Critical opinion on Spielberg, which had begun to diverge as a result of Jaws, was polarized further by Close Encounters. Some reviewers mocked Spielberg for making what Molly Haskell, in New York magazine, called “children’s films that parents can love without shame”; her review was headlined “The Dumbest Story Ever Told.” Reviewers who responded favorably to Close Encounters were willing to partake in what Frank Rich called “a celebration not only of children’s dreams but also of the movies that help fuel those dreams.” Newsweek’s Jack Kroll compared Spielberg to Walt Disney, “with his metamorphic genius, sentimental idealism and his feeling for the technical magic of movies as a paradigm for technological utopia.” But Kroll also understood the darker side of Spielberg, finding the much-maligned imagery of Roy Neary building the mountain in his den “a crazy, funny, touching scene … it seems to come from something deeply personal in Spielberg.”
Praise for Spielberg’s technical wizardry was nearly unanimous, but Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times was among those for whom this “magic set with dramatic interludes” nevertheless confirmed a suspicion that Spielberg was a director of “effects rather than characters or relationships.” In the same paper, however, Ray Bradbury described Close Encounters as “the most important film of our time…. For this is a religious film, in all the great good senses, the right senses, of that much-battered word…. Spielberg has made a film that can open in New Delhi, Tokyo, Berlin, Moscow, Johannesburg, Paris, London, New York, and Rio de Janeiro on the same day to mobs and throngs and crowds that will never stop coming because for the first time someone has treated all of us as if we really did belong to one race.”
Perhaps the most fitting comment on Close Encounters came from the great filmmaker Jean Renoir. In a March 1978 letter to François Truffaut, Renoir reported from Beverly Hills, “We have finally seen Close Encounters. It is a very good film, and I regret it was not made in France. This type of popular science would be most appropriate for the compatriots of Jules Verne and Méliès…. You are excellent in it, because you’re not quite real. There is more than a grain of eccentricity in this adventure. The author is a poet. In the South of France one would say he is a bit fada. He brings to mind the exact meaning of this word in Provence: the village fada is the one possessed by the fairies.”
*
UNFORTUNATELY, Spielberg could not let go of his masterpiece. The Special Edition of Close Encounters of the Third Kind went before the cameras in 1979, on weekends over a nineteen-week period while he was otherwise occupied with filming 1941. Columbia let him spend $2 million to reedit Close Encounters and shoot additional scenes he had been unable to film for the original version, when “certain compromises had to be made as a result of budget and schedule…. I’ve had the opportunity to see how the film plays for audiences. Film is not necessarily a dry-cement process. I have the luxury of retouching the painting.”
But Columbia exacted a heavy aesthetic price. “I never really wanted to show the inside of the mother ship,” Spielberg admitted in the 1990 documentary about the making of Close Encounters. “That was, in a way, how I got the money to fix the movie.” Michael Butler was enlisted to photograph the scene of Roy Neary entering the mother ship, on a newly built set at the Burbank Studios, with added special effects by Robert Swarthe (Douglas Trumbull says he passed up the opportunity to work on the Special Edition because Columbia expected him to do it without pay).
Although the expanded ending was the major selling gimmick in Columbia’s ad campaign—“NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, FILMGOERS WILL BE ABLE TO SHARE THE ULTIMATE EXPERIENCE OF BEING INSIDE”—the scene proved to be a terrible letdown from the phantasmagoria preceding it. Little happens except for Neary gaping around inside an essentially empty, plastic-looking environment bearing a distinct resemblance to the lobby of a Hyatt hotel. By preventing the viewer from simply imagining what happens to Neary, the ending squandered much of the film’s sense of wonder and magic.
