Steven Spielberg

by Joseph McBride

  “I just didn’t expect to have two [blockbusters] in a row,” Spielberg later admitted. “Nobody expects one mega-hit, let alone two. So I was not one of those running around saying Close Encounters would be a big hit. I was just running around saying, ‘I hope Columbia can get their money out of it.’… [Columbia’s executives] were too frightened to share my pessimism—they had more to lose than I did. I would just go on and direct another movie, but they would go down with the lady who holds the torch [on the Columbia logo].”

  “If we knew going in that the picture was going to cost $19 million, we wouldn’t have made it, because we didn’t have the money,” admits John Veitch, the Columbia production executive who supervised Close Encounters. “No Columbia picture, at that time, had cost that kind of money.”

  Michael Phillips recalls that at the meeting in the fall of 1973 when they pitched the project to Begelman, “David asked Steven, ‘How much will this cost?’ Steven said, ‘$2.7 million.’ Julia and I looked at him, we didn’t say anything—[but we thought,] ‘How could he have the temerity to come out with the figure?’ As soon as we got out the door, we said, ‘What were you doing?’ He said, ‘I just had an instinct that that was as high a number I could mention.’ … Then, due to the problems of getting a script developed that we really liked, we were delayed and Steven was offered the opportunity to do Jaws. When he came back it was a whole new ballgame. Suddenly he was a much better risk from the studio’s point of view and he was given free rein to come up with the best that his imagination could conjure…. He was in a position for the studio to really invest, to bet the farm. They needed to; Columbia was teetering on the brink of insolvency, and here they had the hottest director in town and a subject matter that seemed a natural fit for him. So they did bet the farm.”

  Spielberg’s wishes did not come true all at once. With the nightmarish filming of Jaws still fresh in his mind, Spielberg told the producers, “I never want to do a location picture again.” He was thinking in terms of making Close Encounters in and around the Burbank Studios, which Columbia shared with Warner Bros.; the budget was set at $4.1 million. As Spielberg’s plans became more grandiose, the memory of Martha’s Vineyard receded, and he became convinced that he needed to make much of the movie away from Hollywood. Convincing Columbia was not so easy.

  Early in preproduction, Spielberg sent Alves “to scour America for a place that only my imagination told me existed,” the mountain chosen by extraterrestrials for their landing on Earth. “Steven was off doing promotion on Jaws,” Alves relates, “so I reported to John Veitch. He told me, ‘Steven wants you to find a mountain. This is a $4 million picture. We’re going to do one day on location and the rest on the back lot.’ I said, ‘Are you sure?’ We were starting Close Encounters as another small science-fiction film, like we were starting Jaws as a little horror picture. We couldn’t get a handle on Close Encounters visually—the visual effects, the scope of it. I remember John Veitch taking me to Warner Bros. Stages 15 and 16 and saying, ‘This is where we’re going to put the big [Box Canyon] set.’ I said, ‘It’s not big enough.’ He felt maybe we were feeling our oats from Jaws. He said, ‘My God, they did Camelot on this!’”

  Before principal photography began in earnest on May 16, 1976, the budget already had risen in stages to $5.5 million, $7 million, $9 million, and $11.5 million. The cost kept climbing as Spielberg gradually convinced Columbia to let him expand the scope of the movie. “We had six wrap parties on Close Encounters,” Michael Phillips recalls. “We popped the champagne six times. Each time we thought we were finished, he would come up with a great idea that warranted going out and picking up something else. Steven always comes up with new ideas that make the movie better.”

  In order to find Spielberg a mountain, Alves drove through 2,700 miles of western scenery before suggesting Devil’s Tower National Monument near Gillette, Wyoming. An imposing granite landmark with long jagged serrations up and down its front and back aspects, Devil’s Tower closely resembles Mitchell Butte, one of the most prominent features of Monument Valley, where John Ford filmed The Searchers and other classic Westerns. Devil’s Tower had the advantage of being less familiar to movie audiences, and perhaps more eerie in its solitary, abrupt emergence from a wooded landscape.

