When discussing and learning about the subjects involved here, at Pseudo-Occult Media and Vigilant Citizen, people often ask: If these musical artists and movie actors are merely puppets - and in a very real sense, they are exactly that - then who are the people running the show?
Similarly, in her response to my "Imma Bee the Future" article, former manager of apl.de.ap of the Black Eyed Peas, Suzanne Toro, asked:
Who is the Wizard?
This article will endeavor, in part, to answer these questions about who owns, controls and runs the entertainment industry, and will put faces to the often invisible entities who choose and produce the ideas and projects that are deemed worthy of receiving the enormous financial backing to become most, if not all, of the music, film and television entertainment that is propagated to the masses around the world.
This subject will likely become a series of articles, just as "A Brief History of Stars" did, for exactly the same reason - which is that there is so much information involved that it is impossible to pack it all into one article.
But we have to start somewhere, so let's begin by introducing you to just a few of the heavy hitters.
Sumner Redstone aka Sumner Murray Rothstein
Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Chairman and CEO of Viacom
Military service: US Army Intelligence (3 years, WWII)
Father: Michael Redstone
Mother: Belle Ostrovsky
Wife: Phyllis Gloria Raphael (m. 1947, two children)
Daughter: Shari Redstone (b. 1954)
High School: Boston Latin School
University: Harvard University (1944)
Law School: Georgetown University Law School
Law School: LLB, Harvard Law School (1947)
Viacom CEO (1996-2005)
National Amusements CEO (1967-)
National Amusements President (1967-99)
Member of the Board of CBS (as Chairman)
Member of the Board of National Amusements (as Chairman, 1986-present)
Member of the Board of Viacom (as Chairman, 1986-present)
Boston Museum of Fine Arts Trustee
Museum of Television and Radio Trustee
Sumner Murray Redstone (born Sumner Murray Rothstein; May 27, 1923) is a media magnate majority owner and Chairman of the Board of the National Amusements theater chain. Through National Amusements, Sumner Redstone and his family are majority owners of CBS Corporation, Viacom, and MTV Networks, BET, and movie production and distribution Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks movie studios, and are equal partners in MovieTickets.com .
Early on, when Redstone went looking for a new business venture, he set his sights on Viacom International, a company which he had already been buying stock in as an investment and was a spin-off of CBS in 1971 after the FCC ruled that television networks could not syndicate programs they produced.
Viacom syndicated most of CBS's programs, but also made a lot of money from syndicating other programs, including most of Carsey-Werner Productions' shows (The Cosby Show, Roseanne, and A Different World), as well as syndicating shows for other companies (Columbia Pictures Television's 'All in the Family' was one notable example), and cable channels (Nickelodeon's Double Dare and Finders Keepers - co-syndicated with 20th Television - were two examples).
Viacom also owned MTV Networks (formerly known as Warner-AMEX Satellite Entertainment), which owned MTV and Nickelodeon. In addition, other properties included Showtime Networks (a similar pay-television network to HBO and Cinemax) and The Movie Channel. Viacom acquired MTV Networks in 1985 for $550 million from Steve Ross' Warner Communications.
Warner Communications bought American Express' share and then sold the entire entity to Viacom, as they felt that they could not make a lot of money from the venture and the bias of a studio owning cable channels would be a conflict of interest. The studio's stance changed in 1995, when as Time Warner, it bought Turner Broadcasting.
After a hostile takeover in 1987, Redstone won voting control of Viacom and led a series of acquisitions to make Viacom one of the top players in modern media (along with Bertelsmann, General Electric & Vivendi's NBC-Universal, News Corporation, Time Warner, Sony, and Disney).
Redstone's next acquisition came in the form of the purchase of Paramount Communications, parent of Paramount Pictures, in 1993, which he fought over with Barry Diller (former board member of Vivendi Universal and CEO of IAC/InterActiveCorp) and John Malone (president of TCI/Liberty Media), where he had to raise his bid three times.
Some say that Redstone overpaid, but after he shed certain assets (the Madison Square Garden properties to Charles Dolan's Cablevision and Simon & Schuster's educational publishing units to Pearson plc for almost $4 billion), Redstone turned Viacom's expenditure into a substantial profit.
