The Documentary Spielberg Looks At An Iconic Career In An Engaging Manner

This morning, the nominations for the 90th Academy Awards were announced and among the nine films nominated for Best Picture was The Post, Steven Spielberg's newest directorial effort. With The Post securing a Best Picture nod, this meant, as pointed out by Mark Harris on Twitter, that Spielberg has now had eleven of his movies nominated for Best Picture, the second highest amount of movies a single director has ever had nominated in Best Picture (William Wyler has the most with 13 of his features scoring Best Picture nominations). That's an astonishing accomplishment and it's far from the only place where Spielberg's career has been marked with great success as anyone who's been to a movie theater in the last four decades can attest.


Such a career lays the foundation for the succinctly titled documentary Spielberg, which follows Steven Spielberg's life and career from childhood all the way up to the present. The film, which is directed by Susan Lacy, is structured in a more unorthodox manner that eschews a straight chronological arrangement of Spielberg's life and instead zig-zags around as we start with Spielberg's nightmare of a production making Jaws before we go back prior to Jaws to examine the short films Spielberg made that put him on the map to the friendships he made with various influential 1970's directors (which included George Lucas and Martin Scorsese) before we go back even further in time to look at Spielberg's troubled childhood.

For someone like myself who's been a fan of Spielberg and consumed books about him in Middle School, there aren't too many major revelations to be found in terms of broad pivotal events in Spielberg's life but there are some fun stories to be had with Spielberg's mom recounting her wacky antics (like bringing home a monkey to her surprised children) and archival footage of young versions of iconic directors hanging out in the 1970's is absolutely riveting. It's such an odd experience to watch the likes of Francis Ford Coppola shooting the breeze with Spielberg and acting like a normal twenty-something. Plus, it is cool to learn that suggestion from an irate Brian DePalma after an early screening of Star Wars inspired the now iconic opening crawl of those space operas.

Much of the documentary is busy detailing Spielberg's relations to his various films and it is here that the movie really finds it's stride. Hearing Spielberg discuss what personal attributes influenced why he took on certain movies or specific plot details or production aspects of features like E.T., Raiders of The Lost Ark and Schindler's List proves to be a thoroughly engrossing experience. Now that we have more than four whole decades of work to look back on, it's also fascinating to watch how Spielberg has grown as a filmmaker, with his self-proclaimed sheepishness with handling certain material in 1985's The Color Purple being a sharp contrast to how Spielberg thrust himself into exceedingly dark works in the early 21st century.

As the years go by, Spielberg grew as an artist and a documentary like this one helps chronicle the various ebbs and flows of that career nicely. Not much time is spent on the misses of Spielberg's work beyond 1941 (though a person saying "Some [ideas] didn't work" in voice-over while footage of Hook plays is highly amusing), which feels like a missed opportunity since Spielberg's past comments on divisive material in Indiana Jones And The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull show he's able to have perspective and maturity when confronted with criticism, it definitely would have been interesting to see him discuss some of his less highly-regarded work. But even if it isn't as comprehensive as I would have liked it to be, the suitably expansive scope of Spielberg is what makes the documentary work as well as it does as do the various interview segments including numerous extended fascinating discussions with Steven Spielberg himself.