Close Encounters of the Third Kind

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This article is about the film; for the classification, see Close encounter.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) is a science-fiction movie about UFOs, written and directed by Steven Spielberg. It stars Richard Dreyfuss, François Truffaut, Bob Balaban, Melinda Dillon, Teri Garr, and Cary Guffey. The movie has visual effects by Douglas Trumbull and a score composed by John Williams.

Close Encounters was perhaps the most important science fiction movie up to that point to introduce benign or even kind aliens, a sharp departure from the 'evil monster' style of most earlier films. It popularised a number of motifs, most of which were drawn from earlier (and purportedly genuine) UFO encounters: alien abduction, small and thin aliens ("greys"), and UFOs covered in lights rather than the disc shapes more popular in the 1950s and 1960s, and so on. (The moral contradiction between the aliens' "kindness" and the forced abductions they conduct is left unexplored).

The movie has been revised numerous times, notably for a 132-minute "special edition" reissue in 1980 and again for a 137-minute "collector's edition" in 1988. The Special Edition features several new character development scenes, the discovery of a lost ship, the Cotopaxi, in the Gobi Desert, and a view of the inside of the mothership. The interior of the mothership is deleted from the Collector's Edition (Spielberg added this scene as a concession to be allowed to make the Special Edition. He decided it was a mistake and removed it in the later edition).

1 Plot Overview
2 Trivia
3 See also
4 External links

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Plot Overview

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The movie plot has three basic threads:

A group of scientific researchers including Lacombe (Truffaut) and Laughlin (Balaban) investigate UFO reports worldwide, and discover a lost squadron of World War II aircraft (see Flight 19) in a Mexican desert.
Indiana electrical lineman Roy Neary (Dreyfuss) experiences a close encounter of the second kind (a sighting that leaves physical evidence) and thereafter becomes obsessed with UFOs, to the great dismay of his family. He begins making endless models of a distinctive mountain or hill - a place he has never actually seen, and with which he is unfamiliar. At one point, he and his wife attend a meeting featuring both patronizing and skeptical government officials, and an archetypal crackpot ("I saw Bigfoot once!")
Jillian Guiler (Dillon) witnesses the UFOs as well, then loses her son Barry (Guffey) to aliens who come to her home. It turns out that she has also been obsessed with the mental picture of a unique-looking mountain.

After Neary's increasingly bizarre conduct causes his family to abandon him, he sees the feature he has been modelling on a television news show. It turns out to be Devil's Tower in Wyoming. Jillian Guiler sees the same broadcast. He and others with similar experiences obsessively head towards the site. He meets up with Guiler en route. Elsewhere in the world, the pace of alien activity is increasing. Claude Lacombe (a character based on Jacques Vallee, played by Truffaut) investigates a host of weird occurrences along with other United Nations experts. The obsessives and the experts eventually meet up at Devils Tower. The United States Army evacuates the area after spreading false reports that a train wreck has spilled highly dangerous nerve gas.

Neary and Guiler persist, and eventually see dozens of spacecraft appear, culminating with appearances from extraterrestrials, and the return of people who'd been abducted, including Guiler's young son Barry. At the end of the film, the aliens take Neary on board their ship and take off for the stars. Many people believe that the aliens took Neary and a group of specially trained Astronauts aboard, but this is incorrect - they only took Neary (Collection Edition).

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Trivia

Spielberg was given an unprecedented budget of US $20M (1977). However, the film lacked the merchandising and sequel potential of Star Wars, hence the drive to extract extra earnings by releasing 'Special Editions'.
When the original director of Jaws 2 was fired, Spielberg considered taking over. However, his contractual obligations to Close Encounters of the Third Kind meant that production on the sequel would have been delayed by an expensive year.
The five tones that the space ship plays back and forth with the humans have shown up in later movies and TV shows, notably as a code entered on a pushbutton keypad in Moonraker of the James Bond series.
The motif woven through the film is re - mi - do - do (octave lower) - sol. At the climactic scene, François Truffaut and the alien use Kodály Hand Signs to express this motif. The alien smiles after doing so; Spielberg was slightly surprised and pleased that the prop could muster the facial gesture.
Astronomer J. Allen Hynek, a UFO researcher who coined the term "close encounter", was a consultant for the film, makes a cameo appearance.
Dr. Jacques Vallee served as a model for the character of the French scientist Lacome played by François Truffaut. Vallee met Hynek while studying for his Ph.D. at Northwestern University.
A model of the mothership used during filming is on display at the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Northern Virginia; the model includes a number of easter egg (virtual) type hidden objects integrated in and around the ship's antennas, domes and other structures. Examples include a 1930s automobile, a VW Bus and a small model of R2-D2.
During an interview years later, Richard Dreyfuss was asked whether there would ever be a sequel to Close Encounters. He responded that, "The sequel to Close Encounters was E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial."
Spielberg would return to the "evil alien" with his 2005 version of War of the Worlds.
To those familiar with the filming site, there is some geographic license taken in the famous scene in which Richard Dreyfuss' character Roy Neary is on his way to investigate the blackout. He is on Cornbread Rd. and he stops on a railroad crossing, and becomes enveloped in light from the UFO. Cornbread Rd exists, the railroad crossing, however, does not. Cornbread Rd. runs mostly parallel to the CSX Transportation line that comes close, but never crosses.
Spielberg initially wanted the mothership to be very dark, but later on decided to make it extremely bright. He also decorated it with several odd objects, including a cemetery and an upside-down R2-D2.
The synthesizer used to communicate with the aliens at the end of the film is an ARP 2500 modular system. Phil Dodds, a tech from ARP Instruments Inc., is the man playing the keyboard.