Fairclough, K., Willis, A., 2017.

Steven Spielberg and the Rise of the Celebrity Film Director

This chapter looks at Steven Spielberg's career at different stages, considering how it can be read as emblematic of the rise of what might be termed the celebrity director. By the early 1970s, when a new young generation of directors found their way to Hollywood and established their potential, American cinema had become the focus of a great deal of critical writing and its artistic and aesthetic innovation and merit were becoming more widely accepted. Spielberg's film Jaws is often credited as one of the productions that marked the return to traditional Hollywood filmmaking and the studios' reconnecting with audiences. It also manifested the reassertion of Hollywood's marketing power. By the mid-1980s Spielberg had become so much of a marketable product that he now challenged the already traditional notion that the director was the auteur of a film.