LASTING ENCOUNTER
40 years later, insiders tell what a real estate deal, gorilla mask and coffee ad did for ‘Close Encounters’
‘CLOSE Encounters of the Third Kind” cleaned up at the box office back in 1977. It also cleaned up in the real estate market.
The film, which involves Midwestern dad Roy Neary (played by Richard Dreyfuss), who sees a UFO and becomes obsessed, was supposed to be filmed in a residential part of Los Angeles. That is, until the filmmakers realized LA looked nothing like Middle America.
So production designer Joe Alves went scouting in Mobile, Ala., until he found a house in a new development that looked more like a typical American suburb to serve as the Neary residence.
The house needed renovation to fit with director Steven Spielberg’s vision, so Alves suggested the studio buy it. They declined.
“So [associate producer] Clark Paylow and I said, ‘Why don’t we buy it and rent it to the studio?’” Alves tells The Post.
Suddenly, the studio had a change of heart and purchased the house, located at 1613 Carlisle Drive East. The $35,000 price turned out to be a good investment.
“They later sold it for a lot of money,” Alves says of the quick $15,000 profit.
Audiences can catch another glimpse of that house on Friday when a remastered version of the film returns to theaters for its 40th anniversary.
Despite its enduring popularity, “Close Encounters” was hardly a sure bet. Spielberg was a relatively unknown filmmaker back then, and his original proposal called for a budget of $4.5 million — a massive sum for the day, which required studio Columbia to grant the project a special waiver.
The film’s cost would later balloon to nearly $20 million, but in the interim, Spielberg’s blockbuster “Jaws” was released, earning the young director some latitude.
Spielberg had been fascinated with outer space since he was a little boy, and his father drove him out to the desert near their home in Phoenix to watch a meteor shower.
As a teen in the early 1960s, Spielberg made a low-budget movie about aliens called “Firelight.” That planted the seeds for “Close Encounters.”
Spielberg began working on the treatment for what was then called “Watch the Skies” in the early ’70s.
Paul Schrader of “Taxi Driver” took a crack at a script that involved a government employee, whose job was to debunk UFO sightings, seeing a spacecraft himself. Spielberg,
unhappy with the various script versions, ultimately decided to write it himself with input from others.
Dreyfuss lobbied for the part of Roy Neary, but Spielberg feared that he was too young at 28. He later relented when he realized that he needed an actor who had a childlike quality. Teri Garr was cast as Neary’s skeptical wife after Spielberg spotted her in a coffee commercial.
For the crucial role of Barry Guiler, the young boy who has a strange connection to the aliens, the casting director tapped Cary Guffey after spotting him in her niece’s classroom.
Guffey, whoturned 4onset, didn’t quite understand acting, so Spielberg was left to manipulate the boy in creative ways in order to get authentic reactions. In his first scene, when he’s awakened by aliens, for example, Guffeywasfilmed waking upfrom a real nap.
“The scene where I come around the corner and all the stuff is out of the fridge, Spielberg had one of the guys from the set wearing a gorilla outfit,” says Guffey, now working as an Alabama-based financial planner. “I had this quizzical look. He took off his gorilla mask, and I see it’s my friend from the set, so then I smiled.” Midwaythrough the movie, Guffey’s character is kidnapped by the aliens. The twist was added by writers Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, whohelped polish the script. Theabduction did not sit well with the Columbia brass. “The head of the studio was absolutely apoplectic,” Robbins tells The Post. “He was like, ‘What is this?’”
The studio, worried that abduction was too alarming, insisted that Spielberg shoot the scene with a happier (and ultimately unused) ending in which the boy is saved by his mother (Melinda Dillon).
The film’s most iconic location almost got cut, as well. Originally, Spielberg planned to have the alien mothership land in a populated area between fast-food restaurants. That was later changed to an unnamed mountain.
Alves was tasked with find- ing a location, and he took a map and headed to South Dakota to survey sites, including the back of Mount Rushmore. He drove some 3,500 miles, taking photos of rock formations. The winner proved to be Devils Tower, a flattop monolith in Wyoming that has become identified with the movie.
“Devils Tower was a knockout,” Alves says. “You saw this little peak, but as you got closer, it got bigger and bigger.”
Scenes were filmed at the Tower’s base, and the production angered someresidents and ranchers. But onarecent trip, Alves was surprised to findthe local gift shop selling all manner of “Close Encounters” memorabilia.
The military camp at the Tower’s foot, where the aliens land, was actually filmed hundreds of miles away in Alabama. The set was originally going to be built on a Hollywood soundstage, but none existed big enough for what the filmmakers wanted.
The crew flew around the country looking at alternative spaces, before finally settling on an abandoned zeppelin hangar in Mobile, Ala.
“It was the biggest set ever built,” Alves says of the approximately 450-by-300-foot giant display that reportedly cost $700,000.
John Williams’ score was nominated for an Oscar, but it’s the five-note phrase used to signal the aliens that audiences remember most. Williams wanted seven notes because he felt it would be easier to construct a melody, but Spielberg insisted on five. The two tested some 300 combos before settling on the famous D-E-C-C-G.
“Close Encounters” premiered at New York’s Ziegfeld Theater on Nov. 15, 1977, and was a smash, becoming Columbia’s highest-grossing film at the time.
The film zagged from other sci-fi movies, which present- ed aliens as hostile invaders, and instead offered an optimistic view. At the movie’s conclusion, an awestruck Neary walks into the mothership and is whisked away.
“Thethemeof that movie was the idea of, where could a mid-20th-century post-World-War-II soul like Rick Dreyfuss find some transcendence ?” Robbins says. “Wherewas the opportunity for the soul to leap upandout and go to the beyond if you’re not going to go to church anymore?”