If you were to rank the most influential directors in Hollywood today, Steven Spielberg would certainly be in the top five. In terms of money, only George Lucas has amassed a larger fortune from his work in films. However, if you had this same discussion in the early 1980's, Spielberg would have been hard pressed to have made the top 50.

During the mid 1970's Spielberg had a solid string of box office hits that included such films as, The Sugarland Express, Jaws, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But Spielberg's reputation was badly damaged in the late 70's when he decided to follow up his mega hits with a film called 1941, a comedy with an all star cast that became a pseudonym for box office failure. Production costs for 1941 soared during filming and the project was plagued with constant delays which resulted in the film being well...