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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
Star Trek again?
Star Trek forever.
I don’t. I think Reaction Videos are a bit weird. But I also think it’s really, really weird to watch an entire movie (particularly one that’s so visually stunning) on a 13-inch laptop.
Hilariously ironic in retrospect.
There’s a saying among our group of friends that “Everything eventually comes back to Star Trek.” Whatever the current discussion, somehow Star Trek will be interjected into it.
Please, don’t be obtuse. I wrote “rent” so what do you expect?
All the versions are available and you can buy them for about $15.
Like the last couple of lines from Arthur C. Clarke’s Rescue Party. (Pardon my inexact recollection.)
“We should be nice to them. After all, they’ve only known radio for two centuries.
10 years later, that statement wasn’t funny.”
Edit: Kedavis beat me to it and has the money quote:
“Something tells me they’ll be very determined people,” he added. “We had better be polite to them. After all, we only outnumber them about a thousand million to one.”
Rugon laughed at his captain’s little joke.
Twenty years afterward, the remark didn’t seem funny.”
.
Are you expecting an argument?
Those are being held in a different post.
Because that’s what she had. She went to war with the army she had. A laptop to watch movies and edit her videos on, and a cell phone to film her videos. She didnt wait to buy all the best cameras and sound equipment – she decided she was going to do it, and did it.
No problem about filming herself with a phone and a laptop. What I want to know is why watch the movie on a laptop. That’s not necessary for the filming and editing of her YouTube videos.
Space-faring without some kind of warp drive is kinda nothing, when you really think about it. Without some kind of FTL technology, you’re pretty much limited to a solar system. Anything else you might try is going to take decades at minimum, and perhaps several generations. Yes, theoretically such things could be attempted, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the failure rate is close to or right at 100%.
Forever is capitalized too. :-)
If you “rent” a book from the library, do they limit how many times you can read it?
And when you get DVDs from Netflix, they don’t limit how many times you watch them either.
Who says they didn’t have faster than light? Are you really trying to sell me on the idea that the Romulans and Klingons never colonized a single world until after we gave them warp drive?
Sorry. No sale.
Because shes filming with her phone she has to go to the room with the best ambient noise levels. I think she said was filming many of her early reactions in the closet the 2nd bedroom …
Not saying we gave it to them, but they could easily have stolen it, or bought it from someone who shouldn’t have sold it to them… Remember, in TOS terms warp drive had existed for ~200 years. Plenty of time for the Klingons to steal it and build an empire. Also, the Romulans didn’t have warp drive at the start of TOS, until they started using Klingon ship designs. (Which was apparently just a cover for the Romulan ship models having been lost or broken, or something.)
There are also some references in TOS and later shows that many – perhaps most – of the great battles celebrated by the Klingon Empire did not involve space at all, but were just ground battles between different factions of Klingons. Also, Klingon society does not respect scientists. It’s more likely that Klingons boarded a ship from Earth or some other world, like the “mirror universe” Zefram Cochrane in the Enterprise series retcon. It seems unlikely to me that Klingons would even have interplanetary travel on their own.
Ugh. I’m not sure I’m communicating properly.
Yes, I get it. She watched a movie designed for a movie theater on a laptop…
One of her things, is that you accomplish things by trying things. I am just saying why she was doing it in a sub-optimal way.
In Schrader’s version, the aliens land in Times Square and sneer “you singin’ to me?”
It’s interesting that editing is one area of filmmaking, outside of acting, where women have played a prominent role for decades. The one theory I heard was that good editing is the kind that goes unnoticed. Unlike the director, DP, actors, or composers, you’re not supposed to notice the editor’s work (things have changed over the years, but that’s still true of 99% of movies). I’m not sure, though. There are other positions, like foley artist that you don’t notice unless they screw up.
Interesting to think about.
I am sure that if Netflix could charge you for each watch, they would.
And if you don’t want to pay $2.99 to rent it, don’t.
I loved in in jr high, too. But have you watched “Space Jesus and the Adventures of the Robot Forest Gnomes” lately? The sci-fi parts are interesting, the droids a foretaste of all the R2D2s to come, and the real-world branding gave it that “2001” touch of authenticity, but man, it’s self-righteous hippie dreck. Our hero is literally named FREE MAN, and Joan Baez sings as he tends the holy shoots of green. At least it has a PDQ Bach score, so there’s that.
I loved in in jr high, too. But
Blockbuster was fine for its time. I don’t propose there was a better alternative pre-streaming; I just think nostalgia for it is silly.
I’m using Blockbuster as a stand-in for movie rental stores in general. Blockbuster was strict with the content of the movies they’d rent out, so you were often better off with one of the mom and pop stores.
So you were kind of a Missy Cooper? :-)
We loved Silent Running before 1977 because what the hell else did we have? Anything that was science fiction, especially if it had decent visual effects, was on heavy rotation in my childhood. Not because they were great, but because we were starved for SF.
Silent Running still has great visual effects, and the drones were cool. The film fails on almost every other level, starting with a story that makes absolutely no sense. Why was Earth deforested? If the forests could be sustained in self-contained domes, why was it necessary to send them into orbit around Saturn? When it was decided not to continue maintaining them, why was it necessary to blow them up?
Answer: because the script said so.
If the Ancient Bajorans could made it to Cardassia with nothing but a light-sail…
Unfortunately, Trumbull had a weakness for portraying the military as a bunch of slack-jawed morons who had nothing better to do than acting like cartoon villains. This was also true in Brainstorm. Yep, it made no sense whatsoever to blow up the domes. Why?
I am, or was, a New Yorker, but I have always intensely disliked using a southern accent to denote ignorance. The ground controllers in Silent Running come across like a bad parody of citizen’s band radio.
I usually go with Because Plot/Because Drama.
Also, why were they using interplanetary spaceships to do something like cargo service from place to place apparently on Earth?
Of course, that’s just it: They couldn’t. I’ve dismantled that episode in other places too, including the imdb page for it.
Stop picking on an episode I like! >:(=)