According to Joe Alves, Spielberg had proposed scrapping the existing script for Jaws 2 and dealing with the mass attack by sharks in 1945 on sailors from the USS Indianapolis, the story recounted by Robert Shaw in Jaws. Howard Sackler, who wrote Jaws 2 with Carl Gottlieb, previously had suggested basing it on the Indianapolis incident, but was overruled by Sheinberg, who said, “That’s a different kind of shirt than we want to wear.”§§ Whether or not Spielberg would have been able to change Sheinberg’s mind, it was the director’s scheduling demand that proved decisive. “[W]e couldn’t wait that long,” Brown explained. “We had a cast and crew and contracts and a release date.” Universal reapproached Fields, but the Directors Guild of America would not give her a waiver to direct the film, so the job went to Jeannot Szwarc. Jaws 2 ran into many of the same production problems as the original, but its commercial success in 1978 led to two even tackier, more pointless sequels, Jaws 3-D (directed by Alves, 1983) and Jaws: The Revenge (directed by Joseph Sargent, 1987).
The most lasting impact of Jaws on Hollywood was in helping bring about what has been called “the blockbuster mentality.” Before Jaws, it was rare for an important film to open in several hundred theaters simultaneously. But that was what Universal originally planned to do with it. “Universal had planned a mass-saturation blitzkrieg campaign in more than 1,000 theaters,” Spielberg told The Hollywood Reporter in the week after the opening. “I don’t think then that Universal knew what it had on its hands.” But after the second preview in Long Beach, Universal scaled back the planned initial break to 409 theaters and “began handling the film with kid gloves,” Spielberg said. The publicity and word of mouth had a steamroller effect, making Jaws not only a national fad, like hula hoops in the 1950s, but a national event. As a result, studios began opening films more and more widely, and eventually it was not unusual for a potential blockbuster to open simultaneously on two thousand or even three thousand screens, backed by advertising expenditures of commensurately gargantuan proportions.
The blockbuster mentality made Hollywood concentrate its resources on fewer and more expensive films. Most film critics and historians believe that trend has had a serious impact on the overall quality of films made in Hollywood in the last twenty years. Spielberg and George Lucas, whose films have dominated the list of biggest box-office hits, have seen their critical reputations suffer as a result. In part, Spielberg and Lucas were simply being blamed for their popularity, for in America’s traditionally puritanical dichotomy between art and entertainment, a popular artist is automatically and unfairly suspected of not being an artist. But more serious questions, ones that would haunt Spielberg’s career after Jaws, were posed by film historian Peter Biskind in his 1990 essay “Blockbuster: The Last Crusade.” Biskind argued that Spielberg and Lucas, with their high-tech, massively popular “aesthetic of awe,” had helped “reduce an entire culture to childishness…. To infantilize the audience of the sixties and empower the audience of the seventies, to reconstitute the spectator as child, Lucas and Spielberg had to obliterate years of sophisticated, adult moviegoing habits…. The blockbuster syndrome probably started with The Godfather in 1972 and got an added boost from Jaws in 1975 but really took off with Star Wars. Once it became clear that certain kinds of films could reap immeasurably greater returns on investment than had ever been seen before, studios naturally wanted to turn the trick again, and again, and again: enter the Roman-numeral movie, product of the obsession with surefire hits. Blockbusters were expensive to make, and the more they cost, the safer and blander they became, while the smaller, riskier, innovative projects fell by the wayside.”
*
SPIELBERG’S own personal fortunes were greatly changed by Jaws. His directing fee under his Universal contract was “very meager” compared to what another director might have been paid for the film, Zanuck says, and the studio initially “refused to give him any percentage at all,” but before the film was released Spielberg was granted 2.5 percent of the net profits. Spielberg’s agent at ICM, Guy McElwaine, also renegotiated his contract with Universal in July 1975. The new four-picture contract for Spielberg and his Amblin’ production company¶¶ obligated Spielberg to direct two more films for the studio by 1981, but provided that he also would receive a share of the profits.