Under Redstone's leadership, Paramount went on an almost ten-year streak of record performance, producing such films as Saving Private Ryan, Titanic (one of the highest grossing film of all time and Best Picture Academy Award winner), Braveheart (Best Picture Academy Award), and Forrest Gump (also a Best Picture winner) and the creation of the hugely successful Mission Impossible series of pictures.
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| Sumner Redstone and Tom Cruise at the Mission Impossible premiere. |
Redstone replaced the team of Jonathan Dolgen and Sherry Lansing in 2004 after their nine-year winning streak ended and the studio has struggled since with the relatively inexperienced team of Brad Grey and Gail Berman who both came from the TV business. The Dolgen and Lansing years were the high point of Paramount in many other regards as well.
In addition to the aforementioned award winning films, They also doubled the size of Paramount's music publishing division, Famous Music; expanded UCI Cinemas into 13 foreign countries; created the Digital Cinema Initiatives standards body for the new digital film technology; introduced the DVD; and launched the UPN Network (later part of CBS and now called the CW). The current Paramount Pictures consists only of the movie studio, the other groups having been sold or parcelled out to other divisions.
The Paramount acquisition was only the tip of the iceberg. Redstone purchased Blockbuster Entertainment, which included Aaron Spelling's production company and a huge library of films, much of which has been merged into Paramount Pictures. Blockbuster has now been spun off into its own independent entity.
Redstone acquired CBS Corporation in 2000 and then spun it off as a separate company in 2005, taking with it all of Paramount's television shows and catalog. Following the CBS and Blockbuster Spinoffs, Viacom consists of MTV Networks (MTV, Nickelodeon, VH1, Noggin etc.), music publishing (Famous Music) and Paramount Pictures.
In December 2005, Redstone announced that Paramount had agreed to buy DreamWorks SKG for an estimated $1.6 billion. The acquisition was completed on February 1, 2006. A subsequent financing brought Viacom's investment down to $700 million. The animation studio, DreamWorks Animation, was not included in the deal as it has been its own company since late 2004. However, Paramount now has the rights to distribute films by DreamWorks Animation.
One of Redstone's largest acquisitions came in the form of Viacom's former parent, CBS. Former Viacom President & COO Mel Karmazin (who was then the President of CBS) proposed a merger to Redstone on favorable terms and after the merger completed in 2000, Viacom had some of the most diversified businesses imaginable.
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| Viacom - the whole enchilada...almost. |
Viacom had assets in the form of broadcast networks (CBS and UPN), cable television networks (MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, MTV2, Comedy Central, BET, Nick at Nite, Noggin/The N, TV Land, CMT, and Spike TV), pay television (Showtime and The Movie Channel), radio (Infinity Broadcasting, which produced the immensely popular Howard Stern' radio shows), outdoor advertising, motion pictures (Paramount Pictures), and television production ([Aaron] Spelling Entertainment, Paramount Television, and Big Ticket Entertainment), and King World Productions (a syndication unit, which notably syndicates the runaway daytime hit, The Oprah Winfrey Show, as well as Dr. Phil, Wheel of Fortune, and Jeopardy!), among others.
After CBS and Viacom split in late 2005, Sumner Redstone remained chairman of both companies.
And here is a rather bizarre article involving Mr. Redstone that a reader kindly made me aware of. Thank you for that, whoever you are. Take it with a grain of salt, of course, but it is rather humorous. As far as believability, all I will say is that with people of the elite ruling class, almost anything is possible.
Spielberg, Katzenberg, Geffen (DreamWorks SKG)
In December 2005, the founders agreed to sell the studio to Viacom, parent of Paramount Pictures. The sale was completed in February 2006. In 2008, DreamWorks announced its intention to end its partnership with Paramount and signed a US $1.5 billion deal to produce films with India's Reliance ADA Group. Reliance provided $325m of equity to fund recreating Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks studio as an independent entity.
Clark Hallren, former Managing Director of the Entertainment Industries group of J.P. Morgan Securities and Alan J. Levine of J.P. Morgan Entertainment Advisors led the Reliance team in structuring the capital and business plan for the company. The movie studio is now 50% owned by Reliance, which is led by Anil Ambani.
Anil Ambani
Anil Ambani (born June 4, 1959) is an Indian business baron and chairman of Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group. Anil's elder brother, Mukesh Ambani, is also worth more than $28 billion, and owns another company called Reliance Industries. As of 2010, he is the fourth richest Indian with a personal wealth of $13.7 billion, behind his brother Mukesh Ambani, Lakshmi Mittal and Azim Premji.
