Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
1977: We Are Not Alone
In Vince Guerra’s Ricochet Movie Fight Club, Question 107, the topic of “What is the best sci-fi film of all time?” brought on a lively discussion. Kedavis said “I’m disappointed. (Close Encounters) may not be the top-best sci-fi movie, but I’d easily put it above either Back to the Future or Jurassic Park”. Occupant CDN replied: “Is it just me?…Close Encounters is kinda like ET, in that it’s dropped completely out – It’s like these movies are completely invisible”. Matt Bartle agreed.
Entirely reasonable reactions. In its day, Close Encounters of the Third Kind was briefly considered Star Wars’ equal in popularity, yet its superior in ambition and artistry, as important and lasting as any movie ever made. As fondly regarded as it was, fewer people see it that way now. The film isn’t forgotten—I bet you know roughly what it’s about even if you haven’t seen it—but unlike Star Wars, the impact of Close Encounters on popular culture has faded over 44 years.
The whole movie is one long buildup. It has two interwoven plots that converge: first, a solemn, visually stagy worldwide pursuit of eyewitnesses to UFO sightings, up-close-and-direct, and then, the more specific and personal tale of Roy Neery (Richard Dreyfuss), an Indiana electrical worker whose UFO experience completely wrecks—well, alters–his life. He’s strangely impelled to travel to Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, a stunning natural monument where the government is conducting some kind of mystery-shrouded scientific experiment. Here, the two plot lines finally meet: it’s the secret location of an imminent, first-time, face-to-face encounter between humans and aliens.
This climactic scene, in its visual majesty, is intended to come off with the impact of a combination of the first atomic bomb test at Trinity Site and the Crucifixion. For many people, it succeeded. The ending, about 20% of the running time of the film, took up what Steven Spielberg later estimated to be about 50% of its energy, budget, and shooting time.
Lucas and Spielberg started their respective projects, Star Wars and Close Encounters, at about the same time, with script notes in 1973 leading to signed contracts in 1975. Both young directors made their production plans with the recent example of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 in mind. They made a point of filming far from Hollywood, with an unusual degree of independence. George did it Stanley’s way, filming the live action on an English sound stage, and using his own handpicked in-house visual effects crew, which he would come to call Industrial Light and Magic.
2001 and Star Wars had few unexpected problems while filming, which straightforwardly went pretty much as planned. Their studios backed them patiently, at least until near the end of the lengthy effects and editing.
By contrast, CE3K had few problems with its special effects, farmed out to 2001 veteran Doug Trumbull, but it had a troubled, high friction production. Filming went months over schedule. Spielberg, coming off of what was then the most successful film in history, Jaws, was striving to outdo himself. As 1976 progressed, he kept changing and adding things as he went along, running the budget up gradually from $5 million to an eventual $20 million. At that time, it was an enormous sum to spend on a movie, roughly equivalent to $200 million now. The studio was on Spielberg’s tail almost from day one, begging him to speed it up.
Close Encounters was largely filmed in Alabama, which gave big tax breaks to Columbia Pictures. Months of shooting with hot lights in a WWII-vintage blimp hangar, through the sweltering heat of an Alabama summer, was not fun. The co-producer, Julia Phillips, not a Spielberg choice, was a widely loathed cokehead who ended up being barred from the location. (Her malicious autobiography would be titled You’ll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again.) Creating the visual effects in distant California meant that actors on the set couldn’t see what they were supposedly reacting to. Most did their jobs well, but it’s tough for an actor to be told to just gaze reverently at an offstage lightbulb and act awed beyond belief.
Preview audiences gave mixed but mostly positive responses. Press reviews were also positive, many calling it a great film. Some of those good reviews made Columbia nervous when they qualified their praise with “Should do well, but it’s no Star Wars”. George and Steven were pals, but the historic success of Lucas’s film put strains in the relationship. For back in the first weeks of Star Wars’ dazzling run, Columbia Pictures did something rash: they publicly predicted that Close Encounters would equal or best it at the box office. This was very bad management of the expectations game and it would haunt them later. But in the summer of 1977, Star Wars didn’t yet look like the foundation of an entertainment empire; it merely looked like that summer’s Jaws. And after all, Columbia Pictures had the director of Jaws finishing up his flying saucer movie.
Columbia was in the middle of one of Hollywood’s biggest-ever management scandals (over money, not sex) and had bet the company on CE3K being a big hit. They poured an unprecedented amount into marketing and advertising. There’s an expression in Hollywood, “You can’t buy box office gross”, but to a certain degree you can. Kubrick never did that; he gave MGM’s publicity office almost nothing. Lucas was so late -recutting his film that he didn’t give Fox much help, which fortunately didn’t matter. But Close Encounters of the Third Kind was given a rocket push. Splashy screenings were held for such un-cinematic personages as the Dalai Lama and the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Film reviewers across the country were given cassettes of interviews with Spielberg and the actors, as well as complimentary cassette players.