  Alves and Spielberg considered building the Box Canyon landing site in Monument Valley before deciding it would be too difficult to control weather and lighting conditions for a special-effects movie on a remote outdoor location. Even so, Spielberg found himself facing “horrendous” technical problems shooting in the Mobile, Alabama, hangar housing the enormous Box Canyon set, which was built by Alves at a cost of $700,000. The hangar was bigger than a football field and six times the size of Hollywood’s largest soundstage. The humidity inside sometimes caused artificial clouds and drizzle during filming, and rigging the set with dozens of huge lights while choreographing the movements of two hundred extras led to seemingly endless delays and expense. Even though the scenes filmed on the set accounted for only about one-fifth of the running time, they consumed about half the shooting schedule. “That set,” lamented Spielberg, “became our ‘shark’ on this picture.”

  The initially cost-conscious John Veitch eventually became Spielberg’s staunch ally in what the executive remembers as “a labor of love” for both of them. Spielberg said that Veitch’s “understanding of our enormous logistics” made him “sometimes a not very popular guy with the other Columbia executives.” The late studio president David Begelman, despite his many failings in a tragically self-destructive career, also deserves a lion’s share of the credit for enabling Spielberg to make the film he envisioned. “David was fiercely loyal to me throughout Close Encounters,” Spielberg said after Begelman’s suicide in 1995. “When I needed something from the studio, he was there to give it. I think we had faith in each other.”

  The problems Columbia had in trying to budget the film, Veitch says, arose from the impossibility of predicting how much the special effects would cost, particularly in the early stages when the script was constantly being rewritten: “It was no one’s fault, because we were experimenting. From the beginning, Steven always wanted to go one step further as far as visual effects were concerned, and it was time-consuming. It’s not that Steven is not a dedicated individual. He was cost-conscious, but he wanted everything to be just right.” But the man in charge of special effects, Douglas Trumbull, has a different perspective: “When I put in the effects budget at a fairly early phase, with my partner Richard Yuricich, we estimated the effects to be about $3 million. That news never got to upper management until much later. I have no idea what they said to upper management, but it was just too scary a number. Nobody had ever heard of a number like that for effects. It was right on—[the final cost] was maybe $3.2 million or $3.3 million.

  “I think there was a lot of avoidance of facing the realities of what the movie was going to cost. Everybody was trying to make himself believe it was going to be a less expensive movie than it ultimately was. It took on a bigger and bigger scope at every turn, not just in terms of special effects but in terms of the scale of the sets and a lot of complicated production out on location. Nobody at the beginning of that movie knew what it had to look like or how ultimately to achieve the goal.”

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  REJOINING Spielberg after passing up the opportunity to shoot Jaws, cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond missed the close creative partnership he had shared with Spielberg on The Sugarland Express. As a result of his triumph over enormous technical odds on Jaws, “Steven started to know all the answers,” Zsigmond felt. “He was sort of telling me things rather than discussing things.” But Zsigmond was excited about working on Close Encounters because it “had the smell of a great movie. We fell into sandtraps not because anybody made mistakes, but because we were making things that had never been done before.”

  Zsigmond’s conflicts with line producer Julia Phillips and with Columbia, however, almost led to his firing in the midst
of the Mobile location shoot. The trouble began when he said he needed time to prelight the massive set rather than simply start filming cold. The studio was so worried about the shooting schedule that it had not allotted any time for prelighting, and it objected when Zsigmond insisted on a minimum of one day for the task. A compromise was reached in which second-unit cameraman Steven Poster spent a day shooting exterior scenes while Zsigmond stayed behind to prelight.

  “It was a nightmare from that point on,” Zsigmond says. “There was a lot of pressure from the studio. Nobody could even conceive how much light we needed. I never gave in to the pressure to use less light, to do things that I knew were not right. Doug Trumbull stood behind me. He kept saying, ‘Vilmos is doing the right thing. We need a lot of lights,’ because he had to match the scenes with the special effects. Everybody was trapped into that situation. Steven stood behind me, but he was battling the studio and battling Julia Phillips. The budget kept going up. Poor Julia Phillips in her book blames me for many things. I was the scapegoat for many, many things.”

