The Making of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"

or, how big-budget movies become big-budget movies

In many ways, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a classic example of how big-budget pictures become big-budget pictures, often to the great surprise of everyone involved.

In 1973, in adjoining studios on the Universal lot, Steven Spielberg was directing his first feature, Sugarland Express, and Julia and Michael Phillips were coproducing (with Tony Bill) The Sting, their second try following a flop, Steelyard Blues. With no hits behind them at that point, the Phillipses and Spielberg began discussing the possibility of a movie "about UFOs and Watergate," dealing with an Air Force officer frustrated at cover-ups of sightings in the sky.

So they took the idea to Columbia's newly installed president, David Begelman, who asked the obvious question first: What was this picture about UFOs going to cost?

"Steve blurted out $2,700,000," Michael remembers. "But it was meaningless. There wasn't even a script. But it was a figure that came back to haunt us many times over the years."

Columbia agreed to finance a script and a couple of writers went to work on Spielberg's idea while he set about preparing Jaws and the Phillipses finished releasing The Sting. Pause now for a couple of years until the three principals are rich and successful from those two enormous hits--a slight change that caused a quantum leap in (continued on page 272)"Close Encounters"(continued from page 157) Columbia's enchantment with Encounters.

By now, Spielberg had tossed out two scripts by others and had written one himself, radically changing the story line, with an emphasis on an average guy's encounter with UFOs, whose presence onscreen would require special effects never tried before. With the addition of those special effects, Encounters started shaping up as a very expensive undertaking.

"But from Columbia's viewpoint, the risks were now different," Michael believes. "If Jaws had not been such a success, it's really doubtful that Columbia would have gone very high on Encounters. It would not have made sense. But the faith in Steven and us by then was running pretty deep."

Still, it looked like the picture might be too expensive to make. It didn't have a typhoon or a big ape that wouldn't walk, but the concept was growing. Technology costs, and it had a lot of ingredients that had never been tried before. Also, Columbia was not on sound financial footing two years ago. They would have problems getting the money. Begelman would have to persuade the people at the parent company and they would have to persuade the bankers.

"Fortunately," Michael continues, "the definition of an expensive film suddenly changed rapidly in Hollywood. Every studio was working on $8,000,000 and $10,000,000 films. Besides, I think Columbia always believed this could be their biggest film of all time. It could solve their financial problems in one fell swoop. It would be a big gamble but the best place to put their money. Better than spreading the same amount over three pictures of limited appeal."

Begelman was well aware of the gossip. "The rumormongers and knockers were everywhere," he says. "Warren Beatty got a lot of the same talk when he came here with Shampoo. But Steven, Michael and Julia recognized I had a lot of faith in their film, even when the costs started going up. Sometimes, I gulped and gulped again at the budget, but I finally said, 'Let's make this picture.' Columbia needed a hit and I always felt Encounters could be the one to test the world record."

Hailing a "Taxi"

Ironically, though, the studio had made another decision in 1973 that was to be a boon two years later, when more money was needed for Close Encounters. In a highly offhand manner, Columbia bought another Phillips project at the same time, a distasteful tale about a crazy New York taxi driver.

Released just before Close Encounters started rolling in 1976, Taxi Driver pulled in more than $12,000,000 to Columbia's coffers, relieving the company's cash squeeze, which had already been eased considerably the year before by hits such as Funny Lady, Shampoo and Tommy. Most importantly, Taxi Driver was another psychological victory for Phillips, making it almost rude for Columbia to quibble about a few more millions for Close Encounters.

With Michael embroiled in Taxi, the full weight of pushing Encounters fell upon, by then, ex-wife Julia, who gets everybody's credit for keeping the project rolling over the mounting production estimates. Through seven drafts of the script, she quarreled with the front office over money. "That first $2,700,000 budget was a figure in search of a story," she notes. Then it went to $4,100,000, to $4,400,000, to $5,500,000, where the studio wanted her to accept a green light to go. At $6,700,000, she was in New York, when she got an emergency call to come back because the computer had coughed out a $9,000,000 total. Hurrying back, she pushed it down to $7,000,000, but it was back up to $9,000,000 in a week.

"All budgets are fantasyland," Julia complains. "One week before shooting, the studio was still trying to get us to cut a week out. But you always keep in mind that the money is finite. God forbid that it should run out and force you into one week of dubbing. This was particularly intense because of Columbia's cash-flow problems. I've continually had to go back for more money and each time it gets harder and harder.

"You know what finally settled the debate? We had found the location in Mobile where we would need 5000 yards of black velvet for the set. And if we didn't order the fucking black velvet by that day, it couldn't be ready. And that's the day we got the green light, at a budget of $11,900,000."

Finally, it starts

On May 14, 1976, Spielberg and 113 others boarded a chartered jet out of L.A. International Airport, bound for Gillette, Wyoming, where he would establish Richard Dreyfuss and his costars as plain folk encountering UFOs. Though much of the action takes place in the Wyoming wilds, Spielberg had no intention of actually shooting the entire picture on location. After his weather-beaten bouts with Jaws, he insisted on a controlled environment, where his expensive equipment--and he--could be sheltered.

But there are no Hollywood sound stages big enough to re-create an entire Wyoming countryside where spaceships can flit about. After a long search, Spielberg found a hangar in Mobile, Alabama, that was six times bigger than any existing stage.

That was where he would duplicate the landscape. While he shot the necessary relative scenes in the real Wyoming, construction crews rushed to finish the mammoth set, using ten miles of lumber, three miles of steel scaffolding, two miles of steel cable and enough concrete to build the Washington Monument. In film making, these are the millions of dollars that are never fully committed until the picture is a sure thing. Consequently, no matter how carefully budgeted, big pictures are usually behind schedule from the day they start, with directors trying to get the easy shots out of the way somewhere while the sets and the hard technology get into place. Like an airline captain who runs short of fuel between San Francisco and Honolulu, it's considered bad form for a director to run out of scenes to shoot, with fixed costs continuing at $50,000 a day.