He is a member of the Board of Overseers at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the member of the Board of Governors of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur; Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He is a member of the Central Advisory Committee, Central Electricity Regulatory Commission. In March 2006, he resigned. He is also the Chairman of Board of Governors of DA-IICT, Gandhinagar.
Ambani joined Reliance, the company founded by his late father Dhirubhai Ambani, in 1983 as Co-Chief Executive Officer and is credited with having pioneered many financial innovations in the Indian capital markets. For example, he led India's first forays into overseas capital markets with international public offerings of global depositary receipts, convertibles and bonds.
He, along with his brother, Mukesh Ambani, has steered the Reliance Group to its current status as India's leading textiles, petroleum, petrochemicals, power, and telecom company. He has been embroiled in a dispute with his brother, Mukesh Ambani, over the supply of gas from the latter's KG basin.
Buying Bollywood
One of his major achievements in the entertainment industry is the takeover of Adlabs, the movie production to distribution to multiplex company that owns India's only dome theatre and the recently announced joint venture worth US $825 million with Steven Spielberg, which is essentially the beginning of the merger (or hostile takeover) of Bollywood by the Hollywood elite.
In a 2008 interview in the Los Angeles Times, Gunjan Bagla (an Indian-American author, blogger, businessman and public speaker) spoke with Ambani about the impending purchase of DreamWorks by Reliance. In the interview, Bagla compared Ambani to "Rockefeller, Bill Gates and Howard Hughes."
In June 2004, Ambani was elected as an Independent Member of the Rajya Sabha - Upper House, Parliament of India, with the support of the Samajwadi Party.
Ambani has been linked with several starlets in his long career, including his current wife of more than 15 years, Bollywood actress Tina Munim. He is also close friends with Subrata Roy and Bollywood movie star Amitabh Bachchan.
David Geffen
David Geffen (born February 21, 1943) is an American record executive, film producer, theatrical producer and philanthropist. Geffen is noted for creating Asylum Records in 1970 (which was sold to the Warner Music Group who merged it with Elektra Records in 1972 to form Elektra/Asylum Records), and Geffen Records in 1980, along with his later role as one of the three founders of DreamWorks SKG in 1994.
Geffen was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Abraham Geffen and Batya Volovskaya. Both were immigrants who met in British-mandated Palestine (before the establishment of the State of Israel) and then moved to Brooklyn.
Geffen began his entertainment career in the mailroom at the William Morris Agency, where he quickly became an agent. In order to obtain the WMA job, he had to show proof of graduating college.
Geffen is said to have forged a fraudulent letter and submitted it to WMA in order to get hired.
His colleagues in the mailroom included Elliot Roberts, who later became David Geffen's partner in a management company. He left William Morris to become a personal manager and was immediately successful with Laura Nyro and Crosby, Stills and Nash. In the process of looking for a record deal for young Jackson Browne, Ahmet Ertegün (Atlantic Records mogul) suggested that Geffen start his own record label.
In 1980, he founded Geffen Records and recruited Warner Bros. Records exec Ed Rosenblatt as president. The December release of John Lennon's album Double Fantasy seems an impressive feat for a new label, but at the time Lennon stated that Geffen was the only one with enough confidence in him to agree to a deal without hearing the record first.
An alternate view is that Geffen was the only label head to pay attention to Lennon's wife and partner Yoko Ono. In December 1980 Lennon was fatally shot and Double Fantasy became a massive seller.
Over the years Geffen Records/DGC has become well known as a label, releasing works by the likes of Olivia Newton-John, Asia with Steve Howe and John Wetton, Elton John's The Fox album, Cher, Sonic Youth, Aerosmith, XTC, Peter Gabriel, Lone Justice, Blink-182, Guns N' Roses, Lifehouse, Pat Metheny, Sloan, Nirvana, The Stone Roses and Neil Young.
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| David Geffen, Michael Jackson and Madonna Kabbalah. |
The label was distributed by Warner Bros. Records since its inception, but in 1990, the label was sold to MCA and today is part of the Interscope-Geffen-A&M division of MCA's successor, Universal Music Group, formed as the result of the 1999 merger between the MCA and PolyGram families of labels.
