Spielberg

by Frank Sanello

  The studios were also negatively influenced by market research that said UFOs were a big snooze as far as the public was concerned. “They tested the concept of Close Encounters,” Spielberg remembered. “I couldn’t believe it. The response was negative. They said I’d better have a lot of sex and sensationalism in it or I’d be in real trouble. But a picture’s never succeeded on market research yet. It’s still the picture-maker’s passion.”

  The studio executives, however, had ignored an important statistic that showed the film’s concept had a built-in audience of millions. According to a Gallup Poll at the time, fifteen million Americans, including the then President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, claimed to have had some kind of UFO experience. The same poll indicated that 52 percent of the American public believed in UFOs and that they came from outer space.

  Spielberg himself was a believer, although to his great regret he wasn’t one of the fifteen million who had had a close encounter of any kind with a UFO. “I believe in the UFO phenomenon, yes. Whether I believe that UFOs are of extraterrestrial origin, well, the jury’s still out. I would like to believe the hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world have not been hallucinating for three thousand years.”

  The first draft of the script, which never got made, was written by Paul Schrader, the theology-obsessed writer-director of such ham-handed morality tales as Hardcore and American Gigolo.

  Raised in a strict Protestant sect, Schrader wanted to graft the story of Saint Paul onto a visitors-from-outer-space story. In Schrader’s version, his hero Paul Van Owen (after Saint Paul) is an Air Force officer assigned the task of disproving the existence of UFOs. Eventually, this doubting Thomas not only sees a UFO but is abducted by one and whisked away from the earth. The climactic scene re-creates the famous Biblical passage where Paul is knocked off his horse by God and only then becomes a believer. In Schrader’s script, God is replaced by extraterrestrials.

  The Schrader script was so off-putting, Close Encounters’ producer Julia Phillips wrote in her acerbic memoir that she didn’t even show it to David Begelman, then head of production at Columbia. She wrote that Begelman “has agreed not to read Schrader’s first draft, called Kingdom Come, because I told him it would make him not want to make the movie. Certainly it was not a screenplay that Steven wanted to direct.”

  Julia Phillips had only herself—and her husband Michael—to blame for the gobbledygook that Schrader made of the Close Encounters script. The husband and wife team had had such a good relationship with Schrader on The Taxi Driver, which Schrader wrote and they produced for Martin Scorsese, that Phillips felt he would be perfect for Close Encounters. Schrader explained their reasoning, which turned out to be way off base: “They felt that my sensibility, being extremely Germanic and moralistic, was the proper counterpoint to Steve’s sensibility,” Schrader said.

  In fact, Spielberg hated the script, finding Schrader’s injection of Calvinist theology laughable in what the director basically envisioned as an A-budget B-movie. The usually diplomatic director even was quoted as describing Schrader’s effort as “one of the most embarrassing screenplays ever professionally turned into 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, it was more about the Church and the State and it was . . . horrendous. Absolutely horrendous.”

  The departure point for Schrader’s script was a short story called “Experiences,” written in 1970 by Spielberg when he was still a television director. Spielberg’s concept was to combine a UFO encounter and a massive Watergate-style cover-up of the sighting. Schrader must have found some comfort in the fact that he did convince Spielberg to junk the Watergate cover-up plot and focus more on the mystical encounter with the spaceship. “The only thing I deserve a credit for 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,” Schrader told author Tony Crowley in 1983.

  Phillips also credited Schrader with creating the Dreyfuss character. However, Spielberg had otherwise so thoroughly rejected Schrader’s script that the writer didn’t even protest to the Writers Guild’s arbitration panel when his name was left off the “screenplay by” or “story by” credits.

  Spielberg received solo writing credit on the film, and his version bore no resemblance to Schrader’s theological gobbledygook. Hard work must have made it so. Spielberg had been obsessed with writing his own version of an encounter with extraterrestrials. Over a two-year period, he churned out six different versions of the story until he finally was satisfied enough to shout “Action.”

