Director, screenwriter, filmmaker and producer Steven Spielberg was born on December 18, 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Spielberg moved several times but everything changed when he spent part of his youth in Phoenix, Arizona.
While living in Phoenix, when Spielberg was only 13-years-old, decided to film a war film he titled "Escape to Nowhere" using his teenage friends as actors and he won a prize for his 40 minutes war film. The win motivated him to continue to make 15 more amateur 8mm films. When he was 16-years-old, Spielberg wrote and directed his first independent film, a 140-minute science fiction adventure called Firelight, which would later inspire Close Encounters. He made the film with $500 he borrowed from his dad, and was shown in a local cinema for one evening, which earned back its cost. After attending Arcadia High School in Phoenix for three years, his family next moved to Saratoga, California where he later graduated from Saratoga High School in 1965.