”You know what movie I just saw again the other day, which is just fucking mindblowing? ‘Munich.’ That movie has Eric Bana kicking fucking ass. Every movie with Jews, we’re the ones getting killed. ‘Munich’ flips it on its ear. We’re capping motherfuckers! If any of us get laid tonight, it’s because of Eric Bana and ‘Munich.’” -- Ben Stone, “Knocked Up”


I am – Hercules!!


“Spielberg on Spielberg” is something every filmmaker or aspiring filmmaker on the planet should burn to disc and keep handy; it is nothing if not inspiring.

Richard Schickel’s engrossing 90-minute documentary transmits tonight on Turner Classic Movies. Except for characters in Spielberg’s movies, Spielberg is the only individual seen or heard.

The documentary is little more than the filimmaker rattling off one fascinating story after another for an hour and a half, accompanied by a vast array of film clips. Many of the stories contain facts I never knew or forgot about long ago. The documentary focuses exclusively on Spielberg’s directorial career, so there’s no “*batteries not included” or “Goonies” or “Used Cars” or “The Money Pit” or “The Flintstones” or “Deep Impact” or “Twister” or “The Mask of Zorro” or “Men in Black” or “Transformers” footage here. It takes us all the way from the films he made in his backyard to “Munich.”

A few highlights:

* Spielberg recalls floundering at his first professional directing job, helming a segment of Rod Serling’s “Night Gallery” pilot. While he considers the veteran actors on the shoot his allies, aging and aged union crew members apparently resented taking orders from a director less than half their ages, and in Spielberg’s eyes conspired to put him miserably behind schedule by tackling every on-set task as slowly as possible.

* With only the flop “Sugarland Express” on his big-screen feature resume, Spielberg recalls the horror of shooting the trouble-plagued “Jaws.” But he says the malfunctioning nature of the production’s robot shark, which forced it to remain off camera for most of the movie, demonstrated that less is more and "probably added $175 million to the film's box office." Though the “Jaws” experience was traumatic, he remains grateful to it because its critical and popular success won him the thing he wanted most in this world: final cut.

* We’re reminded that Spielberg still owns a piece of “Star Wars,” thanks to a 2.5-point trade he made with George Lucas for a piece of “Close Encounters.”

* He remembers being on the set of “Close Encounters” and toying with the idea of engineering an exchange for Roy Neary. He considered letting one of the extraterrestrials stay on Earth at the end to interact with the human team. He decided to instead save the idea for another film, which evolved into “E.T.”

* He remembers the Dallas test preview of “1941” as a rollercoaster. The huge laughs garnered by the opening “Jaws” parody had him convinced he was sitting on a huge comedy hit – until the rest of the movie began to unspool. “There were about four laughs over next two hours, and that was it!” His theory on why the film failed is one I’d not heard before.

* For his post-“1941” project Spielberg hoped to get Cubby Broccoli to hire him to direct a post-“Moonraker” James Bond movie. This was just before Lucas approached him with “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

* We get to see the “go-motion” raptor animation tests “RoboCop” vet Phil Tippitt created for “Jurassic Park” before Spielberg decided to go with CGI animation instead. Spielberg also says dinosaurs are much more interesting to him when they’re in kitchens and labs and interacting with autos.

* Though Spielberg is frequently credited (or blamed) with the 2,000-year leap forward that concluded “A.I.,” he director says that sequence was part of Stanley Kubrick’s 95-page treatment for the film. Spielberg describes himself as the frog DNA that was used to replace the missing dinosaur DNA that Kubrick never got around to adding to create “A.I.”

* Some of the footage from some of Spielberg’s no-budget backyard home movies carries a weirdly professional sheen; as a teen he was already directing scenes that would look right at home on one of Quentin Tarantino’s grindhouse bills.

Schickel and his editors do a spectacular job with some spectacular footage. One suspects a few eye-opening sequences from the documentary will inspire more than a few cinephiles to revisit “A.I.” and “Schindler’s List” and “War of the Worlds” and “Jurassic Park” if they haven’t recently.

Interesting also, perhaps, is what the documentary chooses to ignore. There is no mention of the Indiana Jones sequels or the “Twilight Zone” movie or “Always” or “Hook” or “The Lost World.” Most odd, I think, is the absence of any reference to 2002’s “Catch Me If You Can,” which I know many regard as Spielberg’s best directorial effort of the last dozen or so years.

In fairness, a 22-hour Ken Burns-style maxi-doc probably wouldn’t provide a broad enough canvas to adequately explore an artist as prolific and influential as Spielberg. But given the 90-minute time constraint, it’s hard to imagine anyone doing a better job than Schickel.

8 p.m. Monday. TCM.

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