We know what filmmaker Steven Spielberg and composer John Williams have done together — 25 films, including four Indiana Jones movies, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List, E.T., Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, to name several.

How they work together, and why, is the subject of “The Art of Collaboration,” an hourlong master class before a room of eager American Film Institute students in which they discuss their nearly 40-year body of work. The talk takes a little while to get focused, but once it does, you’ll be engrossed.

For the first 15 minutes or so, Spielberg and Williams blow kisses at each other. Spielberg, Williams says, walks around the room and “imbibes the sound of the orchestra — and loves it, like he’s paid a ticket to a concert.” Williams — Spielberg calls him “Johnny” — creates music that takes the movies “to an entirely different level,” Spielberg says.

Given their track record, they’ve certainly earned the right to praise each other’s work.

In the first segment, they also show some of their favorite combinations of music and movies, including scenes from Vertigo, Spartacus and On the Waterfront, and I wish I’d been there to argue with them. In each scene they showed, I found the music too loud and overly, unnecessarily dramatic. (I’m not suggesting that I know anything remotely close to what they know about film or music; this, to me, is strictly a matter of personal taste.)

But once they get rolling, telling stories about how Williams presented Spielberg with the music for Jaws and showing scenes from E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark to illustrate their points, the discussion becomes fascinating.

Williams said their collaboration more or less works like this: Spielberg shows him the film. (Williams rarely reads the screenplay.) Williams retreats to his writing room. He’ll write several themes for characters, locations, whatever is needed. Spielberg will come in and talk, and Williams will play a few notes, or perhaps something more elaborate. On the brilliant soundtrack for Catch Me If You Can, Williams said he needed Spielberg to hear the full orchestra to have the music make sense. The famous five-note sequence for Close Encounters had to be written before the scene was shot.

Williams said he can tell by Spielberg’s facial expression whether he likes what he’s heard.

Spielberg says he’ll often tell his editor, “The movie’s gotten so much better in that room” — meaning the room where Williams writes.

The two began working together on 1974’s Sugarland Express. Spielberg had been a TV director till that point. He’d heard Williams’ soundtrack for Mark Rydell's adaptation of The Reivers (1969) and vowed that if he ever got to make a movie, he’d find John Williams.

They devote the last 20 minutes or so of their master class to answering questions, and the AFI students ask a number of good ones, including one about how to get started in the business. They don’t directly answer that, though. Williams suggests that they shouldn’t try to be the next Steven Spielberg, lest they end up disappointed.
He tells them to “confront with joy and pleasure and a sense of opportunity every little simple task we’re given, rather than to try and do the big task, rather than to try to shoot Gone With the Wind.”

Spielberg’s advice is simple: “Just remember to learn your craft…. You shouldn’t think of yourself as an artist. You should let other people think of you as an artist.” But when someone does give you a shot, he says, you need to show them that you have “the basic knowledge of the craft of putting together a story.”

Hell on Wheels
10 p.m. Sundays
AMC

Colm Meaney closes the first episode of “Hell on Wheels,” AMC’s new series about building the transcontinental railroad, with a lovely soliloquy of sorts in which he asks rhetorically: “What is the building of this grand road if not a drama?”

If it wasn’t a drama back then, it certainly is now. And a grand one at that.

“Hell on Wheels” takes us back to 1865. The country’s North and South have reunited, however tenuously, and now, in the words of Meaney’s character, Thomas “Doc” Durant, it’s time to unite east and west by rail. The federal government has hired Durant to oversee the construction, and he approaches the task with glee and gluttony. There’s a fortune to be made, and he’s going to reap every dime.

The project attracts all kinds of people — some seeking work, others looking to erase their past, still others looking for vengeance. They include Cullen Bohannon (Anson Mount), a former Confederate soldier searching for the men who raped and murdered his wife; Elam Ferguson (Common), an emancipated slave; and Lily Bell (Dominique McElligott), whose love is killed by an Indian while mapping the route for the railroad.

