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 for a time the most lucrative motion picture ever.
Two parallel stories are developed in Close Encounters. The first focuses on a scientific team, led by a Frenchman named Lacombe (famous French film director Francois Truffaut), that tracks global UFO activity. The second centers around a midwestern everyman named Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), who is destined to be humanity's emissary to the stars. The film opens in the windswept Mexican desert, where the airplanes (minus their pilots) of a long-lost military training flight have mysteriously appeared. Lacombe's team discovers that the antique airplanes are in perfect working order. Meanwhile, the skies over the American Midwest are abuzz with strange objects and lights. A power company lineman, Neary sees a group of UFOs flying down lonely back roads near Muncie, Indiana, and becomesobsessed with encountering the aliens again. Unhappy with the demands of adult married life, Neary shares his obsession with a local woman named Jillian (Melinda Dillon), who is in search of her young son, Barry, following his abduction by a UFO.
A UFO makes contact, in a scene from the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
As the international scientific team moves closer to setting up a secret landing site at the base of Devil's Tower in Wyoming to beckon the visitors, Neary becomes more fixated on a mental image—that of an oddly shaped mountain—implanted in his head during his UFO encounter. Eventually, his tortured attempts to re-create the image in reality lead him to build a mountain of mud and garbage in his living room and thus drive his family away for good. When he sees Devil's Tower on television during coverage of a supposed nerve-gas spill in the area (actually a hoax concocted by the military to give the UFO team the required secrecy for first contact), Neary finally knows where he has to go and takes Jillian with him. After a hazardous cross-country trek, Neary and Jillian reach the secret landing site and witness mankind's first attempts to communicate with the swarms of beautifully illuminated extraterrestrial craft through a five-note musical tone keyed to a light board. A gigantic mothership—a literal city of light in the night sky—arrives to release numerous abductees, including Jillian's son. Different types of aliens also disembark and mingle with the delighted scientists. Meanwhile, Neary, with Lacombe's blessing, suits up for a long journey aboard the mothership. As soon as the ecstatic Neary and his alien escort disappear inside it, the mothership soars majestically back into the night.
The film originated in Spielberg's memories of his formative years in Arizona, where as a teenager he had made an 8mm sound film on the subject of UFOs entitled Firelight. Throughout the beginning of his career as a professional filmmaker, Spielberg intended to remake his amateur film and call it Watch the Skies. During production of Jaws (1975), Spielberg often entertained his crew with tales about UFOs and his plans to make a film about them; with the critical and financial success of Jaws, Spielberg had the clout to do so. He and other writers, including Paul Schrader, worked on various screenplay drafts, although it was Spielberg who received sole credit. He also re-titled the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind —a puzzling title to all except UFO buffs, who would recognize the phrase as UFO expert and Northwestern University professor Dr. J. Allen Hynek's terminology for physical contact with extraterrestrials.
Columbia Studios agreed to finance the project at an initial cost of $16 million. Pre-production scouting settled on the Devil's Tower location as a suitably mysterious backdrop for the film's climax. The film quickly went over budget, finally costing approximately $20 million because of a host of factors, including the logistical demands of location shooting in Wyoming and India (for a brief sequence involving thousands of extras pointing to the sky); the lengthyclimactic scene, which required an enormous and problem-plagued set in a hangar in Alabama; and the special effects, supervised by Douglas Trumbull, which involved months of planning and consumed millions of extra dollars. Spielberg's fanatic attention to detail and demands for secrecy on the set added to the studio headaches and delayed the film's release date. Producer Julia Phillips did not approve of some key figures associated with the production, including Truffaut, and was eventually fired by the studio head, David Begelman. Columbia itself was suffering from major financial problems and scandals, and a negative early review of the film did nothing to improve frazzled nerves in the production offices. However, once the film opened, the reviews were much more positive, and the film began to make enough money to be considered another huge success for Spielberg.
There are several different versions of the film in existence. A few years after its initial run, Spielberg returned to the film, re-titling it Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Special Edition. At a cost of $2 million and a seven-week shoot, he filmed new scenes, the most notable of which is a rather disappointing look inside the mothership, and removed some of the lengthy middle portion of the film detailing Neary's breakdown. He also added a brief rendition of "When You Wish upon a Star" to the musical score accompanying the mothership's ascent to the heavens. The new version, actually a few minutes shorter than the original, was released in 1980. A later television version combined elements of both films. The special edition was the version most widely available on videostore shelves until a 1998 video release, subtitled The Collector's Edition, a re-edited mix of the original version plus five short sequences from the 1980 special edition.
Further Reading:
Balaban, Bob. Close Encounters of the Third Kind Diary. New York, Paradise Press, 1978.
Brode, Douglas. The Films of Steven Spielberg. New York, Citadel Press, 1995.
Mott, Donald R., and Cheryl McAllister Saunders. Steven Spielberg. Boston, Twayne, 1986.
Perry, George. Steven Spielberg Close Up: The Making of His Movies. New York, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1998.
Taylor, Philip M. Steven Spielberg: The Man, His Movies, and Their Meaning. New York, Continuum, 1992.
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