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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.
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That reminds me of a point made in an older sci-fi fan magazine. It was about math, but it’s the same here: You think music is a universal language? Fine. SAY SOMETHING with music.
I’ll wait.
Note that I don’t mean “saying” just as “I’m sad” or the like. I mean, for example, tell us your name, age, and home address. IN MUSIC. Or, give us directions to the nearest gas station. IN MUSIC.
Explain the Pythagorean Theorem. IN MUSIC.
I think she has a very limited range, but it includes that.
There’s been almost 500% total inflation since 1977, so the amounts aren’t THAT different.
“A Boy And His Dog” starring Don Johnson.
I believe I mentioned those on the RMFC thread. The broadcast version done by ABC apparently is the “Collector’s Edition” plus the mothership sequence from the end of the “Special Edition.” Basically, everything that was filmed. But it has never been available commercially.
I think we’re shown that the aliens have a particular interest in Roy since he was one of those “directly” attracted to the site of the landing. They were calling him, along with those others. I haven’t seen it in some time, but I’m pretty sure the others went into the mothership too, they just put special emphasis on Roy. He JOINED the others, he didn’t REPLACE them.
Average budget for a movie in 1977 was $10 million.
A big deal is made about the people who showed up for “the arrival” not because they were part of a group the government was prepping to send off with the aliens, but because “they were invited” as Truffaut’s character asserts. A lot of them had their own forms of obsessive art. Roy worked in sculpture. Others had drawings.
The point being the aliens were already making their own picks. I think the group the government had prepped to go didn’t actually go, but I have to watch it again.
So the government didn’t get any opportunity to ask the abductees any questions … or do a full medical examination on ’em … to confirm that they were actually human beings.
Convenient.
No, no . . . the abductees were led away after they exited the mothership, presumably to be tested and questioned and cleared an’ all. We never really saw what happened to them. The only one who was freely released was the kid. I didn’t see him taken by the scientists for further examination.
The five-note “greeting” thing, or “we come in peace” or whatever, was okay. But that whole synthesizer/organ thing at the mountain was BS claptrap nonsense. How did the guy who started out playing manually, know what to play until the computer somehow “learned” enough to take over? And so much more. Pure navel-gazing, as far as I can tell. It makes people smile and stuff, but it fails the sci part of sci-fi.
A good point, but film industry inflation is different. Between 1975 and 1980, the cost of making a movie roughly doubled. Then it stayed even with “civilian” inflation, but in the Nineties, it nearly doubled again. The cost of a “tentpole”, a studio’s biggest bet, is about ten times, not five times, what it was forty years ago. That’s how Scorsese’s Hugo cost an incredible $175 million.
Almost, but not exactly. I’m pretty familiar with the broadcast version. Because I was obsessed with the movie, I taped it (scrupulously cutting out commercials) and watched it many times back in the day.
I think it’s basically a union of all of the other versions, including everything that was in the theatrical release and everything that was in the Special Edition. The Collector’s Edition isn’t quite so indiscriminate; Spielberg picked and chose the scenes to include, and trimmed a few scenes. There is some stuff in each of the other versions that is omitted from the Collector’s Edition; in particular, there are some scenes of the Neary family at home (from before Roy went crazy) that were in the theatrical release and the broadcast version, but not in the Collector’s Edition.
So I’d say the most complete version is the broadcast version (which, as you say, isn’t available anywhere). The best version is the Collector’s Edition, because Spielberg actually had a say in putting it together.
But Roy was the only one of the “invited” to make it all the way to the “landing.” (The boy’s mother was with him, but she was not herself “invited,” her son was.)
I’ve never seen anyone point out the obvious fact that Close Encounters ends with the same kind of shot as SFX man Doug Trumbull’s 1972 Silent Running; a glowing dome, drifting away into space as the credits roll. If you look at the two, it’s remarkable that it hasn’t been commented on. It’s like Trumbull sold Spielberg the ending.
A little-known fact: In an impulsive gesture of solidarity, in 1976 Spielberg and Lucas exchanged two and a half “points”–percentages of their films’ gross profits, the real thing.