Their stories form the center of this drama.

“Hell on Wheels,” named for the tent city that moved along as the railroad was built, has a lot going for it. This week’s pilot episode reels you in with a fast-moving, intrigue-filled script that establishes the characters and action quickly. The show also has a look that’s both stylish and gritty. Some of the construction work is “hotter than a whorehouse on nickel night,” as one character says, and it certainly looks that way.

And the actors bring a kind of Clint Eastwood-esque steel to their characters. All harbor secret sorrows (a prerequisite of TV dramas), and they prove themselves to be more than tough enough.

Looks like Sundays will be the night of period dramas for a while. First “Boardwalk Empire” on HBO, then “Hell on Wheels.”

Television is, as Howard Beale said in the film Network, “the most awesome goddamn force in the whole godless world.” Therefore, from time to time, it deserves some scrutiny and perspective.

For that, let’s turn to America in Primetime, a four-hour, four-week PBS series that focuses on character types — Independent Woman, Man of the House, The Misfit, The Crusader — to show how they have evolved on television and how we, the viewers, have changed along with them.

On the surface, this series is pure entertainment, a chance to see clips from many of the greatest television series ever and to hear from a staggeringly impressive array of brilliant television practitioners. From Jerry Mathers to David Lynch and Ron Howard to Larry David, we hear broad, intelligent views on why these shows were/are special.

Beyond that, we get a glimpse into the thought processes of those who made the shows. So David Chase weighs in on Tony Soprano’s constantly conflicted role as the head of the household, Norman Lear discusses the world shifting under Archie Bunker’s feet, James L. Brooks talks about The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi and The Simpsons, and so on.

No one offers any stop-the-presses observations, but they make points worth knowing. Former NBC executive Warren Littlefield reminds us of a scene in The Cosby Show pilot where Theo tells his dad he should accept him for who he is — a D student. Regular folk. Not a doctor or a lawyer like his parents.

Tom Werner, a co-creator of the show, said the audience applauded at that moment because they were conditioned to clap for a boy standing up to his father.

“Theo,” his father responded, “that is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. You’re going to try as hard as you can, and you’re going to do it because I said so.”

Littlefield said he felt a wave of approval from the audience. Werner said the reaction was, “Oh, my God. The parents have taken back the house.”

If I’d been producing America in Primetime, the next clip I would have shown was Tony Soprano acknowledging to his wife that neither of them had much leverage over their children. But that’s me.

Instead, the producers of America in Primetime — Tom Yellin, Lloyd Kramer, Dalton Delan and David S. Thompson — take us through a range of shows and parenting approaches. Homer Simpson, Bernie Mac, Ray Barone, Cam and Mitchell (from Modern Family) and more.

Independent Woman — the first and probably best of these four hours — shows us the broadest changes in television: from perfect moms like Donna Stone and June Cleaver to Lynette Scavo of Desperate Housewives, who hates being a mother, and from Laurie Petrie (who wasn’t allowed to sleep in the same bed with her husband) to the women of Sex and the City and the woman of Weeds. The makers of Roseanne — including Roseanne Barr herself — make a strong case, too, for the importance of having a TV character who was overweight, overworked, underpaid and underappreciated.

In The Misfits, we learn that Rainn Wilson’s family apparently isn’t all that different from Dwight Schrute’s (scary) and that The Larry Sanders Show was about a group of people who love each other, except that show business got in the way (a funny observation/description).

The fourth hour, The Crusaders, covers a significant range of types — Jack Bauer, House, Omar from The Wire and Dexter among them. The last of those leads to the only real dissent in the series — whether Dexter, about the serial killer who works for the police department, has redeeming qualities. The Wire’s David Simon doesn’t think so.

No series like America in Primetime can be complete, of course, and you’ll undoubtedly end each hour saying, “Yes, but what about …?” But this series is smart, topical and highly enjoyable. Well worth an hour of your Sunday night.

