conceived by a retarded eight-year-old. (The much-maligned '80s revival of TZ looks like Welles and Truffaut's love child by comparison.) ER is a fluke when you consider Seaquest DSV, Earth 2, Taken, ad nauseum.

I don't want to give the impression that I hate Spielberg's movies; I think the first dozen years of his career are amazing, pure filmmaking. (Yes, even parts of 1941, a WWII movie I like better than Saving Private Ryan.) But I think with one or two exceptions, he's been on editorial autopilot for way too long. There are filmmakers of equal or greater skill who I wish had just a fraction of Spielberg's freedom and power.

I give a lot of credit for Jackson's success to Fran Walsh, who appears to have an equal amount of input into the filmmaking process. If they ever break up, I guarantee you his movies will flatline creatively, as was the case with Lucas and Bogdanovich after their divorces.

Say what you want about the others, but you insult Gremlins at your peril.

I heard from a guy that Spielberg chooses every AIDS victim in the US using a dartboard and a Bic pen.

Let's give the guy a little credit for "Band of Brothers."

Outside of the '89 BATMAN, is there another movie that people have decided to turn on more than SAVING PRIVATE RYAN? It's just something I've noticed the past couple of years that is odd.

I will say that Spielberg as a producer makes some horrid films, but stuff like THE FLINTSTONES, CASPER, and MEN IN BLACK all make a ton of money so since that is one of the main goals as a producer he seems to know his stuff.

Where are they now?

Tom Hanks -- Mid-career menopause. Not pretty.
Vin Diesel -- Probably doing TV in five years, tops.
Tom Sizemore -- Probably doing time, right now.
Ed Burns -- aka "That guy who married Christy Turlington."
Barry Pepper -- DTV limbo.
Giovanni Ribisi -- aka "Beck's brother-in-law." (Not to be confused with Paul Giamatti.)
Jeremy Davies -- Lars von Trier movies unto Kingdom Come (or a von Trier-produced porno of the same name).
Adam Goldberg -- Two words: Hebrew Hammer.
Matt Damon -- A wee little puppet man.

Betcha anything Playboy will get the actresses who played Ryan's Aryan granddaughters (and WTF was that about, Steve-O?) to appear in a tenth-anniversary centerfold.

I liked it better when it was about eight hours shorter and had Lee Marvin in it and was called The Big Red One.

Yeah, and only coming off two massively-praised lead performances (American Splendor and Sideways) and getting great reviews for his role in Cinderella Man. Yeah, he's fallen off the map....

That's fair enough, I haven't seen THE BIG RED ONE and I probably should. But as a mini-series I think "Band of Brothers" took the sense of what WW2 was like in RYAN and expanded it from paratrooper training to the end of the war.

Oops. Meant Giovanni Ribisi, who really has fallen off the map.