“It’s nothing to worry about,” my agent told me. “But the rumor is Spielberg saw your short and is going to call you.”

“Oh,” I said. “Steven Spielberg?”

“Yeah.”

I had stepped out of my friend Jerome’s house to take the call, my Sony Ericsson T68i pressed to my ear. Above me, the streetlights started going all swirly. It’s fair to say this is not how I expected my Friday night to unfold.

“There probably isn’t anything to do till Monday, but just in case, keep your phone on this weekend. And don’t think about it.”

“Okay, sure. I definitely won’t think about that at all.”

I hung up. Then I freaked out.

By that night in early 2003, I had graduated from USC, and stuck around for an extra semester to make a new musical short called When the Kids Are Away, imagining what mothers do after their children leave for school. I was the only director in my class to put together a team before graduation: an agent, a lawyer, managers. In late 2002 and early 2003, my new team arranged screenings of When the Kids Are Away, hoping it might lead to meetings with producers or studio executives. Anything to get Hollywood to notice me, to get me my shot.

A phone call from Steven Spielberg—assuming it wasn’t a prank, and I was totally prepared for it to be a prank—went far beyond my wildest dream for the kind of attention that the short might draw.

I didn’t sleep that night.

The next day, my agent called again. The prospective phone call with Spielberg was now off the table. He wanted to meet in person.

I didn’t sleep much that night, either.

The next day, Sunday, I assembled my friends and roommates at my apartment for a celebration that doubled as a strategy session. A lot of my classmates had started down a trail marked for us by past generations of USC grads: You hustle to get an entry-level job as a producer’s assistant or working in a mail room, then bust your ass to move forward. That map offered no guidance for someone in my situation. If I really got face time with Steven Spielberg, what should I do with it? What was my goal?

Jason—best friend, former roommate—was blunt: “Get a second meeting.”

He was right. You can cover only so much ground in a single conversation. But if I could play it just right and start a relationship, then anything might be possible.

I spent the rest of the party/summit pondering ways to make that happen. At some point, Jason mentioned a project that he and his girlfriend, Danica, had been developing: a modern-day musical retelling of the Romeo and Juliet story called Moxie. I clocked it, then went back to freaking out.

The next morning, after a weekend that had lasted seven centuries, I drove onto the Universal lot. Mercifully, this wasn’t one of the many times when the guard at the gate took one look at my face and my neon-green Volkswagen Bug and said, “Deliveries are around the side.” On this day —March 3, 2003 —he checked my ID and waved me through.

I thanked him and rolled up the window.

It was really happening. I was almost there.

I tried not to crash my car.

The spaceship lifted off; Elliott watched it fly away.

Turning from the screen, I saw that my brothers and sisters, sitting in the row next to me, were just as rapt as I was. They’d already seen E.T.—Howard had even brought his E.T. doll with him —but it was a new experience for me. Very new.

I was five, and I’d never been to the movies before. Never sat in the dark gaping up at a big screen, never felt the music and sound crash over me. On that summer afternoon in 1985, at the Old Mill mall in Mountain View, Calif., with my family all around me and a bag of Reese’s Pieces on my lap, my life in movies began. Steven Spielberg’s story about a boy’s friendship with a lost alien set a standard that I’d judge every other film experience against, consciously or not, for the rest of my life.

It wasn’t just E.T., either. Jurassic Park, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Close Encounters of the Third Kind: All of Spielberg’s movies left me feeling that I’d been taken outside myself, making me believe in a reality that was different from my everyday world, and bigger. On the morning I was set to meet him, the lobby rendered that feeling in three solid dimensions. The place looked like an Indiana Jones set, all adobe and wood. It also featured a wishing well. I peered down into it, coming face-to-face with somebody’s little joke: the shark from Jaws lunging up at me.

As if I weren’t scared enough already.

Spielberg’s production company is called Amblin Entertainment. (The name comes from the student film that helped him break into the business.) When people asked me about the kinds of movies I wanted to make after school, I would say, “Amblin-y.”

