Steven Spielberg (55 page)

That was enough to reverse the stock slide, although
The
Hollywood
Reporter
noted that “tension concerning the public’s response to the film was running sufficiently high to keep director Steve Spielberg ensconced in his hotel room, unwilling to attend [November 6] screenings” for media and financial analysts at New York’s Ziegfeld Theatre.

After opening on November 16,
Close
Encounters
easily reached the box-office stratosphere, with its worldwide box-office gross eventually totalling almost $270 million.
**
But Spielberg always regretted that his many production delays had forced him to miss the originally planned spring release date, thereby enabling
Star
Wars
to beat
Close
Encounters
into the marketplace.
Although Michael Phillips feels that by reviving the appeal of the dormant sci-fi genre,
Star
Wars
may have helped
Close
Encounters
at the box office, Spielberg could not help thinking that his movie would have been a bigger hit if only it had opened earlier. Nevertheless,
Close
Encounters
proved that
Jaws
was no fluke. Sending Columbia profits soaring to record levels, it sealed Spielberg’s commercial clout within the industry as a filmmaker with a seemingly magical box-office touch. He and Lucas now found themselves with virtually unlimited power to choose their subject matter and dictate the terms of their deals with studios. Their unprecedented levels of success would embolden them to demand a degree of independence within the Hollywood system that few filmmakers had ever been granted.

S
PIELBERG
received his first Oscar nomination as director of
Close
Encounters,
one of eight nominations the film received. But in the impenetrable wisdom of the Academy’s overall membership, Spielberg’s film was not worthy of a nomination for Best Picture. Richard Dreyfuss’s eminently forgettable comedy vehicle
The
Goodbye
Girl
(for which he won an Oscar) took what should have been the
Close
Encounters
slot on the list of nominees for Best Picture, which otherwise matched up with the directing nominations.
Close
Encounters
won two Oscars, for Zsigmond’s cinematography and a special achievement Oscar for Frank Warner’s sound effects editing. Woody Allen’s
Annie
Hall
was the winner for Best Picture and Director, so at least Spielberg could take the consolation that his movie was passed over for another that has become a modern classic.

Critical opinion on Spielberg, which had begun to diverge as a result of
Jaws,
was polarized further by
Close
Encounters.
Some reviewers mocked Spielberg for making what Molly Haskell, in
New
York
magazine, called “children’s films that parents can love without shame”; her review was headlined “The Dumbest Story Ever Told.” Reviewers who responded favorably to
Close
Encounters
were willing to partake in what Frank Rich called “a celebration not only of children’s dreams but also of the movies that help fuel those dreams.”
Newsweek’
s
Jack Kroll compared Spielberg to Walt Disney, “with his metamorphic genius, sentimental idealism and his feeling for the technical magic of movies as a paradigm for technological utopia.” But Kroll also understood the darker side of Spielberg, finding the much-maligned imagery of Roy Neary building the mountain in his den “a crazy, funny, touching scene … it seems to come from something deeply personal in Spielberg.”

Praise for Spielberg’s technical wizardry was nearly unanimous, but Charles Champlin of the
Los
Angeles
Times
was among those for whom this “magic set with dramatic interludes” nevertheless confirmed a suspicion that Spielberg was a director of “effects rather than characters or relationships.” In the same paper, however, Ray Bradbury described
Close
Encounters
as “the most important film of our time…. For this is a religious film, in all the
great good senses, the right senses, of that much-battered word…. Spielberg has made a film that can open in New Delhi, Tokyo, Berlin, Moscow, Johannesburg, Paris, London, New York, and Rio de Janeiro on the same day to mobs and throngs and crowds that will never stop coming because for the first time someone has treated all of us as if we really did belong to one race.”

Perhaps the most fitting comment on
Close
Encounters
came from the great filmmaker Jean Renoir. In a March 1978 letter to François Truffaut, Renoir reported from Beverly Hills, “We have finally seen
Close
Encounters.
It is a very good film, and I regret it was not made in France. This type of popular science would be most appropriate for the compatriots of Jules Verne and Méliès…. You are excellent in it, because you’re not quite real. There is more than a grain of eccentricity in this adventure. The author is a poet. In the South of France one would say he is a bit
fada.
He brings to mind the exact meaning of this word in Provence: the village
fada
is the one possessed by the fairies.”

U
NFORTUNATELY
, Spielberg could not let go of his masterpiece.
The
Special
Edition
of
Close
Encounters
of
the
Third
Kind
went before the cameras in 1979, on weekends over a nineteen-week period while he was otherwise occupied with filming
1941.
Columbia let him spend $2 million to reedit
Close
Encounters
and shoot additional scenes he had been unable to film for the original version, when “certain compromises had to be made as a result of budget and schedule…. I’ve had the opportunity to see how the film plays for audiences. Film is not necessarily a dry-cement process. I have the luxury of retouching the painting.”

