8

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

We must all start with the believable. That is the essence of our craft.

Chuck Jones

SPIELBERG’S TRIUMPH with Jaws was comprehensive. Among critics, it established him as an artist, with the public as a showman, but last, and most important for his career, it convinced the industry he was a money-maker. They could whip the rug away if his next film didn’t click – Dennis Hopper, no less hot following Easy Rider, became a leper almost overnight after his self-indulgent The Last Movie – but for the moment his credit was almost limitless.

Some people, however, would always see him as an upstart. Maître d’s assessed his K-Mart clothes and the leased brown Mercedes that replaced the clunker from Sugarland Express, and gave him the table by the toilets. At LA’s then-trendy restaurant L’Ermitage, his long hair won a ‘Madam’ from a short-sighted greeter. Spielberg shrugged it off. He was more deeply hurt when he slipped into the sound stage where Hitchcock was shooting Family Plot in 1975. The master of suspense had his back to him, but after a few moments he raised a hand and an assistant hurried to his side. The director said a few words, then got up and waddled away, after which the assistant came over to Spielberg and said, ‘Mr Hitchcock feels it disturbs him if you watch him work. Would you please leave the set?’ It was a grotesque replay of his ejection from Torn Curtain, and a reminder, not that one was needed, of how Old Hollywood regarded even the most successful of its newcomers.

Corporate Universal was more grateful. If, as Dennis Stanfill had said when he executed Darryl Zanuck’s orders to fire his son, there was ‘a ritual to severance’, acceptance had its ritual too. One’s office and the way it was furnished radiated significance. When Richard Zanuck returned to Fox in 1979, part of the deal was a room of the same dimensions, to the square inch, as the one from which he’d been evicted, and his old desk, which had also been his father’s. Stanfill, by then chairman, knew better than most that ‘what goes around comes around’. He’d preserved the desk, and personally supervised its re-installation.

As his reward for Jaws, Spielberg got the bungalow he’d coveted – or at least half a bungalow, since he had to share with John Milius. He compensated with a lavish desk boasting a cassette deck, clock, AM/FM stereo, calculator, night light, paper shredder, pencil sharpener, computer phone, and colour TV that also showed who was at both front and back doors. It was sophisticated enough, he joked, to take itself to the bathroom twice a day.

Through Milius, who taught scriptwriting at USC while trying to set up new directing projects like The Wind and the Lion and his surfing epic Big Wednesday, Spielberg met Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, two bright students whom Milius encouraged to collaborate. They shared a flair for intricate plots and outrageous but winning comedy characters, especially villains. On a visit to Universal, Zemeckis took the opportunity of being in Spielberg’s bungalow to screen his student film, Field of Honor. ‘My God, it was spectacular for a film student in his early twenties to have made such a picture with no money,’ Spielberg said. ‘With police cars, a riot and lots of crazy characters – very well done and dubbed to Elmer Bernstein’s score of The Great Escape. I said: this man is worth watching.’ Spielberg put Zemeckis to work doing odd jobs on Jaws, including monitoring screenings around Los Angeles. Eager to please, he tried to boost audience reaction by applauding at impressive moments, in particular that where Quint is taken by the shark. The first time he did this, however, he went into Spielberg’s office the next day to find him aghast. Word had got around that some ghoul had applauded at Quint’s death.

Having intrigued Milius with a script called Tank, Zemeckis and Gale hit him with an unnamed scenario about the wave of panic that swept over a trigger-happy California a week after Pearl Harbor at rumours of a Japanese invasion. Even the war-loving Milius enjoyed its parody of gung-ho heroics. He supplied a working title, ‘The Night the Japs Attacked’, and offered not only to help prepare it for production but to produce it himself. He took it to Herb Jaffe at MGM, who disliked its theme – ‘I was practically accused of being a war criminal,’ Milius recalls – but suggested he might be interested with the right director in charge. Spielberg, for example.

After Jaws, Milius, feeling Spielberg needed to mellow back, had introduced him to skeet shooting, and they often met to shoot and talk at the Oak Tree Gun Club. (Spielberg, like Luis Buuel, developed the ear complaint tinnitus from firearms, which would permanently impair his hearing.) Once he had a finished script of ‘The Night the Japs Attacked’, Milius invited Spielberg for an afternoon’s shooting, and arranged for Zemeckis and Gale to drop by with a copy.

Zemeckis and Gale pitched ‘The Night the Japs Attacked’ to Spielberg. Perhaps the obbligato of gunfire stimulated his imagination. Perhaps, as he claimed later, ‘They caught me in a weak moment.’ Maybe, as Milius has intimated, he was once again attracted to a project someone else had already got up and running. He almost certainly enjoyed the resonances with Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds. Whatever the reason, Spielberg agreed to support the film, with the proviso that Milius drop MGM and take it to Universal.

Universal meanwhile had quietly renegotiated Spielberg’s contract, on which four films remained. He still owed them, but had forty years in which to deliver. Meanwhile, he was free to work for other studios. He promptly allied himself with John Milius’s company, A-Team Productions.

There was no shortage of offers. His first impulse had been to do a period adventure in the style of Errol Flynn. While he was still shooting Jaws, Fox announced he would direct such an unnamed swashbuckler by Jeffrey Alan Fiskin, later screenwriter of Cutter’s Way and The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper, about two brothers, an aristocrat and a peasant, fighting for the same woman. But before he could even get on a sound stage, he complained, the market was swamped by remakes of The Prince and the Pauper and The Three Musketeers.

He turned down Universal immediately on Jaws 2. ‘Making a sequel to anything is just a cheap carny trick,’ he told the audience at the San Francisco Film Festival in October 1975. ‘I didn’t even answer them [when they asked me]. I didn’t call or write or anything. I understand that they plan to star the “sons” of Robert Shaw and Roy Scheider as two kids hunting a new shark.’

