He might be the world's most famous living filmmaker, but Steven Spielberg's first feature-length movie is still impossible to find. Spielberg grew up obsessed with cinema and was always destined to make a living in the business. His talent was undeniable from an early age, and after working in television - including helming the first episode of Columbo - he first broke through with TV movie Duel in 1971. Jaws cemented his career and he's been thrilling (and moving) audiences ever since. While 1973's The Sugarland Express is technically his theatrical feature debut, his very feature film was really 1964's Firelight.
This indie sci-fi adventure was shot when Spielberg - who is a big Searchers fan - was only 17, with the budget being $500. Firelight follows a team of scientists investigating straight lights in the sky around an Arizona town. The film was only screened once in Spielberg's hometown, where it made exactly one dollar in profit. Sadly, while trying to build a career, Spielberg loaned the master reels for Firelight to a production company, which went bankrupt shortly afterward. The reels were soon lost, meaning the complete version of Firelight hasn't been shown since its public screening in 1964 - and it's unlikely to be recovered now.
Watch The Only Surviving Firelight Footage
While the complete version of Firelight is likely lost forever, there is a brief montage of footage from the film available online. Coming in under four minutes, this reel at least gives fans of Spielberg an insight into what the film looked like. Given its independent, no-budget roots it obviously lacks the sheen of Spielberg's later movie work, though it still shows off his gift for unique framing. Interestingly, it feels like Firelight had more of a horror tone, and later in his career, Spielberg would develop two unmade sci-fi scripts involving malevolent extraterrestrials.
One was Night Skies, a horror script where a family is stalked by a group of alien scientists on a remote farm. That project was later scrapped, but parts of it were recycled for E.T.: The Extra-Teressrial. Ironically, calls for an E.T. sequel would see Spielberg return to the evil alien theme, where he briefly worked on a follow-up dubbed Nocturnal Fears. This would have found young Elliott and his friends being kidnapped and tortured by a group of nasty aliens; E.T. later arrives to save them. The sequel wasn't produced, as Spielberg felt an E.T. 2 was unnecessary.
Close Encounters Of The Third Kind Remade Firelight (Sort Of)
Close Encounters Of The Third Kind was Spielberg's follow-up to Jaws and is still considered one of his best works. Close Encounters Of The Third Kind isn't a straight-up remake of Firelight, but there are many similarities between them. In some ways, Firelight was a prototype for Close Encounters, with both following ordinary people caught up in a mystery involving UFOs; the ending of Firelight was significantly darker than Steven Speilberg's more uplifting 1977 sci-fi drama, however.
