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Description
Lets now look into the first of two highly acclaimed alien visitor films from film legend Steven Spielberg.

In the Sonoran Desert, French scientist Claude Lacombe, his American interpreter, cartographer David Laughlin, and other researchers discover a flight of Grumman TBM Avengers that went missing shortly after World War II. The planes are in perfect condition, but without any occupants. An elderly witness nearby claims "the sun came out at night, and sang to him." The researchers are similarly baffled to find the SS Cotopaxi in the middle of the Gobi Desert, intact and completely empty. Elsewhere in the United States, air traffic controllers watch two airline flights narrowly avoid a mid-air collision with an unidentified flying object (UFO).
At a rural home, three-year-old Barry Guiler wakes to find his toys operating on their own. He starts to follow something outside, forcing his mother, Jillian, to chase after him. Large-scale power outages begin rolling through the area, forcing electrician Roy Neary to investigate. While he gets his bearings Roy experiences a close encounter with a UFO, and when it flies over his truck it lightly burns the side of his face with its lights. The UFO takes off with three others in the sky, as Roy and three police cars give chase. The spacecrafts fly off into the night sky but the metaphysical experience leaves Roy mesmerized. He becomes fascinated by UFOs to the dismay of his wife, Ronnie, and begins obsessing over subliminal images of a mountain-like shape, often making models of it. Jillian meanwhile also becomes obsessed, sketching the unique mountain image. Soon after, she is terrorized in her home by a UFO which descends from the clouds. She fights off violent attempts by the UFO and unseen beings to enter the home, but in the chaos Barry is abducted.
Lacombe and Laughlin—along with a group of United Nations experts—continue to investigate increasing UFO activity and strange, related occurrences. Witnesses in Dharamsala, Northern India report that the UFOs make distinctive sounds: a five-tone musical phrase in a major scale. Scientists broadcast the phrase to outer space, but are mystified by the response: a seemingly meaningless series of numbers (104 44 30 40 36 10) repeated over and over until Laughlin, with his background in cartography, recognizes it as a set of geographical coordinates, which point to Devils Tower near Moorcroft, Wyoming. Lacombe and the U.S. military converge on Wyoming. The United States Army evacuates the area, planting false reports in the media that a train wreck has spilled a toxic nerve gas, all the while preparing a secret landing zone for the UFOs and their occupants.
Meanwhile, Roy becomes increasingly erratic and causes Ronnie to abandon him, taking their three children with her. When a news program about the train wreck near Devils Tower airs on television, Roy and Jillian see the same broadcast, realizing it's the same mountain they've been seeing. They, along with other travelers experiencing the same visions, set out for Devils Tower in spite of the public warnings about nerve gas.
While most of the travelers are apprehended by the Army, Roy and Jillian persist and make it to the site just as UFOs appear in the night sky. The government specialists at the site begin to communicate with the UFOs, that gradually appear by the dozens, by use of light and sound on a large electrical billboard. Following this, an enormous mother ship lands at the site, releasing the missing pilots from Flight 19 and sailors from the Cotopaxi, and over a dozen other abductees, from long-missing adults to children, and even a few animals, all from different past eras and all of whom have strangely not aged since their abductions. Barry is also returned and reunited with a relieved Jillian. The government officials decide to include Roy in a group of people whom they had selected to be potential visitors to the mothership, hastily preparing him.
As the extraterrestrials finally emerge from the mothership, they select Roy to join them on their travels. As Roy enters the mothership, one of the extraterrestrials pauses for a few moments with the humans. Lacombe uses Curwen hand signs that correspond to the five-note extraterrestrial tonal phrase. The extraterrestrial replies with the same gestures, smiles, and returns to its ship, which ascends into space.

Pros:
1. Very likeable characters like Roy, Claude, Jillian, David, and Barry.
2. The aliens are also really likeable, and unlike most other alien movies, they aren't antagonists or villains.
3. Very appealing sets and locations.
4. The designs for the aliens and their ships are really well crafted.
5. Plenty of memorable scenes and quotes that can be comedic, dramatic, or suspenseful.
6. A great mix of sci-fi, suspense, and drama.
7. John Williams delivers a spectacular and majestic score, and this is the same year he did the music for Star Wars.
8. Stupendous special effects.
9. Stellar performances from the cast.
10. Great chemistry and development from the characters.
11. A very well written story with a unique spin on most alien visitor movies where instead of wanting to conquer or destroy Earth, these aliens just want to communicate with us. The ending is also really beautiful.