Motown records had recently hired Rob Cohen, late of Fox, to head its film division. His first production was to be Barwood and Robbins’s script of William Brashler’s novel The Bingo Long Travelling All Stars and Motor Kings, about a 1930s black baseball team. While Jaws was in production, Universal offered Motown $3 million for the distribution rights to Bingo Long, and suggested Spielberg to direct, which the record company accepted. The trouble was,’ Cohen recalled, ‘that as Jaws’s opening got nearer and nearer, Steve became less and less available. We were set to begin shooting within about a month of that, and there were a million things to be done. We couldn’t postpone production because we had a pay-or-play deal with James Earl Jones, so we simply had to go ahead with [John Badham].’

Spielberg’s unavailability was calculated. Friends had urged him to drag his feet until the Academy Awards. If, as expected, Jaws swept the board, his budgets and choice of projects would increase tenfold. The competition for Oscars was strong: Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Airman’s Nashville. All these films, not to mention a strong foreign presence, with Isabelle Adjani in Truffaut’s The Story Of Adèle H and Glenda Jackson in Hedda Gabler, had powerful credentials. But Jaws was such a phenomenon that, most people reasoned, it would surely be nominated for Best Film and Spielberg for Best Director, with other nominations for screenplay, music, editing and special effects. Sid Sheinberg was utterly confident. ‘I want to be the first to predict,’ he announced, ‘that Steve will win the Best Director Oscar this year.’

So foregone was the conclusion that a TV crew filmed Spielberg at home when nominations were announced in February 1975. As expected, Jaws was shortlisted for Best Film. Traditionally, directors of Best Film were also nominated as Best Director. But Spielberg’s face showed his disappointment as the Academy named Kubrick, Forman, Altman, Sidney Lumet for Dog Day Afternoon and, incredibly, Federico Fellini for his autobiographical Amarcord. ‘I can’t believe it!’ he moaned, with understandable anguish. ‘They went for Fellini instead of me!’

Nominations for John Williams, Verna Fields and the film’s sound team, all of whom won Oscars, only rubbed in salt. ‘It hurts,’ Spielberg acknowledged later, ‘because I feel it was a director’s movie.’ He attributed the rejection to ‘a Jaws backlash. The same people who had raved about it began to doubt its artistic value as soon as it began to bring in so much money.’ But box-office success is never a drawback at the Oscars. Spielberg was simply the first of New Hollywood’s directors to submit to the Academy’s ordeal and, in a snub calculated to show that the Movie Brats remained outsiders, Old Hollywood nominated a foreigner. They would do the same for Star Wars two years later, fobbing it off with minor awards. There were many in New Hollywood too who would withhold their nomination. ‘You would be surprised,’ Spielberg said later, ‘at the number of friends who turn away when you achieve success. Some acquaintances who I thought were my friends turned into snipers when Jaws hit the top.’

He resented as well those whom he felt profited unfairly from the success of Jaws. ‘The shameless credit-grabbing… would rock you back,’ he complained. ‘There are several individuals whose careers have taken off as a result of their avowed contribution… when the sad fact is that these people did the least work of all.’

At best, the comment seems unkind. Peter Benchley spent decades deep-sea fishing, fruitlessly, for another best-seller. Carl Gottlieb’s later credits consisted mostly of two Jaws sequels and trivia like Doctor Detroit. Nor, despite filming Jaws 2 and Benchley’s The Island, did Zanuck and Brown ever have such a hit again. The actors were no luckier. Dreyfuss is still best remembered for his Spielberg films, while the character of Brody exploited Roy Scheider’s vulnerability so effectively that he was stuck playing men of action haunted by the past: the agent guilty about his dead wife in Last Embrace, the compromised spy in Marathon Man, a psychiatrist in love with an apparent murderess in Still of the Night. Lorraine Gary clung to her fragile celebrity until the fourth outing, Jaws: The Revenge, in 1987, by which time she was the only remaining member of the original cast.

Spielberg probably meant his gibe for only one person – Verna Fields, whose reputation had soared. In an orgy of gratitude, Universal made her a vice president in charge of new talent, and it was rumoured that she would be associate producer of Close Encounters. According to Julia Phillips, Spielberg ‘resent[ed] all the credit she was giving herself for its success and asked me to kill her off’. He had Phillips remove Fields’s name from an Eastman Kodak ad in the trade press in which, as Hollywood’s hottest, indeed only, female line producer, Phillips lauded fellow women professionals in the film business like Fields; Marcia Lucas was substituted. Paul Schrader confirms: ‘[Steve] was furious with Verna, Zanuck and Peter Benchley. He felt they had all conspired to take away his credit.’

Towards the end of 1975, Zanuck and Brown drew Spielberg into their efforts to build up overseas momentum for Jaws. In November he was summoned, along with Shaw, Dreyfuss and their wives, to a charity weekend in Acapulco organised by Zanuck’s sister Darrylin, whose ailing Mexican garment business needed an injection of show-business pizzaz. At one of her cocktail parties, Spielberg sipped ginger ale by a swimming pool choked with rubber sharks, pondering the nature of celebrity and the fact that the Jaws image, which he had urged Zanuck in vain to merchandise, was making millions for everyone except the film-makers. Sugarland Express had taught Spielberg that selling a film was as important as making it. He learned even more from the junkets and promotional meetings with foreign distributors of Jaws. In later years, nobody would be more skilful at squeezing the last drop of profit from a film in the furthest comers of the world.

On the way back from Mexico, he stopped off with Peter Benchley in the Bahamas, where the writer was finishing The Deep, another underwater story, this time about sunken Caribbean treasure. Spielberg made interested noises, but when the book landed on Hollywood desks in October 1976, with a price tag, unnegotiable, of $1 million, plus another $250,000 for Benchley’s services as screenwriter, Zanuck and Brown, given first refusal, passed. Spielberg benefited indirectly, however, since Peter Guber, an independent producer working with Columbia, persuaded the studio to buy it. Though no Jaws, The Deep did inject vital cash into the studio just when it needed it to finance the ballooning Close Encounters.

Even as he planned Close Encounters, Spielberg was thinking of the film that would follow it. Universal were ready to back ‘Clearwater’, now renamed ‘Growing Up’, an intimate picture about his adolescence in Arizona, but his instincts warned him not to be diverted from blockbusters.

