“... own private islands. On the West Coast, the yacht-owning Hollywood moguls David Geffen and Steven Spielberg are joined by tech billionaires including Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Alphabet’s Sergey Brin and his former colleague Eric Schmidt. Microsoft’s Paul Allen owned one, as does Charles Simonyi. The tech-bros have grown their businesses ...”

“... they needn’t waste their time asking if she believed in witchcraft. Thomson compares this with Steven Spielberg, who hired ‘a reliable UFO expert’ to advise him when making Close Encounters of the Third Kind. ‘And some asked Spielberg if he believed in unidentified flying objects. No, he replied, but I believe ...”

“... Corelli’s Mandolin, and the fascination with the war on the part of the human mint that is Steven Spielberg (Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan and soon Band of Brothers) must speak eloquently to publishers. In one direct sense at least, the Second World War is about money: it was the last war that materially affected the lives of all the ...”

“... in which slavery, for both races, seems little more than an occasion for a prolonged party. When Steven Spielberg tried recently to update the celluloid portrayal of slavery, he chose to do so via the Amistad case, which involved not American slaves but Africans who seized control of a Spanish slave ship. The rebels ended up in the United States, but ...”

“... the Kabbalah, Finnish mythology and primitive cave paintings to Stravinsky, Duke Ellington and Steven Spielberg, glancing en route at virtually every major European writer or artist. It is crammed with curios and choice anecdotes, all the way from Richard III’s hump to an oiled arm in a Mapplethorpe photograph probing a gaping anus. In a work which ...”

“... our attention, filling our minds with material worth pondering – including artists as diverse as Steven Spielberg and Derek Walcott. Yet at the same time she is distressed by some of the controlling notions or clichés of our time – ‘myths’ in the lowest sense, dangerous rotten explanations. The six lectures do not allow her the scope to work out ...”

“... books put together, even before it was turned into an Oscar-nominated film by Tom Stoppard and Steven Spielberg. His later career was punctuated by international book tours and lavish TV profiles, and towards the end of his life he had the pleasure of turning down a CBE (‘I might have been tempted had I been entitled to call myself Commander Ballard ...”

“... was not confined to the direction – nor to the preparation, the screenplay or the storyboards. Steven Spielberg storyboards everything: Hitchcock, for all his thorough planning, did not. As Auiler says, Despite his legendary use of storyboards, it was only very rarely that Hitchcock storyboarded an entire film. Lifeboat and The Birds were extensively ...”

“... Shawn had shunned and Gottlieb had parried. (Seabrook tells a signal story of this role reversal. Steven Spielberg comes to visit and asks to see the library. ‘The library!’ exclaimed Tina. ‘Wonderful! … Where’s the library?’) At the end of 1997 Brown was replaced by David Remnick, who as an editor is less Buzz-happy than Brown, but as a ...”

“... does at the end of Collodi’s book). This may be hokum, but it’s also deeply affecting. As Steven Spielberg recognised in his SF version of Pinocchio, A.I., the only way to crank up the pathos still further is to remove Geppetto’s love. In A.I., an android boy, David, is offered as a child replacement to a woman who cannot love him: ‘How can a ...”

“... obviously sharks stoke deep evolutionary terrors that a car or a chair can’t compete with; as Steven Spielberg proved, sharks produce a supremely efficient balance of unknown fears – whatever’s happening under the water – with highly specific ones. The stats and the shark’s motivation are no consolation if your ‘encounter’ turns out like ...”

“... Last All Summer Long’, the short story by Brian Aldiss that was made into a film by Steven Spielberg. In Spielberg’s AI, scientists build a humanoid robot, David, who is programmed to love. David expresses his love to a woman, Monica, who has adopted him as her child. Current experience suggests that ...”

“... direct apology for boyhood’. So, too, with Watkins. If he has a contemporary analogue, it is Steven Spielberg in such nostalgic exercises as Young Sherlock Holmes and his homage to Treasure Island, Goonies. Like Stevenson, Spielberg raises the romp to an art form. The Promise of Light cries out for film ...”

“... parties (among the guests at one of them are Warren Beatty, Peter Bogdanovich, Ryan O’Neal, Steven Spielberg, James Coburn, Dudley Moore, Tuesday Weld and Angie Dickinson), peddling movie ideas (Kathleen trumped him here, too, selling her screenplay for Agatha) and driving to Las Vegas to catch Shirley MacLaine headlining at Caesar’s Palace. But ...”

“... years: Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, the breakthrough films of Altman, Rafelson, Bogdanovich, Spielberg and Scorsese, the two parts of The Godfather, American Graffiti, Chinatown and then Jaws. The weakness of the studios had forced them to take risks, and film-mad young men were allowed to make pictures that were often dark, tough and less than ...”