Spielberg helped create the Scouts' cinematography badge

Person: Steven Spielberg
Lived: b. 1946
Field: Film
From: American

The story

Steven Spielberg was born in Cincinnati in 1946 and grew up in New Jersey and then Arizona. His fascination with film started early. After his parents took him to see Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth, he was so struck by its train crash that at 12 he staged one with his own Lionel model trains and filmed it, so he could watch it again and again. It was his first home movie.

In 1958 he joined the Boy Scouts, and he took his father's eight-millimetre movie camera on every Scout trip. To meet a requirement for the photography merit badge, he made a nine-minute Western called The Last Gunfight. More films followed. At 13 he made a 40-minute war film, Escape to Nowhere, with a cast of classmates, and it won first prize in a statewide competition. He went on to make some fifteen to twenty amateur adventure films, and as a teenager he wrote and directed a science fiction feature, Firelight, which was shown at a local cinema for one evening and took 501 dollars against its 500-dollar budget. He went on to reach the rank of Eagle Scout.

Decades later, as one of the most successful directors in the world, he gave something back. Drawing on his own experience of Scouting, Spielberg helped the Boy Scouts of America develop a merit badge in cinematography, designed to promote filmmaking as a creative and marketable skill. The badge was launched at the 1989 National Scout Jamboree.

The same year he received the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award. The honour is given only to Eagle Scouts who have earned national eminence in their field and have a strong record of voluntary service, at least 25 years after they earned the rank, and its recipients include President Gerald Ford and the businessman Sam Walton.

The badge gave young people across the United States a structured way to learn camera work, editing and storytelling, much as Spielberg himself had once learned by trial and error with a borrowed camera and a cast of friends. For many Scouts it offered the same first step that a photography badge had once offered him.