Above all, he was tantalised by comedy, as were most of the USC crowd, in the main because they were a desperately humourless group. Introspection in childhood, alienation in adolescence and marginalisation in young adulthood doesn’t encourage a jocular view of the world. Amusing an audience, like amusing women, is a function of confidence, a commodity the Movie Brats conspicuously lacked. Nor had film comedy offered them as lonely teenagers the same degree of escape from reality as the heroics of genre melodrama. What little of it they liked was farce, heartless and unsparing, and the yammering, violent comedy of cartoons. Almost without exception, the films Spielberg backed as a producer were comedies, as if, having realised he could never be funny himself, he left that aspect of his creative activities to surrogates. First, however, he had to try for himself.

In the autumn of 1975, ABC TV’s comedy show Saturday Night live broadcast a sketch called ‘Victims of Sharkbite’. Jane Curtin interviewed alleged survivors of shark attacks, including manic comic John Belushi, whose supposedly missing limbs keep falling into view. Spielberg made a note to meet the programme’s team. A few weeks later he flew to New York, where Scorsese was making Taxi Driver, and sat in with him and Marcia Lucas at the Astoria Studios on Long Island during the editing of the final shootout. Of all the USC group, Scorsese remained the one for whom Spielberg still felt some awe. ‘Both of us make movies that provoke strong reactions,’ he wrote. ‘The difference is that Marty does all this on his own terms. He doesn’t fret about what’s going to “work” or not “work” for an audience.’

On the same trip he went to dinner with the Saturday Night Live team at One Fifth Avenue, where the staff watched without surprise as Belushi gobbled food with his hands and ad-libbed comic schticks. Spielberg, however, was astonished. Nobody in Los Angeles behaved like this. He mentioned ‘The Night the Japs Attacked’, which, after complaints from Asian-Americans about the word ‘Japs’, had been retitled in turn ‘The Great Los Angeles Air Raid’, ‘Hollywood ’41’ and ‘The Rising Sun’. Belushi, one of whose specialities was samurai warriors – his samurai baker who hacks his cakes with a sword was famous – yelled: ‘You want to see my Japanese submarine skipper?’ Grabbing a coat rack, he inverted it over his head as an imitation periscope, with the hooks as handles.

‘Gveet Yaaaankeee shipping!’ he said in mock-Toshiro Mifune broken English, and stayed in character all night.

The two men felt an immediate affinity. Both had been bullied at school for ineptitude at sports. Both desperately needed large, appreciative audiences. With his usual enthusiasm for clowns and cut-ups, Spielberg became convinced that Belushi could be the greatest screen comic since Lou Costello – and, if he lost a little weight, a romantic lead as well. Leaving the restaurant, he assured him solemnly, ‘If I ever make this movie, you’re it.’ Such formal public promises were to become characteristic of Spielberg. Often he emphasised his seriousness by placing a finger on the person’s forehead, as if anointing them. ‘You,’ he would say, ‘are going to work for me again.’ Eventually he gave the gesture to E.T, investing the alien’s magic finger with a glowing, almost divine power.

In New York, working alone in a suite at the Sherry Netherland, he finished rewriting Close Encounters. On the armature of Schrader’s moral fable he wound skeins of dream. He included overt references to Pinocchio and its theme tune, ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’, with which he originally intended to end the film, and covert stylistic ones to Bambi, Frankenstein, DeMille’s The Ten Commandments and Chuck Jones. Barry’s mechanical monkey is meant to recall James Dean playing with such a toy at the opening of Rebel Without a Cause (and not, as some people believed, the prologue of 2001: A Space Odyssey). François Truffaut would be struck by the film’s similarity to Hitchcock’s The Birds, but there are resonances as well with North by Northwest in the clambering over the rocks of Devil’s Tower, William Cameron Menzies’ Invaders from Mars and Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers in the rural setting, and Jack Arnold’s It Came from Outer Space in the confrontation with the visitors.

The main character, Roy Neary, an electrical linesman in Muncie, Indiana, is a downmarket Arnold Spielberg, an amateur visionary raised on Disney but becalmed now in suburbia. With Jilian Guiler, a mother who’s lost her child to aliens, and Claude Lacombe, a Frenchman who’s been investigating UFOs for years, Neary is drawn by an implanted compulsion to Wyoming, where the first formal meeting between earth-men and aliens is to take place. Lacombe has been communicating with the aliens via a five-note tune based on a music teaching method developed by Zoltan Kodály and a colour code invented by Scriabin, but it is Neary, notwithstanding his lack of education or training, who wins a place on man’s first stellar voyage. Belief is enough. When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are.

One leftover from Schrader’s concept was the age of Neary, who was fortyish. Spielberg, however, had shown an early draft to Dreyfus, who said he was sorry Neary wasn’t ten years younger, so he could play him. As a result, Spielberg rewrote the part to fit Dreyfus. Once the script was done, Spielberg read it through and sensed a lack of humanity and humour, especially in the character of Neary. He rang Jerry Belson and asked him to come to New York and work with him. Belson arrived the next day, and spent five days taking the chill off the story and glossing over the inconsistencies rooted in undigested lumps of Schrader’s original drafts. According to Schrader, every writer Spielberg knew was called in at some point to paper over inconsistencies, including Milius, David Giler and Walter Hill. Barwood and Robbins worked for four days on the kidnapping of Barry, and were rewarded with cameos at the end as airmen returned by the aliens. Richard Dreyfuss acknowledged, ‘[Spielberg’s] not the best screenwriter there is, obviously, but somehow he got it all together there.’

Spielberg’s personal life was also transformed in 1976, when he met and fell in love with Amy Irving.

‘Fixing up’ Steven was a hobby among his friends. It was Brian De Palma who thought of Amy. Six years Spielberg’s junior, she was the archetypal Jewish princess, a green-eyed lookalike for the young Lauren Bacall, with a mass of wavy chestnut hair. Her mother was the actress Priscilla Pointer, her father Jules Irving, who had directed the LA Actors’ Workshop and the Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre in New York. She’d been through the Professional Children’s School in New York, graduated from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, and was playing in Romeo and Juliet on stage in Los Angeles when her agent sent her to George Lucas’s auditions for the role of Princess Leia in Star Wars. She made the shortlist, but meanwhile De Palma, who was sitting in on the tests in search of people for Carrie, grabbed her to play the homecoming queen. He also suggested her for the role of Neary’s wife in Close Encounters. Spielberg saw her, but immediately rejected her as too young, and apparently forgot about her.