Geffen and Radical Leftist Politics
Geffen was an early financial supporter of President Bill Clinton. In 2001 he had a falling out with the former president over Clinton's decision to not pardon convicted murderer Leonard Peltier, on whose behalf Geffen had lobbied the President.
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| President Obama, David Geffen (age 66) and his boyfriend, 26 yr-old Jeremy Lingvall, at the White House State Dinner. |
Geffen was an early supporter of Barack Obama for president and raised $1.3 million for Obama in a star-studded Beverly Hills fund raiser. On 21 February 2007, in an interview with Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Geffen described Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill Clinton in unflattering terms: "Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease, it's troubling." (Interesting quote, coming from a guy who is said to have forged a letter and lied to get a job at William Morris, eh?)
He said that Hillary Clinton was "incredibly polarizing" and described Bill Clinton as "reckless" and cast doubt on those who say he has become a different person since leaving office.
Geffen has an estimated net worth of $4.6 billion, making him one of the richest people in the entertainment industry.
David Geffen is openly gay. In May 2007, Out magazine ranked Geffen first in their list of the fifty "Most Powerful Gay Men and Women in America". He, along with other celebrities, including Steven Spielberg and Brad Pitt, donated money to stop Proposition 8 from becoming law in California.
Proposition 8, The California Marriage Protection Act, was a ballot proposition and constitutional amendment passed in the November 2008, state elections, by a fairly large margin for being one of the most extreme liberal states in the country (52% for, and 47% against). The measure added a new provision, Section 7.5 of the Declaration of Rights, to the California Constitution, which provides that "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California".
This is an interesting piece, which I have no way of verifying its accuracy, but it's worth reading. When you read what Geffen's attack dog attorneys told the author, and how quickly they jumped on the guy, this may tell us something important.
People that are in very powerful positions, with lots of money and public exposure, tend to have pretty thick skin, and are used to criticism of various kinds - it comes with the territory, as they say.
So, when you see someone of Geffen's stature react so quickly and aggressively (with attorneys!) because some unknown actor says that Geffen asked or told him to do something sexual - well, that could definitely give one cause for reasonable suspicion that Geffen "doth protest too much", and may have something to hide.
I mentioned in another article this tendency of the Hollywood liberal elite, specifically Scientologists, being quite enamored with using fascist legal tactics and attack dog attorneys to attempt to silence those who might dare to say anything remotely unflattering about their egomaniacal, self-deluded and extremely wealthy clients.
Geffen's Malibu home (5 adjacent parcels comprising Doris Day's old beach house) on the Pacific Coast Highway has been a battlefront in an ongoing struggle between property owners and beachgoers over access to public beaches in front of private residences. In 2002, Geffen sued to block access to the public beach in front of his home. His publicly stated concern was "safety" - presumably his own.
Geffen "fought an infamous battle for decades to keep the public from using an easement that he was supposed to grant under terms of building his home on Carbon Beach" before losing the court battle 2005 and having to open the gates beside his home to the public. In 2005, facing a rising tide of anger, Geffen relented and allowed access to the public beach. Garry Trudeau parodied this dispute in his daily comic strip Doonesbury.
Carbon Beach has more than its share of elitist celebrities, such as Nancy Daly Riordan (wife of former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan), Lou Adler (music mogul), Larry Ellison (software billionaire), Eli Broad (billionaire businessman), Haim Saban (another billionaire, producer of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and other TV programming) and David Geffen.
Lou Adler
(Although Lou Adler isn't the major player he once was, since his name came up above as part of the Malibu Carbon Beach crowd with Geffen, we might as well cover a few of the interesting things about him.)
Lou Adler (born December 13, 1933) is an American record producer, manager, and director. Born in Chicago, Illinois and raised in East Los Angeles, Adler grew up in a mixed Jewish/Mexican family.
In 1964, Adler founded and co-owned Dunhill Records. He was President of the label as well as the chief record producer from 1964 to 1967. That summer he sold Dunhill for three million dollars to ABC Records. Later in 1967, he founded Ode Records. In June 1967, Adler helped to produce the Monterey International Pop Festival, as well as the film version, Monterey Pop.
He formerly managed Jan & Dean and produced Sam Cooke, The Mamas & the Papas, Johnny Rivers, Barry McGuire, Scott McKenzie, The Grass Roots, Spirit, Carole King, The Weaver Temptations (which he signed in 1968) and Cheech and Chong.