That commercial compromise alone would have been a fatal miscalculation, but Spielberg, as he later put it, also “added some gestalt and took out some kitsch and reshaped the movie.” His cuts amounted to sixteen minutes of footage. His additions included six minutes of newly shot scenes and seven minutes of footage shot for the original version but previously unseen by the public; the Special Edition runs three minutes shorter than the original’s 135-minute length. The “gestalt” Spielberg added included the scene of a cargo ship, lost in the Bermuda Triangle, turning up in the Gobi Desert (photographed by Allen Daviau). Although it expands the story’s geographical scope, that scene is superfluous because it serves the same function as the opening scene of airplanes turning up in the Mexican desert. What Spielberg considered “kitsch” was much of the heart of the story involving Roy’s estrangement from his family, notably a large chunk of the mountain-building sequence. In partial compensation, Spielberg added a harrowing scene of Ronnie discovering a freaked-out Roy huddled in the bathtub under a steaming shower. He had not used it in the original because it was “so powerful, it was almost another movie.” But for the 1980 edition Spielberg also cut another pivotal scene of Neary and other UFO witnesses being publicly belittled by mendacious Air Force personnel. The net effect of the changes was a diminution of Roy’s personal story in favor of special effects.
Rather than confirming critical reservations about Spielberg, as one might have thought, this change of emphasis was greeted with uncritical praise when the Special Edition debuted in theaters on July 31, 1980. (The public response, on the other hand, was unspectacular, and one patron actually sued Columbia, claiming that fraudulent advertising had led her to expect a new movie.) In part, the critics’ response to the retooling reflected gratification that Spielberg had listened to their advice about how to downplay Roy’s mental problems. But it also indicated that, even in its bastardized form, Close Encounters had become a consensus classic and its director a cultural icon. “What has happened is a phenomenon in the annals of film,” Arthur Knight proclaimed in The Hollywood Reporter. “Director Steven Spielberg has taken his 1977 flawed masterpiece and, by judicious editing and addition of several scenes, has turned his work into an authentic masterpiece.”
At the time Spielberg issued his Special Edition, Michael Phillips, who had no involvement with it, presciently raised a note of caution: “I just hope it doesn’t lead to a trend in which filmmakers ‘redo’ their movies. That would simply be dreadful. Some filmmakers might start withholding a few minutes from the first release so they could add this material in the reissue and get people to spend their five dollars again.”
That is just what has happened in recent years. The release of revised “directors’ cuts” too often has become a dubious exercise in historical revisionism, undertaken largely to gratify egos and obtain additional revenues from the home-video and laserdisc market. While the restoration of such classic films as Lawrence of Arabia, which Spielberg helped sponsor, has been a more positive trend, the continual metamorphosis of film history Close Encounters helped inaugurate raises disturbing questions about the legacy filmmakers are leaving for future generations. When Columbia announced in 1980 that the original version of Close Encounters was being “retired” from the marketplace, Spielberg publicly objected, insisting, “There will be two versions of Close Encounters showing for the next one hundred years, as far as I’m concerned.” Videotapes of the film in distribution today, however, are of the Special Edition. The original version sometimes airs on television in a pan-and-scan format, but it can be seen in its proper wide-screen aspect ratio only on the 1990 Criterion laserdisc edition. Spielberg’s involvement with that third edition of the film, which includes the added scenes as a supplement, seemed a tacit admission that his original cut should be regarded as the true version.
Expressing hope that the Special Edition would not replace the original, Pauline Kael wrote in 1980, “I want to be able to hear the true believer Roberts Blossom tell people that he has seen Bigfoot as well
as flying saucers. It may not seem like a big loss, but when you remember something in a movie with pleasure and it’s gone, you feel as if your memories had been mugged.”
* Spielberg originally wanted Jack Nicholson to play the lead role in Close Encounters, but Nicholson’s schedule would have required a two-year delay in the start of production. “I wrote Close Encounters for a forty-five-year-old man,” Spielberg said, “but Dreyfuss talked me into casting him in the film…. Richard heard me talking about Close Encounters all through Jaws…. He had to listen to about 155 days’ worth of Close Encounters. He contributed ideas, and finally he said, ‘Look, turkey, cast me in this thing!’”
† The 1977 release version of the film contains a scene with George DiCenzo playing a vestigial version of the character, an Air Force officer in charge of misleading a group of UFO witnesses (he is named Major Benchley, after Jaws author Peter Benchley). Spielberg eliminated the scene from the 1980 Special Edition of Close Encounters.
