With its elaborate, unprecedented use of special effects and novel portrayal of extraterrestrials, Close Encounters of the Third Kind opened to popular acclaim in November 1977, eventually earning $240 million in worldwide release and significantly contributing to director Steven Spielberg's status as the most commercially profitable filmmaker in the new Hollywood. Close Encounters depicts an escalation in the number of UFO sightings worldwide and climaxes in the first "diplomatic" contact between mankind and extraterrestrials at a remote military/scientific base in the Wyoming wilderness. In stark contrast to numerous earlier cinematic portrayals of alien visitors as hostile fiends intent on world domination, Spielberg's utopian film presented the extraterrestrials as childishly mischievous but benign: wondrous new friends from the stars. Spielberg would return to some of Close Encounters's themes again in 1982's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, another worldwide blockbuster and...