De Palma hosted a charity premiere of Carrie, to which he invited both Amy and Spielberg. At dinner afterwards, they met. The effect was electric, all the more so since Amy, overwhelmed by the company, got drunk. Next day Spielberg confessed to Julia Phillips, ‘I met a heart-breaker last night.’ It was like being struck by lightning, he told her. Phillips urged him to call her, but it took him a month to do so. Almost immediately they started an affair.

Amy seemed an odd match for the casual workaholic Spielberg. She skied, flew a sailplane, meditated and, despite her Jewish birth, had been raised as a Christian Scientist. Acerbic and highly strung, she resented emotional commitment even as she courted it. She was ambitious and independent, and by far the more experienced of the pair. In liberated San Francisco, and later New York, she had embraced the sexual revolution. ‘I remember it all very clearly,’ she said, ‘living in New York as a single woman, standing on the salad bar line, going home with the wrong guys for the wrong reasons.’

Her effect on Spielberg was immediate and obvious. He became more genial, more social, spent less time hunched over video games, playing his collection of more than seven hundred movie soundtracks or noodling their themes two-fingered on the electric piano that was his latest plaything. He began to replace the movie posters on his walls with original art, though, predictably, his purchases were rare Disney eels and paintings by Norman Rockwell.

Amy also badgered him to improve his appearance. ‘I helped Steven make a big metamorphosis in his wardrobe,’ she said later. ‘Now he’s a real fine dresser.’ A beard that had been an occasional feature of his twenties also reappeared, though it would alternate for a while with a diffident-looking moustache, immortalised in his cameo appearance as the clerk at the end of John Landis’s The Blues Brothers. The beard disguised his unappealing mouth, though Martin Amis spoke for many when he described it as ‘look[ing] like a stick-on afterthought, a bid for adulthood and anonymity’. Later in the year, at Julia Phillips’s urging, he bought a house on Coldwater Canyon, which he asked Joe Alves, his designer from Jaws, to decorate. Spielberg and Amy talked about living there together, but neither quite wanted to make the move, and his crowded schedule made it easy to put off a decision.

Close Encounters was now scheduled to start shooting in the summer of 1976. Anyone trying to get a straight answer out of Spielberg about the new film’s plot faced an uphill struggle. Early in the year, he conceded cagily to a journalist:

All I can tell you is it’s a science fiction picture, totally wrapped up in a lot of political controversy. It’s a very interesting and topical story, something that I believe in. We’ll be shooting in six states, Brazil, and there are five pages with capital letters that say ‘Where Do You Plan To Spend The Winter?’ And yet with all that it will be an incredibly inexpensive movie. We’ll make the whole movie for about a million-five.

In a year of development, however, that estimate had been left far behind. After Jaws, Spielberg loathed the idea of locations so much that he rethought the film as totally studio-shot. This increased the cost to $4.1 million. Columbia agreed, only to see him change his mind again and reinstate scenes on the remote Texas airfields he’d spotted in the location scout for Sugarland. He also insisted on releasing in 70mm, using the 65mm ToddAO process which reserved 5mm of the film for a wider magnetic soundtrack. With Lucas, who developed his own THX sound system for his films and installed high-tech recording studios at the Skywalker Ranch, Spielberg had become convinced that the impact of sound was almost as important as that of image. As the summer warmed up, costs hovered around $12 million.

Much had changed too among the film’s makers. The Phillipses were estranged. Julia wanted to produce; Michael, who’d grown a beard, proposed to visit India and Discover Himself. Though they’re credited jointly on the film, he wasn’t involved in the main preparation or shooting, only in preliminary negotiations and those on release and publicity. Spielberg was upset. He’d felt comfortable with a married couple as producers. It was more ‘family’. When he had his own company, it would be run first by Kathy Kennedy and Frank Marshall, who became a couple and eventually married, and, when they left, by Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald, also husband and wife.

Other producers were auditioned for Close Encounters, including William Sackheim, who had recut Eyes on Night Gallery, but Julia persuaded Columbia she could manage it. In the power vacuum, however, more control than ever passed to David Begelman. Hiring the elegant and charming Begelman had been a gamble for Columbia because he himself was a legendary gambler, with a prodigal lifestyle driven by an innate urge to self-destruction. ‘There is something in me that can’t stand success,’ he once told executive Peter Bart. ‘If everything is going really great, I will find a way to mess things up. It’s a compulsion.’

Begelman opened negotiations on Close Encounters with all the cunning he applied to the big Friday-night high-stake poker games to which he was addicted, and at which he routinely dropped vast sums. Spielberg didn’t protest. Begelman was a brilliant manipulator who could find the money he needed. If everyone else on the film was short-changed, that was the fate of all creative people in Hollywood. In time Spielberg would have the power to negotiate total control, but for the moment he was content to let Begelman work on his behalf, and take his unequal share.

Begelman’s ace in the hole was the British electronics company EMI, rich on sales of TVs, body scanners and other high-tech electronics. It had recently bought Columbia’s music division and, as part of the deal, undertaken to finance three films. Time Inc., the publishers, were also attracted to putting some money into film. Begelman scared up more capital in Europe. The US would outlaw film production as a tax shelter in December 1976, but in West Germany the loophole remained open. Between them, these companies put $7 million into Close Encounters, with EMI sharing production credit on screen, a significant concession.

Begelman’s power typified the prevailing flow of power towards agents, most of whom now regarded a studio spot as the next step after a successful few years in personal management. Every month or two, a top representative from ICM or William Morris moved to studio production. In 1975, in a development which would seem, in retrospect, historic, Mike Ovitz and four other young and ambitious agents were fired by William Morris for protesting at what they saw as the company’s lack of enterprise. They set up shop as Creative Artists Agency, soon to be the most powerful agency in the world.