In 1978, Adler directed the movie Up In Smoke, starring Cheech & Chong. The movie remains a cult hit, and in 2000 Adler recorded a commentary track along with Cheech Marin for the DVD release. His 1981 followup film, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, was barely released, but enjoyed a long life on cable TV broadcasts.
He won two Grammy Awards in 1972 in the Record of the Year category for producing It's Too Late by Carole King and in the Album of the Year category for Tapestry (also by King).
Lou Adler was married to actress and singer Shelley Fabares in 1964 and produced several of her songs. They separated in 1966 but were not formally divorced until 1980. In 1978 he fathered a son, Cisco Adler, with then-girlfriend Phyllis Somer.
Today, Adler is married to former actress Page Hannah, younger sister of actress Daryl Hannah. The couple has four sons, Manny, Ike, Pablo, and Oscar.
Adler can often be seen sitting court side next to Jack Nicholson at Los Angeles Lakers home games. Adler owns The Roxy Theatre in West Hollywood, California.
Lou Adler is also the uncle of former Guns N' Roses drummer, Steven Adler.
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| Steven Adler, before and after drug-induced strokes and subsequent brain damage. |
Steven Adler, a childhood friend of ex-GN'R guitarist Slash, was an original member of the iconic hard-rock outfit and appeared on the band's first three releases, including their breakthrough LP, 1987's Appetite for Destruction.
He was fired from the group in 1990 due to his ongoing struggle with drug addiction, and suffered an intracerebral haemorrhage (stroke) in 1996 after ingesting a large amount drugs. He suffered a second stroke a short while later, and was left with impaired speech.
He has since been arrested and charged with felony drug possession, disorderly conduct and appeared on Celebrity Rehab and its spinoff, Sober Living, in which MTV exploits the misfortunes and addictions of celebrities on television for ratings and profit.
Jeffrey Katzenberg
Jeffrey Katzenberg (born December 21, 1950) is an American film producer and CEO of DreamWorks Animation. He is perhaps most famous for his period as studio chairman at The Walt Disney Company, and for producing DreamWorks animated films such as Shrek, Antz, The Prince of Egypt, Madagascar, Over the Hedge, Kung Fu Panda, Monsters vs. Aliens, and How to Train Your Dragon.
Katzenberg tried being a talent agent briefly, but in 1975 ended up as an assistant to Barry Diller, the Chairman of Paramount Pictures. Diller moved Katzenberg to the marketing department and then the television division where Katzenberg was assigned to revive the Star Trek franchise. He was successful with Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). He continued to work his way up and became President of Production under Chief Operating Officer (COO) Michael Eisner.
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| Jeffrey Katzenberg, James Cameron and Steven Spielberg |
Under Katzenberg's management, the animation department eventually began creating some of Disney's most critically acclaimed and highest grossing animated features. These films include Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991, the first animated feature to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture), Aladdin (1992), and The Lion King (1994).
In addition, Katzenberg also sealed the deal that created the highly successful partnership between Pixar and Disney and the deal that brought Miramax Films into Disney.
When Eisner’s second in command, Frank Wells, died in a helicopter crash in 1994, Eisner refused to promote Katzenberg to the vacated position of president. When Katzenberg pushed the issue, Eisner forced him to resign. Katzenberg launched a lawsuit against Disney to recover money he felt he was owed and settled out of court for $280 million.
Katzenberg and Radical Leftist Politics
Of the total political contributions of $1,444,420.00 given by Katzenberg since 1978, 95% were given to Democrats, 5% to special interest groups without party affiliations, and less than 1% (only $7,000.00) to Republicans.
Jeffrey Katzenberg's net worth was rated as $859 million in 2006. He also owns 36.4 million (of Class A & Class B) shares, worth an estimated $109.2 million. In addition, 618,571 shares of Class A restricted stock with performance-based vesting conditions granted to Katzenberg at the time of its October 2004 IPO will vest in the first quarter of 2009. As of January 12, 2007, these shares had a value of $18.53 million.
Katzenberg was born in New York City, the son of Anne, an artist, and a stockbroker father. He married Marilyn Siegel, a kindergarten teacher, in 1975, and they have two children, Laura and David (twins).
