Close Encounters of the Third Kind
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- This article is about the film; for the definition of the UFO related phenomenon, see Close encounter.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a 1977 science fiction film directed by Steven Spielberg. Paul Schrader, John Hill, David Giler, Jerry Belson, Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins collaborated with Spielberg on the screenplay. The film stars Richard Dreyfuss, François Truffaut, Bob Balaban, Melinda Dillon, Teri Garr and Cary Guffey. The film focuses on a man's obsession and encounter with unidentified flying objects.
Close Encounters is a landmark science fiction film, not only for its special effects, but also for its portrayal of UFO occupants as benign, even kind, which was a sharp departure from the evil monster style of most earlier films. It popularized a number of UFO motifs, many of which had earlier been reported in conjunction with UFO sightings, such as alien abduction, small and thin aliens (Greys), and UFOs covered in lights rather than the disc shapes popular in the 1950s and 1960s.
In 2007, Close Encounters of the Third Kind was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
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[edit] Plot
The enigmatic title refers to the three kinds of close encounters with UFOs, as categorized by the noted astronomer and UFO investigator Dr J. Allen Hynek, who defined Close Encounters of the First Kind as Sighting, the Second Kind as Evidence, and the Third Kind as Contact. In line with Hynek's rejection of the extraterrestrial hypothesis during his life, (and somewhat in line with the interdimensional ideas of Hynek's colleague, the astrophysicist, computer expert and UFO investigator Dr. Jacques Vallee), the UFOs and their occupants, as depicted in the film, are not necessarily regarded as aliens and are not described as such in the film.
The film's plot has three basic threads:
- A group of scientific researchers including Lacombe (Truffaut) and Laughlin (Balaban) investigate UFO reports worldwide, and discover a lost squadron of World War II aircraft (see Flight 19) in the Mexican desert of Sonora.
- During a motorized pursuit of several UFOs, Indiana electrical lineman Roy Neary (Dreyfuss) experiences a close encounter of the second kind (a sighting that leaves physical evidence) and thereafter becomes obsessed with UFOs, to the great dismay of his wife, Veronica "Ronnie" Neary (Garr). Roy begins making models of a distinctive, flat-topped mountain or hill - a place he has never actually seen, and with which he is unfamiliar. At one point, he and Ronnie attend a meeting featuring both patronizing and skeptical government officials, and an archetypal crackpot ("I saw Bigfoot once!").
- A widow named Jillian Guiler (Dillon) witnesses a UFO landing, in which her son Barry (Guffey) is abducted by unseen beings who appear to invade her home. Soon after, Guiler also becomes obsessed with the mental picture of a unique-looking mountain.
After Roy's increasingly bizarre conduct causes Ronnie and their children to abandon him (even though their two sons Brad and Toby believe in UFOs), he sees the feature he has been modeling on a television news show: Devils Tower in Wyoming. Guiler also sees the same news broadcast, and both Roy and Jillian - as well as others with similar experiences - obsessively head toward the site. Elsewhere in the world, the pace of UFO activity is increasing; Lacombe (a character based on Jacques Vallee) and Laughlin investigate a host of weird occurrences along with other United Nations experts.
After Laughlin recognizes a signal from space as a simple set of geographical coordinates pointing to Devils Tower, all parties begin to converge on Wyoming. The United States Army evacuates the area after spreading false reports that a train wreck has spilled highly dangerous nerve gas, all the while preparing a landing zone for the first human contact with the UFOs and their occupants. While the other humans drawn to the site are unable to reach Devils Tower, Roy and Jillian persist and make it to the site as dozens of UFOs appear. The enormous mothership lands, and returns people who had been abducted over the years, including Barry. With an understanding of peace between the two civilizations, the UFOs take Roy on board their ship as ambassadors from Earth, and one of the UFO occupants comes out to greet the humans. Lacombe communicates with him by using the hand signs that are used to create the five tones in the human contact. The UFO occupant does the same and smiles before he boards back on the ship. All the humans smile once the ship soars away to the stars, knowing that they will meet the UFO occupants again.
