Science Fiction in Steven Spielberg’s Suburbia
Steven Spielberg could see it all from the picture window of his house high up in Hollywood’s Coldwater Canyon. The purple smog was at low tide, thick, noxious air resting like a horse blanket on the hills and the city. In the clearness above it, a fine blue sky turned dark. A thin slice of moon appeared just over the hills.
Short, wiry and easily amused, the director wore jeans and a beat-up sweat shirt with a Jaws logo on the back. He was suffering the week’s wait before his new movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, would go public and set new attendance records, before the phrase “close encounters” would become a new catchword in the funny papers and monologues, as “jaws” had in 1975.
Close Encounters itself was about, well, it’s like that story of a tree so tall it took two men to see the top of it. Unidentified Flying Objects, let’s say, on the street where you live. Spielberg had watched his movie forty-eight complete times, shot new footage and recut some scenes right up to the last minute before he allowed the studio to lay hands on his film canisters. His nails looked like he’d gotten his last manicure from a pencil sharpener. But he seemed so focused, so resolute. He wasn’t nervous, was he?
“Every nerve ending!” he croaked. “Can’t you see them standing up in my arm?” He led me through the house of high ceilings and Arizona decoration, talking not much faster than an auctioneer. “It seems like all the forces of nature and Zeus are mustered against you. Like Fantasia: dodging lightning bolts from the clouds. That’s exactly what happened on this film.”
Nineteen million dollars wouldn’t scare Spielberg. He’d spent that much telling his story, and in Hollywood today that means a dandy incentive plan. “If I ever stop to consider that if Close Encounters doesn’t break even,” he said, firm of face, “Columbia Pictures will be a pinball machine company…aaah, I would be very disturbed.” (John Milius, the director and Spielberg’s skeet-shooting pal, had told him, “Either it’ll be the best Columbia movie, or it’ll be the last one.”)
Last time out, just to survive the Jaws previews, he’d had to boil himself in Valium. “I was semiconscious throughout the entire movie,” he recalled enthusiastically as he settled beneath a white lamp in the sitting room. “I remember I was in a daze and couldn’t sit down in a theater seat, so I stood by the exit. In the second reel of the picture, after the kid was killed on the raft, I see our first walk out. Which is a very scary thing, when you see a person walking out of your movie. And this person begins walking up the aisle. And then begins running, then begins speeding! I realize, this guy not only hates the movie, he’s running out of this film. He passes me, then he stops. And he begins throwing up all over the carpeting of the lobby. Found his way into the bathroom. Came out, wiping his mouth, went back to his seat. Suddenly,” Spielberg crowed joyfully, “I was, you know, conscious again.”
We laughed it off. I told him that seeing Close Encounters left me with a long night full of pursuit dreams. He was delighted.
“When I was making the movie I had dreams that were very strange. I had dreams of being pursued, and being watched, and dreams of things outside my window that were trying to get me to come outdoors. Which I refused to do. I had many of those dreams, beckoning me to leave the house and stand in the backyard…that made me wonder what they meant, and why was I supposed to go out in the backyard, and why was I so frightened about standing out in the backyard when I was asked to go out and look at the sky?”
He settled back in his chair. Outside his picture window was the puffy evening mist.
Close Encounters is a long dream that asks us to go outside and look at the sky. The sky is full of questions. But you have to figure it out. Passive viewing won’t work. Like Jaws, it’s a masterpiece of storytelling. The Great Being’s presence is not exploited so much as the mystery of the arrival is dramatized.
When we finally see the spaceships, we know only that we see shapes, shadows, lights. Nothing is specific.
The movie opens: danger music surrounds a furious desert sandstorm. Two headlights drift out of the windy depths. Is that what we think it is? A figure gropes along a battered fence, shouting, “Are we the first ones here?”