Cons:
1. Ronnie isn't very likeable sometimes.
2. It can drag at times.

Overall:
This is a definite science fiction classic, and among one of Spielberg's best works. This is an absolute must watch.

Rating:
9.5/10 (Amazing to Perfect)

Production Notes and Trivia:
1. The film's origins can be traced to director Steven Spielberg's childhood, when he and his father watched a meteor shower in New Jersey. At the age of 18, Spielberg completed the full-length science fiction film Firelight. Many scenes from Firelight were incorporated in Close Encounters on a shot-for-shot basis. In 1970 he wrote a short story entitled "Experiences" about a lovers' lane in a Midwestern farming community and the "light show" a group of teenagers see in the night sky. In late 1973, after completing work on The Sugarland Express, Spielberg developed a deal with Columbia Pictures for a science-fiction film. 20th Century Fox had previously turned down the offer. Julia and Michael Phillips signed on as producers.
2. He first considered doing a documentary or a low-budget feature film about people who believed in UFOs. Spielberg decided "a film that depended on state of the art technology couldn't be made for $2.5 million." Borrowing a phrase from the ending of The Thing from Another World, he retitled the film Watch the Skies, rewriting the premise concerning Project Blue Book and pitching the concept to Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. Katz remembered: "It had flying saucers from outer space landing on Robertson Boulevard [in West Hollywood, California]. I go, Steve, that's the worst idea I ever heard." Spielberg brought Paul Schrader to write the script in December 1973 with principal photography to begin in late 1974. To discuss the script, Spielberg visited the home where Schrader lived with his brother Leonard.[19] However, Spielberg started work on Jaws in 1974, pushing Watch the Skies back.
3. With the financial and critical success of Jaws, Spielberg was able to negotiate a vast amount of creative control from Columbia, including the right to make the film any way he wanted. Schrader turned in his script, which Spielberg called "one of the most embarrassing screenplays ever professionally turned in to a major film studio or director" and "a terribly guilt-ridden story not about UFOs at all." Titled Kingdom Come, the script's protagonist was a 45-year-old Air Force officer named Paul Van Owen who worked with Project Blue Book. "[His] job for the government is to ridicule and debunk flying saucers." Schrader continued: "One day he has an encounter. He goes to the government, threatening to blow the lid off to the public. Instead, he and the government spend 15 years trying to make contact."
4. Spielberg and Schrader experienced creative differences, hiring John Hill to rewrite. At one point the main character was a police officer. Spielberg "[found] it hard to identify with men in uniform. I wanted to have Mr. Everyday Regular Fella." Spielberg rejected the Schrader/Hill script during post-production on Jaws, reflecting that "they wanted to make it like a James Bond adventure".
5. David Giler performed a rewrite; Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, friends of Spielberg, suggested the plot device of a kidnapped child. Spielberg then began to write the script. The song "When You Wish upon a Star" from Pinocchio influenced Spielberg's writing style. "I hung my story on the mood the song created, the way it affected me personally." During pre-production, the title was changed from Kingdom Come to Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
6. J. Allen Hynek, who worked with the United States Air Force on Project Blue Book, was hired as a scientific consultant. Hynek felt that "even though the film is fiction, it's based for the most part on the known facts of the UFO mystery, and it certainly catches the flavor of the phenomenon. Spielberg was under enormous pressure to make another blockbuster after Jaws, but he decided to make a UFO film. He put his career on the line." USAF and NASA declined to cooperate on the film. In fact, NASA reportedly sent a twenty-page letter to Spielberg, telling him that releasing the film was dangerous. In an interview, he said: "I really found my faith when I heard that the Government was opposed to the film. If NASA took the time to write me a 20-page letter, then I knew there must be something happening."
7. Early in pre-production, Spielberg hired the film title designer Dan Perri to design a logotype for Close Encounters. Perri, who had previously worked on The Exorcist and Taxi Driver, produced a logotype in Handel Gothic typeface, with only a script to work from. Delighted with the result, Spielberg applied the logo to all production stationery and crew shirts. Unusually in filmmaking, Spielberg carried enough influence to maintain creative control over the film's entire branding and asked Perri to design the advertising campaign and title sequence for Close Encounters based on his logo. Perri later went on to design titles for many other major Hollywood pictures, including Star Wars, Raging Bull, and Airplane!.
8. Principal photography began on May 16, 1976, though an Associated Press report in August 1975 had suggested filming would start in late 1975. Spielberg did not want to do any location shooting because of his negative experience on Jaws and wanted to shoot Close Encounters entirely on sound stages, but eventually dropped the idea.
9. Filming took place in Burbank, California; Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming; two abandoned World War II airship hangars at the former Brookley Air Force Base in Mobile, Alabama; and the Louisville and Nashville Railroad depot in Bay Minette, Alabama. The home where Barry was abducted is located outside the town of Fairhope, Alabama. Roy Neary's home is at Carlisle Drive East in Mobile. The UFOs fly through the former toll booth at the Vincent Thomas Bridge, San Pedro, California. The Sonora Desert sequence was photographed at the Dumont Dunes, California, and the Dharmsala-India exteriors were filmed at the small village of Hal near Khalapur, 35 miles outside Mumbai, India. The hangars in Alabama were six times larger than the biggest sound stage in the world. Various technical and budgetary problems occurred during filming. Spielberg called Close Encounters "twice as bad and twice as expensive [as Jaws]".