[edit] Cast
- Richard Dreyfuss as Roy Neary. Steve McQueen, Gene Hackman, Jack Nicholson and James Caan were all considered for the main role (McQueen was a recluse at the time, Hackman passed for unknown reasons, Nicholson was deemed too old and Caan's price tag was too high).
- François Truffaut as Claude Lacombe. Spielberg persuaded one of his idols, the iconic French director Francois Truffaut, to play the character based on Jacques Vallée. When Truffaut arrived on set, his presence intimidated everyone on the crew, including Spielberg, who could not bring himself to direct him. In one scene, where obsessed citizens are storming Devil's Tower and the military responds with EZ-4 sleeping gas, Truffaut's line was supposed to be: "They belong here, more than we." Truffaut tried his best with his poor English, and the intimidated Spielberg accepted the shot. At the next day's shoot many of the crew wore T-shirts emblazoned with: "Zay bee-long ere Mozambique" (a classic example of a mondegreen). Truffaut was embarrassed, but laughed. Steven thought the moment where Francois said, “They belong here more than we” was really lovely, but he says he wants the line in English, so he will subtitle it. Someone tells him the line was in English. The big joke today is when Francois speaks English, it sounds like French. Buddy Joe Hooker, the stunt coordinator, rushes up to Francois and says the line in pigeon English: “Zay bee-long ere Mozambique.” Truffaut loves it, and yells back, “Tudore yellou tchevrolay coupay” which I am finally able to translate as “two-door yellow Chevrolet coupe”. Later, Buddy Joe comes by with T-shirts with “Zay bee-long ere Mozambique” printed on the back.
Astronomer J. Allen Hynek, a UFO researcher who coined the term "close encounter," was a consultant for the film, and makes a cameo appearance as a scientist smoking a pipe near the end of the picture. UFO researcher Dr. Jacques Vallée served as a model for the character of the French scientist Lacombe played by François Truffaut. Vallée met Hynek while studying for his Ph.D. at Northwestern University.
[edit] Production
[edit] Writing
Paul Schrader wrote the first-draft script for Close Encounters, entitled Kingdom Come. Schrader's script was essentially a modern-day retelling of the story of Saint Paul. Its protagonist, Paul Van Owen, is an Air Force officer whose job is to disprove the existence of UFOs. In a climactic scene which recalls to mind St. Paul seeing a vision of Jesus and being converted to Christianity, Van Owen sees a UFO, is abducted, and carried away from the earth. Spielberg hated Schrader's script (referring to it as "embarrassing" and "terribly guilt-ridden") and the final screenplay - credited to Spielberg alone - bore very little resemblance to it. However, Schrader did have some influence on the final version of the movie: he convinced Spielberg to focus less on the government's Watergate-style cover-up of the UFO, and more on the mystical encounter with the spaceship.
[edit] Filming
The shooting/working title for the film was Watch the Skies, which is the last line of the classic 1950s science fiction film, The Thing from Another World. When the original director of Jaws 2 was fired, Spielberg considered taking over. However, his contractual obligations to Close Encounters of the Third Kind meant that production on the sequel would have been delayed by an expensive year. Principal photography began in spring 1976 and continued until late-summer, with additional filming taking place in India in February 1977.
Roy Neary lives in Muncie, Indiana and there were plans to actually film on location, but those plans were changed and no filming took place in Muncie. Still, there were multiple references mostly noticeable to Muncie, Indiana natives, such as the reference to an actual road in the Muncie, Indiana area (Cornbread Road) as well as a scene at the breakfast table where Neary wears a local college shirt (Ball State University) while other props on the breakfast table such as a newspaper from the now defunct Muncie Evening Press, as well as a milk carton from a now defunct Muncie based drive up convenience store (Miller's Milkhouse). Inaccuracies also noted by locals of Muncie, Indiana are the fact that the scene supposedly taking place on Cornbread road takes place at a rail road crossing, although Cornbread road does not intersect with any railroads. Another scene portrays Muncie Police cars chasing UFOs through the mountains and then going through tolls booths into Ohio, Muncie, Indiana is not on the Ohio state line nor are there any mountains (or even large hills), or toll boths anywhere near Muncie, Indiana.
