Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Close Encounters of the Third Kind is Steven Spielberg's extraordinary film about a man named Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) who becomes obsessed with meeting extraterrestrials after encountering a UFO on an abandoned road one night. Against the wishes of his wife (Teri Garr) and children, Neary, along with another witness to the sighting (Melinda Dillon), travels to a mysterious mountain where the government has built a landing strip hoping to attract the aliens.

Director François Truffaut costars as Claude Lacombe, one of the organizers of the project. Spielberg hoped to follow up the huge success of JAWS with a low-budget film that would be an easy shoot, but, thanks in part to the complicated special effects, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS quickly snowballed into being an expensive endeavor but a commercial and artistic success. No one who has seen the film has ever looked at a plate of mashed potatotes the same way again.

Detailed storyline: Close Encounters

Close encounter of the first kind are UFO sightings. Close encounters of the second kind involve the discovery of physical evidence, and close encounters of the third kind are contact with extraterrestrials.

The film was shot in India, Alabama, and
Devil's Tower National Monument in
Wyoming.

Close Encounters is different for two reasons. It was the first film of its type to show aliens in a good light. They don’t come out of their ships wielding ray guns, but instead appear friendly and peace loving. Its like an antidote to all the cheap fifties UFO invasion flicks.

Second, the effects are mind blowing. In the seventies when the film was made there were no supercomputers capable of rendering CGI effects. Everything had to be done by hand, either through model work, hand drawn animation or simply dressing an actor up in a strange costume.

In all films prior to Close Encounters, if model spacecraft were to be composited into a shot, the camera would need to be fixed. Remember all those cheap TV shows where the tray covered in silver foil floated across London or New York? The skyline itself never moved. However, in Close Encounters, a new motion control process was used to enable both the camera and model to move. This used some electronic trickery to record the exact movements of the camera on set, which could later be played back through the camera in the model workshop to ensure they both moved in exactly the same way.

The small, lithe aliens were played by young girls who Steven Spielberg believed were more graceful than boys.

Theatrical release: November 16, 1977 ..... Estimated budget: $20 million
When CLOSE ENCOUNTERS was released in 1977, it quickly became Columbia Pictures' most profitable film, eventually taking in $166 million at the domestic box office and $338 million worldwide.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND is number 64 on the American Film Institute's list of Americas 100 Greatest Movies.
In 1980, Steven Spielberg issued a reedited version of the film entitled THE SPECIAL EDITION. He shortened some scenes and added a sequence at the end showing the interior of the mother ship.
The laserdisc features interviews with Spielberg, composer John Williams, and special effects man Douglas Trumbull, as well as previously edited material.