In cartoons, movie directors are caricatured as fussy artistes or heavyweight intellectuals, draped in capes, berets or scarves, a lens hanging from the neck.
Steven Spielberg, America’s best- known modern director – and the most represented on AFI’s Top 100 list – defies the cliché. No artistic posturing for this conjurer of memorable, emotional and jarring film images. He may have created some morally serious work in recent years, but he is probably best loved for his escapist entertainments. His most popular films are supremely accessible, and in a candid interview, he looks and sounds as unpretentious as they do.
“Spielberg on Spielberg,” a documentary debuting at 6 p.m. Monday on TCM, is a departure for the man who has consistently avoided attaching audio commentaries to the home video releases of his movies.
Here, in a film produced by critic and film historian Richard Schickel, the director reminisces about his boyhood fascination with moving pictures, recalls sneaking around the Universal lot as a teen after skipping out of a tour group, and talks matter-of- factly about how his simple fascination grew into a 30-year career that has produced memorable, entertaining and, in one case, he suggests, important work.
Even his throwaway comments about hanging out with his friend George Lucas are revealing, and fun for the film- going public. “George told me … ,” he begins, and we can only imagine the masters veering from directorial dilemmas and production problems into fantasyland.
Spielberg credits a problem with the mechanical shark in “Jaws” for enhancing the look, feel and box office of that film. He rightly salutes composer John Williams for the transcendent aspects of many of his films, and specifically for making the over-the- moon moments of “E.T.” sound operatic.
Clips from most of Spielberg’s efforts, including his first 8mm short, made in grade school, appear here, but there are omissions. Lesser efforts like “An American Tail” are not noted; “Hook” is absent. No mention is made of DreamWorks SKG, nor Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, his partners.
Instead, the film moves from “Escape to Nowhere,” which he made at age 13, and “Firelight” (age 16) to “Amblin’,” his first college project, and 1971’s “Duel,” a made-for- TV thriller.
Spielberg recalls his youthful trepidation before directing Joan Crawford in the pilot for “Night Gallery,” then considers his mid-career blockbusters (“Jurassic Park” in 1993 outgrossed “E.T.” to become his most commercially successful feature). He weighs the more recent films, “Saving Private Ryan” and the controversial “Munich,” explaining what each film meant to him and how it came to be. The Holocaust and his Jewish identity figure prominently in his recitation.
One of the fascinating aspects of this show is listening to this one-time wunderkind reassess his movies.
Spielberg says that “Close Encounters,” which was released in 1977, would have a different ending if he undertook it now. Today he would never let the family man walk away from his responsibilities as Richard Dreyfuss’ character did.
Spielberg’s noted flop “1941” resulted in a critical drubbing, which was “the best thing that could have happened. I sobered up quickly.”
Then “Raiders of the Lost Ark” in 1981 “rescued me.”
“E.T.” was “the most spiritual movie I’ve made,” the result of feeling like an alien as a Jewish child in a world of Gentiles, and as a child of divorced parents. The Jewish themes reverberate strongly throughout, and his feelings about his heritage helped inspire him to launch the Shoah Foundation as a result of his involvement with “Schindler’s List.”
“The Color Purple” was “my first grown-up movie,” the first that doesn’t go better with popcorn, he says.
“Empire of the Sun” is about the death of childhood. “Close Encounters” is the “most hopeful about communication.”
Asked which films he’d like to be remembered for, Spielberg regularly says “E.T.” and “Schindler’s List” – fitting bookends that display the range and maturation of his abilities.
But ultimately this documentary suggests he should be best remembered as an unpretentious movie lover, maker of accessible films (not all of them hits) that impart mostly hopeful slices of modern Americana.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
