Steven Spielberg (54 page)

Befitting a film with so many overt and covert autobiographical overtones for its director, not only do the extraterrestrials communicate by putting on a spectacular light and music show, with François Truffaut “directing” the human response, but Roy and Jillian cope with, and compound, their alienation from society by turning to artistic expression. When Truffaut’s Lacombe meets Neary, he asks, “Mr. Neary, are you an artist or a painter?” In an extended sequence derived from Schrader’s original draft, Roy (following Barry’s lead) obsessively sculpts a model of the mountain, an image implanted in his consciousness by the extraterrestrials (the sculpture is literally a “Play Mountain,” the meaning of Spielberg’s family name in German). Jillian compulsively churns out sketches and paintings of the same mysterious shape, which she and Roy later discover (via television) to be the Devil’s Tower landing site.

What Roy considers “art,” conventional society considers “madness.” Spielberg knows this dilemma well, having been stigmatized as “kind of nuts” and “the strange kid on the block” for his early filmmaking activities in suburban Arizona. Roy’s emotional breakdown at the family dinner table while sculpting the mountain out of mashed potatoes (“Well, I guess you’ve noticed there’s something a little strange with Dad”) is the most moving moment in Dreyfuss’s performance. When the mud-streaked Roy piles together his massive artwork, alarming his neighbors and almost wrecking his own home in the process, he exhibits the frenzied, furious passion of a demented sculptor. These dark-humored scenes are so disturbing that many audience members and reviewers had a visceral reaction against watching the protagonist going “mad,” a virtual taboo for a father/hero figure in mainstream American filmmaking. Spielberg caved in to that negative response by drastically abridging the scenes for his
Special
Edition.
That unfortunate decision diminished the psychological impact of Roy’s experience, tacitly accepting the misunderstanding that his obsession with UFOs is merely a cop-out from social responsibility, rather than a matter of overwhelming spiritual urgency.

“I used the Van Gogh analogy to Richard many times,” Spielberg said in a 1978 interview. “When I justified the psychotic behavior in building the mountain in the den, I used the Van Gogh madness parallels several times. A person who is an artist—and Neary is an artist—probably all the people who wound up there are artists of some sort, even if they had no external ability, they certainly had something inside of them that made them worthy.”

While the artistic impulse is falsely equated with madness, its true source,
for Spielberg, is the “naive wonderment” of childhood, a quality represented at various levels of consciousness by Roy, Lacombe, and little Barry Guiler. Lacking the cultural conditioning that leads adults to xenophobic reactions, Barry accepts the aliens (whom, at first, only he can see) as “friends” beckoning him, like Peter Pan, to a great adventure. Spielberg underscores their kinship by casting an angelic-looking toddler whose soft, round, wide-eyed features and beatific smile give him a family resemblance to the Casper the Ghost–like aliens. “I really wanted to take a child’s point of view,” Spielberg said. “The uneducated innocence that allows a person to take this kind of quantum jump and … go abroad, if you will. A conscientious, responsible adult human being probably wouldn’t.”

In the marvelous scene of Barry discovering the aliens disrupting his mother’s kitchen, Spielberg evoked an extraordinarily spontaneous and affecting series of expressions from the untrained child actor. As the pajama-clad Barry stands in the shadowy doorway, his expression changes in a single close-up from initial trepidation to quizzical amusement and, finally, to an almost rapturous joy.

Spielberg’s instinctive affinity with children manifested itself in the magical means he used to direct Cary Guffey in that scene: “I had to the left of the camera a cardboard partition, and to the right of the camera a second cardboard partition. To the left of the camera, I put Bob Westmoreland, our makeup man, in a gorilla suit—the full mask and hands and hairy body. To the right of the camera, I dressed myself up as an Easter Bunny, with the ears and the nose and the whiskers painted on my face. Cary Guffey didn’t know what to expect. He didn’t know what he was gonna react to. His job was to come into the kitchen, stop at the door, and just have a good time…. And just as he came into the kitchen, I had the cardboard partition dropped and Bob Westmoreland was there as the gorilla. Cary froze, like a deer caught in car headlights…. I dropped my partition, and he looked over at me, and there was the Easter Bunny smiling at him. He was torn. He began to smile at me—he was still afraid of that thing. Then I had Bob—I said, ‘Take off your head.’ Bob took off his mask, and when Cary saw it was the man that put his makeup on in the morning, Cary began to laugh. Even though it was a trick, the reaction was pure and honest.”
||

