Soon after Spielberg finished shooting the film, John Milius took him to actor Robert Stack’s duck-hunting lodge near Colusa in northern California. There had been reports for months of UFOs being sighted in the nearby buttes, and Spielberg, Stack recalls, was eager to see one. Late one night, when they were all in the cabin, Milius reported seeing a UFO outside. Spielberg stayed up the rest of the night with Milius, hoping for an encore. The caretaker on Stack’s property, Bill Duffey, later told them brilliant lights had flown over that night and “lit up the entire orchard, sixty-five to seventy acres. They hung there and dropped pieces like tinfoil.” Duffey said that he had jumped into his car to pursue the UFOs, which he claimed made chugging sounds, like a washing machine. “I’ve done research,” Spielberg replied, “and that’s not the sound they’re supposed to make. It should be a solid humming sound.”
Continuing to hope for a sign of extraterrestrial life, Spielberg donated $100,000 to The Planetary Society in 1985 to make possible its META (Mega-channel Extraterrestrial Assay) system using a Harvard telescope to scan the skies for possible radio signals from distant civilizations. After throwing the switch while holding his infant son, Max, Spielberg said, “I just hope that there is more floating around up there than just old reruns of The Jackie Gleason Show.”
*
SPIELBERG’S technical advisor on Close Encounters was the prominent ufologist Dr. J. Allen Hynek. For many years, Hynek was scientific consultant to the U.S. Air Force and its Project Blue Book on Unidentified Flying Objects. A professional astronomer, he initially was asked by the Air Force “to weed out obvious cases of astronomical phenomena—meteors, planets, twinkling stars, and other natural occurrences that could give rise to the flying saucer reports then being received…. For years I could not accept the idea that a genuine UFO phenomenon might exist, preferring to hold that it was all a craze based on hoaxes and misperceptions. As my review of UFO reports continued, and as the reports grew in number to be of statistical significance, I became concerned that the whole subject didn’t evaporate as one would expect a craze or fad to do.”
Considered a professional debunker by UFO believers, Hynek later admitted, “To put it bluntly, the Air Force was under orders from the Pentagon to debunk UFOs.” Hynek broke with the Air Force in the late 1960s because he “could no longer, in good conscience, keep calling everything ‘swamp gas.’” Founding the Center for UFO Studies in Evanston, Illinois, he cautiously emerged as an agnostic, if not a true believer, on the subject of UFOs and extraterrestrial contact.
It was in his 1972 book, The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry, that Hynek originated the term “Close Encounters.” He defined Close Encounters of the First Kind as those in which “the reported UFO is seen at close range but there is no interaction with the environment (other than trauma on the part of the observer).” In Close Encounters of the Second Kind, “physical effects on both animate and inanimate material are noted.” Close Encounters of the Third Kind are those in which “the presence of ‘occupants’ in or about the UFO is reported.” People who report such encounters, he wrote, “are in no way ‘special.’ They are not religious fanatics; they are more apt to be policemen, businessmen, schoolteachers, and other respectable citizens.”
After playing a scientist in the final sequence of Close Encounters, Hynek said, “Even though the film is fiction, it’s based for the most part on the known facts of the UFO mystery, and it certainly catches the flavor of the phenomenon. What impressed me was that Spielberg was under enormous pressure to produce another blockbuster after Jaws, and he decided to do a UFO movie. He’s putting his reputation on the line.”
Although Spielberg’s first proposal for Close Encounters explicitly linked belief in UFOs with the public’s loss of faith in the American political system, the political implications became less overt as the screenplay gradually evolved. The film takes only a mildly critical view of the military’s use of a cover story (a phony nerve gas spillage) to evacuate a Wyoming site for the UFO rendezvous. Explaining his decision to downplay the military cover-up aspect, Spielberg told a European interviewer in 1978, “I didn’t want to beat it to death because in the U.S. it’s passé. We have lived through Watergate, the CIA, and people already find them redundant.”