Anxious to head off any possible conflict over who had written Close Encounters, Julia Phillips asked Paul Schrader to notify the Screenwriters’ Guild Arbitration Board that he expected no screen credit. No trace of his work remained in the script, she assured him. ‘We were all gentlemen,’ said Schrader, ‘and if [Spielberg and the Phillipses] told me that such a thing was true, it was.’ When he read the final script, however, he saw the character of VanOwen in Lacombe, and much else besides. ‘I recognised the infusion of heavily spiritual elements that had not been there when Steven first approached me with the project – particularly the ending and the notion of the five tones, the five colours that I had designed. The idea of flying saucers as a religious experience. This is not in Steven’s nature. It is in my nature.’ He remains bitter about what he sees as Spielberg’s duplicity. For his part, Spielberg says, ‘It surprises me that Schrader would slink after someone else’s success by vividly inflating his imagined contributions.’

Another person who bridled at the new film was J. Allen Hynek. He wrote an acerbic letter to the producers, pointing out that they were using his terminology and ideas without credit or payment. They hurriedly recruited him as Technical Consultant, and he too has a final cameo among the crowd welcoming the aliens.

Other rivalries were also crystallised by Close Encounters. Rather as they assembled twenty or more French directors under Godard, Truffaut and Chabrol as the New Wave, journalists lumped Spielberg with Lucas, William Friedkin, Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Milius, Schrader and a dozen more film-makers in their twenties under the broad leadership of Coppola. It was an understandable error, but a grievous one. As with the nouvelle vague, the generalisation presupposed a level of friendship and a shared commitment which didn’t exist. If it was hard to discern any similarity between the right-wing Catholic upper-middle-class Eric Rohmer and the ex-juvenile delinquent Truffaut, the gap between, for example, Peter Bogdanovich and Martin Scorsese was even wider.

People were already separating into Lucas, Spielberg or Coppola camps, a division that became increasingly clear after the Lucas/Coppola friendship cooled over Apocalypse Now, which Lucas co-wrote and expected to direct. In addition, Spielberg, Lucas and Coppola had visibly drawn away from Milius, De Palma and Scorsese. As Michael Pye says, ‘people like Lucas and Spielberg were building empires rather than making films.’ From now on, the Three, but especially Spielberg, would become patrons and power-brokers. The rest, however readily the others returned their calls and looked at their rough cuts, were reduced to clients, acolytes, supplicants. The irascible loner Scorsese regarded the change with indifference, the self-absorbed Milius with humour, De Palma, who remained Spielberg’s closest personal friend of the group, with truculence. ‘They’re running a business,’ De Palma said of the Three, ‘and I don’t want to run a business. I want to make movies.’

Among the Three themselves, and especially between Spielberg and the other two, there were equally fundamental variations. Both Coppola, with his property deals and ducal gravitas, and Lucas, with his preoccupation with history, the quasi-Zen mysticism of The Force, and the relocation of human conflicts ‘a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away’, were drifting from Spielberg’s essentially earthly, contemporary and American concerns.

Attitudes to money dramatised the growing divisions. Lucas distributed bonuses to everyone who worked on his films, down to the janitors, gave percentage ‘points’ to actors he admired, like Sir Alec Guinness, and swapped them with friends, usually to his cost. He shrugged off his exchange of a point in Star Wars for one in John Milius’s flop Big Wednesday: ‘It proved I was a good friend but a bad investor.’ In this area, Spielberg was almost a mirror image of Lucas. He offered no such lavish gifts, nor did he expect any. Lucas’s generosity surprised him, while the profligacy of Coppola’s operation earned his disapproval.

With Close Encounters, Spielberg staked out his territory and began to assemble the support group which evolved into his company Amblin Entertainment. Most of the faces on the film were familiar. Joe Alves was again production designer and Vilmos Zsigmond on camera. Still ambitious to direct, the photographer saw that the film would increase his prestige. Soon he demanded that his name be included in all advertising, no matter how trivial, for any production he lit. Eleven different directors of photography eventually worked on the film, including Douglas Slocombe (the India sequences), William Fraker (the desert opening), and John Alonzo and Laszlo Kovacs (retakes on the kidnapping of Cary Guffey and the Ohio tollgate sequences, plus Dreyfuss’s entry into the mother ship for the alternative ‘Special Edition’ ending). Allen Daviau also shot new material, the first time for years that Spielberg had worked with his Amblin’ cameraman, who’d muddled along doing documentaries and commercials, though after Close Encounters he used him increasingly. Some people suggest that Spielberg, confident now of his technique, no longer needed the best lighting cameramen. Others, more credibly, feel that he wanted as many loyal foot-soldiers as he could find for the Amblin family.

Dreyfuss reluctantly took the role of Neary. Even after Spielberg’s rewrites, the actor was doubtful. He’d been offered $500,000 and a share of the profits to play the magician Harry Houdini in a new film, and hoped for a similar deal on Close Encounters. Julia Phillips out-manoeuvred him by sending the script to Hollywood’s best middle-aged actors. Gene Hackman, Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino. Nicholson was interested, but asked Spielberg to wait until he finished his first film as a director, Goin’ South. This news nudged Dreyfuss into accepting the part for $300,000.

Spielberg, as usual, didn’t want stars. The little-known Melinda Dillon was Jilian Guiler and Teri Garr Neary’s wife. Dreyfuss’s nephew played her son. Cary Guffey, the kidnapped Barry, was a four-year-old Spielberg spotted in Atlanta and manipulated into a winning performance by subterfuges like presenting him with gifts to produce a smile, and having a man in a rabbit suit pop out to evoke wonder at the first sight of the aliens.

Schrader’s supporters feel Spielberg’s decision to cast a Frenchman as the investigator Lacombe was calculated to distance the character from the original vision of a scholarly, middle-aged VanOwen, but Spielberg was more influenced by polls suggesting that most Americans thought UFOs an exclusively American phenomenon. Showing that there were researchers elsewhere, like Aimé Michel and Jacques Vallée in France, made UFOs seem less an exclusively American obsession and more an international phenomenon. His first choice for Lacombe, Lino Ventura, the blocky specialist in crime thrillers, spoke no English. Yves Montand declined. So did Jean-Louis Trintignant, France’s best-known actor in America since he starred as the racing driver romancing Anouk Aimée in Claude Lelouch’s 1966 A Man and a Woman. Spielberg considered Philippe Noiret, then remembered François Truffaut, who had played a director in his own movie about film-making, La Nuit Americaine. Since Warners financed it, and most of the cast, including Truffaut, spoke English, the film had wide play in the US as Day for Night. Spielberg had also admired Truffaut in L’Enfant Sauvage, his film of 1970 where the director played a nineteenth-century doctor who tries to educate and civilise an abandoned ‘wolf boy’, Close Encounters was about communication too. Impulsively, he offered him the role.

