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Steven spielberg

Steven Spielberg
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Steven Spielberg
Planetary Society Board member Steven Spielberg.

One of the most celebrated directors in film history, Steven Spielberg first became affiliated with The Planetary Society in 1985 when he donated $100,000 to finance a new radiotelescope search for alien civilizations – META, the Megachannel Extraterrestrial Assay, based in Harvard, Massachusetts.  A few years later, he joined the Society’s Board of Directors.

The repertoire of films that Spielberg directed and/or produced is legendary and includes Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Back to the Future, The Color Purple, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, Men in Black, and Saving Private Ryan.   Two of his most well-known films presaged Spielberg’s interest in the question of whether intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe – Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

Spielberg produced many of his blockbusters through his production company Amblin.  In the 1990s, he co-founded a new production company, Dreamworks, which is responsible for many recent box office successes, including the animated children’s classics, Shrek and Shrek 2.  The company also made a film that resonates with The Planetary Society’s own funding of near-Earth object research – Deep Impact, about an asteroid on a collision course with our planet.

Spielberg dropped out of college early to pursue his film career,  but he recently returned to campus to officially graduate from Long Beach State University with a degree in filmmaking.