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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.
Published in General
The Right Stuff is great, but definitely not sci-fi.
There are a lot of behind-the-scenes connections and coincidences. Alan Ladd Jr., when he was head of 20th Century Fox, was the patient paymaster who shielded George Lucas from the studio bureaucracy and kept faith with him on Star Wars. Ol’ George was never exactly lavish with his praise of Hollywood executives, but he has always thanked Alan Ladd, without whom there would not be Star Wars.
Then Ladd formed his own company and produced Blade Runner and The Right Stuff. Neither, alas, was a hit. But they are two films anyone would be proud of making.
The director of The Day the Earth Stood Still, Robert Wise, was also the director of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I met with Bob Wise a fair number of times while I was at the American Film Institute.
BTW, I know 2001 came out in the Sixties and all that, but as a Boomer, I can assure you that far more people went to see Star Wars stoned than ever went to see 2001 that way. (LSD, on the other hand…) Pot was vastly more popular in 1978 than in 1968.
Also the original Andromeda Strain.
Both of them have quite the cult following too.
Many films try for a vague, timeless, could-be-anywhere feeling that is intended to keep the film looking fresh longer. To Spielberg’s credit (I think, anyway) he didn’t do that. Close Encounters is like a catalog of particularity; this is what the real America looked like in the mid-Seventies, brand names and all, from the kitchens to the gas stations to the TV commercials.
His location scouts managed to find Alabama locations to stand in for Indiana and some of Wyoming. (There was some filming at Devil’s Tower, but all the climactic Sky Harbor base scenes were filmed in the blimp hangar.) For Spielberg’s purposes, it was useful and convenient for so many franchise businesses to look nearly alike all over the country. A number of viewers have noted that the railroad scenes display working rolling stock from southern freight railroads that would not ordinarily be seen where CE3K puts them.
There were a few fill-in bits and pieces filmed in Los Angeles, things like brief shots of toll booths or a driver stopping to the side of a road to check a map.
Nor is it history. At least not good history. It’s a well made movie, but it takes enormous liberties with the facts (as does the Tom Wolfe book it’s based on). It’s best viewed as a sort of modern mythology, but no one should rely on it as an accurate depiction of the Mercury program.
A myth, yes, but a good myth.
How is it not available?
Or do you mean, it’s not available free on any streaming service at the moment?
Man, remember the 90s, when you had to drive to the Blockbuster Video and wander the shelves looking for tapes to rent and then take them to the checkout, and then drive back home and then turn on both your television and your VHS (separate remotes, man!) and then put the VHS in your player and . . . man, that was such hard work!
People are getting lazier.
What are “remotes”?
Those little hand-held things that turn on your television. Remember them?
The weirdest thing about that video clip above with the woman reacting to Close Encounters is that she said she was watching the movie on a 13-inch laptop.
WHY!?
Why would you do that? What good is progress made in ever-larger (and ever-cheaper) television screens if you end up watching a glorious movie on a 13-inch laptop?
These are the dark ages, man.
Yeah, but when we were kids, we were the remotes. I’m sure your dad said things like, “Hey, Drew, get up and change to Channel Five,” more than once when you were a kid. Mine did.
Of course, my response was, “Dad, you know my name’s not Drew. Why do you do that?”
I’d buy that. The Right Stuff was made in the Bay Area, unusual then and now, especially for a film with no scenes that are set there. The Wall Street tickertape parade was staged in the streets of San Francisco. The effects, many of which are quite beautiful, were relatively low tech. I enjoyed it and went back to see it in 70mm several times. I think it’s a useful primer for younger Americans who didn’t realize to what degree we had to win a come-from-behind victory over the USSR to catch up in space.
Some quibbles, though. Like most films about real subjects, the number of people involved is compressed. (This was also true of Space Cowboys, where NASA’s head doctor also seems to lead tour groups.) Werner von Braun was not in the control room all the time. He didn’t have to explain what would happen if the heat shield came off; they already knew.
Another, more general thing: the film wants to be irreverent but sometimes just comes across as snarky, unlike the book. Tom Wolfe wrote it at at time when there was a long pause in the manned space program, and the Mercury astronauts were fading from collective memory. He wanted readers to see that these weren’t plaster saints, but career military men who smoked Luckies, argued with their wives, and knew they could die horrible deaths. The movie seems to imply that Chuck Yeager did have the right stuff, but the astronauts were caught up in some silly, needless competition with the Russians.