Also this week:

Allen Gregory (8:30 p.m. Sundays, WXIN-59), a new animated series, stars Jonah Hill as the voice of a pretentious, spoiled 7-year-old boy. Allen has two dads, and when the second dad is forced to go to work and stop home-schooling, Allen must go to — gasp! — public school, where he doesn’t come close to fitting in.

It’s a cute idea, and I’d like to be able to tell you whether I thought the pilot episode was good, but I can’t say one way or the other. I had no reaction at all. Didn’t like it, didn’t hate it, might watch it again, or not.

Enlightened begins with Laura Dern’s character, Amy Jellico, ready to snap. The affair she's been having with her boss has gone public inside their company, she's being transferred from a job she loves, she’s recently divorced and she’s living with her cold and distant mother.

In short, Amy is about to make Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction seem almost like the girl next door. Amy’s not murderous, but she is in the midst of a breakdown.

And then, after the eruption, comes … enlightenment. She goes off to Hawaii for treatment and comes back imbued with the logic of self-help. She learns to say things like, "You can walk out of hell and into the light" and "You can change, and you can be an agent of change."

That’s great. But as Ian Hunter once sang, “I wanted to conquer the world, but the world has a mind of its own.” And Amy is about to find out that the world doesn’t want to change, that the world thinks anyone who's relentlessly cheerful is, perhaps, crazy.

The world might be right. But Dern straddles that fence magnificently, giving one of the finest performances you’ll ever see, as part of one of the best new series of 2011. Dern is in almost every frame of every episode — there are no “B” stories here — and she earns every second of screen time.

She injects her character with a remarkable amount of nuance, flowing from the cheerful optimist to the raging beast and back. One scene among many stands out: When Amy hands her drug addict ex-husband (Luke Wilson, in a terrific performance) a brochure for a treatment facility, we watch Dern’s face reflect many moods and reactions. She’s subtle and stellar. You feel bad for her, but you also feel like she should know better.

Enlightened is fascinating on multiple levels: the reaction from Dern’s co-workers after she returns from treatment; the way her soul-sucking company chooses to deal with an employee it would rather not have; how a person can stay positive in a world where she gets no support. (In a great bit of dialogue, Amy says to her mother — played by Dern’s real-life mother, Diane Ladd — “It’s good to see you, Mom.” To which mom replies, “Why?”)

Why, indeed. Mom is a pill, Amy’s ex-husband is a self-centered jackass and her co-workers are either weasels or damaged. She’s trapped in an untenable situation and she knows it. And all the self-help books in the world can’t help her.

A certain number of viewers will relate. Others can take comfort, knowing their life is so much better than Amy’s and that they’re watching a gifted actress give a wonderful performance. Enlightened is exceptional.

Ken Burns' new film tells the story of a single-issue political movement, the demonization of a particular ethnic group and people who felt they had lost control of the country and wanted to take it back.

No, it’s not about the tea party. The film is called Prohibition, and it runs on WFYI (Channel 20) at 8 p.m. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, with repeats immediately following the initial airing.

For about five and a half hours over three nights, the film documents how the United States came to outlaw alcohol from 1920-1933.

The film is filled with fascinating facts — like how in 1830, the average American older than 15 drank 88 bottles of whiskey a year. And how in the 1800s and early 1900s, alcohol taxes funded one-third to around one-half of the federal budget. And how the income tax was created to eliminate the government’s dependence on tax revenues from alcohol sales.

I’ve enjoyed some of Burns’ other films more, but I felt like I learned an extraordinary amount from this one.

“I think that’s the best review,” Burns said when I told him that.

Here’s the rest of our conversation:

NUVO: The amount people drank was just staggering.

Burns: We’ve got a nearly six-hour series divided into three parts. The first is called "A Nation of Drunkards," and that was really no lie. John Adams began his day with an alcoholic beverage. People drank way, way more than they drink now. Drunkenness — it wasn’t called alcoholism — was a severe social problem, and it prompted a very legitimate attempt by what we felt was a new utopian society to try to come to terms with it. The idea of temperance — drinking less, which was an incredibly smart thing to do — just metastasized into this single-issue campaign.