As Truffaut himself found when they met, Spielberg, like most American film-makers, knew few foreign films. His favourite French directors, Spielberg confided, were Lelouch, whose sentimentality and flashy technique Truffaut detested, and Robert Enrico, who’d directed two popular vehicles with Ventura. It also emerged, not to his credit as far as Truffaut was concerned, that Spielberg had written to Philippe de Broca saying he’d watched his action comedy That Man from Rio, with Jean-Paul Belmondo, nine times and that he’d never seen anything like it before or after. (Spielberg’s enthusiasm isn’t surprising. De Broca planned the film ‘to contain everything that I’d wanted to see when I was twelve’.)

Though he’d praised Duel, Truffaut was almost as ignorant of Spielberg’s work as Spielberg was of his, but the idea of working on a Hollywood film intrigued him. He’d been thinking of writing a book about screen acting, and here was a chance to observe it from the inside. ‘I was there a lot,’ he said, ‘but, like Greta Garbo, I can only say I had the feeling of waiting.’ All the actors contracted for twenty weeks, and were warned they might be working in Wyoming, Alaska, India, Alabama and Outer Mongolia.

Truffaut too finally signed in March, with the proviso that he must be finished by August, when he hoped to shoot The Man who Loved Women. Since his English was poorer than it had seemed in Day for Night, a translator was written into the film. Bob Balaban took the role, despite being refused a script. ‘Nobody gets to read the script,’ casting director Juliet Taylor said severely. Later, when the plot demanded a map-reader, Balaban metamorphosed into a cartographer, a change typical of the film’s disordered but somehow convincing narrative. As the critic James Monaco says, Close Encounters is ‘shot through with false leads, gaping holes, and circuitous side trails… But it doesn’t seem to matter.’

For special effects, Spielberg retained Douglas Trumbull, though not without misgivings. Trumbull had ambitions as a director, and had already made the highly regarded Silent Running in 1971. However, he’d worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey, which made him indispensable for a film that was to exist in the shadow of Kubrick’s masterpiece. Spielberg ran it repeatedly before and during shooting, and the whole Close Encounters team strove for the same, in Trumbull’s phrase, ‘awesome simplicity’.

For his aliens, Spielberg wanted to be just as circumspect as Kubrick had been. His wide-eyed, hairless creatures, who would eventually be played, except in close-up, by masked pre-teen girls on rollerskates, owe much to the space child which appears at the end of Kubrick’s film, but it took months of experimenting with stop-motion dolls and mechanised puppets before Italian Carlo Rambaldi came up with the spindly humanoids who emerge from the mother ship. Rubbery, big-eyed, hairless, without visible noses or ears, they resemble the photographs of alien corpses supposedly found in a flying saucer that crashed at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, and may have been inspired by some shaky footage of their dissection which circulated on the UFO underground, reputedly part of fourteen cans of 16mm shot by the US military. Shown worldwide on TV in 1995, the film was widely dismissed as a fake, but in the seventies it enjoyed a near-holy status among believers.

For the site of first contact, Spielberg visualised something as remote and simple as Kubrick’s monolith. To avoid odious comparisons, he settled on a mountain. ‘You want to find the most unique mountain,’ De Palma advised. ‘You don’t want [the ‘invited’ humans] to think it’s ten mountains in ten parts of the country.’ After discarding Ship Rock in Oregon and rejecting Monument Valley as too obvious, Joe Alves found Devil’s Tower National Monument, an 865-foot-high volcanic monolith in Wyoming.

Hollywood had no stages even half the size demanded by the arrival of the alien mother ship. Some of the biggest enclosed spaces in the country were hangars left over from the military’s flirtation with dirigibles. The largest, in Tillamook, Oregon, was too remote for a film crew, but Alves found three more, conveniently remote, on the flat, muggy Gulf coast near Mobile, Alabama. The largest of them, 450 feet long, 250 feet broad and ninety feet high, more than accommodated Alves’s sets for the stretch of hillside highway called ‘Crescendo Summit’ where Dreyfuss, Dillon and a group of hard-core believers first see the spaceships, and the landing area in a box canyon behind Devil’s Tower, christened ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’.

For a film that was to carry an overwhelming impression of visual artistry, Close Encounters was shot with little apparent attention to style. Above all, Spielberg feared comparisons with Star Wars. ‘Mine is a film that’s rooted on earth,’ he said, ‘not in stellar space. It’s about extraordinary encounters in middle-class suburbia. It’s not a movie that keeps attacking the senses with visual assaults.’ (He would make a similar disclaimer for Jurassic Park, saying it was ‘not science fiction but science actuality’.)

The mother ship is all the more impressive for its appearance in the night skies over present-day Indiana rather than in outer space. The film’s major advertising graphic, a stretch of road leading over a hill from behind which an unearthly glow fills the night sky, could also hardly be more prosaic, nor could the advertising line, ‘We Are Not Alone’. The most effective moments of both Close Encounters and 2001 spring not from special effects but from imaginative shooting of the real and normal. Kubrick gave his ships the Pan Am logo and set them waltzing to Johann Strauss. Spielberg compared his to ice-cream cones, nicknamed one ‘The Quarter Pounder’ after a McDonald’s hamburger, and turned them into practical jokers who delight in turning lights on and off, trashing houses, raiding refrigerators. They even cruise the roads like joyriding teenagers, inviting the police to chase them. Nor had Trumbull forgotten the technical lessons of Kubrick’s film. Bowman’s exercise jog round the outer walls of the zero-gravity ship is echoed by Spielberg’s similar use of a revolving drum to show Neary’s cab going crazy as the alien ship passes above. By tilting both cab and camera 90 degrees anti-clockwise, he makes the glovebox appear to erupt junk, an effect he would use again in Poltergeist.