David Katzenberg
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| David Katzenberg and M.K. Olsen |
Jeffrey's son, David, is following in his father's footsteps and becoming a film and tv producer (Survivor, The Hard Times of RJ Berger). He is also know for dating some famous young butterflies of the Hollywood crowd - notably, Mary-Kate Olsen and, his apparently soon-to-be wife, Nicky Hilton.
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| David Katzenberg, in his Skull and Bones costume, out with Nicky Hilton. |
"I mostly just hang out with my boyfriend and my sister," Paris admitted to OK! at the launch of the new Bandit hairband/extension in Malibu over the weekend. She also added her Simple Life co-star Nicole Richie and her fiancé, Benji’s twin brother Joel Madden to the mix. "Basically my family," she said.
"It’s cool because we are all dating twins," Paris added. "Even my sister is dating a twin – David [Katzenberg] is a twin. My cousin is dating an identical twin. So, we all date twins and we all hang out. It’s pretty interesting."
Yep, I might even go so far as to say that whole twins thing is extremely interesting. Maybe even more than Paris realizes.
Steven Spielberg
Steven Allan Spielberg (born December 18, 1946) is an American film director, screenwriter, and film producer. In a career spanning six decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an archetype of modern Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking. In later years, his films began addressing such issues as the Holocaust, slavery, war and terrorism. He is considered one of the most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema.
Spielberg won the Academy Award for Best Director for Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). Three of Spielberg's films - Jaws (1975), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and Jurassic Park (1993) - achieved box office records, each becoming the highest-grossing film made at the time. To date, the unadjusted gross of all Spielberg-directed films exceeds $8.5 billion worldwide.
Studio producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown offered Spielberg the director's chair for Jaws, a thriller-horror film based on the Peter Benchley novel about an enormous killer-shark. Spielberg has often referred to the grueling shoot as his professional crucible. Despite the film's ultimate, enormous success, it was nearly shut down due to delays and budget overruns.
But Spielberg persevered and finished the film. It was an enormous hit, winning three Academy Awards (for editing, original score and sound) and grossing $470,653,000 worldwide at the box office. It also set the domestic record for box office gross, leading to what the press described as "Jawsmania". Jaws made him a household name, as well as one of America's youngest multi-millionaires, and allowed Spielberg a great deal of autonomy for his future projects. It was nominated for Best Picture and featured Spielberg's first of three collaborations with actor Richard Dreyfuss.
Spielberg was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to a Jewish family. His mother Leah Adler was a restaurateur and concert pianist, and father Arnold Spielberg was an electrical engineer involved in the development of computers. He spent his childhood in Haddon Heights, New Jersey and Scottsdale, Arizona.
Throughout his early teens, Spielberg made amateur 8 mm "adventure" films with his friends, the first of which he shot at the Pinnacle Peak Patio restaurant in Scottsdale. He charged admission (25 cents) to his home films (which involved the wrecks he staged with his Lionel train set) while his sister sold popcorn.
Spielberg and actor Richard Dreyfuss reconvened to work on a film about UFOs, which became Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). One of the rare films both written and directed by Spielberg, Close Encounters was a critical and box office hit, giving Spielberg his first Best Director nomination from the Academy as well as earning six other Academy Awards nominations.
In 2001, Spielberg filmed fellow director and friend Stanley Kubrick's final project, A.I. Artificial Intelligence which Kubrick was unable to begin during his lifetime. A futuristic film about a humanoid android longing for love, A.I. featured groundbreaking visual effects and a multi-layered, allegorical storyline, adapted by Spielberg himself. Though the film's reception in the US was relatively muted, it performed better overseas for a worldwide total box office gross of $236 million.
Spielberg and actor Tom Cruise collaborated for the first time for the futuristic neo-noir Minority Report, based upon the sci-fi short story written by Philip K. Dick about a Washington D.C. police captain in the year 2054 who has been foreseen to murder a man he has not yet met. The film earned over $358 million worldwide. Roger Ebert, who named it the best film of 2002, praised its "breathtaking vision of the future" as well as for the way Spielberg blended CGI with live-action.
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| Space aliens invading Earth in Spielberg's remake of War of the Worlds |
Spielberg is to produce a new series in collaboration with the TNT (Ted Turner) television network. The unnamed series is based on the aftermath of an alien invasion. He will direct and produce the 12-hour miniseries Nine Lives for Syfy, and will also create the science fiction film Robopocalypse.
