I have been following Jawad's website on Steven Spielberg for several months and have found it a very useful source of up-to-date information on Spielberg's films and TV shows. I appreciate Jawad's great enthusiasm for Spielberg's work and his determination to keep the public posted on the developments in Spielberg's career.

I had great fun writing my book "Steven Spielberg: A Biography," which was first published in hardcover by Simon & Schuster in 1997 and has just been published in trade paperback by Da Capo Press. For three years I followed Spielberg's progression from childhood to maturity, visiting all the places where he grew up and interviewing his boyhood friends, neighbors, and classmates, and teachers from Ohio, New Jersey, Arizona, and California, as well as interviewing many people who have worked with him throughout his film and television career in Hollywood. In all, I interviewed 327 people, including Spielberg's father, Arnold, who had rarely spoken publicly about his son before this. I learned from my research that contrary to Steven's earlier claims that his father did nothing to help his film career, Arnold was a full partner with Steven in his amateur filmmaking endeavors, which were a father-son hobby during several of Steven's formative years. Interviewing dozens of people who worked on Spielberg's amateur films was perhaps the most fascinating part of my work on this book. They had been waiting decades for someone to come along and ask them to tell this largely untold story.

The theme of my book, broadly speaking, is how discovering moviemaking "made a mensch" out of Steven Spielberg, as his rabbi from boyhood put it to me. This is the story of how a bright, nerdy, outcast kid from a troubled family found a way of channeling his anger, need for attention, and need for social approval into a creative outlet. By making his amateur films, he become a personage in his neighborhoods and schools, neutralizing and converting the bullies and other kids who otherwise would have shunned him. Steven's conflicted feelings about his Jewish heritage and the anti-Semitism he endured while growing up made him a more empathetic person and helped lead him eventually to embrace and pay witness to his background in "Schindler's List."

I think everyone who visits Jawad's site and shares his and my enthusiasm for Spielberg's work will find this book full of insights into how Spielberg's creative personality developed from childhood to the personal epiphany of "Schindler's List." I also hope that anyone who does not take Spielberg's work seriously, or continues to underrate him as a facile entertainer incapable of dealing with "serious, mature, adult" issues, will be challenged by this book's view that Spielberg has been making serious, mature, adult films since the beginning of his professional career with "Amblin'" and "Duel"

Rather than wait twenty years for a critical consensus to form on Spielberg, I thought it was valuable to write this biography now when he is in the prime of his life and career and when almost everyone is still around to talk about him. I hope that by doing the book I have contributed to a deeper public understanding of the greatest filmmaker working in America today.