No mention of Steven Spielberg, George Lucas or Frank Marshall to explain her sudden promotion from secretary to producer.
Here's what a Fortune article says about her ascension:

She went to see a new sci-fi film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which was written and directed by Spielberg. The film inspired her so much, she says, she dropped everything and headed north to Los Angeles to break into Hollywood movie-making. She called up her former college roommate, an actress who was married to director Robert Zemeckis—and the friend got Kennedy her first interview, with filmmaker John Milius, who was developing Spielberg’s next movie, 1941.

Kennedy landed a not-so-glamorous position: as Milius’s secretary. One of her first tasks was cataloguing his gun collection (the director and Apocalypse Now writer was also a longtime board member of the National Rifle Association). Apparently she had a knack for instilling order—and that caught Spielberg’s eye. “I noticed that John had a very organized office,” Spielberg recalls during a recent phone interview. “I was watching how Kathy handled all of his incoming requests, and I said, ‘Since I’m directing this movie, shouldn’t I have a top-notch secretary?’ ” Spielberg pulled rank and asked Kennedy to work for him.

Not long after he hired her as a secretary, Spielberg promoted Kennedy, then 26, to be his assistant—a role that was less administrative than it sounds. Then, almost as swiftly, she was named an associate producer. In 1980, when Spielberg began working on E.T.—the idea originated as a sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind—he asked Kennedy to co-produce it with him.

“She was supposed to take minutes at meetings but would spend most of the time talking and wasn’t writing anything down. I was wondering if this was the protocol for secretaries in Hollywood.”
—Steven Spielberg

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