By 1980, Close Encounters’ box office earnings had finally exceeded those of Jaws, Steven Spielberg’s original goal. He’d done it on his own this time, without a Peter Benchley best seller as a platform. Nor did he need a major star to help sell the movie. Star Wars, it was now understood, couldn’t be compared with anything else, and the press tactfully didn’t remind Columbia Pictures about their on-the-record and off-the-record comparisons of the prospects of the two films, merely three years ago, before CE3K’s release on December 14, 1977.
By then, the movie industry was in a different, hyper-inflationary new world. Video cassettes were already filling studio coffers, and cable was finally catching on. There was a lot more money sloshing around. 1975, the relatively innocent days when the Star Wars and Close Encounters studio deals were made, might as well have been a generation ago.
Some other notes about the aftermath of Close Encounters: Before it came out, Steven Spielberg was already known as a director of blockbuster movies, but not specifically of science fiction or visual magic. CE3K is where that all began.
The Spielberg “God Light” effect, an intense point source associated since then with otherworldly moments, began here. This kind of visual treatment, as well as dozens if not hundreds of stories of everyday Americans suddenly in the presence of transcendence, became something of a cliche. The concept of an overwhelmingly large mothership has become a regular presence in pop science fiction. Over the decades, CGI, computer generated imagery, made some of these moments more routine and hence, less magical.
From that point forward, most major studios now strove to have at least two $20 million films in its roster every year, in hopes that one or both would be a $100 million box office home run. This would remain true throughout the Eighties and Nineties, as the dollars of more and more production outlets chased a limited amount of proven talent. It wasn’t that studios were resisting a sensible risk/rewards ratio as much as the fact that the rewards could be so much more rewarding. It’s the Tentpole Effect, and it affects Hollywood’s judgment to this day.
Published in General
I have a strange relationship with Close Encounters. I was 12 years old when it came out, and for a time I was absolutely obsessed with it; I certainly would have named it as my favorite movie in early 1978. That’s pretty remarkable if you think about it: for a 12-year-old boy who was around at that time, it was a tall order for anything to eclipse Star Wars, even briefly.
I think what mainly drew me to the movie at the time was its visual effects. Star Wars had made me a VFX buff, and the effects in Close Encounters were astounding. It’s difficult for anyone today to understand the impact they had. I can still remember the first time I saw the movie; I was fortunate enough to see it at a theater in Charlotte that had quite a big screen. The first time you get a clear look at the alien spaceships is when Roy Neary stands by a road and watches them swooping around a hillside. My jaw was on the floor. And later in the film, when the mothership first begins to emerge from behind Devil’s Tower (accompanied by a low rumble, if the theater had a good sound system), it was beyond breathtaking.
The effects have mostly aged well, but they’re not particularly remarkable by today’s standards. Any movie with a moderate CGI budget (or, for that matter, a skilled amateur on YouTube) can do as well or better. Meanwhile, the rest of the film has aged less well; it was Spielberg’s first screenplay, and it shows. I think the sense of wonder is still there (thanks in large part to John Williams’s score), but the story really doesn’t make all that much sense. And Spielberg himself has expressed regret at the cavalier way he depicted a man abandoning his wife and children.
Roy was not a great dad and husband to start with.
So then at which level requires the requisite “butt probing”
I love the movie, but this is my lingering uneasiness with it. The guy basically abandons his family to go chasing after his vision. While this “follow your dreams” stuff appeals to an adolescent mind (perhaps why I loved this movie when I was growing up) it isn’t very admirable when it comes at the expense of family.
I’ve heard that Spielberg later regretted that aspect of the movie. I’m not sure how true that anecdote is.
Anyway, I still love the movie, but not as much now that I’m middle-aged with middle-aged-man responsibilities.
The anecdote is true. Spielberg has said he would never have written it that way once he himself became a father. As BXO says, it was his first screenplay (Paul Schrader wrote the first version, which Spielberg heavily rewrote.
To be fair, his wife takes the kids and leaves him. Of course, at the end, when he leaves, he really leaves. But Bryan’s right; it didn’t sit well with me even 44 years ago.
This gets to the awkward weaving of two stories. Spielberg originally set out to make a more straightforward movie about flying saucers and UFO lore. This would probably have been a fairly mediocre film, and the remaining elements of it are sometimes cliched and predictable. One of those elements is, nobody but nobody believes your story–absolutely everyone turns on you as a madman. Neery is fired the next day (where was the Utility Worker’s Union?), his wife never gives one moment’s thought to the notion that her husband isn’t nuts.
Having the lead UFO researcher played by a Frenchman was inspired by a real life character, but since we don’t know who that is, it’s just an odd dangling story thread.
The film played at the Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard. Right up the block, Ivar Avenue, was the Hollywood USO club, where it had been since WWII. Servicemen were always arriving and leaving, so some entrepreneurial genius turned the small Ivar Theater next door into a strip club. While CE3K was at the Dome, the Ivar had its own rooftop banner advertising “Close Encounters with Undressed Female Objects!”
