r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I turned on hte TV at 5 p.m. yesterday (March 10) for one of Turner Classic Movies’ “#1 Days of Oscar” presentations I was deeply interested in seeing, Steven Spielberg’s 1977 science-fiction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. That clunky title, which was supposed to denote the third level of contact with extraterrestrials – the first lind was sighting of a UFO (or, as they’re called now, a “UAP” – ”unidentified aerial phenomenon” instead of “unidentified flying object”), the second was seeing one land and the third was actual contact and communication – became the subject of a lot of jokes when this film first came out in 1977. Stepping in dog poop was referred to as a “close encounter of the turd kind,” and when Roman Polanski was busted for having sex with a 13-year-old girl the joke was his next movie would be called Close Encounters with the Third Grade. This was the movie Spielberg got to make right after the smash success of his 1975 action mega-hit Jaws, and as it happened Charles and I had seen Spielberg and his long-time composer, John Williams, on a pre-taped interview with Stephen Colbert for his late-night talk show in which they discussed both the famous two-note motif from Jaws (which Spielberg said he used quite a lot more of in the film than he’d anticipated because “Bruce,” the mechanical shark that was supposed to be playing the title character, kept breaking down and so Spielberg was forced to be more Val Lewton-esque and shoot many of the big action scenes with the shark’s presence suggested by sound alone) and the five-note motif from Close Encounters. I’d seen Close Encounters only once before, on the tail end of its first theatrical run in 1977 (probably at the big theatre in Berkeley, California that was the foundation of the Landmark chain), and I remember thinking it was grandiosely silly, especially in the scenes in which the central character, electrical lineman Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss, somewhat at sea trying to play a proletarian), starts sculpting a mountain first with his shaving cream and then with mashed potatoes at the family dinner table. One expects one of his kids to ask Neary’s wife Ronnie (Teri Garr, whiny as usual; a lot of people joked about the film’s ending, “If I were married to Teri Garr,m I’d go aboard a flying saucer too,just to get away from her!”),”Why is Daddy playing with his food?” At times Close Encounters is heart-rendingly beautiful; at other times it’s just abominably silly and self-indulgent. The best aspect of the film is the way the arrival of space aliens totally disrupts a normal suburban family – a theme Spielberg would return to five years later in a far better film, E.T.
Eventually that weird-looking mountain Roy is psychological compelled to keep sculpting over and over again turns out to be the “Devil’s Tower” in Wyoming, which Spielberg’s script tells us was the first U.S. national monument, dedicated in 1914 by President Theodore Roosevelt (1914 was actually during the administration of Woodrow Wilson, two Presidents later), and where the UFO’s, UAP’s or whatever you call them have decided to land and announce themselves to the world of humans. This is the sort of movie that often gets made by a director just coming off a huge hit and finding producers willing to bankroll him in whatever crazy project he wants to do next – like John Boorman’s Zardoz after Deliverance or Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate after The Deer Hunter – and the only difference is that Close Encounters was also a box-office hit (maybe not at the mega-level of Jaws, but a big money-maker nonetheless), and it solidified Spielberg’s reputation as a commercially successful and “bankable” filmmaker. There are a number of ironies in Close Encounters, including the cover story that the government (the bad guys in this tale; in fact,Charles thought Spielberg had unwittingly concocted a story of modern-day Right-wing paranoia in which the “dep state” is hiding important information from ordinary people and even making them wear masks they don’t need) puts out of a train derailment that released great amounts of toxic nerve gas in the Devil’s Tower area. Given what just happened in East Palestine, Ohio – ia train derailment and the decision of the railroad to “vent” the cars that had crashed did indeed release large clouds of toxic gas – the idea that this tale represents a cover story invented precisely because it could never really happen plays quite a bit differently than it did when this film was made. There’s also a scene ripped off almost shot-for-shot out of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, in which Roy rescues his traveling companion, Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon) – a single mom from his neighborhood whom we’ve already decided would make a much better partner for him than the whiny Teri Garr – by pulling up onto a ledge and thereby preventing her from falling to her death.
The special effects in Close Encounters generally hold up quite well despite the advances in effects technology over the last 46 years (has it really been that long?), even though Star Wars won the Academy Awards for special effects that year. The next film on TCM’s “31 Days of Oscar” schedu9le was Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, for which Kubrick took credit for the effects even though they were principally the work of two other people, John Dykstra (who did the models of spacecraft) and Douglas Trumbull (who did the spectacular ending sequence). Subsequently Dykstra did the ship models for Star Wars and Turnbull did the ones for Close Encounters, including the elaborate flashing lights on the extraterrestrial spacecrafts. (One thing I hadn’t remembered is there was a whole fleet of them, not just one, and a whole squadron of stick-figure aliens created by Italian puppeteer Crlo Rambaldi, later the creator of E.T.) Perhaps as a result of Kubrick pissing off the effects community for taking sole credit for 2001’s effects, Spielberg decided to list the names of all his major technicians on the final credit roll of this film – and since other crews started demanding that of their directors, this led to the hyperthyroid expansion of credits that now afflict just about every movie made. (This has led to questions among a lot of moviegoers about just what these people listed in the credits actually do; just what is a “best boy electric,” anyway?) Also Spielberg later reissued Close Encounters in a so-called “special edition,” featuring a 10-minute epilogue showing just what happened to Richard Dreyfuss’s character after the aliens took him on board their craft, though the version TCM showed was the original and Spielberg later said after the 9/11 attacks that if he’d made Close Encounters after that event, he would never have let Roy go aboard the spacecraft. Indeed, there are certain parallels between this film and Spielberg’s The War of the Worlds, especially in making the central character an ordinarily proletarian instead of the scientist he’d been in H. G, Wells’ original tale and most of the adaptations previously – only in that story the aliens are definitely malevolent and out to conquer us, white in Close Encounters the aliens are presumably benign and in E.T. the tithe character is positively friendly.