10. Matters worsened when Columbia Pictures experienced financial difficulties. Spielberg claimed the film would cost $2.7 million to make in his original 1973 pitch to Columbia, although he revealed to producer Julia Philips that he knew the budget would have to be much higher; the final budget came to $19.4 million. Columbia studio executive John Veich remembered, "If we knew it was going to cost that much, we wouldn't have greenlighted it because we didn't have the money." Spielberg hired Joe Alves, his collaborator on Jaws, as production designer. In addition the 1976 Atlantic hurricane season brought tropical storms to Alabama. A large portion of the sound stage in Alabama was damaged because of a lightning strike. Columbia raised $7 million from three sources: Time Inc., EMI, and German tax shelters.
11. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond said that, during the time of shooting for the film, Spielberg got more ideas by watching films every night which in turn extended the production schedule because he was continually adding new scenes to be filmed. Zsigmond previously turned down the chance to work on Jaws. In her 1991 book You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, producer Julia Phillips wrote highly profane remarks about Spielberg, Zsigmond, and Truffaut, because she was fired during post-production due to a cocaine addiction. Phillips blamed it on Spielberg being a perfectionist.
12. Douglas Trumbull was the visual effects supervisor, while Carlo Rambaldi designed the extraterrestrials. Trumbull joked that the visual effects budget, at $3.3 million, could have been used to produce an additional film. His work helped lead to advances in motion control photography. The mother ship was designed by Ralph McQuarrie and built by Greg Jein. The look of the ship was inspired by an oil refinery Spielberg saw at night in India. Instead of the metallic hardware look used in Star Wars, the emphasis was on a more luminescent look for the UFOs. One of the UFO models was an oxygen mask with lights attached to it, used because of its irregular shape. As a subtle in-joke, Dennis Muren (who had just finished working on Star Wars) put a small R2-D2 model onto the underside of the mothership. The model of the mothership is now on display in the Smithsonian Institution's Air and Space Museum Udvar-Hazy Annex at Washington Dulles Airport in Chantilly, Virginia.
13. Close Encounters was filmed anamorphically and the visual effects sequences were shot on 70 mm film, which has greater resolution than the 35 mm film used for the rest of the production, so that when the miniature effects were combined with full-sized elements through an optical printer, the effects footage would still appear clear and sharp despite having lost a generation's worth of visual data. A test reel using computer-generated imagery was created for the UFOs, but Spielberg found it would be too expensive and ineffective since CGI was in its infancy in the mid-1970s.
14. The small extraterrestrials in the final scenes were played by fifty local six-year-old girls in Mobile, Alabama. That decision was requested by Spielberg because he felt "girls move more gracefully than boys". Puppetry was attempted for the extraterrestrials, but the idea failed. However, Rambaldi successfully used puppetry to depict two of the extraterrestrials, the first being a marionette (for the tall extraterrestrial that is the first to be seen emerging from the mothership in what was originally a test shot but eventually used in the final film) and an articulated puppet for the extraterrestrial that communicates via hand signals near the end of the film.
15. Close Encounters is the first collaboration between film editor Michael Kahn and Spielberg. Their working relationship has continued for the rest of Spielberg's films. Spielberg said that no film he has ever made since has been as hard to edit as the last 25 minutes of Close Encounters and that he and Kahn went through thousands of feet of footage to find the right shots for the end sequence. When Kahn and Spielberg completed the first cut of the film, Spielberg was dissatisfied, feeling "there wasn't enough wow-ness". Pick-ups were commissioned but cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond could not participate due to other commitments. John A. Alonzo, László Kovács, and Douglas Slocombe worked on the pick-ups. Lacombe was originally to find Flight 19 hidden in the Amazon Rainforest, but the idea was changed to the Sonoran Desert. Spielberg also took 7.5 minutes out from the preview.
16. In 1979, Columbia gave Spielberg $1.5 million to produce what became the "Special Edition" of the film. Spielberg added seven minutes of new footage, but also deleted or shortened various existing scenes by ten minutes, so that the Special Edition was three minutes shorter than the original 1977 release, running 132 minutes. The Special Edition featured several new character development scenes, the discovery of the SS Cotopaxi in the Gobi Desert, and a view of the inside of the mothership. Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Special Edition was released in August 1980. The 1980 Special Edition was the only version officially available for many years on VHS. Then, in 1990, The Criterion Collection offered two versions for LaserDisc, one a variant of the original 1977 edition (with subtle edits made by Spielberg—this became the syndicated television version), the other the Special Edition (programmed by the viewer using their LaserDisc player's remote features that predated the seamless branching of DVDs). In 1998, Spielberg recut Close Encounters again for the "Director's Cut", released on home video as simply the "Collector's Edition", which was released on home video and LaserDisc. This version of the film is a re-edit of the original 1977 release with some elements of the 1980 Special Edition, but omits the mothership interior scenes as Spielberg felt they should have remained a mystery. The director's cut is the longest release of the film, running at 137 minutes, two minutes longer than the theatrical version and five minutes longer than the special edition. Spielberg regards the "Collector's Edition" as his definitive version of the film. In tribute to the film's 30th anniversary, Sony Pictures released the film on DVD and Blu-ray in 2007. For the first time, all three versions were packaged together.