‡ The British entertainment conglomerate EMI, Time Inc., and a group of German tax-shelter investors. The last official budget for the film, formally agreed upon by the Phillipses and Columbia during production, was $15,942,296. The final production cost was $3,458,574 over that figure, and the producers’ contract called for an additional penalty of the same amount to be included in the final break-even accounting figure of $22,859,444.
§ Frank Stanley also shot two days on the film, without credit.
¶ The Phillipses were divorced in 1974 but continued working together as producing partners on Close Encounters until her firing.
|| Spielberg was not always able to work such magic with Cary Guffey. “One time, God bless him, the little boy was tired, and we were filming at night,” production executive John Veitch recalls. “He said to his mother, ‘I’m not working tonight. I want to go to sleep.’ Steven and all of us said to him, ‘We’ll give you any kind of a toy, anything you want.’ ‘I don’t want anything. I want to go home, Mom.’ And he did. We lost about $100,000, because that was the big set with all the people and the mother ship.”
** According to a 1994 Forbes magazine profile of Spielberg, while his contract for Close Encoun ters called for him to receive 17.5 percent of the profits, he “ended up with about $5 million. Spielberg was discovering the first rule of Hollywood accounting: Even the biggest hits show very little ‘profit’ after overhead, interest and distribution fees are generously factored in.”
TWELVE
“REHAB”
IN EVERY FILMMAKER’S LIFE, A 1941 INVARIABLY COMES ALONG. I CAN SEE 1941 MORE AS A CLEANSING EXPERIENCE, THE ONE POSSIBLE WAY I CAN MAKE YOU FORGET ALL THE GOOD THINGS I’VE DONE IN MOTION PICTURES.
– STEVEN SPIELBERG, SEPTEMBER 1979
I MET a real heartbreaker last night,” Spielberg told Julia Phillips while they were working on Close Encounters. The “heartbreaker” was Amy Irving.
The twenty-two-year-old actress, whose curly-brown-haired, sloe-eyed, high-cheekboned beauty masked an intense and fiercely ambitious nature, had recently returned to California from dramatic studies in London when she met Spielberg in 1976. The daughter of TV producer-director Jules Irving, former artistic director of New York’s Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center, and actress Priscilla Pointer, Amy was of Russian-Jewish ancestry on her father’s side and Welsh-Cherokee on her mother’s, but she was raised as a Christian Scientist. She was the niece of Universal TV executive producer Richard Irving, who had worked with Spielberg on The Name of the Game. Amy grew up on the stage in San Francisco and New York and felt somewhat alienated when she followed her parents to Hollywood. “When we were in San Francisco, Los Angeles was a dirty word to us,” she admitted. “I never in a million years thought I’d ever be in television or films. I always thought I was going to be a struggling stage actress.”
But with her three-year stint completed at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, Amy found herself unexpectedly in demand in Hollywood. After playing a few TV roles, she tried out for the part of Princess Leia in George Lucas’s Star Wars. Although she was passed over for the more hard-edged Carrie Fisher, Amy caught the attention of director Brian De Palma, who was conducting the audition jointly with Lucas in order to find actresses for his next movie. De Palma offered Amy her first movie role, as the sweet-natured high school girl Sue Snell in Carrie. Since he “had a feeling Amy and Steven would like each other,” De Palma also sent her to audition for the role of Richard Dreyfuss’s wife in Close Encounters.
“I was much too young [for the role], and Steven said so right away,” Amy recalled three years later. “We just sat and talked for a while. It was a month before I saw him again. That encouraged me, however. If he’d been one of those directors who immediately asked an actress out for a date I’d be very worried today; in fact, I’d probably insist on sitting in on all his auditions.”
Their second meeting came at a small dinner party arranged by De Palma during the shooting of Carrie. Steven reminded Amy of her father, who was also a “wonderful, boyish man, a real hard worker—gifted with a silly sense of humor.” She soon moved out of her Laurel Canyon house and into Steven’s “bachelor funky” digs nearby. Later described by director Robert Markowitz as having “an icy exterior but a high degree of sexuality teeming beneath the surface,” Amy would spend the next four years living with Spielberg in a passionate but often turbulent relationship.