But Columbia exacted a heavy aesthetic price. “I never really wanted to show the inside of the mother ship,” Spielberg admitted in the 1990 documentary about the making of
Close
Encounters.
“That was, in a way, how I got the money to fix the movie.” Michael Butler was enlisted to photograph the scene of Roy Neary entering the mother ship, on a newly built set at the Burbank Studios, with added special effects by Robert Swarthe (Douglas Trumbull says he passed up the opportunity to work on the
Special
Edition
because Columbia expected him to do it without pay).

Although the expanded ending was the major selling gimmick in Columbia’s ad campaign—“
NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, FILMGOERS WILL BE ABLE TO SHARE THE ULTIMATE EXPERIENCE OF BEING
INSIDE
”—the scene proved to be a terrible letdown from the phantasmagoria preceding it. Little happens except for Neary gaping around inside an essentially empty, plastic-looking environment bearing a distinct resemblance to the lobby of a Hyatt hotel. By preventing the viewer from simply imagining what happens to Neary, the ending squandered much of the film’s sense of wonder and magic.

That commercial compromise alone would have been a fatal miscalculation, but Spielberg, as he later put it, also “added some
gestalt
and took out
some
kitsch
and reshaped the movie.” His cuts amounted to sixteen minutes of footage. His additions included six minutes of newly shot scenes and seven minutes of footage shot for the original version but previously unseen by the public; the
Special
Edition
runs three minutes shorter than the original’s 135-minute length. The
“gestalt”
Spielberg added included the scene of a cargo ship, lost in the Bermuda Triangle, turning up in the Gobi Desert (photographed by Allen Daviau). Although it expands the story’s geographical scope, that scene is superfluous because it serves the same function as the opening scene of airplanes turning up in the Mexican desert. What Spielberg considered
“kitsch”
was much of the heart of the story involving Roy’s estrangement from his family, notably a large chunk of the mountain-building sequence. In partial compensation, Spielberg added a harrowing scene of Ronnie discovering a freaked-out Roy huddled in the bathtub under a steaming shower. He had not used it in the original because it was “so powerful, it was almost another movie.” But for the 1980 edition Spielberg also cut another pivotal scene of Neary and other UFO witnesses being publicly belittled by mendacious Air Force personnel. The net effect of the changes was a diminution of Roy’s personal story in favor of special effects.

Rather than confirming critical reservations about Spielberg, as one might have thought, this change of emphasis was greeted with uncritical praise when the
Special
Edition
debuted in theaters on July 31, 1980. (The public response, on the other hand, was unspectacular, and one patron actually sued Columbia, claiming that fraudulent advertising had led her to expect a new movie.) In part, the critics’ response to the retooling reflected gratification that Spielberg had listened to their advice about how to downplay Roy’s mental problems. But it also indicated that, even in its bastardized form,
Close
Encounters
had become a consensus classic and its director a cultural  icon. “What has happened is a phenomenon in the annals of film,” Arthur Knight proclaimed in
The
Hollywood
Reporter.
“Director Steven Spielberg has taken his 1977 flawed masterpiece and, by judicious editing and addition of several scenes, has turned his work into an authentic masterpiece.”

At the time Spielberg issued his
Special
Edition,
Michael Phillips, who had no involvement with it, presciently raised a note of caution: “I just hope it doesn’t lead to a trend in which filmmakers ‘redo’ their movies. That would simply be dreadful. Some filmmakers might start withholding a few minutes from the first release so they could add this material in the reissue and get people to spend their five dollars again.”

That is just what has happened in recent years. The release of revised “directors’ cuts” too often has become a dubious exercise in historical revisionism, undertaken largely to gratify egos and obtain additional revenues from the home-video and laserdisc market. While the restoration of such classic films as
Lawrence
of
Arabia,
which Spielberg helped sponsor, has been a more positive trend, the continual metamorphosis of film history
Close
Encounters
helped inaugurate raises disturbing questions about the legacy filmmakers are leaving for future generations. When Columbia announced
in 1980 that the original version of
Close
Encounters
was being “retired” from the marketplace, Spielberg publicly objected, insisting, “There will be two versions of
Close
Encounters
showing for the next one hundred years, as far as I’m concerned.” Videotapes of the film in distribution today, however, are of the
Special
Edition.
The original version sometimes airs on television in a pan-and-scan format, but it can be seen in its proper wide-screen aspect ratio only on the 1990 Criterion laserdisc edition. Spielberg’s involvement with that third edition of the film, which includes the added scenes as a supplement, seemed a tacit admission that his original cut should be regarded as the true version.

Expressing hope that the
Special
Edition
would not replace the original, Pauline Kael wrote in 1980, “I want to be able to hear the true believer Roberts Blossom tell people that he has seen Bigfoot as well as flying saucers. It may not seem like a big loss, but when you remember something in a movie with pleasure and it’s gone, you feel as if your memories had been mugged.”