Close Encounters was filmed under conditions of extreme secrecy. Spielberg was determined to retain the element of surprise and concerned that the story might be ripped off for a quickie TV movie before he could complete his lengthy shooting and postproduction schedule. Most of the film was shot in an abandoned U.S. government dirigible hangar in Mobile, Alabama, and security was so tight that even Spielberg was denied admission to the set one day because he had forgotten to wear his plastic ID card.
The clandestine goings-on, which included a virtual blackout on press coverage, helped give rise to a strange rumor. As Balaban reported, the story went around that the film was “part of the necessary training that the human race must go through in order to accept an actual landing, and is being secretly sponsored by a government UFO agency.” In fact, both NASA and the Air Force refused to cooperate with the film, fearing that it, fearing that it would inflame public hysteria about UFOs, just as Jaws had terrified people about sharks. “I really found my faith when I heard that the government was opposed to the film,” Spielberg said. “If NASA took the time to write me a twenty-page letter, then I knew there must be something happening.”
Even though the director had to forge ahead on his own, the rumor about the film’s secret sponsorship continued to live long after its release, and Spielberg found his 1982 film E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial accused of being part of the same sinister plot to indoctrinate the public. The tale also circulated among ufologists that when Spielberg visited the White House to screen E.T., President Ronald Reagan confided to the filmmaker, “You know, there are fewer than six people in this room who know the real story.”
*
SPIELBERG receives sole screenplay credit for Close Encounters, but he was not the only writer who worked on the film. He has acknowledged Paul Schrader’s early involvement in the writing, but only to disparage, Schrader’s work as “one of the most embarrassing screenplays ever professionally turned in to a major studio or director…. Actually, it was fortunate that Paul went so far away on his own tangent, a terribly guilt-ridden story, not about UFOs at all.”
“The only thing I deserve a credit for,” Schrader said, “is changing Steve’s mind about doing the film as a UFO Watergate. I thought it ought to be about a spiritual encounter. That idea stayed and germinated.” In Schrader’s draft, which the writer titled Kingdom Come, the protagonist whose life is transformed by an encounter with a UFO on a deserted country road was not the film’s common-man hero Roy Neary, a thirtyish, lower-middle-class working stiff from Indiana. The original protagonist was a forty-five-year-old Air Force officer whose story bore an unmistakable resemblance to that of Dr. Hynek. Both Spielberg and Schrader have claimed authorship of that character.†
Spielberg said he changed the protagonist to a civilian “because I find it very hard to identify with anybody in uniform…. A favorite theme of mine has always been the ultimate glorification of the common man…. A typical guy—nothing ever happens to him. Then, all of a sudden, he encounters something extraordinary and has to change his entire life in order to measure up to the task of either defeating it or understanding it. So that was my theme in Close Encounters.”
Schrader’s account was that after he wrote his draft, he and Spielberg “had a falling-out along strictly ideological lines, which was quite an instructive disagreement—it says a lot about him and it says a lot about me. My script centered on the idea of a modern-day St. Paul, a guy named Paul Van Owen, whose job for the government is to ridicule and debunk flying saucers. But then one day, like St. Paul, he has his road to Damascus—he has an encounter. Then he goes to the government; he’s going to blow the lid off the whole thing, but instead the government offer him unlimited funds to purs
ue contact clandestinely, so he spends the next fifteen years trying to do that. But eventually he discovers that the key to making contact isn’t out there in the universe, but implanted inside him.
