Bryan Curtis, national correspondent for Newsweek and the Daily Beast, shared an absolutely fascinating look on Grantland yesterday at the California high school reporting career of one Steven Spielberg.

After Spielberg moved to northern California in the summer of 1964, he joined the ranks of Saratoga High School, located 50 miles southeast of San Francisco. There, he penned various “Athlete’s Feats” columns for the Falcon student newspaper, under the byline of Steve Spielberg. Curtis isolates some of the 17-year-old’s earliest cinematic prose, including this excerpt from a football game account:

"As precious seconds ticked away, fingernail fragments flew high into the static filled air…" See what he was doing? He was taking a chaotic action scene and reducing it to a single, memorable (and probably fictitious) image. Think of the bald, muscled Nazi luxuriously removing his coat before a fight scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark–that’s what Spielberg was going for.

Best part about the above referenced column? Steve Spielberg never mentions the final score. To read the full article, click here.

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