When Alien opened two years later, film critics correctly called it the “anti-Close Encounters“, as on second thought maybe alien life wouldn’t be as benevolent as it looks in CE3K or The Day the Earth Stood Still.
I don’t know if the distributors want too much money for it or what, but I don’t remember the last time I saw CE3K pop up on the schedule for like HBO or whatever. Another issue might be that with its length, the cable/streaming outlets would rather “churn” the viewership faster. In some ways it might be like a physical theater showing movies: if a movie is 90 minutes, they can get 4 showings in an evening. If it’s 2 hours, they can only have 3 showings. That’s a 25% reduction in how many tickets they can sell, as well as perhaps how much popcorn they can sell, etc.
And then you have the people who proudly watch movies on their PHONES.
Well, Clavius works for that distributor. He wouldn’t give us the secret knowhow of how much they would charge for it, but I’m pretty sure the real issue is the buyers, not the seller. Cable systems seldom program 44 year old movies, especially in prime hours. They probably don’t do many runs of The Deep, Smokey and the Bandit, Julia, or The Turning Point either.
You’re right about theaters: they don’t like films that can only have one showing a night. Still, they didn’t exactly do badly with Titanic (3 hours, 14 minutes).
“Old”movies aren’t that uncommon on cable systems, and there’s certainly no reason for streaming services to not have it AVAILABLE, other than cost or some other licensing restriction.
For actual theaters, if a movie has enough “draw” they can put it on more than one screen. That happened EVERYWHERE with Titanic. But large theaters/multiplexes also weren’t common in 1977.
Indeed, from what I read of multiplex history, it may be that CE3K…
It’s a real product of the times. There was a decade back then in the late 70s and 80s when it seemed everyone in the United States was just obsessed with UFOs, Close Encounters really tapped into this. It all seemed to evaporate by the time the 90s arrived and everyone moved on to the next thing.
That the hopeful, inspiring Close Encounters started it and that the mania all seemed to vanish after Whitley Strieber published his six month best seller Communion in 1987 as “nonfiction” seems somehow appropriate.
I agree with all this. It’s all but forgotten now, but when Close Encounters opened, there was a widespread expectation that this might actually happen, sooner than we think, if not precisely in the form we see in the movie. That was the main reason why some people treated it as a world-historic event, a holy relic that would prepare us.
Also, the purchase of a video or DVD is a permanent right to view the content. Streaming services license the content from the studios. If they don’t want to or can’t pay what the studio wants, the content is not available. As Disney has shown, holding content off the market increases its value when you decide to put it back on the market.
Cable and streaming outfits don’t make money by churning viewers. They make money through subscriptions. More showings don’t equal more revenue.
In fact, if it is broadcast, licenses often limit the number of showings of a title. For example, a broadcaster might get the rights for 6 months or five broadcasts, whichever comes first.
But if the content switches every 30, 60, or 90 minutes they can “churn” more stuff that more people want to drop in on for 30, 60, or 90 minutes. But if people see that a 2- or 3-hour movie is on, they might not even check back until tomorrow. And if they find they’re not watching much, they may be inclined to not renew.
That was my first point, that whoever now owns CE3K might value it too highly now.
For it to be available, the owning studio needs to be willing to license it and the streaming service needs to be willing to pay for it to be available.
That is why many old titles (like CE3K) are available for rental or purchase, but not for streaming on the service. E.g., Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B00AFFFHA8/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r In this model, the rental or sale generates revenue for both the retailer and the studio. Win-Win with no carriage license needed.
If you are on a streaming service, you can “churn” your title whenever you want.
As far as broadcast / linear goes, you will renew if you like what they are broadcasting, regardless of its length.
But again, they’re more likely to hit upon something you like if they show 6 half-hour shows or 3 one-hour shows, rather than a 3-hour movie.
In linear or non-linear broadcast? That is streaming or cable?
On non-linear, you churn whenever you want, so that is off the table.
On linear, you like what you like, regardless of the churn. If I want to see Lawrence of Arabia I will value the channel that has it, even though it is four hours long. I don’t believe content is valued at random.
It is probably valued just more highly than those who would want to pay for it. The market needs to clear.
Only $2.99 to rent https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B00AFFFHA8/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r
My point was, those channels are less likely to show Lawrence Of Arabia – or CE3K – to start with, because they can put several other things in the same slot, that might get them renewals for each of those other shows, versus just one renewal from you.