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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
You like it for the father-son stuff, correct? Just move on to “The Visitor.”
Trying to figure out what your face looks like. I’m getting, unhappy with a Thanos chin?
I’m thinking (=) is supposed to be “baring teeth/fangs”
Yes, that’s one of the ways we old-timers used to express anger/rage back in the days before emojis.
It might work better if you add a nose. I always use a nose.
And } can be a better indicator of a “furrowed brow.”
I don’t like “The Visitor” that much. It’s too maudlin, it tries too hard to make everyone cry. And Tony Todd is always going to be Kurn, and I just don’t see Kurn crying about missing Sisko.
I like the episode about the solar-sail ship because it’s a bit of a breather after a pair of arc-heavy (and excellent) episodes, and before the arc kicked back in again. And it’s just quiet and pleasant. Of course the “father and son spend some time bonding while sailing in a ship they built is pretty cool, too.” I still wish that my dad and I had taken a trip together before he died.
Since it’s impossible, maybe they should have turned it into some kind of dream-sequence.
Or, as Ryan George says in his Pitch Meeting videos, “So the movie can happen.”
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9Kq-yEt1iYsbUzNOoIRK0g
Or, as he also says, “I don’t know!”.
For another example, that’s also why, in the movie “Star Trek: First Contact” the Borg didn’t do the obvious thing of going back in time FIRST, and THEN go to Earth. Because they would have won!
I don’t care!
My first visit to Hollywood was in September 1976. A guy I knew at the William Morris Agency and a gal I knew at MGM each told me that the screenplay for Close Encounters, still in the middle of production, was “wonderful”, “fantastic”, “possibly the finest script ever”.
You’ve seen the film. It has many virtues, but a brilliantly written script is not one of them.
Back in ’76 I pressed my friends for details. No, they both allowed, they hadn’t read it themselves, but they knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who supposedly read it. It’s Spielberg, right? It’s got to be good.
The moral of the story? Until you’ve cast your own eyes on an unreleased movie, don’t take rumors too seriously.
Or, “I’m gonna need you to get way off my back.”
The SF movies that began the Seventies were by and large a dystopian bunch: The Andromeda Strain, THX, Zero Population Growth, Colossus: The Forbin Project, Soylent Green, Zardoz, Dark Star, A Boy and His Dog, Westworld, Logan’s Run–a real cheery night at the movies. No wonder the fun-packed Star Wars and the secular religious aura of Close Encounters were such a welcome relief.
Wait, those weren’t all comedies?
You must be this guy:
Not intentionally.
Had to confirm they weren’t lizard people, who might one day alter a presidential election.
Also, there’s an extra test for sassy lizard people.
As should we all. Set us straight on a few things.
Might be completely devolving here, but –
I got a job at Blockbuster in like, what, 2004 or so (long story as to why, but just roll with it). They had for their inventory system a DOS-based tool, I think it was then still a black and white screen for loading inventory, rental transactions, etc.
I say this only because it’s a clear indicator that whoever is in charge is not investing in the company, but is probably squeezing every dime out, keeping operating costs as low as possible, because the End is Coming.
Just an assumption. Maybe someone(s) at Blockbuster were smart and cashing in while it was still a viable operating model.
I moved to North Carolina from Vermont 7 years ago. Let’s just say I think the northern culture (if that’s the right word) is so out of whack on this as to be punch-worthy.
It depends on how complicated the operations are, and to what degree they are automated. I still write a fair number of text-based scripts because adding a GUI would be a lot of effort with minimal return.
Hey! I thought the 5 year mission was given to the Enterprise commanded by James T Kirk… Not Pike?
Another Retcon?
Did you see the dome with the trees at 1:23? It’s Silent Running!
Depends on who you’re asking. The user?
For a great deal of it, I am the user. A lot of it is test software.
To give the suits at Blockbuster the benefit of the doubt, even as late as 2004 it was unclear how quickly most of the country would get broadband. No broadband, no streaming.
Broadband direct to the home, like a lot of tech-business issues, seemed to happen really slowly, and then suddenly all at once.
It seems each time out, was a 5-year mission for ship, crew, and commander. Captain April had his, then Pike, then Kirk. Although there must have been someone in between, since the Talos IV events occurred 13 years earlier. So maybe Pike got two of them.
I’m digging the music. Dang. They could make me like it with music like that. I’d rather hate it.
Imma give it a shot. I liked the Captain Pike season of Discovery. But Discovery is so very, very awful, I have dim hopes that the current keepers of Star Trek can return it to its glory days.