Spielberg wanted the Warner Brothers classic "Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century" to play before the film in theaters, but Columbia balked at showing a rival studio's cartoon with one of their movies. However the Chuck Jones directed Merrie Melodie can be seen on the living room television as Roy Neary begins throwing dirt into the house to build his model of Devils Tower.
Bob Balaban wrote a book about his experience shooting the film entitled Spielberg, Truffaut & Me: Close Encounters of the Third Kind - An Actor's Diary. The book was first published in 1978, and a 25th anniversary edition featuring more photos and an extra chapter was published in 2002.
[edit] Effects
The film has visual effects by Douglas Trumbull. Spielberg and Trumbull decided they did not want the usual hardware look of the spacecrafts that were so prevalent in Star Wars where instead the emphasis would be on bright lights. Trumbull photographed the UFO miniatures in dark smoke-filled rooms to give them a halo look. A computerized camera mount was designed to record camera movements used on the live sets and to be duplicated when filming the miniatures in order to seamlessly blend the UFOs into the live footage. White and gray paint was injected into a water tank for the cloud effects.
Spielberg initially wanted the mothership to be very dark, but seeing a large oil refinery at night while filming in India gave him the idea to have it lots of spindly towers covered in lights. A model of the mothership used during filming is on display at the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Northern Virginia; the model includes a number of hidden objects integrated in and around the ship's antennas, domes and other structures. Examples include a 1930s automobile, a cemetery, a VW Bus and a small model of R2-D2. The model of R2-D2 can be seen upside-down on the mothership at 1:54 into the Collector's Edition DVD, as it rises behind Melinda Dillon. Most of the Devils Tower landing site scenes were filmed in a Mobile, Alabama aircraft hangar. The small aliens in the final scenes were played by local girls ranging from 8-12 years old. That decision was specifically requested by Spielberg himself due to the fact that girls move more gracefully than boys.
In 2003, the primary special effects model of the "Mother Ship" was placed on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center annex of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM), located near Washington Dulles International Airport in Chantilly, Virginia.
[edit] Music
The film's score was composed by John Williams. The synthesizer used to communicate with the aliens at the end of the film is an ARP 2500 modular system. Phil Dodds, a tech from ARP Instruments Inc., is the man playing the keyboard. The motif woven through the film (the five tones that the space ship plays back and forth with the humans) is re - mi - do - do (octave lower) - sol. (Truffaut also communicates with the last alien using Kodaly hand signs for the solfege used for the 5 tones - see: [1]) These tones all lie on a major pentatonic scale. (It can also be thought of as partials 9, 10, 8, 4 and 6 of the overtone series over a fundamental pitch) The motif was developed to resemble Hello (H-E-L-L-O) in musical form. Steven Spielberg remarked that "it shouldn't even be a melody: it should be more like somebody pushes a doorbell. Like Avon calling—you know. 'Ding Dong.' It's not a melody. It's not even a phrase. It's just musical intervals. With no rhythm assigned to them or anything. Just five notes. Quoted by John Williams, in Laurent Bouzereau, "An Interview with John Williams", printed in the booklet to The Collector's Edition Soundtrack: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Arista Records 1998. When the last two notes are played after the first three, it roughly follows the repetitive Planet Krypton melody from John Williams' Superman. "Yearbook 1980: Biographies," Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1980.
This sequence of five tones was used as a doorbell sound effect in the 1979 James Bond film "Moonraker" (see Spielberg's comments above).