  Besides dumping Schrader, Spielberg also made quick work of another collaborator, Verna Fields, who had provided Jaws’ Oscar-winning editing. In a rare snit of jealousy, Spielberg reportedly was angry that the maternal Fields had taken so much credit for the success of his film. Fields was supposed to be promoted on Close Encounters, with the title of associate producer. Julia Phillips later claimed the director told her “to get rid of her.” Phillips did.

  Spielberg wasn’t that bullish on Richard Dreyfuss, either. The director was angry that the actor was demanding 5 percent of the film’s gross. Spielberg was intent on limiting gross participation to himself and the film’s two producers, Phillips and her husband Michael.

  Spielberg was “pissed about Richard allowing [his agent] to do this to us. Livid in fact. He said he was pissed about the injustice, but it was really the money,” Phillips recalled.

  So Spielberg offered the role that Dreyfuss eventually made his own to Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, and Al Pacino—and they all turned him down. Nicholson complained that the special effects were the star of the film. The imperious actor even refused to meet with Spielberg to discuss the role. Hackman didn’t want to work on a film that would take him away from home for four months. Pacino passed, it was rumored, because his manager had a personal vendetta against the head of Columbia.

  The head of Columbia, David Begelman, suggested James Caan, who agreed to take on the job, but demanded a million dollars up front and 10 percent of the gross, more than twice the profit participation Dreyfuss was demanding. By now, Dreyfuss was beginning to sound like a bargain. Eventually, Phillips sweet-talked the actor into taking less money.

  “We don’t mind you making a lot of money, but you ain’t making more money than us,” Phillips told Dreyfuss, who eventually agreed to forgo all gross participation.

  An interesting bit of trivia: Meryl Streep, not yet the major talent, actually auditioned for the role of Dreyfuss’s wife. Although she wasn’t a big star yet, her presence was so intimidating that when she sat down to read for the part, both Spielberg and Dreyfuss unconsciously moved their chairs away from hers. Teri Garr ultimately landed the role.

  Richard Dreyfuss played an electrical worker who has a close encounter of the third kind with an extraterrestrial spaceship. (The first kind is seeing a UFO. The second kind is finding evidence left behind after a sighting. The movie’s third category is actually making physical contact.) The experience literally marks Dreyfuss’s Roy Neary, giving him a radiation burn on his face and turning him into a man obsessed with traveling to a spot in the Rockies where the mother ship will eventually land.

  Along the way, the extraterrestrials, who aren’t completely benevolent, snatch an adorable four-year-old boy, played by Cary Guffey, from his mother’s arms (Melinda Dillon). By film’s end, it’s made clear that they simply want to study the child, and the extraterrestrials do return the kid, but not until the poor woman is nearly driven out of her mind searching for him.

  Logistically, Close Encounters made Jaws look like a day at the beach, without the obnoxious fish. After filming finally was completed, Spielberg would say with a sigh, “Close Encounters was the most draining ordeal I ever went through. The feedback is like Chinese water torture, one drop on the forehead at a time, evenly spaced five seconds apart.�
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  The king of special effects would have been happy to abdicate. After one too many instances of Chinese water torture, he said, “Right now, I would take 100 child actors, ten canines, fifteen senile actors and four impossible movie stars over another day with special effects. I swear it. The next UFO I want to see is the one that sits down in my backyard and takes me on an all-expense-paid trip to the Virgin Islands.”

  Spielberg had a right to be exhausted. Although filming only took five months, another year was devoted to editing and wrestling all those optical effects onto celluloid. More than 350 special effects were employed, and Spielberg insisted on an obsessive secrecy to avoid any quick-buck television movie rip-offs of the film’s concept.

  In retrospect, Spielberg decided that the trauma was worth it. After his special effects’ nightmare had been forgotten or at least repressed, he would say, “I could make Jaws every year if I really wanted to. I’m interested, however, in testing other facets of myself. Jaws is a movie I could have played on a toy xylophone, but Close Encounters made me stretch farther. It required all eighty-eight keys. When you take a dipstick and you measure Close Encounters against Jaws from an artistic standpoint, Jaws is half a pint, and Close Encounters is two quarts.”