With each point of Jaws worth more than a million dollars, Spielberg became a wealthy man at the age of twenty-eight, though not on the scale of Zanuck and Brown, who shared about forty points in the film; Zanuck said he made more money from Jaws than his father, Darryl, made in his entire career in the movie business. Close Encounters producer Michael Phillips says Spielberg “still feels that, in principle, two [and a half] percent was too little for his contribution [to Jaws].”
More important to Spielberg than the money he made for Jaws, however, was the creative freedom the movie bought him: “It was a free ticket for half a dozen rides.” The immediate leverage it gave him was to convince Columbia Pictures to keep increasing the budget on Close Encounters at a time when that studio was in precarious financial condition. “After Jaws,” recalls Phillips, “the money spigots opened.”
Spielberg’s newfound success also brought with it a new level of anxiety, for he found that people kept asking him, “How are you going to top Jaws?” But, said Phillips in 1977, “Steven is a mensch. The only change in him is that he’s stronger now and better able to get what he wants. His values are the same. He could have had his head turned by the success of Jaws, but all it did was give him more toys to play with. The interesting thing now is that he’s still maturing as a person. He’s mastered his craft. I think his films will change now as his experience deepens. In other words, he’s only going to get better.”
* Begelman had been a principal in Creative Management Associates, the agency that represented Spielberg. CMA merged with International Famous Artists (IFA) in 1975 to form International Creative Management (ICM).
† Benchley also received a $70,000 licensing fee for each sequel and a $50,000 bonus keyed to his book’s lengthy stay on The New York Times best-seller list.
‡ Spielberg had first met Dreyfuss when the actor turned down a role in his TV movie Savage.
§ The Screen Actors Guild was threatening to strike on July 1, 1974, but the strike did not take place.
¶ One of the three sharks was not attached to the platform, but rode a mechanized sled controlled by scuba divers.
|| When the shark dies, Spielberg uses the same sound effect he used for the death cry of the truck in Duel, the “Jurassic roar” of the prehistoric Creature from the Black Lagoon.
** On another movie, when cinematographer Allen Daviau worried about a technical glitch, Spielberg told him, “John Williams will put some cellos in there and you’ll look like a genius.”
†† While MCA stock skyrocketed, Alfred Hitchcock was shooting his last film, Family Plot, at Universal. He gleefully received daily reports on the box-office performance of Jaws and its effect on his sizable stock holdings. Spielberg had been thrown off the set of Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain ten years earlier, but he still wanted to see the man he considered “The Master” at work, so after Jaws was released, he crashed the Family Plot soundstage. “Hitchcock was sitting with his back to me watching the action,” he recalled. “All of a sudden it was as if he sensed an intruder in his reverse vision. He couldn’t have seen me, but he leaned over to an assistant director and whispered something. A few moments passed and the AD came over to me and said, ‘Sir, this is a closed set.’ I was escorted off the set and it was actually quite thrilling. That was the closest I came to Hitchcock. I learned that he had eyes in the back of his head.”
‡‡ Federico Fellini was nominated for Amarcord. The other nominees were Robert Altman, for Nashville; Milos Forman, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; Stanley Kubrick, Barry Lyndon; and Sidney Lumet, Dog Day Afternoon.
§§ The Indianapolis incident served as the basis for a 1991 TV movie, Mission of the Shark.
¶¶ The fir
st mention of the name Amblin’ in that context, with the apostrophe temporarily intact.
ELEVEN
WATCH THE SKIES
“IT IS GOOD TO RENEW ONE’S WONDER,” SAID THE PHILOSOPHER. “SPACE TRAVEL HAS AGAIN MADE CHILDREN OF US ALL.”
