Life magazine declared him the most influential person of his generation, while he had to settle for being just one of the top 100 people of the 20th Century chosen by Time. Yet somehow Spielberg never gets the sort of awed respect bestowed on the other great living filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood. This is undoubtedly because he has spent most of his four-decade career creating fantasies, from the brilliant, i.
e. "E.T.
: The Extraterrestrial," to the banal, i.e. And it's also because unlike the commercial geniuses to whom he is often compared, Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock, he has made almost as many bad movies as he has great ones.
It probably shouldn't be surprising that the director discusses only one of his failures during "Spielberg on Spielberg," a 90-minute documentary that has its premiere Monday on Turner Classic Movies. The only voice heard (aside from the actors in the accompanying clips) on the show is Spielberg's, and he discusses his career and his films, mostly in chronological order. He begins with the remarkably elaborate and sophisticated films he made as a kid, a couple before he was even a teenager, and then retells the legendary story about how he conspired to obtain a pass to the Universal Studios lot.
He would go to work there every day, hoping to eventually get discovered as the plucky little kid who thinks he can make movies. He was, and could, and after helming a few TV episodes, including the best segment of the pilot for Rod Serling's "Night Gallery," he was given the opportunity to direct a made-for-TV movie called "Duel," which happened to be about 20 times better than the average made-for-TV movie. Though the documentary fails to note it, "Duel" was released theatrically to some success in Europe, and his first true feature, "Sugarland Express," was greeted with great critical response, including a rave by no less than Pauline Kael.
So it wasn't really a shock when Universal named "the kid" to direct "Jaws," which was not only his first hit, but the movie credited with creating the idea of the summer "event movie." As Prince likes to say in his concerts, "so many hits, so little time," and Spielberg speed talks, Scorsese-style, through his catalog, which may further frustrate fans who complain he has never done an audio commentary track for the DVD editions of his films. He does, however, slow down a minute between the triumphs that were "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark" to muse on "1941," his noisy, frantic comedy riff on the Zoot Suit Riots and the World War II rumor that Los Angeles was being attacked.
He chalks up the movie's big-budget folly to his own hubris, feeling that after "Jaws" and "Close Encounters" he could do no wrong. But if he learned a lesson from the experience, you wouldn't know it from the failures that go unmentioned, perhaps because "Hook" and "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" were box-office successes. More egregiously, he spends almost as much time rhapsodizing over "The Color Purple," which he made a mess of, as he does "Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan.
" Perhaps this is because he considers all his grown-up movies to be of a piece, which they are not: The latter two films are often grimly realistic; his adaptation of "Purple" is so fanciful it manages to miss the point of the story. We can only hope that someday Spielberg sits down for a dissection of his work, film by film, perhaps for a book along the lines of "Truffaut/Hitchcock," in which one great director coaxes another into coming clean on his inspired work and his missteps. Then, maybe, we could understand why Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" remake is so much more passionate and heartfelt than "Amistad," or hear the true story about how he took over "Poltergeist" from its original director, and in the process, made one of his most thrilling films.
For now, we'll have to settle for the hits -- without the misses that always say just as much about a storied and legendary career. Life magazine declared him the most influential person of his generation, while he had to settle for being just one of the top 100 people of the 20th Century chosen by Time.
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