When Steven Spielberg was a kid growing up in 1950s Arizona, watching westerns on his family’s 20-inch black-and-white Philco, he would creep right up to the screen, as if to surround himself with the image. He also wished he could see these moving pictures in color. So he’d riffle through his family’s collection of slides, having learned that by holding one transparency or another up to the television screen he could turn grayed-out western skies blue, or the ground to a realistic-looking green. Recalling this story from a conference room at his production company Amblin Entertainment, he winds toward the classic punch line: “So my mom would walk in, and she’d see me holding these slides up to both of my eyes, right next to the TV set. And she’d say, ‘You’re going to burn your eyes out!’”