– RAY BRADBURY, THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES
UNLIKE most of the science-fiction movies Spielberg grew up watching, Close Encounters of the Third Kind takes a benign view of human contact with extraterrestrials. The aliens in Spielberg’s film don’t carry ray guns or threaten to blow up the Planet Earth. They aren’t fire-breathing creatures with horns and tentacles, but childlike figures with spindly limbs, large craniums, and shy, beatific smiles. They are emissaries of goodwill, communicating through a dazzling display of light and music. And they are received in similar spirit. Spielberg’s optimistic vision of interplanetary contact marked a radical departure from the Cold War xenophobia that characterized most sci-fi movies in the 1950s, when fear of space aliens served as a metaphor for America’s phobia about Communism.
The Jewish filmmaker who grew up thinking of himself as an “alien” in Middle America, and whose family was not far removed from its immigrant roots, gravitated toward the point of view of the outsiders in Close Encounters, seeing their arrival and influence in only the most positive, transforming light. Spielberg often has been accused of romanticizing suburban conformity, but Close Encounters paints a harsh picture of the dull, repressive midwestern community where the UFOs make their first appearance. Municipal power repairman Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss)* yearns to escape from his Muncie, Indiana, surroundings to share the company of fellow “aliens.” Roy’s “whole belief structure is shattered,” Spielberg commented.“… He had to go through … I guess you could call it a ‘socially dislocating awakening’; and without this cultural shock there is no way he would have been ready or capable or willing to step on that ship and leave the parameters of our astronomy.”
Close Encounters and Schindler’s List form contrasting yet complementary thematic bookends in the trajectory of Spielberg’s career to date. Schindler’s List, Spielberg’s most powerful confrontation with reality, depicts the cruelty with which the world too often treats those it considers “alien,” and yet, while facing this bitter fact, the film still manages to find a solitary ray of hope. Close Encounters, Spielberg’s most spellbinding dream of the transcendence of mundane reality, celebrates the potential for universal brotherhood, while offering in its purest form what the director called “my vision, my hope and philosophy.”
*
THE origins of Close Encounters trace back to Spielberg’s experiences watching a wondrous meteor shower with his father as a young boy in Phoenix. The film germinated in his mind throughout his adolescence, when he absorbed vast quantities of science-fiction books, movies, and TV shows, and watched the desert skies over Camelback Mountain through his front-yard telescope.
Two seminal cinematic memories from childhood stood out in Spielberg’s mind when he began work on Close Encounters in the 1970s. The first was the image of the mountain from the terrifying “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence in Fantasia. The second was a soothing memory from another Disney movie: the song “When You Wish Upon a Star,” performed in Pinocchio by Cliff (Ukulele Ike) Edwards as Jiminy Cricket. “I pretty much hung my story on the mood the song created, the way it affected me emotionally,” Spielberg said. “The mountain became the symbolic end zone of the movie, and everything danced around that.”
His 1964 rough draft for Close Encounters, Firelight, seemed to vacillate on the question of whether a meeting with alien kidnappers was something to be feared or something to be welcomed. Perhaps it was Spielberg’s youthful ambivalence toward his own ethnic identity, and his resulting tendency to identify more with the dominant culture, that was keeping him from fully accepting the “alien” within him. According to producer Michael Phillips, Spielberg still seemed somewhat conflicted on the subject in the preliminary stages of work on Close Encounters: “I think my biggest contribution was to convince Steven that the aliens would be friendly. He wasn’t sure that, dramatically, you could have a climax of the meeting of these two species based on the sense of wonder alone. I remember arguing a great deal, saying, ‘If they were this advanced, they wouldn’t come to squash us. Would we? If we found lower life on Mars, would we enslave it or would we give help to it?’ But he got into it, and went beyond it, and came up with this cornucopia at the end. That’s why I think Close Encounters is like The Day the Earth Stood Still.” Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., on the other hand, questioned the innocent optimism of Close Encounters: “[H]ow can we be so sure that a civilization sufficiently in advance of our own to put its spaceship on Earth will regard us with any more consideration than white intruders from Europe regarded the Indians of the American continent, the blacks of Africa, or the primitive peoples of the South Pacific? … Let us pray that the future dreamed of in this humane, attractive, brilliant movie turns out to be right.”