Spielberg’s employment of the “child’s point of view” in presenting Trumbull’s luminous, multicolored space vehicles (Barry calls them “Toys!”) gives the audience the same awestruck feeling reported by those who claim to have experienced close encounters. One does not have to be a believer in UFOs to share Spielberg’s sense of wonder about the possibility of an encounter
with higher forms of life. In proposing “a seductive alternative for a lot of people who no longer have faith in anything,” Spielberg countered the growing cynicism of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era with a myth of transcendence, expressed in the secular idiom of the modern world. Skeptical of organized religion, Spielberg expresses his hope for social harmony in a high-tech, quasi-spiritual vision of an alternate reality.

“The present world situation is calculated as never before to arouse expectations of a redeeming, supernatural event,” Jung wrote in his 1959 book on flying saucers. “… We have indeed strayed far from the metaphysical certainties of the Middle Ages, but not so far that our historical and psychological background is empty of all metaphysical hope…. It is characteristic of our time that, in contrast to its previous expressions, the archetype should now take the form of an object, a technological construction, in order to avoid the odiousness of a mythological personification. Anything that looks technological goes down without difficulty with modern man. The possibility of space travel makes the unpopular idea of a metaphysical intervention much more acceptable.”

Spielberg’s visual style in
Close
Encounters
is characterized by shots of people gazing in wonderment at something bigger than life, in images flooded with what he calls “‘God light,’ shafts coming out of the sky, or out of a spaceship, or coming through a doorway.” Such images would become Spielberg’s cinematic signature, his way of conveying the sentiment expressed by his grandfather Fievel: “How wondrous are Thy works.”

E
ARLY
in 1977, when
Close
Encounters
was still months away from completion, George Lucas showed a rough cut of
Star
Wars
(without John Williams’s rousing musical score) at his San Anselmo home, in northern California. The audience included executives of Twentieth Century—Fox; Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, who had worked on the script; and several of Lucas’s other filmmaker friends, among them Brian De Palma, John Milius, Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins, and Spielberg.

“It was the first time the executives from Fox had seen it,” Katz recalls. “It had no special effects; the battles were scenes from old World War II movies. Afterward, there was stunned silence. George’s then-wife [Mareia] broke into tears. I told her, ‘Don’t cry when there are people from the studio there.’ She said, ‘It’s the
At
Long
Last
Love
of sci-fi.’ Brian De Palma said, ‘What
is
this shit?’”

But while Lucas, Spielberg, and the writers were driving to a restaurant after the screening, Spielberg piped up,
“I
liked it. I think this movie’s going to make a hundred million dollars.”

Lucas was pessimistic, predicting that his offbeat sci-fi epic would do about as well as an average Disney film. When
Star
Wars
opened that May, Lucas escaped to the Hawaiian island of Maui to recuperate from the editing process and to avoid dealing with the anxiety of the opening. He invited
Spielberg to join him at the Mauna Kea Hotel. The two filmmakers were on the beach building a sand castle for good luck when Lucas excused himself to take a call from Los Angeles. Learning that
Star
Wars
was selling out at every theater it was playing in the United States, Lucas returned in what Spielberg described as “a state of euphoria.”

As they continued sculpting their sand castle, Lucas asked Spielberg what he wanted to do after
Close
Encounters.
“I said I wanted to do a James Bond film,” Spielberg recalled. “United Artists approached me after
Sugarland
Express
and asked me to do a film for them. I said, ‘Sure, give me the next James Bond film.’ But they said they couldn’t do that. Then George said he had a film that was even better than a James Bond. It was called
Raiders
of
the
Lost
Ark,
and it was about this archeologist-adventurer who goes searching for the Ark of the Covenant. When he mentioned that it would be like the old serials and that the guy would wear a soft fedora and carry a bullwhip, I was completely hooked. George said, ‘Are you interested?’ and I said, ‘I want to direct it,’ and he said, ‘It’s yours.’”