NUVO: Then there’s the amount of money the taxes on alcohol brought in. That’s what really funded the government.

Burns: More than half of all the internal revenues — remember, we had a lot of import-export, on which there were excise taxes — generated for the federal government came from taxing beer, wine and distilled spirits. So one of the comfortable feelings those industries had was, “We’re the fifth-largest industry. Nothing’s going to interrupt this. There may be local laws that could interfere, but that’s all right, we can get around them.”

But what happened was, this single-issue lobbying campaign — the organization the Anti-Saloon League — led by the shrewdest of them all, a man who could have senators shake in their boots, Wayne B. Wheeler, rather cynically — that’s my opinion — allied himself with the progressives, who were looking for the redistribution of wealth. This was in the Gilded Age, where there was such disparity of wealth, and they hoped to pass an income tax. When they supported it, when the conservatives supported it, then you had a real movement toward Prohibition. Coupled with World War I, where the Germans were suddenly the enemies, beer equals treasons, it was ripe for the dominos to fall and we ended up with an amendment to the constitution and then a draconian law on top of that that even the supporters were shocked at. They thought they might have Near Beer or 3.2 (percent alcohol) beer or something.

NUVO: Going in, did you know that’s why the income tax passed?

Burns: Not at all. To us, we know what it’s like to be taught a lesson. And quite often, it’s homework. What we like to do with you is share a process of discovery. So we realized that we were in possession of the conventional wisdoms about Prohibition — the images of a Model-T careening around rain-slicked Chicago streets , Tommy guns ablaze, mini-skirted flappers with their hair bobbed and braless, part of a new sexual revolution, the wonderfully propulsive jazz that seemed to fuel the orgy, the speakeasy culture. And we’ve got all that. And it is sexy, it is exciting, it is violent.

But we have a much deeper dive into what happened, and we find that stunningly unfamiliar to us. So we just hope to share our process of discovery rather than assign it as homework.

NUVO: This film is really a confluence of a lot of other films you’ve made.

Burns: I’m in the middle of three films that are dealing significantly with the Depression: this; the Dust Bowl, which is finished and we’re now sound editing (for release in 2012); and a major series on the Roosevelts. And we’ve already dealt with the Depression in Jazz and in Baseball and in other films we’ve done. The cross-meshing of these things gives you infinitely more perspective to see them and understand American history. And the biggest thing is that people are so much like today. We always try to impose this arrogance that we in the present have over the past. It just isn’t there. Human nature has never changed.

NUVO: You’re going to hear the comparisons to HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, so …

Burns: I think it’s terrific. Once again, we’re part of the Zeitgeist. We always feel like we’ve chosen something and then all of a sudden, everyone else seems to be. They started that long after we began ours, but because of our PBS construction, it took a little longer. But how wonderful that there’s a drama out that speaks directly, in a dramatic way, to the things we’re doing in documentary.

NUVO: Have you watched it?

Burns: I think I’ve missed one episode. They did great casting — Capone, Rothstein, everybody’s really great. And once again, I think they’ve struck gold in The Sopranos model. Everybody wishes they could kill the people who piss them off, and gangsters get to do that. And the women — and they’re always attractive women — take their clothes off a lot. This is a winning formula.

NUVO: An interesting part of “Prohibition” is that you don’t have star commentators like you do in so many of your films. You have good ones, but no one emerges.

Burns: I think Danny Okrent does. He’s so wonderfully smart, and has written this book (Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition). It’s not a companion; it’s a parallel effort and we just drew on his expertise and some of his research and went in our own directions. I think a real surprise sleeper is Pete Hamill, who has a gravitas.

NUVO: You have that great Pete Hamill quote, “If you want to get people to brush their teeth, make toothpaste illegal.”

Burns: Mark Twain once said the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. That opening phrase, “Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits,” we could have almost quit there. Mark Twain. Prohibition. Boom. Done.