Description
Lets now look into the first of two highly acclaimed alien visitor films from film legend Steven Spielberg.

In the Sonoran Desert, French scientist Claude Lacombe, his American interpreter, cartographer David Laughlin, and other researchers discover a flight of Grumman TBM Avengers that went missing shortly after World War II. The planes are in perfect condition, but without any occupants. An elderly witness nearby claims "the sun came out at night, and sang to him." The researchers are similarly baffled to find the SS Cotopaxi in the middle of the Gobi Desert, intact and completely empty. Elsewhere in the United States, air traffic controllers watch two airline flights narrowly avoid a mid-air collision with an unidentified flying object (UFO).
At a rural home, three-year-old Barry Guiler wakes to find his toys operating on their own. He starts to follow something outside, forcing his mother, Jillian, to chase after him. Large-scale power outages begin rolling through the area, forcing electrician Roy Neary to investigate. While he gets his bearings Roy experiences a close encounter with a UFO, and when it flies over his truck it lightly burns the side of his face with its lights. The UFO takes off with three others in the sky, as Roy and three police cars give chase. The spacecrafts fly off into the night sky but the metaphysical experience leaves Roy mesmerized. He becomes fascinated by UFOs to the dismay of his wife, Ronnie, and begins obsessing over subliminal images of a mountain-like shape, often making models of it. Jillian meanwhile also becomes obsessed, sketching the unique mountain image. Soon after, she is terrorized in her home by a UFO which descends from the clouds. She fights off violent attempts by the UFO and unseen beings to enter the home, but in the chaos Barry is abducted.
Lacombe and Laughlin—along with a group of United Nations experts—continue to investigate increasing UFO activity and strange, related occurrences. Witnesses in Dharamsala, Northern India report that the UFOs make distinctive sounds: a five-tone musical phrase in a major scale. Scientists broadcast the phrase to outer space, but are mystified by the response: a seemingly meaningless series of numbers (104 44 30 40 36 10) repeated over and over until Laughlin, with his background in cartography, recognizes it as a set of geographical coordinates, which point to Devils Tower near Moorcroft, Wyoming. Lacombe and the U.S. military converge on Wyoming. The United States Army evacuates the area, planting false reports in the media that a train wreck has spilled a toxic nerve gas, all the while preparing a secret landing zone for the UFOs and their occupants.
Meanwhile, Roy becomes increasingly erratic and causes Ronnie to abandon him, taking their three children with her. When a news program about the train wreck near Devils Tower airs on television, Roy and Jillian see the same broadcast, realizing it's the same mountain they've been seeing. They, along with other travelers experiencing the same visions, set out for Devils Tower in spite of the public warnings about nerve gas.
While most of the travelers are apprehended by the Army, Roy and Jillian persist and make it to the site just as UFOs appear in the night sky. The government specialists at the site begin to communicate with the UFOs, that gradually appear by the dozens, by use of light and sound on a large electrical billboard. Following this, an enormous mother ship lands at the site, releasing the missing pilots from Flight 19 and sailors from the Cotopaxi, and over a dozen other abductees, from long-missing adults to children, and even a few animals, all from different past eras and all of whom have strangely not aged since their abductions. Barry is also returned and reunited with a relieved Jillian. The government officials decide to include Roy in a group of people whom they had selected to be potential visitors to the mothership, hastily preparing him.
As the extraterrestrials finally emerge from the mothership, they select Roy to join them on their travels. As Roy enters the mothership, one of the extraterrestrials pauses for a few moments with the humans. Lacombe uses Curwen hand signs that correspond to the five-note extraterrestrial tonal phrase. The extraterrestrial replies with the same gestures, smiles, and returns to its ship, which ascends into space.

