Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln has earned 12 Academy Award nominations, including best picture and best director. Another Spielberg film — the multi-Oscar winning Schindler's List — will be celebrating 20 years since its release. These films have at least two important things in common: Spielberg and publicist Marvin Levy.
Levy started his career in New York writing questions for quiz shows. He wound up in publicity for MGM radio and TV personalities, but was lured to Hollywood in the mid-1970s. He took a job with Columbia Pictures and was later assigned to do publicity for the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, written and directed by Steven Spielberg. That began an almost 40-year relationship with the filmmaker.
Levy's office is in the back section of the Universal Studio lot, an area inhabited by DreamWorks Studios, the company Spielberg helped found. Adobe buildings were fabricated for the filmmaker to echo a southwestern motif because Spielberg grew up in Scottsdale, Ariz. This was a thank you from Universal, which financed and distributed Spielberg's 1982 megahit, E.T.
Looking Back At 'Schindler,' 20 Years On
Marvin Levy is 80-something, small and peppy in a blue jacket, jaunty baseball cap and black-framed glasses. And he's still going strong.
On this day, Levy is meeting with Universal Home Video publicists and a representative from the USC Shoah Foundation about the 20th-anniversary marketing campaign for Schindler's List. Spielberg won Oscars for best director and best picture for his 1993 film.
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