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We all admire the wunderkind — that rare person of remarkable talent and ability who achieves great success or acclaim at an early age. Prodigies usually reach legendary status through their extraordinary accomplishments alone, but the occasional wunderkind-in-a-hurry helps his nascent legend along with a little fanciful embroidery. Such is the case with film director Steven Spielberg, who began garnishing his past with a bit of fantasy even from the earliest days of his professional career. Spielberg's first practical exposure to the workings of Hollywood studios came in the summers just before and after he graduated from high school in the mid-1960s, when he apprenticed at Universal Studios as an unpaid assistant in the studio's television department. Over the subsequent years, those humble beginnings morphed into a more and more elaborate tale told by Spielberg about how he had supposedly sneaked into Universal dressed in business attire, commandeered an empty bungalow, and set up shop on the premises for over two years before someone finally discovered didn't actually belong there: By 1985, Spielberg had added the detail that he first made his way onto the Universal lot by sneaking off the tram during a public studio tour: So much for the legend. In fact, Steven Spielberg's entree to the Universal lot was gained while he was a 16-year-old on break from his junior year of high school in Arizona (in late 1963 or early 1964), and it had nothing to do with his sneaking onto the premises — his visit was arranged in advance by his father (through an intermediary) with Chuck Silvers, assistant to the editorial supervisor for Universal TV, as Silvers recalled to Spielberg biographer Joseph McBride: After Spielberg returned to Arizona, he kept up an occasional correspondence with Chuck Silvers and returned to Universal during the summer of 1964 to work as an unpaid clerical assistant. It was then that one of the few details from Spielberg's imaginative account of his early days at Universal Studios actually played out -- according to Chuck Silvers, young Steven did have to use his ingenuity to get onto the lot each day: The first time he came back there I got him a pass to come on the lot. I couldn't get him a permanent pass on the lot. Steven found his own way of getting on the lot. Steven was able to walk onto the lot just about any time he damned well pleased. But both Silvers and his co-worker divulged to biographer McBride that the tale about Spielberg's finding and occupying an empty office at Universal was a bit of creative fiction on the fledgling director's part to romanticize his early background: Even though Spielberg embroidered the reality of his first few summers at Universal, he certainly did make the most of his experience. At the tender age of 22 he directed Joan Crawford in the pilot episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery for Universal Television, and by the age of 30 he had helmed two of the top-grossing films of all time, Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind — just a small part of a stellar cinematic career that also included box office favorites Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, and the Academy Award-winning Schindler's List (the latter of which nabbed top honors in 1993 in seven categories, including Best Picture and Best Director). Embellishment is part of the magic that is Hollywood. Or, as comedian George Burns was wont to say about the tall tales woven into the fabric of his own life: Most of what I say is true. The rest is show business.
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