One can easily notice in Spielberg's films the desire and intent not just to tell stories, but to shape and influence the viewer's feelings and opinions on various subjects. One consistent theme is that aliens exist. Whether he simply believes this, or if a symbolic and metaphorical ulterior motive is attached to this idea is debatable.
Spielberg, Nazis and The Holocaust
Another prevalent theme with Spielberg is that totalitarian governments like Nazi Germany were evil (Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers) - which is painfully obvious to anyone with even a few functional neurons.
Yet, in his real life support of radical socialist ideas, leaders and governments, these are somehow good for humanity. More accurately and honestly, they are good only for one small fragment of humanity - the elite ruling class.
Mass media has played a critical role in falsely portraying political extremes as follows: Extreme left is Marxist/Leninist Soviet Socialism/Communism and Extreme Right is Hitler/Mussolini fascism.
But, in reality, both of those are extreme left-wing ideologies, involving totalitarian and centralized control of the many, being governed by a select, elite few.
The Biggest Lies and Liars in the World: Mass Media and the Ruling Elite
The German Nazi Party (National Socialism) was a fanatical left-wing concept, not right-wing, in any sense.
If anything, Nazi Germany was the polar opposite of "right-wing ideologies", which envision and support government that is as limited and decentralized as possible, and would perhaps tend toward anarchy (or no government at all), in the most extreme sense.
You see, tyranny and total government control versus anarchy and no government control are the true opposites, whereas, the two flavors of tyranny that are constantly and falsely sold to us as being "opposites" by the mass media, political leaders and celebrities of the world are, indeed, the biggest possible lie.
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| Nazi propagandist extraordinaire, Joseph Goebbels |
As this infamous and very evil Nazi once said: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
One cannot reasonably or logically say that the polar opposites in political thought would both involve total government control and tyranny - one extreme must be the opposite of this - and in reality, it is.
Yet, we are constantly sold this very big lie by the news media, the primary and university education (indoctrination) systems and other avenues of mass media - which are (not coincidentally) owned and controlled by the elite ruling class.
This is the very nature of "Big Brother" and the fictional, but all too prophetic, "Ministry of Truth" in George Orwell's "1984".
This is a common and persistent thread in most of the prominent and wealthy celebrities in the world - make your fortune and become insanely wealthy by exploiting the abundant freedom and money in capitalist societies, and then criticize their unfairness and support socialism. Michael Moore and his films are an especially good example of this interesting and supremely hypocritical duality. I was going to add a picture of him here, but I just can't bring myself to do that to myself, or the rest of you.
One might even (and I most definitely would) call this Duplicity - a concept which was thoroughly examined in the PsyWar section of "Imma Bee the Future: Selling Transhumanism to the Masses Using Psychological Warfare".
The moment that I see Spielberg, Michael Moore, Streisand, ad nauseum selflessly donate 99% of their vast wealth to help the extreme poverty in Darfur or Ethiopia (or perhaps Cuba in Moore's case), is the same moment when I will give their extreme socialist views some credibility.
After all, anyone should be able to survive and live quite well on 1% of hundreds of the millions or billions they possess (or does the wealth possess them?). The rest of us certainly manage somehow, not only to survive, but also to buy tickets to their movies and concerts, with far less over our entire lifetimes than 1% of their wealth. Am I correct? :)
Spielberg and Radical Leftist Politics
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| Steven and Bill...and Whoopi's even there in the background, too. |
Spielberg usually supports U.S. Democratic Party candidates. He has donated over $800,000 for the Democratic party and its nominees. He has been a close friend of former President Bill Clinton and worked with the President for the USA Millennium celebrations. He directed an 18-minute film for the project, scored by John Williams and entitled The American Journey.
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| I wonder if these elitist scum make Ben Franklin as nauseous as they do me? |
On February 20, 2007, Spielberg, Katzenberg, and David Geffen invited Democrats to a fundraiser for Barack Obama. But on June 14, 2007, Spielberg endorsed Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) for President. While Geffen and Katzenberg supported Obama, Spielberg was always a supporter of Hillary Clinton. However Spielberg directed a video for Obama at the DNC in August 2008 and attended Obama's inauguration.
Forbes magazine places Spielberg's personal net worth at $3.0 billion.
Coming soon...
Interscope and Jimmy Iovine...and much more.
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