Star
Wars
exceeded even Spielberg’s optimistic box-office prediction, passing the hundred-million mark in only three months and eventually grossing more than half a billion dollars. Spielberg’s gracious advertisement in the trade press congratulating Lucas after
Star
Wars
broke the box-office record of
Jaws
did not tell the whole story of his reaction.
“Star
Wars
was our rival,” says
Close
Encounters
producer Michael Phillips. “Steven felt really upset about the fact that they were coming out ahead of us.” Not only was Spielberg disappointed to see his record surpassed, he worried that
Star
Wars
would steal much of
Close
Encounters’
box-office potential.

Those fears were exacerbated after Columbia held sneak previews of
Close
Encounters
at Dallas’s Medallion Theater on October 19 and 20. Spielberg felt he needed seven more weeks of postproduction to finish the movie properly for a mid-December release, but Columbia was pushing for a November 1 opening. As a result of that pressure, Spielberg considered the initial release version a “work in progress that had never been finished.” One decision he left up to the preview audiences was whether they wanted to hear Jiminy Cricket singing “When You Wish Upon a Star” under the end credits as the mother ship ascends into the heavens with Roy Neary aboard. After previewing the film both with and without the song, Spielberg realized that the song seemed to imply “everything up until the last thirty minutes was a fantasy. Audience response to it was somewhat fifty-fifty. The people who liked it didn’t
love
it—they
liked
it. The people who didn’t like it were
adamant.
”
“It diminished the film,” Douglas Trumbull felt. “It was too cornball and too referential to something else that took you out of the mood that had been created for the film.” Although the song had helped inspire the movie, Spielberg reluctantly excised it. But he retained two instrumental quotations of the tune in John Williams’s score, and vowed as early as 1978 that he would put back the song when the movie was reissued (the 1980
Special
Edition
used an instrumental version over the end credits). While a
previously scheduled international press junket to Los Angeles and bicoastal press previews were delayed following the Dallas previews, Spielberg also trimmed the movie by seven and a half minutes.

The most dramatic fallout from those previews was a premature review by
New
York
magazine financial writer William Flanagan. By offering a $25 bribe to someone who resembled him, Flanagan made his way past security guards checking driver’s license photographs of the preselected test audience. Flanagan’s scathingly negative article, which hit the streets on October 31, noted that Columbia’s stock had risen from $8 to $17 a share over the past few months in anticipation of the release of
Close
Encounters,
but that the studio still seemed unusually anxious to keep the film under wraps. “I can understand all the apprehension,” Flanagan wrote. “In my opinion, the picture will be a colossal flop. It lacks the dazzle, charm, wit, imagination, and broad audience appeal of
Star
Wars
—the film Wall Street insists it measure up to, despite author/director Steven Spielberg’s artistic protestations.”

Flanagan’s piece triggered panic selling on Wall Street, causing Columbia to issue a statement reaffirming its “faith in backing Steven Spielberg” and attacking Flanagan’s supposed bias “because he was denied access to the film and saw it at a preview to which he was not invited. In fact, no member of the press was invited to the preview.” Nevertheless, Frank Rich of
Time
magazine also managed to see the film in Dallas and ran a glowing review at the same time as Flanagan’s pan. “Although the movie is not a sure blockbuster—it lacks the simplicity of effect that characterizes most all-time box-office champs—it will certainly be a big enough hit to keep Columbia’s stockholders happy,” wrote Rich, while failing to mention that Time Inc. was a silent investor in the movie. To the relief of Columbia, which did not criticize
Time
for jumping the review date, Rich continued, “More important,
Close
Encounters
offers proof, if any were needed, that Spielberg’s reputation is
no accident. His new movie is richer and more ambitious than
Jaws,
and it reaches the viewer at a far more profound level than
Star
Wars.
”