Steven Spielberg (50 page)

After playing a scientist in the final sequence of
Close
Encounters,
Hynek
said, “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. What impressed me was that Spielberg was under enormous pressure to produce another blockbuster after
Jaws,
and he decided to do a UFO movie. He’s putting his reputation on the line.”

Although Spielberg’s first proposal for
Close
Encounters
explicitly linked belief in UFOs with the public’s loss of faith in the American political system, the political implications became less overt as the screenplay gradually evolved. The film takes only a mildly critical view of the military’s use of a cover story (a phony nerve gas spillage) to evacuate a Wyoming site for the UFO rendezvous. Explaining his decision to downplay the military cover-up aspect, Spielberg told a European interviewer in 1978, “I didn’t want to beat it to death because in the U.S. it’s passé. We have lived through Watergate, the CIA, and people already find them redundant.”

Close
Encounters
was filmed under conditions of extreme secrecy. Spielberg was determined to retain the element of surprise and concerned that the story might be ripped off for a quickie TV movie before he could complete his lengthy shooting and postproduction schedule. Most of the film was shot in an abandoned U.S. government dirigible hangar in Mobile, Alabama, and security was so tight that even Spielberg was denied admission to the set one day because he had forgotten to wear his plastic ID card.

The clandestine goings-on, which included a virtual blackout on press coverage, helped give rise to a strange rumor. As Balaban reported, the story went around that the film was “part of the necessary training that the human race must go through in order to accept an actual landing, and is being secretly sponsored by a government UFO agency.” In fact, both NASA and the Air Force refused to cooperate with the film, fearing that it, fearing that it would inflame public hysteria about UFOs, just as
Jaws
had terrified people about sharks. “I really found my faith when I heard that the government was opposed to the film,” Spielberg said. “If NASA took the time to write me a twenty-page letter, then I knew there must be something happening.”

Even though the director had to forge ahead on his own, the rumor about the film’s secret sponsorship continued to live long after its release, and Spielberg found his 1982 film
E.
T.
The
Extra-Terrestrial
accused of being part of the same sinister plot to indoctrinate the public. The tale also circulated among ufologists that when Spielberg visited the White House to screen
E.
T.,
President Ronald Reagan confided to the filmmaker, “You know, there are fewer than six people in this room who know the real story.”

S
PIELBERG
receives sole screenplay credit for
Close
Encounters,
but he was not the only writer who worked on the film. He has acknowledged Paul Schrader’s early involvement in the writing, but only to disparage, Schrader’s work as “one of the most embarrassing screenplays ever professionally turned in to a major studio or director…. Actually, it was fortunate
that Paul went so far away on his own tangent, a terribly guilt-ridden story, not about UFOs at all.”

“The only thing I deserve a credit for,” Schrader said, “is changing Steve’s mind about doing the film as a UFO Watergate. I thought it ought to be about a spiritual encounter. That idea stayed and germinated.” In Schrader’s draft, which the writer titled
Kingdom
Come,
the protagonist whose life is transformed by an encounter with a UFO on a deserted country road was not the film’s common-man hero Roy Neary, a thirtyish, lower-middle-class working stiff from Indiana. The original protagonist was a forty-five-year-old Air Force officer whose story bore an unmistakable resemblance to that of Dr. Hynek. Both Spielberg and Schrader have claimed authorship of that character.
†

Spielberg said he changed the protagonist to a civilian “because I find it very hard to identify with anybody in uniform…. A favorite theme of mine has always been the ultimate glorification of the common man…. A typical guy—nothing ever happens to him. Then, all of a sudden, he encounters something extraordinary and has to change his entire life in order to measure up to the task of either defeating it or understanding it. So that was my theme in
Close
Encounters.
”

Schrader’s account was that after he wrote his draft, he and Spielberg “had a falling-out along strictly ideological lines, which was quite an instructive disagreement—it says a lot about him and it says a lot about me. My script centered on the idea of a modern-day St. Paul, a guy named Paul Van Owen, whose job for the government is to ridicule and debunk flying saucers. But then one day, like St. Paul, he has his road to Damascus—he has an encounter. Then he goes to the government; he’s going to blow the lid off the whole thing, but instead the government offer him unlimited funds to pursue contact clandestinely, so he spends the next fifteen years trying to do that. But eventually he discovers that the key to making contact isn’t out there in the universe, but implanted inside him.

