They’re not moon burns

All the Close Encounters completist could possibly need. One wonders, though, what Jack Nicholson would have brought to the lead role…

Close Encounters of the Third Kind The Ultimate Visual History Michael Klastorin Titan Books 2017 Hb, 192pp, illus, £40.00, ISBN 9781785657283

When Spielberg was a teenager, he brought his fascination with UFOs to the screen in an 8mm film called Firelight. Using family and friends, he shot the story of missing people and pets linked to the investigation of mysterious lights in the sky near his home in Phoenix, Arizona, on a $500 budget. It was shown for one night only at a local theatre to a sell-out audience, making it Spielberg’s first taste of success as a filmmaker.

UFOs continued to fire his imagination in ‘A Meeting of Minds’, the outline of a Watergate-inspired plot about an officer discovering that the government is hiding the existence of extraterrestrials from the public. Under the new working title of ‘Watch the Skies’, the project was turned down by Twentieth Century Fox, who were already producing a science fiction film – Star Wars, directed by George Lucas. Fortunately, Columbia Pictures was intrigued enough to back it at the end of 1973.

Work on the project slowed in the following year when Spielberg took over directing

Jaws. A script by Paul Schrader strayed too far from Spielberg’s vision, and a second draft by John Hill lacked imagination. Spielberg had to write the screenplay in 1975 while editing Jaws. The project was retitled Close Encounters of the Third Kind, inspired by the classification scheme outlined in Dr J Allen Hynek’s 1972 book The UFO Experience. In his foreword, Spielberg says that the Watergate theme had become overused. He was impressed by NBC anchorman John Chancellor’s view that if UFOs were real, Nixon would have told the press the aliens are here to distract from his crimes.

With Jaws becoming the top grossing film of all time, Columbia green-lighted CE3K despite worries about the budget, which quickly escalated from its $3 million estimate. (The total bill was $20 million).

Part One of this book provides the origins of the film and how the cast, crew and production staff was put together. Spielberg had hoped Steve McQueen would play Roy Neary, but because the part required him to cry on screen, he refused it. Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson were also considered before Jaws star Richard Dreyfuss was picked as the normal Joe dazzled by UFOs invading his life. He succeeded in getting François Truffaut to play Claude Lacombe, who was based on ufologist Jacques Vallée.

Spielberg was still working on the script during preproduction, and for three weeks screenwriter Jerry Belson helped add depth and humour to some of the film’s characters. Only days before shooting, Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood helped tweak the script and added the scene where Jillian Guiler’s son is abducted by the aliens.

Part Two details the location shooting in a dirigible hangar at Brookley Air Force Base, which was used for the scenes at the landing site and the Devil’s Tower mountain.

Part Three covers how Douglas Trumbull used his special effects genius to add the magical UFOs and spaceships to the live footage combined with model work by Gregory Jein, which included a four-foothigh model of the Mothership. A hundred detailed matte paintings by Matthew Yuricich were also superimposed on the footage to fill in details of land and skyscapes.

One of the biggest problems for Spielberg, which Stanley Kubrick also experienced in making 2001: A Space Odyssey, was creating convincing extraterrestrials. Production designer Joe Alves made grey-type aliens, as recorded by Hynek, with large bulbous heads and almond-shaped eyes. Make-up artist Frank Griffen made them into masks, and Tom and Ellis Burman produced multiple versions for close-ups and wide-angle shots. Girls from a ballet school in the Mobile area were filmed walking and flying out of the mothership wearing them. In postproduction, puppet master Bob Baker created the longlimbed alien who emerges from the craft, and special effects expert Carlo Rambaldi created a mechanical alien for scenes where it exchanges hand gestures with Lacombe.

Spielberg felt the film was not as he had envisioned it, and in 1980 Columbia agreed to fund a ‘Special Edition’, with the proviso that it included scenes inside the mothership. He cut a few scenes from the original film to make it more focused. This did well at the box office as a re-release, but many thought tinkering with his masterpiece was unnecessary. For the 1997 ‘Collector’s Edition’ DVD, Spielberg cut all the interior scenes, showing that he agreed that they added nothing to the original film.

The book includes a fantastic selection of photographs, illustrations, concept art and sketches made during the production of the movie, and even includes inserts of notes and sketches. The only shame is that it does not include a bibliography or index. Nigel Watson