Pros:
1. Very likeable characters like Roy, Claude, Jillian, David, and Barry.
2. The aliens are also really likeable, and unlike most other alien movies, they aren't antagonists or villains.
3. Very appealing sets and locations.
4. The designs for the aliens and their ships are really well crafted.
5. Plenty of memorable scenes and quotes that can be comedic, dramatic, or suspenseful.
6. A great mix of sci-fi, suspense, and drama.
7. John Williams delivers a spectacular and majestic score, and this is the same year he did the music for Star Wars.
8. Stupendous special effects.
9. Stellar performances from the cast.
10. Great chemistry and development from the characters.
11. A very well written story with a unique spin on most alien visitor movies where instead of wanting to conquer or destroy Earth, these aliens just want to communicate with us. The ending is also really beautiful.

Cons:
1. Ronnie isn't very likeable sometimes.
2. It can drag at times.

Overall:
This is a definite science fiction classic, and among one of Spielberg's best works. This is an absolute must watch.

Rating:
9.5/10 (Amazing to Perfect)

Production Notes and Trivia:
1. The film's origins can be traced to director Steven Spielberg's childhood, when he and his father watched a meteor shower in New Jersey. At the age of 18, Spielberg completed the full-length science fiction film Firelight. Many scenes from Firelight were incorporated in Close Encounters on a shot-for-shot basis. In 1970 he wrote a short story entitled "Experiences" about a lovers' lane in a Midwestern farming community and the "light show" a group of teenagers see in the night sky. In late 1973, after completing work on The Sugarland Express, Spielberg developed a deal with Columbia Pictures for a science-fiction film. 20th Century Fox had previously turned down the offer. Julia and Michael Phillips signed on as producers.
2. He first considered doing a documentary or a low-budget feature film about people who believed in UFOs. Spielberg decided "a film that depended on state of the art technology couldn't be made for $2.5 million." Borrowing a phrase from the ending of The Thing from Another World, he retitled the film Watch the Skies, rewriting the premise concerning Project Blue Book and pitching the concept to Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. Katz remembered: "It had flying saucers from outer space landing on Robertson Boulevard [in West Hollywood, California]. I go, Steve, that's the worst idea I ever heard." Spielberg brought Paul Schrader to write the script in December 1973 with principal photography to begin in late 1974. To discuss the script, Spielberg visited the home where Schrader lived with his brother Leonard.[19] However, Spielberg started work on Jaws in 1974, pushing Watch the Skies back.
3. With the financial and critical success of Jaws, Spielberg was able to negotiate a vast amount of creative control from Columbia, including the right to make the film any way he wanted. Schrader turned in his script, which Spielberg called "one of the most embarrassing screenplays ever professionally turned in to a major film studio or director" and "a terribly guilt-ridden story not about UFOs at all." Titled Kingdom Come, the script's protagonist was a 45-year-old Air Force officer named Paul Van Owen who worked with Project Blue Book. "[His] job for the government is to ridicule and debunk flying saucers." Schrader continued: "One day he has an encounter. He goes to the government, threatening to blow the lid off to the public. Instead, he and the government spend 15 years trying to make contact."
4. Spielberg and Schrader experienced creative differences, hiring John Hill to rewrite. At one point the main character was a police officer. Spielberg "[found] it hard to identify with men in uniform. I wanted to have Mr. Everyday Regular Fella." Spielberg rejected the Schrader/Hill script during post-production on Jaws, reflecting that "they wanted to make it like a James Bond adventure".
5. David Giler performed a rewrite; Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, friends of Spielberg, suggested the plot device of a kidnapped child. Spielberg then began to write the script. The song "When You Wish upon a Star" from Pinocchio influenced Spielberg's writing style. "I hung my story on the mood the song created, the way it affected me personally." During pre-production, the title was changed from Kingdom Come to Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