  After the first two months of shooting, when nervous studio executives and bankers were beginning to show up in Mobile, Phillips wanted to bring in a replacement cameraman. But, she wrote, “Steven refuses to fire Vilmos, and by now we have shot enough to have to be committed to him.” Exasperated over the memory of “Vilmos fiddling with the lights on every shot” (a singularly odd complaint to make about a cinematographer), she wrote that “on a bad night, I can still see a scene being shot, with Vilmos walking into it, and telling his crew that we just need ‘vun leetle inky-dinky over here.’”

  “I guess she had to blame it on somebody,” Zsigmond responds. “It would have been the easy solution to tell the studio to fire me. There was tension for a couple of days when this happened. They called four or five people [including John A. Alonzo and Laszlo Kovacs]. Most of those people were friends of mine, and they all came back to me. When I told them our problems, they all said, ‘If you can’t do it, nobody can.’ The only one who was going to possibly take over was Ernest Laszlo. He had done Fantastic Voyage, and they thought he could do it. But this was 1976, and he was in Montreal. Ernest Laszlo called back and said, ‘You guys crazy? I’m going to the Olympics.’”

  After that, Spielberg continued to let Zsigmond “do what I had to do,” and the director’s support helped make Close Encounters a “very rewarding” creative experience. But when additional sequences and pickup shots were filmed after the company’s return from Alabama, Zsigmond was not asked to shoot them. “Unfortunately, because of the studio and Julia Phillips, Steven could not hire me anymore,” Zsigmond says. “He told me I was going to shoot the India sequence, and he sent me to get [inoculation] shots. I found out later that Dougie [Douglas] Slocombe was going to do the India sequence, which hurt my feelings very much.” Although Zsigmond says he shot about 90 percent of the film, William A. Fraker shot the majority of the added material, notably the opening sequence of a lost squadron of World War II airplanes discovered in the Mexican desert. Fraker, Slocombe, Alonzo, and Kovacs were given prominent credit as additional directors of photography.§ Phillips admitted in her book that she did “everything in my power to let the world know how [Zsigmond] sandbagged us, by the credits.”

  “I’m glad she wrote exactly how it was,” Zsigmond comments, “because I always felt bad that they gave these people credit to diminish my credit. I don’t think Steven was really that vicious to do this. I think it came mostly from the studio and Julia Phillips, because they were so mad at me. It hurt my credit so badly, because some of the reviewers wrote [that Close Encounters was shot by] ‘Vilmos Zsigmond and all the great cameramen.’ They don’t realize I’m the only one who got the Academy Award. That was a vindication, but it was not really a pleasant vindication. I was so bitter at the whole thing that I didn’t thank ‘Steven Spielberg and Julia Phillips who gave me the opportunity to do this picture’; I thanked a couple of teachers I had in Hungary, and I thanked America for giving me a new life. It was not politically correct for me [to avoid thanking the director and producer]; I never shot a picture for Steven again. But we’ve talked a lot since, and we’ve gotten together many times. I still think he’s the greatest.”

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  CONSTANT time and budget overruns during the Mobile filming and during a year of postproduction caused the beleaguered studio to become increasingly impatient with all the filmmakers, but especially with the stressed-out line producer. Because of her cocaine problem (exhaustively documented in her 1991 memoir), Julia Phillips was forced off the picture by Columbia during postproduction in the summer of 1977.

  She felt “betrayed by the only partners who have mattered: Michael. Steven. Begelman.” Her ex-husband¶ takes strong exception to that statement: “There was no conspiracy to do her in. That was complete nonsense. She had a drug problem and she was really out of it. At that point she was not helping, but she was in the way of the picture getting done. Her authority was removed. She went off to Hawaii when that happened and we didn’t really communicate. Her perceptions were, at the time, not really accurate. It was a lot of pressure because it was a high-profile film with budget problems, and the press and everybody kind of rooting against it. But I don’t think that’s what the problem was for her. It was a serious chapter of substance abuse that made her not capable of functioning the way she would normally have functioned.”