[edit] Release
[edit] Marketing
[edit] Variant versions
Because Spielberg was disappointed with certain aspects of the theatrical cut of the film, Close Encounters was revised and re-edited for a 132-minute "Special Edition" reissue in 1980. The Special Edition features several new character development scenes, the discovery of a lost ship, the SS Cotopaxi, in the Gobi Desert, and a view of the inside of the mother ship. This "Mothership Finale" was added by Spielberg as part of a deal he made with Columbia that if he was going to show audiences the inside of the mothership, he would be allowed to re-edit the film to his intentions at that time. In recent interviews, Spielberg has stated his regret to film the "Mothership Finale" in the first place, claiming the inside of the mothership should remain ambigious in the imagination of viewers.
In the years that followed, other variant versions were prepared for network television, syndicated television, and LaserDisc. Some of these alternate cuts were not prepared and edited by Spielberg, although he did have a hand in the re-editing of a third major theatrical version, a 137-minute "Collector's Edition", in 1998. It is essentially the original theatrical cut with differently selected and edited material from the earlier theatrical cuts, but minus the "Mothership Finale" from the 1980 version.
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment released a 30th Anniversary "ultimate edition" of the film on DVD and Blu-ray Disc on November 13, 2007. This edition features all three major cuts of the film—the original 1977 theatrical cut, the 1980 "Special Edition" cut, and the 1998 "Collector's Edition" director's cut. In addition, the Blu-ray edition includes a storyboard-to-scene comparison to the original 1977 Watch the Skies short feature. This set marks the first time that a Spielberg film has been released in high-definition video.
[edit] Reception
[edit] Box office performance
Close Encounters grossed $116,395,460 in 1977 and $15,693,175 in the 1980 re-release, bringing the domestic total to $132,088,635 and $303,788,635 worldwide making it one of the top grossing movies ever made at the time. Steven Spielberg's earlier film "Jaws" and George Lucas's "Star Wars" that came out the same year as Close Encounters grossed more, but Close Encounters was less remembered for it's special effects like Star Wars but the story of how people were affected by the aliens coming to earth and how Spielberg handled it.
[edit] Critical reception
Close Encounters got mostly positive reviews in 1977 and showed Steven Spielberg would continue his glory at the box office after his hit "Jaws". Close Encounters has a 95% rating at rottentomatos.com and keeps a score of 7.8 on imdb.com. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times said "it's one of the great movie going experiences" and today this film is known as a classic by most critics and fans, the movie is considered to be one of Spielberg's best films and also one of the best films to deal with aliens coming to earth.
[edit] Awards
The film received eight Academy Award nominations. In the end, Director of Photography Vilmos Zsigmond won the Oscar for Best Cinematography and sound effects editor Frank E. Warner was granted a Special Achievement Award. http://imdb.com/title/tt0075860/awards In 1998, the American Film Institute placed the film 64th on its' list of the 100 greatest American films. In 2007, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
[edit] References and parodies
- Saturday Night Live spoofed the film when Dreyfuss was the guest host as "Cone Encounters of the Third Kind" featuring the recurring Conehead characters. In this case, instead of removing the cone top from the clay sculpture like he did in the film, Dreyfuss attaches it to make it right.
- The film was spoofed in a short titled Closet Cases of the Nerd Kind on the original 1980's videotape Hardware Wars and other Film Farces. In this short, the mother ship was a huge pie accompanied by marching music.
- On the episode "Who Wants It More?" of That '70s Show, Kelso (Ashton Kutcher) tells of seeing a UFO. Hyde (Danny Masterson) later mocks Kelso by sculpting Devils Tower out of mashed potatoes and saying "This means something".