6. J. Allen Hynek, who worked with the United States Air Force on Project Blue Book, was hired as a scientific consultant. Hynek felt that "even though the film is fiction, it's based for the most part on the known facts of the UFO mystery, and it certainly catches the flavor of the phenomenon. Spielberg was under enormous pressure to make another blockbuster after Jaws, but he decided to make a UFO film. He put his career on the line." USAF and NASA declined to cooperate on the film. In fact, NASA reportedly sent a twenty-page letter to Spielberg, telling him that releasing the film was dangerous. In an interview, he said: "I really found my faith when I heard that the Government was opposed to the film. If NASA took the time to write me a 20-page letter, then I knew there must be something happening."
7. Early in pre-production, Spielberg hired the film title designer Dan Perri to design a logotype for Close Encounters. Perri, who had previously worked on The Exorcist and Taxi Driver, produced a logotype in Handel Gothic typeface, with only a script to work from. Delighted with the result, Spielberg applied the logo to all production stationery and crew shirts. Unusually in filmmaking, Spielberg carried enough influence to maintain creative control over the film's entire branding and asked Perri to design the advertising campaign and title sequence for Close Encounters based on his logo. Perri later went on to design titles for many other major Hollywood pictures, including Star Wars, Raging Bull, and Airplane!.
8. Principal photography began on May 16, 1976, though an Associated Press report in August 1975 had suggested filming would start in late 1975. Spielberg did not want to do any location shooting because of his negative experience on Jaws and wanted to shoot Close Encounters entirely on sound stages, but eventually dropped the idea.
9. Filming took place in Burbank, California; Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming; two abandoned World War II airship hangars at the former Brookley Air Force Base in Mobile, Alabama; and the Louisville and Nashville Railroad depot in Bay Minette, Alabama. The home where Barry was abducted is located outside the town of Fairhope, Alabama. Roy Neary's home is at Carlisle Drive East in Mobile. The UFOs fly through the former toll booth at the Vincent Thomas Bridge, San Pedro, California. The Sonora Desert sequence was photographed at the Dumont Dunes, California, and the Dharmsala-India exteriors were filmed at the small village of Hal near Khalapur, 35 miles outside Mumbai, India. The hangars in Alabama were six times larger than the biggest sound stage in the world. Various technical and budgetary problems occurred during filming. Spielberg called Close Encounters "twice as bad and twice as expensive [as Jaws]".
10. Matters worsened when Columbia Pictures experienced financial difficulties. Spielberg claimed the film would cost $2.7 million to make in his original 1973 pitch to Columbia, although he revealed to producer Julia Philips that he knew the budget would have to be much higher; the final budget came to $19.4 million. Columbia studio executive John Veich remembered, "If we knew it was going to cost that much, we wouldn't have greenlighted it because we didn't have the money." Spielberg hired Joe Alves, his collaborator on Jaws, as production designer. In addition the 1976 Atlantic hurricane season brought tropical storms to Alabama. A large portion of the sound stage in Alabama was damaged because of a lightning strike. Columbia raised $7 million from three sources: Time Inc., EMI, and German tax shelters.
11. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond said that, during the time of shooting for the film, Spielberg got more ideas by watching films every night which in turn extended the production schedule because he was continually adding new scenes to be filmed. Zsigmond previously turned down the chance to work on Jaws. In her 1991 book You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, producer Julia Phillips wrote highly profane remarks about Spielberg, Zsigmond, and Truffaut, because she was fired during post-production due to a cocaine addiction. Phillips blamed it on Spielberg being a perfectionist.