Like Firelight, but on a far more sophisticated level, Close Encounters is an eclectic compendium of sci-fi movie motifs and archetypes. Its closest affinities are with the handful of movies that departed from the Cold War norm by depicting space aliens as relatively benign, including The Day the Earth Stood Still and It Came from Outer Space. One of Spielberg’s favorite sci-fi writers, Arthur C. Clarke, also was a major influence; both Clarke’s 1953 novel Childhood’s End and his story “The Sentinel,” the source of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey, deal with aliens helping earthlings reach a higher plane of spiritual evolution. Somewhat more covertly, Spielberg also drew from his favorite films in other genres. Although he credits Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins with suggesting the plot about a kidnapped child, Spielberg evidently was inspired by the treatment of that theme and some visual elements in John Ford’s Western The Searchers, which he watched twice while on location for Close Encounters. Spielberg also echoed the scenes of family tension in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. He has noted that the theme of “ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances” (as François Truffaut’s ufologist character puts it in the film) gives Close Encounters affinities with both Capra and Hitchcock.
“During Close Encounters, Steven used to see one or two movies every night,” cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond recalls. “Every night he was watching movies and getting more ideas. They had storyboarded everything; we had four sketches to do every day. Then Steven would see a movie and we would add sketches—suddenly four sketches became five we had to do, and five became six. One day Steven was complaining to the crew, ‘Gotta shoot fast.’ Earl Gilbert, an old, experienced gaffer [head electrician], said, ‘Steven, if you would stop watching those fucking movies every night, we would be on schedule.’”
• • •
CLOSE Encounters melds such purely fictional storytelling elements with the extensive post-World War II reports and folklore about UFO sightings. The modern “flying saucer” phenomenon dates from Spielberg’s infancy, when Kenneth Arnold reported sighting nine bright saucerlike objects over the Pacific Northwest in June 1947. The possibility of visitors from other planets stimulated an extraordinary mixture of fear and anticipation, especially among baby boomer children prone to fantasizing.
Spielberg’s desire to escape into otherworldly fantasy was especially acute. In his 1959 book Flying Saucers. A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, Carl Jung suggested that a belief in UFOs stems from “an emotional tension having its cause in a situation of collective distress or danger, or in a vital psychic need.” The Cold War and collective anxieties about the dangers of nuclear war helped stimulate that tension in Spielberg’s formative years. It may not have been coincidental that the widespread revival of interest in UFOs during the early 1970s occurred at a time when the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal were causing an unusually high degree of “collective distress” in the American psyche; Spielberg’s 1973 pitch of Close Encounters as deali
ng with “UFOs and Watergate” suggests that such a connection existed in his mind. His family problems during adolescence and difficulties finding social acceptance among his peers also stimulated his fantasies of extraterrestrial contact. Another psychiatrist who has studied the UFO phenomenon, Kenneth Ring, noted that when a child from a dysfunctional family learns “to dissociate in response to the trauma,” he is “much more likely to become sensitive to alternate realities.”
Although Spielberg was careful to call himself an “agnostic” on the subject, the fact that his interest in UFOs only increased as he reached adulthood suggests that his “vital psychic need” to believe in such phenomena was still intact and undiminished. And he realized that he was not alone in having such a need: “I knew that if this film was to be popular it wouldn’t be because people were afraid of the phenomena, but because the UFOs are a seductive alternative for a lot of people who no longer have faith in anything.” In his “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” Diary, cast member Bob Balaban reported that on the night of July 22, 1976, during location shooting in Alabama, “some people thought they saw a UFO over the hangar. By the time Spielberg and the rest of us ran outside to look, the lights had disappeared.” Spielberg, however, recalled initially being convinced that he had seen his first UFO that night. “When I found out later that it was only an Echo satellite,” he said, “I was as depressed as I’ve ever been.”
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