- The movie is also spoofed in two episodes of The Simpsons. In the episode "The Springfield Files", while the citizens of Springfield are gathered in the field awaiting the 'alien's' appearance, the school music instructor, Mr. Largo and 5 of his students play the famous 5 note tune on marching band instruments. Finally, just before this, Kent Brockman references the title with "Close Encounters of the Blurred Kind", show Homer's photo and videocam evidence. In another episode called "Homie the Clown", Homer forms a large mashed potato circus tent after becoming obsessed with a billboard advertising a local clown college.
- In the film UHF, George Newman ("Weird Al" Yankovic) sculpts his mashed potatoes into Devils Tower and says, "This means something, this is important."
- The mashed potato sculpture is once more spoofed in the film Muppets From Space, where a fan of Gonzo presents Kermit the frog with a mashed potato sculpture of Gonzo's head.
- Close Encounters was parodied in an eighth-season episode of the British comedy The Goodies entitled "U-Friend or UFO?". Steven Spielberg was a fan of The Goodies and in 1979 he considered making a film with the British trio.
- In the movie Bruce Almighty, there is a deleted scene, which may be viewed on the DVD, of Jim Carrey's character, Bruce, parodies being crazy and sculpting what looks like Devils Tower out of cookie dough, saying "This means something, this is important!"
- In the film Canadian Bacon, Rhea Perlman's character, swept up by a faux Cold War with Canada, builds a replica of the CN Tower in Toronto out of mashed potatoes.
- The five-note musical motif of the film has been referenced many times. It was used as a code entered on a pushbutton keypad in Moonraker of the James Bond series, and the first five notes on Mr. Herriman's keypad security system in the Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends episode: The Big Cheese, and in the Power Glove sequence of The Wizard. In one episode of the short-lived animated series The Oblongs, the tones are used for the doorbell of an alien masquerading as a teenage girl. Rock guitarist Steve Vai referenced it in his song "Little Green Men" from his 1984 solo album, "Flex-Able." John Petrucci plays it before beginning the song Trial of Tears on the Dream Theater album Once in a LIVEtime. Jerry Garcia also quotes it in a solo from the Grateful Dead's January 22, 1978 concert at the University of Oregon. The tone is also played at the beginning of Alien Hominid. Enigma also borrowed the motif for the song "Back to the Rivers of Belief". Daft Punk opened their 2006 U.S. performance, their first in 8 years, at Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival with the theme music from the movie, performing in an LED pyramid. Originally intended to serve as a sound check, the duo opened every show of their Alive 2006 and 2007 tours with the five-note tune. Duran Duran plays it before beginning the song The Chauffer on the Arena Album.
- Close Encounters was parodied in an episode of That's So Raven, called Close Encounters Of The Nerd Kind.
- It was mentioned by Captain Steve Hiller in the movie Independence Day, when he knocks out an alien. He says, "Now that's what I call a close encounter".
- The title is brought up briefly in the X-Files episode "Squeeze".
- Matt Bellamy of Muse played the musical motif from the film before Knights of Cydonia at their two massive gigs at Wembley Stadium on June 16, 2007 & June 17, 2007. This was probably due to the stage being heavily sci-fi based.
- There is an episode of the anime series Pani Poni Dash! where Miyata tries to communicate with aliens (with a piano, not a Simon as in the film), but gets shot by their laser for her efforts.
- In the first episode of the anime series Vandread, when the character Dita first meets Hibiki for the first time, she does the hand signs as a greeting, believing he is an alien.
- ImprovBoston's fourth annual "GoreFest" Halloween production, "Gross Encounters of the Nerd Kind," was named for the film although there are few similarities otherwise.
- The five note sequence was used (played on violin) in a sketch by Trev and Simon, on Live and Kicking, the main thread of the parafy being related to the release of Stargate.
- One of the chapters in Rodman Philbrick's novel, Freak the Mighty, is called Close Encounters of the Turd Kind.
- Belgian stand-up comedian Alex Agnew sings the five note sequence in his show "KA-BOOM"
- In the Blood Sisters, May seems to be a fan of the movie, having a poster of the movie in her room.