“About the only thing that was left of all that when Steven finally made the film was the idea of the archetypal site, the mountain that’s planted in his mind, and some of the ending. What I had done was to write this character with resonances of Lear and St. Paul, a kind of Shakespearean tragic hero, and Steve just could not get behind that, and it became clear that our collaboration had to end. It came down to this. I said, ‘I refuse to send off to another world, as the first example of Earth’s intelligence, a man who wants to go and set up a McDonald’s franchise,’ and Steven said, ‘That’s exactly the guy I want to send.’ Steven’s Capra-like infatuation with the common man was diametrically opposed to my religious infatuation with the redeeming hero—I wanted a biblical character to carry the message to the outer spheres, I wanted to form missions again. Fortunately, Steven was smart enough to realize that I was an intractable character, and he was right to make the film that he was comfortable with.”
When asked by Cinefantastique magazine interviewer Don Shay in 1978 whether anyone else besides Schrader had worked on the script, Spielberg replied, “No. There was just me.” Later in the same interview, however, the director admitted that he had received help with the story from his frequent collaborators Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, who also play two of the returning airmen who emerge from the spaceship at the end of the film. Other writers who contributed to Close Encounters included John Hill, who wrote the second draft after Schrader left; David Giler; and Jerry Belson, a TV comedy writer who polished the script with Spielberg at New York’s Sherry-Netherland Hotel shortly before shooting began and also on location in Mobile. Julia Phillips reported that Columbia paid for “one under-the-table rewrite after another.”
Spielberg’s conceptual work during preproduction began with a year of exchanging visual ideas with a production illustrator, George Jensen, who made thousands of scene drawings and color sketches as a result of those discussions. Spielberg recalled that “together we plotted seven major sequences—including the last thirty minutes of the movie, which is all phantasmagoria.” After rejecting the Schrader and Hill screenplays, Spielberg wrote his own draft during the period when he was editing and promoting Jaws. His script, he felt, “had a pretty good structure, but I wasn’t crazy about some of the characters…. I find writing to be the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. I find it much more difficult than directing, because it requires a lot of concentration and I’m not the most concentrated of people…. Essentially I’m not a writer and I don’t enjoy writing. I’d much rather collaborate. I need fresh ideas coming to me.”
However, Spielberg was so possessive about the genesis of his magnum opus that he wanted the final credit to read simply “Written and Directed by Steven Spielberg,” as if sharing credit with anyone else for the story or screenplay would have diminished his own creativity in the eyes of the public, and perhaps in his own eyes as well. His need to insist on sole writing credit may have stemmed not only from the project’s deeply personal nature but also from an anxiety that others involved in the film would try to appropriate credit to themselves that he felt belonged more properly to him, as he thought had happened with Jaws. Such anxiety tends to be an occupational hazard for directors, particularly for young directors who have had a major hit and suddenly find themselves in a position of great power. The success of Jaws, Spielberg admitted in 1982, initially had “a very negative effect on me. I thought it was a fluke…. I began believing it was some kind of freak and agreeing when people said it could never happen again. They were saying it was the timing and the climate that created the success of Jaws more than what I had done to make the movie a success.” A typical defense mechanism against such feelings of insecurity is to exaggerate a genuine achievement or credit into a claim of omnipotence.
Julia Phillips wrote in You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again that Spielberg “made me pressure every writer who made a contribution to the script. When the Writers’ Guild insists on an arbitration, I get Schrader and Grady [her pseudonym for one of the other writers] to back off their right to credits.” (In a 1991 interview with Los Angeles magazine, Phillips, who had fallen out with the director during the making of Close Encounters, called Spielberg “the ultimate writer fucker.”) Schrader recalled that “at Steven’s request I withdrew from the credit arbitration, which is something I’ve come to regret in later years, because I had [2.5 profit-participation] points tied to credit. So I gave up maybe a couple of million dollars that way, but that’s the way it happens.”