The question that inspired my film, When the Kids Are Away, was what do stay-at-home moms do when their children are at school? My short answer was: They sing and dance! I wanted to do big ensemble numbers, with dozens of moms dancing up and down the street.

Somehow, in early 2003, Spielberg had gotten a copy of my movie. (How, I’ll never be sure. Four different people have claimed credit, which is about average for a Hollywood success story.) Apparently, unbelievably, he’d liked it enough to want to meet me.

And now here I was, crossing his lobby, heading for his door. My brain was racing through the many things that might go wrong. Spielberg might realize that I knew nothing about film. Or, in spite of how much I’d built up the meeting in my mind, it could be a quick handshake and goodbye. The scariest possibility of all was that it might go great. That my life would peak right then and there. What if my first great Hollywood adventure would also be my last?

Please, I prayed, let this not be the end of the story.

I reached the reception desk. I felt silly, but there was no other way to say it: “I’m here to see Steven Spielberg.”

“We’ve actually met,” I said when we sat down in a small conference room near his office.

“Was I nice?” he asked.

“You were.”

“Phew!” he replied.

(A couple of years earlier, I’d designed a fake security credential to sneak into the Oscars. I laminated a photoshopped image of a pass, then talked my way into the backstage press area, where I worked up the nerve to shake his hand, though not to give him a letter I’d written. It was very fulsome.)

Spielberg took all the pressure off and launched into how much he’d loved When the Kids Are Away. He said it was different from any student film he’d seen in a long time. How had I made something that did so many things so well, with such high production value? That had a big orchestra and dancers and period costumes? That was so joyful?

I’d wanted the movie to be a warm picture of family life, a celebration of mothers. (Again, I was never going to be the cynical guy.) That’s why we’d shot it in Pasadena, in all that suburban sunshine. The movie also showcased little kids, another Spielberg signature. On set, I’d tried all the tricks that I’d seen him use in behind-the-scenes videos of The Goonies and E.T. to draw beautiful performances out of child actors. He had made it look so easy. It was not easy.

He said that after he watched those family scenes, he knew immediately that he needed to share my film with his wife, Kate Capshaw. Her reaction, according to him, was: “He gets us mothers.”

“That’s when I knew I had to meet you,” he told me.

The more we talked about the movie, the more surreal the conversation became. Because the final explanation for how we’d made the film was by using tools that were just as new and unfamiliar to Spielberg as they were to me.

From the day my classmates and I arrived at film school, our professors had drilled us on all the ways that shooting on film was superior to using a digital camera. Even I, a trueborn son of Silicon Valley, had to agree. But by the time I graduated, technology had leapt ahead. Sony and Panavision had developed a digital camera capable of filming in high definition at twenty-four frames per second, which is how most directors had shot most movies for decades. We prepped When the Kids Are Away at the same time George Lucas was giving that camera, the F900, its first test in a major Hollywood feature, Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones. Lucas described it as “a giant experiment for everybody.”

There was no earthly reason a couple of recent college grads should get their hands on technology that cutting-edge. But Alice and I wrote a letter to Bob Harvey, then senior vice president of sales at Panavision, that was nearly as effusive as the undelivered one I’d written to Spielberg. Miraculously, it worked. Once we learned the secrets of the F900, all sorts of new possibilities arose.

Since we didn’t have to worry about burning through film (and our budget), we could shoot more and longer takes of dance sequences, which made us look more polished than we were. We could let the camera run during rehearsals, catching amazing moments from our child actors. Best of all, during postproduction, we could manipulate the color and frame until we found the right look. Doing this on film would’ve been financially ruinous, impossible.

This was all so new in 2002 that a filmmaking magazine interviewed me and Alice about what we did. It was so new that Steven Spielberg was curious to hear how it had gone.

