Mega Movie Maker

Steven Spielberg, born in 1946, American motion-picture director, producer, and executive, whose movies feature action, suspense, special-effects wizardry, and memorable stories. Spielberg films such as Jaws (1975), E.T.—The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Jurassic Park(1993), and Schindler’s List (1993) enjoyed enormous commercial success and earned recognition for their craftsmanship.
Spielberg was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and educated at California State College at Long Beach (now California State University at Long Beach). He began making movies at the age of 12, and by the time he left college he had at least eight amateur works to his credit. Spielberg’s short film Amblin’ (1968) came to the attention of Universal Pictures, which signed him to a seven-year contract.

Spielberg’s earliest commercial efforts were television movies, among them Duel (1971), a suspense film that brought him wider recognition. Sugarland Express (1974), Spielberg’s first full-length feature film, was an expertly crafted variant on the road picture. It was soon followed by Jaws, a thriller based on American author Peter Benchley’s novel about a great white shark that terrorizes a beach community. Jaws proved a tremendous success, established Spielberg’s reputation as a director, and heralded a new era of blockbuster films with large gross revenues. Other Spielberg films of the 1970s included the science-fiction epic Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and an unsuccessful historical farce, 1941 (1979).

Spielberg teamed up with writer-producer George Lucas in the 1980s to make the action-adventure Indiana Jones film series: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). Other directorial projects during this period included the science-fiction fantasy E.T.—The Extra-Terrestrial, at the time the highest-grossing film ever made; The Color Purple (1985), a drama based on the novel by Alice Walker; Empire of the Sun (1987), based on an autobiographical novel by J. G. Ballard about a young boy’s struggle to survive in Japanese-occupied Shanghai at the beginning of World War II (1939-1945); Always(1989), a romantic fantasy; and Hook (1991), a film based on the Peter Pan story.

In the late 1970s Spielberg began to get involved with production and screenwriting. In 1984 he established an independent production unit called Amblin Entertainment. Under this company he produced such films as Gremlins (1984), Back to the Future (1985),Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), *batteries not included (1987), Back to the Future II (1989), Arachnophobia (1990), Cape Fear (1991), and The Flintstones (1994). He also produced the animated features An American Tail (1986), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991), and We're Back! A Dinosaur’s Story (1993).

In 1993 Spielberg released Jurassic Park, which featured spectacular computer-created dinosaurs and became within four weeks of its release the top-grossing motion picture to that time. Later that year Schindler’s List, a powerful black-and-white epic about loss and survival during the Holocaust, earned critical acclaim for Spielberg and won Academy Awards for best director and best picture. It was Spielberg’s first Academy Award for best director, although the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had honored him with the Irving Thalberg Award in 1987.

In 1994, along with powerful Hollywood figures Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, Spielberg started a new movie studio, DreamWorks SKG, to produce his films. The first of these,Amistad (1997), was based on the true story of a revolt by a group of slaves while en route from Africa to America. With it Spielberg attempted to create another socially and historically conscious film in the same vein as Schindler’s List. Speilberg’s World War II film Saving Private Ryan (1998) featured a stunning opening sequence that graphically depicted the full horror of war as experienced by American troops during the D-Day invasion. It starred Tom Hanks as an Army officer leading a mission to locate the Private Ryan of the title, and it received five Academy Awards, including one for Spielberg as best director.
Spielberg followed this success with two science-fiction films: He wrote and directed Artificial Intelligence: AI (2001), a project originally conceived by Stanley Kubrick, based on the Brian Aldiss story “Supertoys Last All Summer Long.” Minority Report (2002), a thriller, impressed critics with its vision of a dystopian society where civil liberties have been eroded in the interests of law and order. The film, based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, stars Tom Cruise as a Washington, D.C., cop and depicts a future where police have the foreknowledge and power to arrest murderers before a crime has been committed. In 2002 Spielberg also directedCatch Me If You Can (2002), based on the true story of a charming young con artist.
Spielberg again directed Tom Hanks in The Terminal (2004), a film about an Eastern European man who is stranded in a United States airport after a political coup in his own country deprives him of his nationality. Spielberg returned to the science-fiction genre with War of the Worlds, a film version of the H. G. Wells novel that stars Tom Cruise. Munich (2005) is Spielberg’s film dramatization of Israel’s deadly response to the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games by the Black September terrorist group.

Al Pacino the Actor

Al  Pacino, born in 1940, American motion-picture and stage actor, best known for his work in Hollywood gangster films. He is distinguished by his willingness to appear in risky productions and unusual roles.
Born Alfredo Pacino in New York City, he dropped out of Manhattan's High School for Performing Arts at the age of 17. He continued his acting studies, however, first at the Herbert Berghof Studio and later at Actors Studio (headed by American director and actor Lee Strasberg), while working at various jobs and appearing in off-Broadway productions (seeBroadway). Dark, wiry, and passionate, Pacino was ideally suited for the gritty urban stage dramas popular in the 1960s. He won an Obie Award (presented for off-Broadway theater work) in 1968 for his role as a psychotic alcoholic in The Indian Wants the Bronx, and he won a Tony Award in 1969 for his performance as a drug addict in Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? He again played an addict in his first important motion-picture role, the victimized antihero of The Panic in Needle Park (1971).
For his portrayal of the ambivalent heir to a Mafia dynasty in the gangster epic The Godfather(1972), written and directed by American filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, Pacino received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor. (He reprised the role in two sequels,The Godfather Part II, in 1974, and The Godfather Part III, in 1990.) The tremendous success of  The Godfather made Pacino a star, but he refused to play roles traditionally given to leading male Hollywood actors. He played a gentle, doomed drifter in Scarecrow (1973); a homosexual bank robber in the tense political melodrama Dog Day Afternoon (1975), by American director Sidney Lumet; and a police detective in the controversial tale of homosexual life Cruising (1980).
After a string of motion pictures that did not achieve great commercial success, Pacino returned to acting in the theater, winning a second Tony Award in 1977 for The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel. His movie career revived with the success of Sea of Love (1989), and he won an Academy Award for his performance as a suicidal, blind war veteran in Scent of a Woman (1992). In 1996 Pacino made his directorial debut with Looking for Richard, a film about actors preparing to stage a production of the play Richard III by English dramatist William Shakespeare. The following year Pacino played the Devil disguised as a lawyer in The Devil’s Advocate.