Steven Spielberg, On Both Sides Of the Camera

When they say "Spielberg on Spielberg," they ain't kidding. That is what you get, Spielberg on Spielberg, and nothing but.

The 90-minute documentary -- well, it's more of a tribute, an encomium, a hagiography, I suppose -- which will be shown tonight at 8 on the peerless Turner Classic Movies channel, will have to go into the books as Spielberg ephemera. Someday, someone will write the definitive book or long essay on what this slender 60-year-old has accomplished, what hope and decency he restored to American popular art, as a way of saying thank you for a life exceedingly well spent. This is not it.

It is nice to see what the director thinks of himself, and it is nice to learn that the man behind the man behind the camera is much like the man behind the camera: decent, unprepossessing, ironic, aware, supportive of peers, respectful of moviemaking as a craft, a tradition and a social responsibility. Is it too much to expect him to be a critic?

Indeed, "Spielberg: The Critics Squawk and Bristle" almost certainly would have been more illuminating, as the Great One has inspired love (from me) and disdain (also from me) in equal parts among pointy-heads, and it would have been amusing to watch as five or six of America's movie thinkers -- leave me out, by the way -- chewed over the Spielberg career and tried to torpedo each other's egos in the process.

Instead, "Spielberg on Spielberg" is crisply edited, utterly unrigorous, and permissive of only one voice, Spielberg's. It consists of one camera setup -- the Man Wonder in a purple shirt and a black leather jacket but otherwise mild as tapioca -- facing the lens and making comments, some amusing, some banal, some pointless, some fluffy, on the topic of each of his major films.

Before each new segment, the writer-director, Time magazine's venerable and widely respected critic Richard Schickel, runs a montage from a Spielberg picture. Occasionally, he'll cut dynamically from a Spielberg comment to a supporting scene from a film, as when Spielberg says of "Saving Private Ryan," "I really enjoyed making this movie, even if I felt a little guilty because it was by far the most violent and bloody film I'd ever made." Then we see a scene of particularly gruesome combat mayhem, where two of Pvt. Ryan's rescuers toss Molotov cocktails into a German tracked vehicle, sending two German crewmen scampering off to painful, blazing death.

But generally, such exertions are beyond Schickel. One treasure is a few scenes from the teenage Spielberg's first time behind the camera, an 8mm, in which he candidly acknowledges the raw ego gratification that must attract talents to the directing trade: "I was fascinated by the control movies gave me," he recalls. "I saw how I could make it better for me."

Those early films were inspired by the World War II movies he was seeing on television in his Arizona split-level: What we see, mostly, are other youngsters climbing into the cockpits of Piper Cubs that stand in for P-51 Mustangs (he would use real P-51s in "Saving Private Ryan.")

On it goes, pleasant, never bitter; mild, never angry. If you ache for some gossip, for some behind-the-scenes fireworks, some acidic commentary on the irrational egos that come out to play in the movie business, you certainly won't find it here. Spielberg takes no revenge, punctures no giant egos, pays off on no grudges. He is probably the most polite superstar director in the world, and of course we peons in the paying public never get to see the realpolitik butt-kicker he must be when he's on-set with millions of bucks in play. We just see nice Mr. Spielberg.

He continually downplays his own genius. The brilliant stroke in "Jaws" of not showing the 26-foot-long predator until the end? He ascribes that to mechanical failure, not his own storytelling skills. "It was supposed to perform like Esther Williams," he says of the mechanical beast, and describes instead how it drifted to the bottom amid a blitz of bubbles. "So I had to go to Plan B," he says, "except I didn't have a Plan B." The busted shark, he says, "probably added $175 million to the film's box office."

The unbelievable terror and chaos he uniquely injected into the combat sequences in "Saving Private Ryan" he ascribes again not to his own shrewd eye and sublime talent but to the fact that "I improvised the whole thing. I didn't know what would happen next, just like in real combat."

The presentation begs the question: Is it enough to simply admire Spielberg and not judge him? It makes no discrimination between, say, "E.T." and "Amistad," and it ignores a couple of flopperoos like "Hook" and "Always." You're left, somehow, with an idealized view of a character so bland you'd never see him in a Steven Spielberg movie.

Spielberg on Spielberg (90 minutes) airs tonight on TCM at 8 and again at midnight.