For Spielberg, the move from Wyoming to Mobile was a flashback. "One of the cost tragedies in Close Encounters was that when it came time to move onto the big set, the set wasn't ready for us," he says. "I blew my cover because we were all guaranteed that the set would be ready on a certain July date. When it came time to move onto the big set, we were left looking for inserts for two weeks."

Hung up in a hangar

Like the ocean off Martha's Vineyard, Spielberg's Alabama hangar proved to have its own temperament, with rain clouds forming 120 feet in the air, drizzling down on those below, choking in the humidity. The director bought $150,000 worth of new air-conditioning gear but never got the temperature below 90 degrees.

Though the set was heavily guarded to keep the plot a secret, it's doubtful that anyone sneaking through would have stolen any clear idea of what was going on. Much of the time, the cast was costarring with great stretches of nothing. "A lot of it was reacting to things that weren't there yet," Spielberg explains, noting that it would be many months before the special effects were laid in and he himself knew what the film looked like.

To give the cast more to react to, Spielberg and effects specialist Doug (2001) Trumbull spent about a week and $200,000 trying a 70mm front-projection system for the first time. (One of the earliest special effects in film making, of course, is rear-screen projection, the showing of one film on a screen behind the actors in the one being shot--for example, the trees rolling by behind the actors in a stationary car. Often, it looks faked. Front projection is a much more advanced and difficult way to introduce prefilmed action into the scene so that it interplays realistically with the performance.)

"We were going to shoot all of the effects of people in groups watching the events unfold. It had never been done before," Spielberg explains. "Kubrick could use an 8 x 10 still projector on all of his front-projection shots in 2001; those were stills, not movies. We wanted to have movies, just as clear, sharp and lifelike as 2001, but it just didn't work out that way. That's an example of the money you lose when things you thought would work don't work."

More often, though, dollars fly in less dramatic directions. Spielberg says, "The increases sort of creep up on you. You wake up in the morning and find out that the scaffolding that cost $150,000 has to be rebuilt because it doesn't meet with the approval of the Alabama building code. Then somebody taps you on your other shoulder, and you discover the weather has blown down the set and you have to rebuild. Then you discover that the 100 extras look like 25 extras on a set as big as the Super Bowl."

Sometimes, however, the dollar god is kind--at least if he has an exchange rate in frozen Indian rupees. Much earlier, when Spielberg was still at the typewriter, he randomly picked Bombay as the exotic site for a mystical sequence. Whether he would ever get there, however, became a point of constant negotiation.

"Bombay was always the big threat--the big stick," Spielberg recalls. " 'If you want to go to Bombay, finish by the 15th.' 'If you want to go to Bombay, finish by the 21st,' finish by July or something. That was always the big threat hanging over our heads, and I thought Bombay was essential to the storytelling because it provided a major clue to some of the mystery.

"Fortunately and surprisingly, Bombay was the least expensive facet. Columbia had blocked, frozen rupees there that in American dollars--including air fare for four people from this country and air fare for another three from Europe, two days' shooting and four days of preparation with 3000 extras--cost only 50 grand, that's all."

Hauling Dirt to the Desert

By comparison, the last two days' shooting cost twice as much on the El Mirage Desert, an hour's drive from Hollywood. For those connected with the picture, it is more literally an hour's ride with a Teamster driver. Under the town's rigid work rules--some call it a feather-bedding system designed to create unneeded jobs--nobody involved in filming is allowed to wheel himself to location, no matter how much more convenient that might be. Many times, this convention is breached in the confusion of urban lensing. But not this day--when the watchful Teamsters can see you coming for miles across the horizon. And that's all part of the budget, too.

Though last on the sked, the work on the desert would be the opening scene, in which François Truffaut, playing an international investigator of strange events, arrives at a remote point in Mexico where five old Grumman Hellcats have mysteriously appeared overnight, parked in a strange pattern near a shack and a mountain of rusted cars. Before the director arrived, the shack was constructed, the cars collected and stacked and the five rare planes flown in from Texas, Idaho and Utah at an hourly rental rate, in the air or on the ground.

Sometime in the innocent previous months, Spielberg the writer had scribbled, "It is a windy, dusty day...." Now, Spielberg the director moves wearily among the planes, his familiar black baseball cap and blue windbreaker caked with the pyrolite sand hauled by the ton from Los Angeles.

Looming over the set are two enormous blowers, literally aircraft engines themselves, their propellers hurling the sand tossed into them by the shovelful. The director is rapidly losing his voice trying to be heard over the roar, and Truffaut and the score of supporting players and extras are accumulating more doses of dirt than pleasant temperament can stand. This is Truffaut's first picture for another director and, while friendly and sympathetic toward his young boss, the Frenchman is fast learning it's not always fun to stand exactly where you're told to or wait again for another take while the planes are wiped free of the dust from the last try that failed because one of several hundred possible errors occurred.

Since he's the one who calls for action, Spielberg should be the first ready each time for the next shower of sand. More often than not, however, he forgets to put on the face mask that protects each member of the crew. (Another labor regulation but sensible, under the circumstances.) When he finally wraps the scene, Spielberg's next location will be a doctor's office, where his lungs, throat and ears are cleared so he'll still be around to edit the picture.

Only miles from El Mirage, on a shady hillside in Beverly Hills, there's a lovely large home that Spielberg just bought, with a cool, crystal-clean pool that he's never had time to splash in.