When the production moved to Mobile in March, Spielberg put into practice some of the lessons learned on Jaws. Special-effects sequences were left until last. And the press was rigorously excluded. Close Encounters would be Hollywood’s best-kept secret.

Mobile became the most hermetic of closed sets. Cast and crew worked, ate, sometimes even slept inside the stifling hangar, which 150 tons of air-conditioning equipment, enough for thirty large houses, did little to make habitable. Occasionally they emerged to cruise pretty but provincial Mobile. ‘I’m not saying it isn’t a nice town,’ said one crew-member plaintively. ‘I just wish there was more of it.’ Nobody entered without a name badge. Even Spielberg himself, who lived in a Winnebago parked outside, was briefly barred when he forgot his. Scripts were numbered, and distributed only on a need-to-know basis. Most actors got only their own lines. Since everything above the heads of the actors was masked out with black velvet, leaving room for the wonders to be added by special effects, many secondary performers had no idea what the film was about, so nosy reporters often got grossly misleading accounts of the plot, some of which found their way into print.

Bored, Truffaut asked for an office within the complex. There, for six hours a day, he pecked out the screenplay of his new film. The Man who Loved Women, and even part of the one that followed, The Green Room. He also rewrote his own dialogue when Spielberg’s proved undeliverable, and wrote long letters to friends in Paris. To them he confided that he found Spielberg unpretentious, good-humoured and patient, with an enthusiasm that was infectious. ‘This film of flying saucers means a great deal to him,’ he told Serge Rousseau. ‘It’s a childhood dream come true.’

On the other hand, he sensed little intellectual conviction under the film’s elaborate technique, a fact he couldn’t resist mentioning to Spielberg. ‘In order to be a story-teller,’ he told him, you have to live a life. If your stories are not about life, you’re just a very good craftsman.’ It would take him years, Spielberg conceded much later, to realise that Truffaut was right. Watching him work with Cary Guffey, Truffaut made another important suggestion. ‘You should have a film about kids,’ he said, ‘because you are a kid yourself.’ This remark became the germ of E.T. Moved by Truffaut’s counsel, Spielberg probably wasn’t aware that the Frenchman gave it to many others. Bob Balaban recalls: ‘I spent nine months standing next to Truffaut. He told me that, as a director, it’s better to focus on the things that really interest you, because each [film] takes a chunk of your life, and life is basically short. He said all that mattered to him was the relationship between men and women and children.’

Aside from members of the Columbia board, who made repeated nervous trips to Mobile to stare at the sets and convince themselves their money wasn’t being wasted, the only regular visitors were Amy Irving, and Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, who arrived periodically with the latest drafts of ‘The Rising Sun’, now called 1941. For eight weeks Spielberg directed all day, but at night found himself ‘dragged helplessly through the streets by this crazo script’. To feed their imagination, the three screened lots of World War II propaganda movies, a technique George Lucas used on Star Wars, the space dogfights of which copied camera movements from wartime flying films. Some, though perhaps not enough, of the stereotypical characters in these films found their way into 1941. The closest parallels, however, were to Stanley Kramer’s 1963 It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, of which 1941 became a virtual remake.

Julia Phillips, progressively more ill-tempered and paranoid with stress and cocaine, dismissed Zemeckis as ‘a pest’ – not her last failure to understand that Spielberg was quietly building his own circle of trustworthy collaborators, in which she and other producers would have no place. Truffaut too aroused her anger. She was convinced his deafness was feigned, and that he thought her a Hollywood whore. Nor was she any happier with Irving, increasingly a fixture in Spielberg’s life. No slouch at emotional manipulation herself, she assessed her as calculating and devious. ‘Every time Amy is afraid she’s losing Steven,’ she said, ‘she opts for a tearful confession.’

Spielberg, in his offhand way, was using Phillips, as he would other women throughout his career, as a buffer. He even, Phillips says, coaxed her to derail Irving’s suggestions that they live together once the film was finished. From her evolved the team of women who became the Spielberg inner circle. It was a model he knew from adolescence: someone like his mother and sisters, loyal to him alone, and dedicated to protecting him from the world. Her influence, as woman and producer, was fundamental. It was she who persuaded him to invest some of his money in a new house. They also enjoyed what she insists was an innocent flirtation enlivened with a few dark-car gropes and kisses. For his part, Spielberg tried to limit her increasingly self-destructive drug use.

More crucial was what she taught him about producing. If Spielberg pioneered Film as Event, Phillips championed Film as Commodity. With the exception of Disney, Hollywood studios usually begged businesses to exploit a title or logo because it promoted the film. Jaws triggered a frenzy of spin-off T-shirts, magazines and books, few of which paid anything back to the production.

Phillips, however, signed lucrative licensing agreements for Close Encounters merchandise. After Close Encounters Spielberg formed Entertainment Merchandising Inc. with LA businessman Sam Grossman to market spin-offs from 1941 and other films, and Amblin’s marketing division was to become one of its most profitable. Within a few years, such deals, which gave the film-maker between 6 and 10 per cent of the wholesale price of every baseball cap, beach towel, plastic toy, board game, hamburger, soft drink and candy bar which used the film’s name, would be ticketed in the tens of millions. Even Phillips was astonished by the scale of spin-offs. ‘I sometimes think,’ she complained in 1991, ‘that movies are almost an afterthought for the tie-ins, the ads and special offers at McDonald’s. The ancillaries throw off more money than the movie.’ Fifty items were licensed for sale with the E.T. logo. By Jurassic Park, the total topped a thousand.

