Think Steven Spielberg and you’ll think of some of the most famous films in recent Hollywood history.

Jaws.

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.

Schindler’s List.

Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Jurassic Park.

Maybe even War of the Worlds, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Save for Schindler’s List, Spielberg’s Academy Award-winning film about one man’s determined efforts to save Jewish workers from the Nazis, the others have been dismissed by some critics as “popcorn movies.”

But watch Spielberg on Spielberg, which will be shown at 8 p.m. Monday on the Turner Classic Movies cable channel, and you’ll discover how varied have been the movies turned out by the world’s most popular Hollywood director. Spielberg ruminates on his long career, highlighted by clips from most of his films. Those range from the almost forgotten 1974 The Sugarland Express, starring Goldie Hawn as a distraught mother who helps her husband break out of prison and steal a police car with the sheriff as hostage so she can stop her son’s adoption, to the nearly forgotten 2001 A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, a spin on Pinocchio in which a robot boy sets off with a mechanical teddy bear to find the Blue Fairy who can make him a real boy.

The program was written and directed by film historian Richard Schickel. Presumably, Schickel prompted Spielberg with questions about his filmmaking career, but he is not even an off-screen voice. We only see and hear Spielberg speaking casually and seemingly off the cuff.

He’s full of interesting anecdotes that will entertain movie fans who’ve loved his work. There even are clips from some of his pre-Hollywood days such as the 8mm black-and-white Fighter Squad, about a team of underage air jockeys, made in 1961 when Spielberg was 14 years old, or the more sophisticated Amblin’, about a pair of teenagers hitchhiking from the desert (Spielberg lived in Phoenix) to the sea (the “promised land” of California) in 1968, when the director was 21.

There are stories about how, as a teenager, he sneaked away from the Universal Studios tour to wander the huge lot “just walking in and out of doors” to see what he could see of the behind-the-scenes operation of a real movie studio. Eventually he befriended a Universal employee and got a three-day pass, which he wound up using all summer long once he’d struck an acquaintance with the studio guard at the gate who’d just wave him inside. Spielberg calls his experience “Universal University” for all he learned there, later parlaying that knowledge into being hired as a TV director on the series Night Gallery. Only in his early 20s — and frightened to death — Spielberg found himself at the mercy of the experienced film crew on the series, who slowed work to a crawl in hopes he would get fired. But he got help from the actors on the episode he was filming at Universal, including legendary star Joan Crawford.

Things worked so well that he eventually was assigned the TV movie Duel starring Dennis Weaver as a traveler on a lonely desert road who suddenly finds himself at the mercy of the unseen driver of a huge oil tanker. It worked so well that Duel was released overseas as a theatrical feature and Spielberg was showered with praise for his “Hitchcock-like” thriller. Spielberg modestly credits Richard Matheson’s script for the film’s high-octane suspense.

Following the success of Duel, Spielberg was allowed to make his first film, which turned out to be The Sugarland Express, only after a big enough star — in this case, Hawn — agreed to do it.

From there it was a jump to Jaws, which Spielberg remembers as “a horrendous experience.”’ It starred a mechanical shark that bedeviled Spielberg and the movie crew from the start when, on its first test run, it sank to the bottom of the Atlantic off Martha’s Vineyard. Panicked, Spielberg admits that “I had no Plan B.” Instead, he had to improvise immediately.

In the end, the fact that the shark was out of commission for several weeks proved to be a huge plus. Originally, Spielberg had laid out a storyboard for the first shark attack, at night on a young woman swimming off a lonely beach, with shots of the shark’s nose and tail popping up on screen. But without the shark, the sequence became much more terrifying as the young woman is yanked to and fro by the unseen denizen. Spielberg explains that if the shark had been working, he would have shown a conical nose coming out of the water and, later, its tail. “Had there been any evidence of the shark … I promise you the audience wouldn’t have leapt three feet out of their seats and thrown their popcorn into the air when, [later,] the shark came out when Roy Scheider was [tossing fish bait into the water].

“The shark not working probably added $175 million to the box office because I think what’s scary about that movie is the unseen.”

There are plenty of amusing anecdotes like that one in Spielberg on Spielberg, as well as some more introspective moments. He says that, had he made Close Encounters of the Third Kind today rather than when he was in his 20s, he probably wouldn’t have the Richard Dreyfuss character abandon his family to take off on the mysterious alien spacecraft for outer space.

During production, he continues, George Lucas, then in the middle of filming Star Wars, visited Spielberg’s CE3K set in a huge warehouse in Alabama. Spielberg says Lucas was so amazed by the enormous set and its special effects that he was certain CE3K would become a much bigger box office success and traded points in his film for some in CE3K. Spielberg muses that although both films were successful, Star Wars was the much bigger attraction and that he still gets money for his points in it to this day.

Flush with success following CE3K, Spielberg remembers feeling invincible … until he made the World War II comedy 1941. He recalls the preview for the film in Dallas at which 1941’s opening sequence, which spoofed Jaws, earned a rousing roar of approval from the audience. Spielberg, buoyed by the laughter, was certain he had a hit on his hands. But then the rest of 1941 unspooled “and it had maybe four laughs.” Fortunately for him, he recalls, by the time 1941 flopped into U.S. theaters, he was in Africa shooting Raiders of the Lost Ark.

In Spielberg on Spielberg you’ll find information on the new technology that made dinosaurs come to believable life in Jurassic Park, stories about how he made up shots of the D-Day invasion of Normandy as he went along for Saving Private Ryan, stories about how he was touched by the experience of making Schindler’s List. “It’s the only time,’ ” he says when discussing Schindler, “I’ve made a movie where something better than the movie came along because of the opportunity to tell that story.” He’s referring to the Shoah Foundation, which he funds and which has gone on to catalog thousands of eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust. “In that respect, Schindler’s List is the most important film I’ve ever made.”

The Color Purple, War of the Worlds, The Terminal, Munich, Minority Report, the Rhode Island-made Amistad are all represented in Spielberg on Spielberg. But Something Evil, Always, Hook, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Catch Me If You Can are not.

The only time Spielberg seems to shift blame for one of his mistakes is when he says that the reason the offbeat A.I.: Artificial Intelligence came out looking so strange and audience unfriendly is that he was only following the 95-page blueprint for the story laid down by the late filmmaking icon Stanley Kubrick. Still smarting from criticism about the film’s ending, which takes the story 2,000 years into the future, he says it was actually Kubrick’s ending.

It’s a jolt in an otherwise smooth program that will please both casual viewers who tune it at home or university students taking Moviemaking 101, where it one day will undoubtedly be part of the curriculum.

Monday night’s premiere of Spielberg on Spielberg will be followed on TCM by showings of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which earned him his first Oscar nomination, and Jaws, which redefined the term blockbuster.

mjanuson@projo.com