It wasn’t all shop talk, though. He wanted to know about my family, where I’d grown up, what I’d learned at USC —an institution that he said he was very proud to support. And we talked about what might come next.

“I’ve wanted to do a musical,” he said.

“Oh, I know.”

When we compared notes on our favorite musicals, he said his was Oliver!, then launched into a rendition of “Consider Yourself,” the song that the Artful Dodger sings when welcoming quick-fingered young Oliver into his gang: “Consider yourself at home. / Consider yourself one of the family.” I sat there as he sang the song to me, all the way to its final words: “Consider yourself —one of us!” The irony of him singing that song, of all songs, on the day of our first meeting didn’t strike me until much later.

Eventually a couple of his senior executives joined us. They asked, in a casual way, what I was working on. The big moment had arrived.

I told them that some friends and I had been developing a new musical called Moxie.

“We’d love to hear about it when it’s ready,” they said.

“Oh, it’s ready,” I said. “We just finished it this week. We’d love to show it to you.”

A couple of hours later, as soon as I got home, I recounted this conversation for Jason and Danica. Then I broke the bad news: There wasn’t going to be a second meeting. After they’d consoled me for a while, I told them the truth: I was just kidding. (I was about to give them the greatest news of their whole lives. How could I resist messing around with them for a minute first?)

I’d gotten my second meeting with Spielberg. And this time, they were coming with me.

They screamed. I screamed. We all jumped up and down and shouted into each other’s faces. If this scene were directed by Spielberg (who likes to cut away from big moments to something comically mundane), we’d see the people in the apartment downstairs looking annoyed as the wineglasses on their table rattled back and forth.

They were so excited —so euphoric —that they didn’t mind the ridiculous jam I’d put us in. Contrary to what I’d said, Moxie was nowhere near finished. It was barely even an idea. The three of us would spend the next week pulling all-nighters, racing to figure out how to pitch our movie. Or, come to think of it, how to pitch any movie. None of us knew.

Those few frantic days were like the condensed version of that whole phase of my life, after the call from Spielberg scrambled every expectation of what my beginning in Hollywood might be. I didn’t know where I was going, but I was going there fast.

Social media didn’t exist in 2003 —a lot of Hollywood execs didn’t even use email—but gossip got around. Once people heard that Steven Spielberg had wanted to meet a twenty-three-year-old to talk about a student film, the whole town snapped to attention.

And here’s the best part: The fact that I’d made a musical made them more eager to meet me, not less.

About twenty minutes after my screenwriting professor had told me that musicals were a dead art form, Moulin Rouge had reminded everybody of their enormous creative possibilities. Then, three weeks after the premiere of When the Kids Are Away, Rob Marshall’s movie version of Chicago had opened huge. It racked up thirteen Oscar nominations, more than any other film that year. Just like that, musicals were the hottest genre in town. And here I was, a young filmmaker with a musical that even Steven Spielberg was curious about.

My team had taken a counterintuitive approach to getting me known. Instead of flooding the town with dozens of screener copies of When the Kids Are Away, they tightly limited access. We held invitation-only screenings —not too many of them — for producers and execs. That way, people would experience the movie the way a joyful musical should be experienced: in a crowded theater on a big screen.

Those screenings led to meetings. Dozens and dozens of meetings. Rachel Shane, an exec at Red Wagon Productions, had come to the premiere of When the Kids Are Away. She loved it and asked to meet with me and Lucy Fisher, the cohead of Red Wagon and former head of Columbia Pictures. The company had the rights to remake Bye Bye Birdie, the 1960 musical about a pop star going into the army. At her invitation, I worked up an idea for what I would do with it.

It wouldn’t be a period piece, I decided. It should be set here and now. In my version, Birdie would be a pop star whose fame is waning. His manager, Albert, would come up with a plan to reignite his career and get him street cred by manufacturing a fight that would land him in jail: a live, nationally televised broadcast and reality show in which he would use his last days of freedom to “do good” for his fans. Who would be America’s luckiest teenager? It would deal with issues that actually mattered to young people in the twenty-first century: celebrity and the distorting power of fame.