  In what might be a fitting epigraph to his entire career, he underlined the importance of constantly challenging himself, even if the challenge involved a lot of suffering and pain.

  “If one is to grow bigger in any career,” he said after Close Encounters wrapped, “you should always undertake something which is a bigger challenge than anything you’ve done before.”

  Close Encounters was shot on location in Wyoming; on the world’s largest soundstage in Mobile, Alabama; and in Bombay! The India sequence takes only a few seconds of the film, but it is one of the most powerful and doesn’t involve any special effects. A giant crowd is asked in subtitled Hindi where the UFO sighting originated, and a thousand hands, accompanied by a thunderous shout, all point up to the sky at once.

  The Alabama soundstage was located in a hangar that normally housed dirigibles. The set was six times bigger than anything ever built. Spielberg actually had to enlarge the original 450-foot hangar by 150 feet. It took four months to build the set which used ten miles of lumber, three miles of steel scaffolding, 29,000 feet of nylon for a canopy, two miles of steel cable, 885 cubic yards of concrete fill—more than enough to build a duplicate of the Washington Monument—7,000 cubic yards of sand and clay fill, 150 tons of air-conditioning equipment—enough to cool thirty large homes. The air conditioning was installed after the crew complained to Spielberg about the swampy southern heat. Spielberg, the man who had the biggest money-maker in history under his belt, simply had to pick up the phone to get the money men at Columbia to say, go ahead, air-condition the place.

  The cost of building what was simulated in the movie would have been $400 million. The electronic equipment alone, if it had been purchased new, would have cost $100 million. To run all the high-tech equipment required 42 million killowatts, enough power to run the electrical appliances in 500 homes. After the film wrapped, the crew spent an entire month just tearing down the set.

  Julia Phillips said, “You can see why the budget kept going up and up.”

  Despite all the hardware, Spielberg, the writer, insisted that character—not high tech—ultimately would sell his movie. “If the Dreyfuss character doesn’t work and the audience is not interested in the last thirty-eight minutes, I could have done four years of special effects, and it wouldn’t have meant diddly. Like the human story in Jaws. If those people hadn’t worked out, the shark could have bitten all their heads off and you wouldn’t have given a damn.”

  Spielberg didn’t ignore the technical aspects. In fact, he drove the crew crazy with his constant tinkering. Dreyfuss recalled, “He’d suddenly get an idea. He’d wander casually on to the set and say, ‘Hey, why don’t we just turn the shot around and do it again?’ Something which gave the crew mild heart seizure. They’d say, ‘No, please, that side isn’t even built yet. . . .’ Then they’d say, ‘Jesus, he’s right. It is a better idea.’ ” Spielberg continued to tinker with the film until only days before it opened.

  Casting the film allowed the director to indulge in what might be called groupie behavior. A huge admirer of French film director Francois Truffaut, Spielberg one night on impulse picked up the phone and called the director in Paris. He asked him to play a bit part as the scientist, M. Lacomb, who acts as the intermediary between the UFO sighters and the inhabitants of the UFO. It’s a nothing part that could have been played by any character actor. Spielberg offering the role to one of the greatest directors of all time suggests he simply wanted to work with his idol.

  They spent all of five minutes on the phone. Truffaut mulled over the offer for a week, then agreed—for a curious reason. “He sent a telegram saying he wanted to work with [producer] Julia Phillips whom he had admired in her black dress when she picked up the Oscar for The Sting.” It seemed that Truffaut was something of a groupie himself.

  Spielberg later would describe their collaboration in reverent tones. “Directing Francois Truffaut was not only a humbling experience, but one of the great highs of my life. His acting is effortless because he prefers to play closer to his own personality, which is why I cast him in the first place.”

  Actually, Spielberg wrote the role with Truffaut in mind, never thinking the director would agree to do a bit part.

  Truffaut, the consummate artist, was impressed with Spielberg’s ability as a field commander. The French director told Newsweek admiringly, “We had 250 people on the crew in Alabama. When I direct a film I have a maximum of 30 people on the set.”