A few months after they began living together, they moved into a lavish new home Steven bought in Coldwater Canyon, close to the Beverly Hills Hotel. “The house that Jaws built,” as they called it, marked a considerable step up the social ladder for Spielberg. “Steven had this huge, huge house—eight or nine thousand square feet, it must have been,” screenwriter Bob Gale recalls. “He was proud and embarrassed at the same time to have a five- or six-bedroom house. What was he going to do with all this? He said, ‘You know, I thought about it. I could either take my money and have it invested and every month I could look at numbers in a book or on a sheet, or I could live in it. So I decided I should live in it.’”
Steven and Amy shared the house with a cook and a cocker spaniel, Elmer; two parrots, named Schmuck I and II after Steven’s boyhood pets in Arizona; and, briefly, a monkey who could not be housebroken. Elmer made appearances in The Sugarland Express, Jaws, Close Encounters, and 1941, and one of the parrots was trained to croak the five-note interplanetary signal from Close Encounters.
Spielberg worked at an elaborate customized desk with built-in telephone, radio, tape recorder, and (befitting his growing sense of privacy) a security television monitor and a paper shredder. The five-year-old house had a fancy screening room where Spielberg, Amy, and their friends watched 35mm prints of movies borrowed from the studios. He also relaxed by listening to his collection of movie soundtrack albums and by playing Space Invaders and other state-of-the-art video games.
If all that wasn’t enough to keep him occupied, “There was a television in just about every room of that house, and there was always a television on,” reports Gale. “He’d have a conversation, and out of the corner of his eye he’d be watching television and see something and get excited about it. He’d make a note, ‘Find out the name of this actor or who directed this commercial.’ He was always thinking about what he was seeing and filing it away.”
Amy did not find it easy to accommodate to Steven’s hyperkinetic, high-powered lifestyle or to the publicity spotlight that went with it. Since she was just at the beginning of her career, and he was already phenomenally successful, she naturally felt in his shadow. While growing up, she had become tired of hearing herself described as “Jules living’s daughter,” resenting people’s assumptions that whenever she won a part, it was because of her father. Now she faced the same problem all over again, but on a much bigger stage. “I don’t want to be known as Steven’s girlfriend,” she already was telling the press in 1978. They did not work together during their first four years as a couple, in part because Amy wan
ted to ensure that whatever success she attained was her own.
She felt overwhelmed, at first, by Steven’s creative abilities. When she saw Close Encounters, she was moved to tears, both by the beauty of the images and, she said, “by the beauty of Steve Spielberg’s soul. He disclosed things none of us ever imagined.” But by 1979 she had developed more mixed feelings about his work. “I know he’s an incredible moviemaker,” she said, “but the kind of films he makes aren’t necessarily the kind I want to be in.”
During that period, De Palma put Amy into another surreal horror film, The Fury, and Robert Markowitz directed her in Voices, a love story in which she played a deaf woman who teaches hearing-impaired children. Voices was not a commercial success, and while her reviews were respectful, they did not win her the separate identity she craved. She suffered because she “wasn’t secure enough to have some people think I owed my career to Steven.” Steven, for his part, still had to overcome his lingering resistance to growing up and assuming the responsibilities of a husband and father.
Amy felt herself treated as a “second-class citizen” in a status-conscious industry town consumed with talk about moviemaking and box-office grosses. “Our social life was going out to dinner with studio heads,” she complained. Like Steven’s former girlfriend who met him during the making of Sugarland Express but ultimately went back to Texas because she couldn’t share his obsession with movies, Amy quickly became frustrated by Steven’s single-minded absorption in his career. “Steven has trouble with a level of intimacy,” his longtime producer Kathleen Kennedy has said. “He gets close to people to a point, and then it begins to break down, because I don’t think Steven is always comfortable communicating his feelings. His inability to trust very many people creates a certain amount of personal loneliness for him. But I also think it comes from just wanting to be by himself and be close to some creative, inanimate world he can live within, rather than deal with the real world and real people.”
Steven Spielberg Page 44