Even as a kid I found CE3K boring. The only part I liked was when the headlights behind the car went straight up.
He learned with E.T. that this kinda movie needs an actual story to keep things moving along.
At a time when Hollywood first came down with sequel-itis, Spielberg had the integrity to resist making CE3K-II, but he couldn’t quite leave it alone, either, hence the 1980 Special Edition.
In a way, E.T. became the sequel: the heartwarming aspects of Close Encounters, some of the visual magic, but none of the ponderous stuff about Project Ozma or SETI.
E.T. refined a theme that appears in some of Spielberg’s movies; fatherless families. A plucky single mom trying to do the best she can.
Remember all the slow build, teaser ads that along the way explained what the meaning of the three kinds? Starting, if I remember, with just the light behind the mesa that’s the center of the movie poster.
It was kind of similar to a modern, guerilla-marketing campaign, but done through major media.
I saw Close Encounters as a 12 year old kid in the theater and was bored stiff. My 12 year old self greatly preferred Star Wars in 1977. This year I had the opportunity to watch Close Encounters again and found my reaction slightly different. I wasn’t bored stiff but neither was I enthralled. My 57 year old self still greatly prefers Star Wars.
I remain a bit disappointed that this shot never appears in the movie.
Credit where credit is due: Spielberg himself sketched the image that an ad agency turned into the evocative, mysterious glow just over the horizon.
I was just at the age when I was venturing away from NYC and driving the Interstates, so the poster image made perfect sense to me–always something unknown ahead.
Gary, that was the good part! Modelling Devil’s Tower out of mashed potatoes? Gah!
Better setup: instead of a lackluster father and husband, make the main character the lead singer for a band. He goes on and on about his close encounter, but the other musicians ignore him, because singers be trippin,’ ya know? Maybe after he splits, they take off after him because they suspect he’s fallen prey to bad acid, or maybe he has the keys to the equipment van.
Oh, man … it practically writes itself.
Isn’t that the plot of Pod People?
Universal made that movie in 1980! It was called Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie. Its parody of CE3K’s visual effects is low-low budget but surprisingly decent.
Yes! I haven’t seen that either.
Haven’t seen it. I’ve watched a lot of MST3K, but I don’t remember it.
Okay … I think I might have seen that.
If so, I was probably pharmaceutically impaired at the time.
Also, it takes a huge leap of faith to believe the ending is a happy ending. The humans get on the spaceship never to be seen again, and we just assume that they aren’t immediately being vivisected? It’s a friggin’ alien abduction story!
Furthermore, how much did the scientists actually learn about the aliens? Virtually nothing. They didn’t get a tour of the ship. They didn’t find out where the aliens were from. They didn’t find out what the aliens’ mission was. Etc. Etc. It was just a “hi, we’re aliens and we definitely exist, now bye bye!” Seems like a big waste of spaceship fuel to me.
Like, if/when humanity finally makes it to another star system and discovers intelligent life there, are we just gonna land, say “hi there!” and then pack up again and leave?
Nine if you cook and eat one.
Well, remember, they did release a whole bunch of people (and a dog) that they’d previously abducted. So, you know, that’s relatively harmless.
From what I recall, there were a whole bunch of people prepared to go with the aliens, but they only took Roy Neary. (Or did they take the others, too.)
So, Fire In The Sky.
Totally what they should have done in The Sparrow.
[ Misthiocracy runs to Wikipedia… ]
You’re right. It was just Roy. Why did they choose him? Because he’s the main character of the movie.
And why did the government officials offer up civilians to go on the ship instead of trained scientists? And why didn’t they at the very least give Roy a pad of paper and a pen so he could take notes, let alone give him a camera or some other sort of recording equipment?
And why did the government officials offer anybody up to go on the ship at all considering how little they knew about the aliens? Maybe they should have debriefed the released abductees first? Nah, I’m sure it’ll be fine.
Nonsense! Utter nonsense!
I get angry thinking about how overrated that movie is.
One of the weird things about the film is that it really doesn’t have an antagonist. At least not a consistent one. Sometimes the aliens are scary and menacing (particularly when they abduct Barry), and sometimes they’re sweet and beautiful (like at the end). Sometimes the UFO researchers are a government conspiracy, and sometimes they’re just committed scientists. At the end, it seems everybody is on the same side, and there are no hard feelings.
It always seemed to me that Close Encounters had two spiritual sequels. The “sweet and beautiful” aliens gave us E.T., while the “scary and menacing” aliens gave us Poltergeist. Admittedly, the latter was about ghosts rather than aliens, but the feeling of that film is very much reminiscent of the Barry abduction sequence.
Of course it must be acknowledged that Poltergeist was officially directed by Tobe Hooper, even though the rumor is that Spielberg was a very hands-on producer.
The SNL version of that scene was hilarious.