As opposed to “net points”. British writer Penelope Gilliat co-wrote Sunday Bloody Sunday and was given net points. One of her friends frostily clued her in; “Oh, my dear, ‘net’ is gossamer”.
Of course, the exchange worked to Spielberg’s advantage, although no one would have known that the year before both films opened.
She should have talked to Jim Rockford.
Similar-looking, maybe, but not that similar really. The dome from Silent Running (an all-time favorite movie by the way, I did a “book report” presentation from the novelization in jr high) is actually just drifting, the ship in CE3K is under power, going deliberately somewhere in space – and perhaps in time, too – presumably the aliens’ home world.
So, who spotted R2-D2 on the Mothership model?
Or the shark? Supposedly there was a shark too.
I’d love to see the Schrader version of CE3K.
“All the aliens come out at night. Martians, Venusians, Lobos, Tranqs, Zipperheads…Some won’t take Martians. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me. I take ’em to Arcturus, Polaris, Alpha Proxima. Don’t matter to me. Someday a real solar storm’ll take ’em all away.”
“I’m the only human up here. I’m God’s lonely man.”
One thing that never changes: Not all of the movies that you think are lasting will stand the test of time. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re no good, just that they’re less, in some way, than you thought. The Fifties would have been surprised that Around the World in 80 Days would be a dusty relic that nobody watches. Close Encounters is, IMHO, a good, flashy Seventies movie that is still watchable. It has moments of real magic and real drama. But it isn’t some kind of spiritual event for all humanity that’s “bigger than mere movies” as it once appeared to many to be.
In 1978, the time frame of this post, The Deer Hunter was supposed to be a profound and lasting piece of work. So was Robert Altman’s Nashville. They’ve both got “something”, but their perceived greatness has faded. In both their cases, politics has a role, though in The Deer Hunter, it went both ways; first, liberals were impressed, then they turned on the film.
I think more people would watch CE3K if it were more available, but that’s a decision made by distributors etc, not by consumers.
I think that Deer Hunter kinda got caught in political whipsaw… Liberals were at first impressed because of its value as an antiwar film. But as the utility of the antiwar message faded, they realized that the it also portrayed soldiers in a sympathetic light – as victims of the war. They cant have nuanced messaging on such clear moral questions.
Same thing kinda happened to the Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone movies, as the Vietnam war fades from public memory the propaganda value of these movies also decline.
There was the movie from The Day the Earth Stood Still from 1951.
I don’t remember when I saw that movie, but I have been a conservative since I was about 20 years-old, if not practically before that and forever.
The scene where the alien thinks that Earth is supposed to have a one-world government stood out to me even then. I guess that was a bit of a default view just after the horrors of World War II and the invention of atomic weapons. That mindset reminds me of all those 1970s M*A*S*H episodes where various physical problems were blamed on not seeing a psychiatrist or psychologist.
Wow, I never knew that Close Encounters was filmed in Alabama.
I remember that I was just a bit too young or way too young to see and appreciate that movie when it came out. My neighbor who was slightly younger than me saw it, but she didn’t seem impressed. I probably did not actually see that movie until 6 to 9 years later when access to VCR machines exploded as a young person was then able to watch movies that he had been too young to see until around that time. I don’t remember being impressed even then. I think like 2001: A Space Odyssey a person might need to be in his 20s or 30s to really appreciate that movie, but the pacing of movies has completely changed since then, so I don’t know if a younger generation could really appreciate movies like that as other movies are now available. Star Trek: The Motion Picture seems so slow and dated as compared to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan made just three years later. Personally, I always liked 2010: The Year We Make Contact a lot more than 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I am probably the only one, although perhaps younger people share my opinion. 2001: A Space Odyssey? When I do not understand the popularity of certain things, I usually chalk it up to my lack of taking various illegal drugs.
I think the 1983 movie The Right Stuff is one of the most underrated or underappreciated movies of all time. The younger generation really needs to watch that one.