Michael Phillips believes that Spielberg’s sole writing credit is appropriate: “Paul Schrader wrote a different film. Paul’s was a much more serious quest, a religious transformation of a doubter into a believer. It wasn’t a surprise to us, because we talked it out first, and it sounded like a good idea. But when it came in, it just wasn’t a Steven Spielberg film; it wasn’t a joyous roller-coaster. Close Encounters is really Steven’s script. It was a project that he had started in his childhood and had always wanted to do. He got help from his friends and colleagues here and there, but 99.9 percent is Steven Spielberg. There was not really a basis for a credit for Paul except that the first writer on a project usually gets the benefit of the doubt, but in this case, since Steven really started over, I think that it would have been wrong to put it into an arbitration. Jerry Belson made a contribution that was appreciated, but he did not in any way author the story.”
*
WHILE in the throes of making Jaws, Spielberg was sure he would never face a more difficult filmmaking experience. But he found Close Encounters “twice as bad—and twice as expensive, as well.”
It was a two-year ordeal of trying to realize a vision of mind-boggling technical and artistic complexity, while at the same time having to coax more and more money out of financially strapped Columbia Pictures. “Poor Steven was involved in a terrible battle with the studio,” cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond recalls. “He was not used to it. It was not pleasant.” At one point, when the studio refused to pay several thousand dollars for a special effect involving shattering glass, Spielberg paid for it out of his own pocket. As François Truffaut observed, “In [the] face of overwhelming hardships and innumerable complications that would, I suspect, have discouraged most directors, Steven Spielberg’s perseverance and fortitude were simply amazing.”
Perhaps the hardest part for a director who acknowledges being a control freak was having to shoot scenes without knowing exactly how Douglas Trumbull’s elaborate visual effects would look when they were added months later in postproduction. “The difference between Jaws and Close Encounters,” Spielberg later reflected, “is that Jaws was a physical effects movie and Close Encounters was an optical-effects movie. It meant that for Jaws I had to shed blood six days a week—from eight in the morning to eight at night—and for Close Encounters I had to shed blood seven nights a week, from eight at night to eight in the morning, because of the laboratory turnover time. But the problems were exactly the same between the studio and myself, and between the cast and the script.”
“I saw Steve more frustrated on Close Encounters,” says production designer Joe Alves. “It was unlike Jaws, where he was dealing with concrete objects. You go out on the water, it gets too rough to shoot, you say, ‘OK, we couldn’t do it, the shark didn’t work.’ It’s real. You have things to get upset with. The shooting of Close Encounters was more questionable [because of the visual effects]. It’s hard for a director—you have to have a lot of confidence that the stuffs going to happen. So there was tension on the set.”
“If I were Steven, I would have been terrified,” Trumbull says. “I’ll never be able to thank him enough for having the confidence and the patience to see it through and not panic. There was enormous pressure on the production all the time from the studio to keep moving on.”
Columbia had been near collapse in the early 1970s, amassing more than $220 million in bank debt. The First National Bank of Boston had veto power over any Columbia film budgeted at more than $3 million. By the mid-1970s, the studio had begun a partial recovery under the leadership of Alan Hirsch-field, president and chief executive officer of Columbia Pictures Industries, and studio president David Begelman. But the studio’s financial health was still marginal when Spielberg began shooting his commercially dicey sci-fi movie.
More than half of Columbia’s film production funding was derived from tax-shelter sources, a short-term strategy that helped the studio remain functional but necessitated the sharing of film-rental income with outside investors. When Close Encounter of the Third Kind (as it was then titled) began shooting on December 29, 1975, at an air-traffic control center in Palmdale, California, the company filmed for only two days to qualify for tax-shelter provisions before resuming the following May. Budget escalations caused a string of crises during production, and further anxiety arose during the final stages of postproduction in 1977 when Begelman was suspended from his job (he was later forced to resign) for forgery and embezzlement, in one of Hollywood’s most widely reported financial scandals. Although Columbia eventually laid off about $7 million of Close Encounters’ $19,400,870 production cost on outside investors,‡ it was not journalistic hyperbole when it was said that the future of the studio was riding on the film. Shortly before the film’s opening, Variety calculated that Close Encounters had to be among the top eighteen moneymakers in film history simply to break even.
Steven Spielberg Page 40