Steven Spielberg

The filmgoer was noticeably upset. He didn't like a moment in "Lincoln. " More specifically, he didn't like the final moments of "Lincoln. " "I don't understand why it didn't just end when Lincoln is walking down the hall and the butler gives him his hat," he said. "Why did I need to see him dying on the bed? I have no idea what Spielberg was trying to do. " The man on the mini-rant wasn't some multiplex loudmouth. He was actor Samuel L. Jackson, and he was just getting started.

The USC School of Cinematic Arts celebrated its 80th birthday Sunday with a dedication ceremony of its new $175-million campus home. Oh, and George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were there too. The veteran filmmakers both made brief remarks and were joined by university officials, alumni and hundreds of supporters at the celebration, which also featured a performance by the USC Trojan Marching Band. "We're now officially a legitimate school . . .

These have been scrapbook seasons for Tom Hiddleston — over the last two years the 30-year-old British actor has worked with directors Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, Kenneth Branagh, Terence Davies and Joss Whedon — but there is one snapshot memory from it all that he says "will be with me until the day I die. " It was during the filming of "War Horse," the Christmas Day release that takes Spielberg back to the epic battlefields of Europe and puts...

When "Schindler's List" comes to home video on Aug. 17, it won't be accompanied by the array of never-before-seen sequences and behind-the-scenes glimpses that have become part of many "event" video releases. After all, how do you improve upon what many consider to be perfection?

Faced with an identity crisis, the Widescreen Film Festival, now in its eighth year at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center at Cal State Long Beach, reached out to one of the university's latest and certainly most prestigious graduates for help--Steven Spielberg--and he accepted. The Oscar-winning director is serving as the festival's first honorary artist-in-residence and has chosen a collection of eight films that have inspired him.

How do you sell audiences on a three-hour black-and-white movie with no major American stars that is about the Holocaust? Get Steven Spielberg to direct it. Carefully position it in the marketplace as an important "experience" rather than a movie. And pray that positive word of mouth will ignite the public's passion for a subject that is historically a tough sell on the big screen.

It has been a long while since an actor wearing a U.S. infantryman's helmet qualified as an undisputed American movie hero, but Tom Hanks and the seven men who play his Omaha Beach brothers in arms are poised to turn back the clock on that notion when "Saving Private Ryan" opens Friday. Their director, Steven Spielberg, has not exactly recast them in the mold of John Wayne in "The Sands of Iwo Jima" or "The Longest Day," however. Hanks, as Capt.

Nearly a year after embarking on plans to relaunch DreamWorks as an independent studio, Steven Spielberg finally has the financial means to greenlight his own movies. DreamWorks said Monday that it had finalized the first phase of a long-in-the-works funding deal that paves the way for the production company to be fully operational. The funds, which will enable DreamWorks to make 18 to 20 films over the next three years, include $325 million in bank debt and a matching equity investment from Spielberg's 50% partner, India's Reliance Big Entertainment.

"Man only uses 20% of the planet," proclaimed an excited Robert D. Ballard, one of the world's preeminent underwater explorers. The tall, distinguished Ballard, grinning like a schoolboy, was riding high behind the wheel of a golf cart in a mad dash across the back lot of Universal Studios. "There are more people alive today than ever died," said Ballard, 51, his voice rising to a fever pitch. "In the next 25 years, we will have quadrupled the world's population."

Sitting in a restaurant here, Amy Irving looks as if she could well be an extra from ex-husband Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List." With no makeup, a babushka taming her frizzy brunet curls and a long gray shawl draped over her shoulders, the blue-eyed actress conveys a picture of severe beauty and intensity. But Irving's character is a Jewish refugee not of an Eastern European pogrom but of 1938 Brooklyn.