He most definitely snuck onto an Alfred Hitchcock set, and when Sid Sheinberg, the Universal executive and future head of the studio, caught Spielberg’s dreamy poetic 1968 counterculture short “Amblin,” he recognized that he was seeing a once-in-a-generation voice. There’s a legendary story - it might be apocryphal, but it could also be true - about how he didn’t just sneak onto the Universal lot as a teenager but set up an office there, complete with working phone, in a hidden attic. We see clips from those boyhood 8mm films, which already, in primitive form, have the quality of roving wonder that marked “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Estranged from his father after his parents’ divorce, Spielberg was a nerd who felt whole when he was behind the camera, where the simple enunciation of “Action!” and “Cut!” made it seem like he could control his destiny.
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The word around Hollywood was that “Jaws” was going to be a disaster, but it was Spielberg, and Spielberg alone, who had the movie in his head. The constant logistical calamity (broken-down shark weather and ocean color making it a feat to match shots) meant that Spielberg had to not just plan but improvise, inventing (for instance) much of the business with the yellow barrels when he realized that a barrel being dragged through the water by a shark worked just as well as showing the shark. It was the first men-in-a-boat movie to be shot entirely at sea, and the insistence on that, even when it extended the shoot from 54 days to nearly half a year, became the cornerstone of Spielberg’s boy-wonder virtuosity. It’s a way of working that may have descended from his experience on “Jaws,” which is colored in here with a shivery sense of film history being made. Spielberg claims that he still gets nervous, on set, whenever he has to shoot a new scene, a confession that might make you go “Yeah, right,” until he explains that his best ideas arrive when they’re pumped by the adrenaline of anxiety. It was the little machine he hid behind…out in the open. (He could never admit to his pals that he was the dreaded Shmuel.) That’s why his first 8mm movie camera was such a game-changer.
The Spielbergs were Orthodox, and Steven, the only Jewish kid in his Phoenix, Ariz., neighborhood, came to cringe at his ethnic identity. Spielberg can be funny and quite candid, as when he recalls that as a teenager, he’d be out on the street with his friends, and they would hear his Russian Jewish grandfather yelling “Shmuel!” (Steven’s Hebrew name), which made him die of embarrassment. Here, looking back with the documentary’s director, Susan Lacy, he proves a singularly captivating present-tense explorer of his own life and work.
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Spielberg has always been a voluble and articulate interview subject, if also a cagey one (he knows how to talk a blue streak and still keep his guard up). It’s like HBO’s free-flowing version of a PBS “American Masters” doc.
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Mostly, though, with its penetrating look at a career that now spans half a century, “Spielberg” enriches a series of films that you - or, at least, some of us - never get tired of thinking about. It’s also packed with lively, resonant anecdotes and images - from Spielberg’s memories of being bowled over to the point of exhilarated despair by seeing “Lawrence of Arabia” at 16 (“The bar was too high”) to footage of him orchestrating Henry Thomas’ minute reactions in “E.T., The Extra-Terrestrial,” from his tale of the first super-rough-cut screening of “Star Wars” that George Lucas held for Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese (De Palma went apoplectic with how disorienting it was, which resulted in Lucas devising that opening crawl) to Dustin Hoffman explaining how Spielberg is able to compartmentalize and multi-task his talent (“Steven Spielberg is a guy who works for Steven Spielberg”).
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