Although Spielberg excelled at making movies he was not a good student. He hated school and was one of the most un-athletic students there. His movie-making career began at the age of twelve when his father bought a movie camera that Spielberg used all the time. Instead of doing his schoolwork he was using the camera. While he was working with his mom and sister on his projects, his father helped him make miniature sets out of paper-mache. .
Spielberg turned out his first production, with script and actors, when he was thirteen, and a year later he won a prize for a forty-minute war movie titled Escape to Nowhere. At the age of sixteen, his 140-minute production, Firelight, was shown in a local movie theater. In college, his short film, Amblin was shown at the Atlanta Film Festival. Ironically, all this led to a contract with Universal Studios at the age of twenty. Only after he had sneaked in and tried to fit in as best as he could. He started coming to the studio everyday, as a worker, even wearing a suit with a briefcase, just to fool the guards. He found an empty office and placed his name on the door and started making phone calls to let people know that he was there. .
Spielberg learned his craft doing television work, which included an episode of the Rod Serling series Night Gallery and the classic cult movie Duel. His first feature, The Sugarland Express, was released in 1974. Then he was offered the chance of a lifetime to direct a thriller about a great white shark terrorizing a small New England beach town that would make him into the well-known director he is today. Jaws cost $8.5 million and grossed $260 million. Spielberg followed it up two years later with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, earning a Best Director Oscar nomination and proved to the world that he was one of the best directors of the time. However, he followed Close Encounters with the disastrous Movie, 1941, which was his first attempt at comedy and his first true failure.