Lucas was toughing out the last weeks before Star Wars’ 25 May release. He showed successive rough cuts to friends. ‘They all thought it was a disaster,’ he said, though in Spielberg’s memory it was Lucas who had the most doubts. ‘When I sat with George a few weeks before the film opened, he was predicting $15 million in domestic rentals. ’Cause he thought he’d made a Walt Disney film that wouldn’t have much appeal beyond very young pre-teens.’ Spielberg was more supportive than De Palma, who was convinced it would flop. At one memorable dinner, Spielberg and Time’s Jay Cocks sat on one side of the table, loyally lauding the film, while De Palma demolished it. Lucas, unperturbed, kept eating, and, in Spielberg’s recollection, changed nothing. Fully expecting it to fail, however, he’d booked a holiday for himself and Marcia in Hawaii to coincide with the first week of release.

In August 1976 everyone was sent home from Mobile while Trumbull’s Future General started adding space ships and bizarre cloud formations to the top half of the images shot in Alabama. Instead of the razor-sharp craft of Lucas’s film, Spielberg remembered his 1972 TV film Something Evil, where he’d overlit windows to turn bodies into blurred, undefined outlines. The blaze from the mother ship became so blinding that the aliens who emerged were barely visible. The same light appeared during Barry’s kidnap, which Spielberg reshot to make it more terrifying, with heating vents unscrewing themselves and mysterious beings plunging down the chimney. The logic is obscure, the effect mesmerising.

Columbia was panicking. The budget had soared to $19 million, and John Milius joked lugubriously, ‘It will either be the best Columbia film or it will be the last Columbia film.’ The studio needed $50 million profit before the film went into the black: $133 million in gross receipts. They hoped to recoup $24 million even before the film opened in exhibitors’ guarantees. New York cinemas were asked to pledge a minimum $150,000 income from seat sales, and a twelve-week run. In New Jersey the figure dropped to $50,000, but with no promise of exclusivity. Each cinema was levied $2000 for promotion. Nervous about a December release, many exhibitors pressed Columbia to bring the film forward to mid-November, giving a chance for word-of-mouth to build before the Christmas season. The studio agreed, over protests from Spielberg, who would always argue that he’d never been given time to finish the film as he wanted.

After watching a rough cut, Daniel Melnick, who’d become head of production, pointed out to Spielberg that The Exorcist had gained a box-office boost from an eerie pre-credit sequence, added much later, of Max von Sydow encountering the devil in the deserts of Iraq. Close Encounters might do the same. Melnick personally went before the board to extract the $4 million needed for such an opening scene, and for more exotic locations.

In February 1977, while he thought about a possible new introductory sequence, Spielberg went to Bombay to shoot scenes of locals re-enacting their own close encounter. It was a nightmare, with extras unable to remember the film’s five-note musical motif, nor co-ordinate their single gesture, pointing in unison at the sky when the investigators asked where the sound had come from. Evenings were spent in mutual complaint sessions with Douglas Slocombe and his crew, the basis of an enduring friendship between the two men. The visit also produced a useful addition to the film. Passing an oil refinery festooned with lights, Spielberg fused the image with the inverted lights of the San Fernando Valley to create a new vision of the alien mother ship.

Julia Phillips’s drug problem was now common knowledge, exacerbated by some incautious TV interviews given when she was obviously spaced out. On the way back from India, Spielberg had to stand over her while she flushed her precious supplies of the potent local hash down the toilet; he couldn’t afford to have her arrested as she arrived back in the US. When Jeff Walker, then West Coast editor of the alternative magazine Crawdaddy, interviewed him towards the end of the shoot, a casual question about Carlos Castaneda triggered a detailed rejection of hallucinogens. ‘He absolutely wanted it to be known that no, he never took LSD, he never took drugs, that it was not a factor in his film-making or his artistic consciousness.’

For the new opening, Spielberg had written scenes of Amazon Indians encountering World War II aircraft in the jungle, but, flinching from yet more inoculations, he reset them in Sonora, Mexico. In May, Truffaut and Balaban were recalled to Lake Mirage in the Mojave Desert where Lacombe discovers a squadron of World War II planes, still miraculously preserved in the same condition as when they flew into the Bermuda Triangle thirty years before.

John Williams’s music had maximised the momentum of Jaws, but Spielberg wanted less from him now. Unlike Star Wars, the raw narrative of which Williams chromed in Straussian brass and clashing cymbals, Close Encounters’ music is mostly questioning horns and misterioso strings in the style of Bernard Herrmann, rising occasionally in a crescendo that ceases abruptly, with a bump, as if of astonishment. The most distinctive motif is the aliens’ five-note call, which Spielberg chose from hundreds picked out by Williams on the piano in an all-day session. He didn’t want it to sound like door chimes, but this was often how it was to be used. Roger Moore punches it out on a keypad in Moonraker, and Vilmos Zsigmond had his chimes altered to play the five-note theme.

During this period, Spielberg added another anecdote to his growing legend. Noticing a gawky thirteen-year-old boy wandering round the set, he offered him a Coke, and found that he was Patrick Read Johnson from Wadsworth, Illinois. His mother, desperate at his obsession with film and persistent production of 8mm movies, had written to Herb Lightman, editor of American Cinematographer magazine, begging him to show the boy round Hollywood. Lightman took Patrick with him on a set visit to Close Encounters, and Spielberg, impressed, invited him to a preview of Star Wars. (Johnson later became a special-effects technician. In 1980 Spielberg persuaded Disney to release his first feature, Spaced Invaders.)

Spielberg was glad that Close Encounters bore little resemblance to Star Wars. The differences encouraged him to make his film even more prosaic. Long domestic arguments between Neary and his wife were left in, and he also retained a visit by Neary to the power station where he works and a sequence where, gripped by the implanted vision of Devil’s Tower, he loots his own yard and that of neighbours to build a huge model in his living room.

In May, the Lucases fled to Maui to escape the expected bloodbath of Star Wars’ opening. When it became clear that the film was a hit, Spielberg himself, with Amy, took a week’s break from the treadmill of supervising special effects. It was there, on the beach at Mauna Kea, that he and Lucas discussed Raiders of the Lost Ark and planned their radical business strategy. Afterwards, Spielberg returned to LA and the last and most nerve-racking part of the production process, the fine tuning of the film and the preparation of publicity and promotion. But nobody who had seen Close Encounters doubted that it would be a masterpiece. On his last day, Dreyfuss went up to Spielberg. This has been the most horrible experience of my life,’ he told him, ‘and thank you so much.’