They had me return on a different day and do it again for Doug Wick, Lucy’s partner. He’d just won the Oscar for Best Picture for producing Gladiator. Soon after that, Rachel, Lucy, and Doug invited me to deliver the pitch yet again—this time for Amy Pascal, the highly respected head of Columbia Pictures.

By the time I got home from her office, I had a call from my agent. Columbia wanted me to direct Bye Bye Birdie.

How did it happen so fast —so ludicrously fast? Partly it was golden timing: Doug, Lucy, and I were selling a musical when the whole town was looking to buy. Partly it was the liberating power of ignorance. I had no fear about talking a big, bold game in Amy’s office because, at twenty-three, I had no sense of how powerful she was. I didn’t know that a studio head can end your career if you mess up. I didn’t know enough to be scared.

The last factor might be the most important of all: Spielberg.

At my second meeting with him, he introduced me, Jason, and Danica to his lieutenants, a handful of people who were well on their way to running the town: Adam Goodman would become president of Paramount; Mike De Luca is now running Warner Bros. Once again, I had no idea whom I was talking to—or, in this case, singing to. Jason, Danica, and I, in our naivete, thought that when you pitch a new musical, you’re supposed to perform it—to put on a literal song and dance. We brought a big chest with us full of wigs, hats, and stacks of images we’d printed at Kinko’s—images we taped to walls around the room as the presentation went on.

It’s a fair bet that we put on the weirdest pitch of those guys’ careers. But it worked. On the way out, in the parking lot, we happened to bump into Steven and his wife. He didn’t just congratulate us; he said we should teach a class on how to pitch.

The execs at Columbia moved fast because they wanted to be able to say that they’d introduced me—that Birdie was my debut. Then I’d do Moxie for DreamWorks, with Spielberg producing. As insane as that sounds.

Very early on the morning of April 10, I ran to my local newsstand, at the corner of Pico and Robertson. That’s how we got our news in ye olde Hollywood. My own face smiled up at me from the covers of The Hollywood Reporter (“ ‘Birdie’ Redo Hatches in Chu’s Hands”) and Variety (“Tyro to Watch ‘Birdie’ ”). I had to look up “tyro”—I was relieved to learn it meant “novice.”

Both stories were light on details of my deal, which was fine, because I didn’t want any further envy bombs to go off under my feet. Columbia was so determined to get me before Spielberg that it had offered incredibly generous terms, including a “pay-or-play” clause, which meant that I would collect my fee even if the movie didn’t get made. Deals like that were rare back then and are all but nonexistent now. I haven’t gotten one like it since.

I accepted everybody’s congratulations, but something about them rang hollow to me. I knew deep down that I hadn’t actually done anything yet. The sudden surge of acclaim was a projection—the industry’s view of my potential, based on one short film that had shown some promise and exceptionally lucky timing. It was all happening too fast for me to process, let alone for me to control. Which meant that behind my smile, I was terrified. I thought, I hope I’m the person they think I am. Because in spite of everybody’s apparent confidence in me, I knew that I had no real idea how to make a movie like Birdie or Moxie.

From the outside, it looked like I was flying. But I was really trying to figure out how to flap my wings.

“Hey, who are you?” said Tom Hanks.

Spielberg answered before I got the chance. “Oh, this is my buddy Jon.”

It turns out that if you’re a kid and you’re sitting next to Steven Spielberg on a film set, people want to know what you’re doing there. And they are very nice.

“So you’re a new filmmaker,” said Hanks. “What kind of films?”

A few months after the Birdie news broke, Steven had invited me to visit him on the set of The Terminal. The production had taken over a gigantic hangar —the size of four football fields —in Palmdale, north of Los Angeles. They’d built a full-sized airport terminal inside it with real clothes in the shops, real coffee at the Starbucks, and escalators that actually worked. I arrived that morning every bit as scared as I’d been the first time I’d met him. Maybe even more so. After all, I’d been to an office before, but I’d never been on a film set —a fluky side effect of missing the phase of your career where you work as a production assistant. I worried about which door to use, where to sit, what to touch.

