#209 Steven Spielberg: A Biography

**David Senra** (0:00)
One of his boyhood friends recalls Spielberg saying he could envision himself going to the Academy Awards and accepting an Oscar and thanking the Academy.
He was 12
I've been really serious about filmmaking as a career since I was 12 years old, Spielberg said. I don't excuse those early years as a hobby. Do you know what I'm saying? I really did start then.
That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Steven Spielberg, A Biography, and it was written by Joseph McBride. And that is one of the reasons I wanted to read a biography of Spielberg. It's because I think it's so there's a few reasons. But one of them is the fact that from 12 from the from the age of 12 to 74, which is how old he is today, he's had the same goal.
He has been making movies for 62 years.
It's very rare for somebody to do something for that long for 62 years. So I think that's somebody that we should obviously be studying and learning from. Another reason that that he came to my attention is because he appears in one of my favorite books that I've ever read for the podcast. That's back on Founders number 35 And that's the biography of George Lucas. It's called George Lucas, A Life. And George and Steven met when they were in their early 20s and they became best friends and collaborators throughout their entire career. And I actually just re listened to that episode. And then I reread I want to make sure I'm rereading my highlights from that book from that George Lucas book every year because I think what he did his approach to filmmaking that made him a multi-billionaire.
There's a lot of ideas that he used in his work that we can use in ours, where he just approached the industries like, well, why is he just kept asking why like why movies made this way? Why are they financed this way? Why are they owned this way? Why are they distributed this way? And he constantly questioned every aspect and realized, hey, I could come up with a better way to do things. And my favorite sentence in that entire book, and that's another gigantic book, it's like 500 pages, it's George Lucas unapologetically invested in what he believed in most of the most, himself.
And we'll see today that Steven Spielberg did the exact same thing. So for today's podcast, it took a really, really long time. This is a gigantic book. It's almost 500 pages. The author interviewed over 325 people that knew Steven Spielberg. It goes into amazing detail of all the movies he made up until the end of the book. The book ends, he had just finished Schindler's List and Jurassic Park. He's just over 50 years old. And in addition to reading the book, I also watched and took notes on this documentary that's on HBO Max right now, which serves as another biography of Steven Spielberg as well. It's two and a half hours long. So between the book and watching the documentary and taking notes, it took me about 30 hours of prep work before I'm sitting down to talk to you about it. So I'm going to be working off my notes from the book and the notes from the documentary as well. Before I jump into the book, I want to tie something that's remarkable that maybe you knew this. It blew my mind when I found this out because I'll tell you how Steven Spielberg reminds me of Coco Chanel.
So a few weeks ago, a few months ago, I read the second biography of Coco Chanel that I've read. And she started off as an orphan and I wind up before she died, she was the richest woman in the world. And part of the way she got that way was because she signed one of the most lucrative deals in history.
She previously made a mistake when she started her perfume company. She wound up giving away 90% of it. Didn't realize that Chanel No. 5 was going to be one of the most successfully commercial products ever made. And so like 20, maybe 15, 20 years later, she winds up redoing the deal and she gets 2% of all sales globally for Chanel No. 5 That made her in today's dollars, so that means she made $300 million a year. And she had a clause in that deal where the company had to pay for every single one of her living expenses. So Spielberg has a very similar deal. I just found out because I'm going to be reading a biography of Michael Jordan soon as well that he has a deal like this. Michael Jordan gets 5% of all sales from his Jordan shoe brand. And he's estimated to make about $150 million a year in present day because they're doing around $3 billion a year in sales. So Spielberg winds up, and this deal is done after the book ends, but he winds up signing a deal where he gets 2% of all the ticket revenue at Universal Studios, the theme parks. And so that's rumored to pay him out. Again, this is just from this one deal. It's rumored to pay him out about $50 to $75 million a year. Universal keeps trying to buy him out. They say, hey, we'll give you a couple billion just to buy you out of this contract. And he keeps saying no. And one of the reasons I think that he keeps saying no is because in that contract, it's not only the Universal theme park that's in Orlando, but it's any future theme park that they built. And I think they're making a new one in China and somewhere else. I can't remember the other destination or the other place, rather. But he's going to get 2% of all ticket sales on that. And the last time I looked, it was something like 10, 10 to 12 million people a year buy tickets to just their Universal theme park in Orlando.