The name Spielberg is German for “play mountain.” He has a fine sense of play. There is wit even in the white knuckle scenes. A house is under siege by unknown forces and the woman inside (Melinda Dillon) sees all the electrical appliances go berserk and she clutches her child (Cary Guffey) to her bosom. Suddenly the stereo snaps on and it’s Johnny Mathis crooning “Chances Are.” They appear to be slow dancing!
“When I was making the movie I had dreams that were very strange. I had dreams of being pursued, and being watched, and dreams of things outside my window that were trying to get me to come outdoors.”
We care about these characters. Unlike disaster movies where you see the usual crowd of schlemiels get rubbed out, Close Encounters was made by a man who is interested in people. At the lead is Roy Neary, played by Richard Dreyfuss, an everyday kind of fellow who encounters a UFO. His head filled with inexplicable visions, his American world turned upside down, he has a new destination, unnamed. He is possessed, and we know where that gets you.
Spielberg sings to innocence. We see one dazzled face reverberate in three people — a baby boy, a synthesizer musician whose duet with the extraterrestrials is the first dialogue, and finally the Distant Stranger. Even Francois Truffaut, the French director Spielberg persuaded to perform here, has a magical, saintly face.
Spielberg gets the “Visual Effects Concepts” credit, even while working with special effects wizard Doug Trumbull, of 2001 fame, and a stable full of the best cameramen. His movie frame is a broad, deep canvas, swept by locomotion. “It’s like a tapestry,” he once said, describing the job of gathering together all his images. He draws every scene in intricate detail before shooting. Aided by state-of-the-art cameras with computer memories, he superimposed layers and layers of shots on film, giving the appearance of absolute reality to all manner of weird monkey business. To an Alabama landscape he added a sky full of stars, miniature trees and many Great Beings. The colossal Mother Ship was inspired by an oil refinery in Bombay which he saw all lit up one night. He thought it would scare the daylights out of anyone if it landed in their backyard. The spaceship model now fills his three-car garage.
The night sky is so important it almost becomes one of the movie’s characters. Sitting in Spielberg’s darkening living room, I mentioned that most of the strange events in this movie happen at night.
“Most do happen at night,” he nodded, “although there were some spectacular daylight sightings that I’ve read about. But also, I wrote the screenplay from eleven to eight o’clock in the morning because I was editing Jaws in the daytime. I’d come home, have dinner, rest for a few hours, and start writing Close Encounters. Subconsciously you begin writing about your environment while you’re behind the typewriter. I expect if I had written the film in daylight, there would be more daylight scenes, and perhaps some daylight encounters.
“I’m a night person, basically. I always stay up late, I sleep late in the mornings. I love the night.”
Our attention was drawn to the skies in this movie.
“Oh, the starry skies.” He pushed his wire-framed glasses up his nose. “When I was first planning the movie, I felt like I had to frame everything with more sky than ground. So a lot of the shots have more sky than ground. I felt the sky was as important to the suspense and mystery of Close Encounters as the water was to Jaws. In Jaws, all you had to do was cut to the water and it was an implied threat, the simple water horizon line. In Close Encounters, I felt the sky was important as a positive energy mural.
“This film will only be successful if, when people see it, they come out of the theater looking up at the sky. If they come out looking for their car keys, we’re in big trouble.”
Do you fly?
“Ho, ho, me? Elevators and airplanes, forget it. Terrified.”
He turned serious. “My whole thing about taking special effects to the limit — where there is nothing to criticize because you can’t see how it was done — it stems from being in school and hearing the word ‘fakey.’ You know, you could go back to class on Monday after everyone’s seen a movie over the weekend. ‘How’d you like the film?’ ‘Ah, that was kind of fakey. Those weren’t dinosaurs, those were big lizards with things glued on their backs. That wasn’t a brontosaur, that was a Gila monster.’
“I really do think that kids notice flaws in films more than adults. I get a lot of letters from kids who say, ‘I love Jaws even though the shark was only mechanical.'”
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