When he’d welcomed me, Steven had tried to put me at ease. He’d pulled up a chair right next to his. I’d still felt an urge to scoot it back a little.

He’d invited me on this day, of all days, because he was shooting a musical number—and Hollywood now believed I was the hotshot young musical guy. Ultimately he wouldn’t include the song in the movie, but nobody knew that as Catherine Zeta-Jones and a handful of dancers rehearsed on an escalator, and the production team made the thousand tiny adjustments needed to capture even the simplest moment on-screen.

Those hours at Steven’s side made me feel that I belonged. I knew I wasn’t among my peers on that set, but I knew for certain I was among my people. Film school had led me to think that in order to succeed in Hollywood, I would need to be disciplined and businesslike. But there was a lightness about Spielberg and his actors and crew. They acted like children, in the best possible way. They were deeply invested in a great game of make-believe in their gigantic, hangar-sized sandbox.

He let me spend the whole day with him. Now that I’ve directed movies of my own, I belatedly realize how generous that was. After all those hours of watching him and talking with him, my fear and insecurity about my future melted away. I knew what I needed to do and I knew how to do it. The Oliver! lyrics he had sung to me in his office had come true: I felt like I really was one of the family.

I was still standing at his elbow when he called, “That’s a wrap!”

The set, which had been so serene, burst into commotion. Actors bolted for wardrobe; the crew began packing equipment away. This rush for the exits always happens at the end of a long day, particularly when you’re in Palmdale and know that you’re going to spend hours in traffic before you get home. But before Spielberg disappeared, there was one last thing I needed to do.

“I have a gift for you,” I told him.

I knew that he was a cigar aficionado, which I definitely wasn’t. But a friend of mine knew all about them and agreed to pick out a great one. I pulled it out of my jacket pocket and presented it to him —in a Ziploc bag —to express my gratitude.

“Jon, thank you so much,” he said, genuinely enthusiastic. “This is so nice, this is great.”

He called over an assistant who had been carrying a suitcase around. At his signal, she opened it, revealing a humidor filled with the most beautiful cigars I’d ever seen. I watched him try to squeeze my cigar —still in its shabby plastic bag —into one of the available spaces, then try again, then try again. It was too small for the slot.

I was mortified. He was gracious. We shook hands.

“Come back any time,” he said.

A huge gust of wind blew through the set, followed by a deep rumbling sound. Behind me, the hangar doors, seventy feet tall, began to part. Outside, on the tarmac, a helicopter waited, its rotors spinning. A red carpet led to its door.

With a few waves to his left and right, Spielberg said his goodbyes. He started walking down the carpet. In the months and years that followed, I would replay his exit over and over in my mind —always with regret. Was there something else I could have said or done in those moments to change what came after?

A couple of assistants trailed behind him. Before long, I’d envy them, how they still got to talk with him, work with him, and watch him do what he did, after my own chance was gone.

I’d think back on how I might have looked to him, standing alone in the hangar doorway, backpack on my back, watching him climb aboard. Did he think about me after all the ideas we’d talked about fell apart? Did he even notice it happen?

If I’d managed to stay on the road that seemed, at that time, like my destiny —of my impossibly fast start, of Birdie and Moxie, of reinventing the musical—I would have talked about that set visit in every interview I gave. But when all my plans misfired, that day with Spielberg turned into a kind of orphan memory, detached from the rest of my life. It might as well have been a dream.

The helicopter lifted off; I watched it fly away.

From the book VIEWFINDER: A Memoir of Seeing and Being Seen by Jon M. Chu and Jeremy McCarter. © 2024 by Jon M. Chu. Published by Random House, an imprint and division on Penguin Random House LLC.