12. Douglas Trumbull was the visual effects supervisor, while Carlo Rambaldi designed the extraterrestrials. Trumbull joked that the visual effects budget, at $3.3 million, could have been used to produce an additional film. His work helped lead to advances in motion control photography. The mother ship was designed by Ralph McQuarrie and built by Greg Jein. The look of the ship was inspired by an oil refinery Spielberg saw at night in India. Instead of the metallic hardware look used in Star Wars, the emphasis was on a more luminescent look for the UFOs. One of the UFO models was an oxygen mask with lights attached to it, used because of its irregular shape. As a subtle in-joke, Dennis Muren (who had just finished working on Star Wars) put a small R2-D2 model onto the underside of the mothership. The model of the mothership is now on display in the Smithsonian Institution's Air and Space Museum Udvar-Hazy Annex at Washington Dulles Airport in Chantilly, Virginia.
13. Close Encounters was filmed anamorphically and the visual effects sequences were shot on 70 mm film, which has greater resolution than the 35 mm film used for the rest of the production, so that when the miniature effects were combined with full-sized elements through an optical printer, the effects footage would still appear clear and sharp despite having lost a generation's worth of visual data. A test reel using computer-generated imagery was created for the UFOs, but Spielberg found it would be too expensive and ineffective since CGI was in its infancy in the mid-1970s.
14. The small extraterrestrials in the final scenes were played by fifty local six-year-old girls in Mobile, Alabama. That decision was requested by Spielberg because he felt "girls move more gracefully than boys". Puppetry was attempted for the extraterrestrials, but the idea failed. However, Rambaldi successfully used puppetry to depict two of the extraterrestrials, the first being a marionette (for the tall extraterrestrial that is the first to be seen emerging from the mothership in what was originally a test shot but eventually used in the final film) and an articulated puppet for the extraterrestrial that communicates via hand signals near the end of the film.
15. Close Encounters is the first collaboration between film editor Michael Kahn and Spielberg. Their working relationship has continued for the rest of Spielberg's films. Spielberg said that no film he has ever made since has been as hard to edit as the last 25 minutes of Close Encounters and that he and Kahn went through thousands of feet of footage to find the right shots for the end sequence. When Kahn and Spielberg completed the first cut of the film, Spielberg was dissatisfied, feeling "there wasn't enough wow-ness". Pick-ups were commissioned but cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond could not participate due to other commitments. John A. Alonzo, László Kovács, and Douglas Slocombe worked on the pick-ups. Lacombe was originally to find Flight 19 hidden in the Amazon Rainforest, but the idea was changed to the Sonoran Desert. Spielberg also took 7.5 minutes out from the preview.
16. In 1979, Columbia gave Spielberg $1.5 million to produce what became the "Special Edition" of the film. Spielberg added seven minutes of new footage, but also deleted or shortened various existing scenes by ten minutes, so that the Special Edition was three minutes shorter than the original 1977 release, running 132 minutes. The Special Edition featured several new character development scenes, the discovery of the SS Cotopaxi in the Gobi Desert, and a view of the inside of the mothership. Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Special Edition was released in August 1980. The 1980 Special Edition was the only version officially available for many years on VHS. Then, in 1990, The Criterion Collection offered two versions for LaserDisc, one a variant of the original 1977 edition (with subtle edits made by Spielberg—this became the syndicated television version), the other the Special Edition (programmed by the viewer using their LaserDisc player's remote features that predated the seamless branching of DVDs). In 1998, Spielberg recut Close Encounters again for the "Director's Cut", released on home video as simply the "Collector's Edition", which was released on home video and LaserDisc. This version of the film is a re-edit of the original 1977 release with some elements of the 1980 Special Edition, but omits the mothership interior scenes as Spielberg felt they should have remained a mystery. The director's cut is the longest release of the film, running at 137 minutes, two minutes longer than the theatrical version and five minutes longer than the special edition. Spielberg regards the "Collector's Edition" as his definitive version of the film. In tribute to the film's 30th anniversary, Sony Pictures released the film on DVD and Blu-ray in 2007. For the first time, all three versions were packaged together.