  Truffaut was not so kind toward the film’s producer, Julia Phillips, calling her “incompetent” in a New York Times interview. In her autobiography, she returned the compliment by saying, “Of all the dead people I know, Francois Truffaut wins the prick award hands down.”

  Ever loyal, Spielberg defended Phillips, even though she later said many unkind things about him in her memoir. Even so, Spielberg wrote the Times a letter to the editor, insisting: “I’ve never had such constructive and consistent support from a producer as I have had from Julia Phillips.”

  Elsewhere, he was even more effusive about her contribution to the project. “Let me be one of the first directors to say that I need a good producer. I need a confessor, a cop, a bank robber, and I need a buddy. I can’t get it from myself because I don’t have the time. I go full out on the script, directing, cutting, dubbing and now the actual selling [giving interviews] of the film. Both Michael [Phillips] and Julia were like the front four of the Minnesota Vikings. There was none of that, ‘Hey, baby! Time’s money.’ ”

  Spielberg compared Phillips to a linebacker, but she was also a big cheerleader for her boss. At times, she had more confidence in him than he had in himself. The director remembers one scary meeting where Phillips made all sorts of outlandish claims that would nevertheless come true.

  “My worst moment occurred at an early production meeting when my producer, Julia Phillips, announced to the studio chiefs that this movie would earn more than $100 million. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. She actually predicted $100 million in revenues and was putting both our reputations on the line.” Phillips’ prediction turned out to be conservative: the film made more than a quarter billion dollars.

  A deeply caring person, Spielberg felt guilty about the way he treated another actor on the set, four-year-old Cary Guffey, the tow-headed tot who gets sucked out of Melinda Dillon’s kitchen by a UFO tractor beam.

  “I had to do an awful thing to get that last shot,” Spielberg said, referring to the scene where the child sadly waves good-bye to the mother ship. “I told Cary that the movie was finished, and he wasn’t going to see any of his new friends anymore.”

  Just call him “Director Dearest.”

  Although Close Encounters was the ultimate special effects extravaganza, it w
as also autobiographical to some extent. Spielberg’s Jaws star, Roy Scheider, explained, “You remember that kid in Close Encounters, looking upwards to the spaceship with its light on his face and wonder in his eyes? That kid is really Steven. That kid made Jaws. That enthusiasm, that need to do everything on the technical side. Nobody seemed to mind or think of it as interfering. Because that enthusiasm is catching; it’s the enthusiasm of a kid.”

  Scheider wasn’t the first—or the last—to compare the director to Peter Pan.

  The release of the film was a nail-biter. Columbia had spent a then whopping $18 million on the film, $10 million over its original budget. Rumors in the press and a disastrous sneak preview caused the studio’s stock to fluctuate wildly before the film’s release.

  Based on rumor rather than a screening of the film, New York magazine’s financial analyst William Flanagan predicted Close Encounters would be a “collossal flop.”

  When the film finally premiered in November 1977, a handful of critics agreed. Vogue called the film “preposterous, trivial, simple-minded, shallow and steeped in pretension.”

  The majority opinion, however, summarized by the New Republic’s Stanley Kauffmann, hailed it as “breathtaking, stunning, dazzling, moving and brilliant.” Kauffmann, who had hated Jaws, confessed that he was so “happily engulfed” by the film’s “dazzling epiphany” that he “just didn’t want to leave this picture. It was one of the most overpowering, sheerly cinematic experiences I can remember.” Other critics gave it what in Spielberg’s estimation was the ultimate accolade, calling the film, “Disney-esque.” In fact, Spielberg originally planned to end the film with “When You Wish Upon a Star,” Jimminy Crickett’s signature song, but even he ultimately decided that including the theme song from a fantasy cartoon like Pinocchio would undercut Close Encounters’ realism.

  He explained his decision by saying, “The song was the coat hanger on which I designed the movie three years ago, but it didn’t work. It seemed to make a comment that the story you had just seen had been a fantasy. It seemed to belie all the effort that went into trying to shed some verisimilitude on the UFO phenomenon. The song was an overstatement of innocence.”