  Julia Phillips claimed in a 1991 interview that cocaine “had never been a problem” for her before Close Encounters: “It was only after I started working with Steven. He was such a perfectionist.” In her book, she attacks Spielberg as “the little prick … a precocious seven-year-old” with “a childish self-preoccupation.” At the time of the book’s publication, a spokesman for Spielberg told the press that the director was busy shooting Hook and would have nothing to say about You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again. To this day, he has made no public comment about it.

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  SO much of the imagery of Close Encounters was added in postproduction that the actors had to spend most of their time staring into lights passing overhead, trying to imagine sights they could not see. “There’s no way to work with effects,” said Melinda Dillon. “… For weeks we were just sitting on a rock, shifting positions, pretending to look at the landing site and the sky. Steven would say to us, ‘There’s a light going by you. Oh, but there’s an extraordinary light going by you.’ It was a great acting exercise.” François Truffaut, however, found the experience unnerving: “I never had the impression of playing a role, only of lending my carnal envelope. Spielberg had shown me the two thousand sketches of his storyboard, so I knew that what he was after was a grand cartoon strip and that I could put back in my suitcase the book by Stanislavsky that I had bought for the occasion.”

  Richard Dreyfuss was “very upset with several moments in his performance,” Spielberg recalled, “because he feels that had he seen the effects, he might have reacted differently.” Dreyfuss admitted being depressed the first time he saw the film, because “I didn’t like my work. And it took me a long time to recontact that feeling in me of why I made the film…. I didn’t do it because it was a Spielberg movie, because they didn’t exist as such yet, or because it was a great role. I did it because I knew that they would show that film in the Museum of Modern Art in the year 2030, that … this movie would be potentially the most important film ever made, and I wanted desperately to be a part of that experience.”

  More than two hundred shots in Close Encounters involved special effects, and some shots contained as many as eighteen separate visual elements. Dozens of matte paintings by Matthew Yuricich rounded out the design, which also employed miniature outdoor settings for some of the Indiana and Devil’s Tower landscapes. The film’s night imagery was augmented with artificial stars and cloud formations, and animation was used for sequences showing the Big Dipper and a meteor appearing above Devil’s Tower. Spielberg commissioned tests of computer-generated imagery (CGI)
, a technique then in its embryonic stages, but concluded it did not look believable enough and would be prohibitively expensive (seventeen years later, Spielberg would help pioneer the combined use of live action and CGI in Jurassic Park).

  Admitting he had “no savvy about optical and miniaturized special effects,” Spielberg interviewed various effects technicians but felt he needed “one enthusiastic, driving ‘wilderness guide’ who would take me where nobody else had gone before.” He found that person in Douglas Trumbull, who had played a crucial role in helping Kubrick realize his vision on 2001. “If Trumbull hadn’t accepted the job,” Spielberg acknowledged in his 1978 article on the filming in American Cinematographer, “I’d still be on the Columbia back lot trying to get a cloud to materialize from thin air.”

  After making his feature directing debut with the sci-fi movie Silent Running in 1971, Trumbull was resistant to doing special effects for another director; he was working on innovative projection systems with his Future General Corporation and had turned down an offer from George Lucas to work on Star Wars, which was in production at the same time as Close Encounters. “I didn’t have any adverse reaction to Star Wars per se, but I felt I was space-movied-out,” Trumbull recalls. “When Steven came along, I was hunting for ways to put together 65mm camera equipment to develop the Showscan process, and that was part of the deal with Steven, to put together this 65mm facility I needed. I was very impressed with Jaws, and I thought, This is going to be a really interesting filmmaker to work with, and an opportunity to push the envelope.”

  The guiding principle of the special effects in the first two-thirds of Close Encounters was to bring about a seamless integration of fantasy elements into a mundane, Middle-American setting. That would help the audience accept the UFOs as real and prepare them for the rhapsodic, almost avant-garde spectacle of the last forty minutes when the mother ship lands. Spielberg’s UFOs announce their presence by activating a toddler’s toys, turning out the Muncie municipal light grid, vibrating a railroad crossing sign, and illuminating a McDonald’s billboard. Manipulating those familiar sights and sounds makes the film’s most extravagant phantasmagoria—clouds turning into strange shapes and colors, a dazzling orange light flooding through the door of a farmhouse—seem natural occurrences.