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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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Last I heard, “Strange New Worlds” starts out with Pike already knowing what’s going to happen to him, and when, especially regarding his radiation-injury.
My last visit to the Star Trek universe was Enterprise. I grew weary of the Deep Space 9 series (why are we not going anywhere), Was so so on Voyager (silly premise). Saw some Picard, but I cannot recall if I even made it thru the first season. Blew off most of the recent reboots movies from “the kid” (Red Matter WTH?). Perhaps more exciting than save the whales, but it felt like the series was heading “woke for broke”, and I did not need that in my entertainment.
Many people think DS9 was the best Trek ever, but you have to go all the way through.
Many people think cilantro is edible. They’re wrong.
He got a vision of it in Discovery, Season 2.
You don’t have to. It’s easily the Best Trek Ever by Season 3. But given the story arc, you do want to watch it all the way through.
We’ll find out shortly. The first episode is released on May 5. (May 4th would have been better) But by the end of the week, we’ll know if this redemption or just more of the same…
It does cross the threshold early, but my point was more about the people who stop in season 2, or even 1.
My issue with DS9 was that, after a lifetime of following the Middle East, with the inevitable exasperation, watching the Trek version in long form with Ferengi piñatas for all the Roddenberry branch of the Fabian tradition, it wore quickly. Add in the pioneering work on unnecessary gender bending and I found it great preparation for a greater appreciation of SG-1.
Gender bending, do you mean the Trill stuff?
Sisko trying to adapt that his old comrade is now hosted by a female rather than a male? You betchya.
They went back and forth (so to speak) on that. And really, Sisko’s old comrade was the male host AND the “slug” inside. The producers etc probably thought that kind of thing was “daring” but I basically ignored it. Because they were pretty inconsistent themselves.
Another thing I had forgotten about that movie was that it was called Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and my childhood brain had trouble understanding that there weren’t previous movies called Close Encounters of the Second Kind and Close Encounters of the First Kind.
Reminds me of the play, the Madness of King George III. When they made it into a movie, they dropped the number thinking folks would think it a threequel.
You know that town in the Netherlands that built real-life copies of the fake bridges on EU currency so as to capitalize on the tourist trade? You could do something similar. Make a movie called Close Encounters and heavily imply that it’s actually a prequel.
A worthy jest! The legal department of Sony Pictures Entertainment prepares to laugh!
Titles can’t be copyrighted, for some arcane reason, yet they have some kind of don’t-mess-with-us protection. When Paramount released Double Indemnity in 1944, a low budget schlock merchant tried to call his film Single Indemnity, but they wouldn’t let him do it.
Comment in wrong thread. Bad job, Auggie! Pay attention next time!
I’ll admit that the strategy is legally somewhere between “Come at me bro!” and “Does this bug you? I’m not touching you.”
Consider posting it in the correct thread instead.
Instead of a prequel, how about a “sequel?”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Kind
I ignored it for the sake of the story in given episodes, but they weren’t making the point they thought they were and it contributed to my distaste for the series as a whole.