“About the only thing that was left of all that when Steven finally made the film was the idea of the archetypal site, the mountain that’s planted in his mind, and some of the ending. What I had done was to write this character with resonances of Lear and St. Paul, a kind of Shakespearean tragic hero, and Steve just could not get behind that, and it became clear that our collaboration had to end. It came down to this. I said, ‘I refuse to send off to another world, as the first example of Earth’s intelligence, a man who wants to go and set up a McDonald’s franchise,’ and Steven said, ‘That’s exactly the guy I want to send.’ Steven’s Capra-like infatuation with the common man was diametrically opposed to my religious infatuation with the redeeming hero—I wanted a biblical character to carry the message to the outer spheres, I
wanted to form missions again. Fortunately, Steven was smart enough to realize that I was an intractable character, and he was right to make the film that he was comfortable with.”

When asked by
Cinefantastique
magazine interviewer Don Shay in 1978 whether anyone else besides Schrader had worked on the script, Spielberg replied, “No. There was just me.” Later in the same interview, however, the director admitted that he had received help with the story from his frequent collaborators Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, who also play two of the returning airmen who emerge from the spaceship at the end of the film. Other writers who contributed to
Close
Encounters
included John Hill, who wrote the second draft after Schrader left; David Giler; and Jerry Belson, a TV comedy writer who polished the script with Spielberg at New York’s Sherry-Netherland Hotel shortly before shooting began and also on location in Mobile. Julia Phillips reported that Columbia paid for “one under-the-table rewrite after another.”

Spielberg’s conceptual work during preproduction began with a year of exchanging
visual ideas with a production illustrator, George Jensen, who made thousands of scene drawings and color sketches as a result of those discussions. Spielberg recalled that “together we plotted seven major sequences—including the last thirty minutes of the movie, which is all phantasmagoria.” After rejecting the Schrader and Hill screenplays, Spielberg wrote his own draft during the period when he was editing and promoting
Jaws.
His script, he felt, “had a pretty good structure, but I wasn’t crazy about some of the characters…. I find writing to be the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. I find it much more difficult than directing, because it requires a lot of concentration and I’m not the most concentrated of people…. Essentially I’m not a writer and I don’t enjoy writing. I’d much rather collaborate. I need fresh ideas coming to me.”

However, Spielberg was so possessive about the genesis of his magnum opus that he wanted the final credit to read simply “Written and Directed by Steven Spielberg,” as if sharing credit with anyone else for the story or screenplay would have diminished his own creativity in the eyes of the public, and perhaps in his own eyes as well. His need to insist on sole writing credit may have stemmed not only from the project’s deeply personal nature but also from an anxiety that others involved in the film would try to appropriate credit to themselves that he felt belonged more properly to him, as he thought had happened with
Jaws.
Such anxiety tends to be an occupational hazard for directors, particularly for young directors who have had a major hit and suddenly find themselves in a position of great power. The success of
Jaws,
Spielberg admitted in 1982, initially had “a very negative effect on me. I thought it was a fluke…. I began believing it was some kind of freak and agreeing when people said it could never happen again. They were saying it was the timing and the climate that created the success of
Jaws
more than what I had done to make the movie a success.” A typical defense
mechanism against such feelings of insecurity is to exaggerate a genuine achievement or credit into a claim of omnipotence.

Julia Phillips wrote in
You
’ll
Never
Eat
Lunch
in
This
Town
Again
that Spielberg “made me pressure every writer who made a contribution to the script. When the Writers’ Guild insists on an arbitration, I get Schrader and Grady [her pseudonym for one of the other writers] to back off their right to credits.” (In a 1991 interview with
Los
Angeles
magazine, Phillips, who had fallen out with the director during the making of
Close
Encounters,
called Spielberg “the ultimate writer fucker.”) Schrader recalled that “at Steven’s request I withdrew from the credit arbitration, which is something I’ve come to regret in later years, because I had [2.5 profit-participation] points tied to credit. So I gave up maybe a couple of million dollars that way, but that’s the way it happens.”

Michael Phillips believes that Spielberg’s sole writing credit is appropriate: “Paul Schrader wrote a different film. Paul’s was a much more serious quest, a religious transformation of a doubter into a believer. It wasn’t a surprise to us, because we talked it out first, and it sounded like a good idea. But when it came in, it just wasn’t a Steven Spielberg film; it wasn’t a joyous roller-coaster.
Close
Encounters
is really Steven’s script. It was a project that he had started in his childhood and had always wanted to do. He got help from his friends and colleagues here and there, but 99.9 percent is Steven Spielberg. There was not really a basis for a credit for Paul except that the first writer on a project usually gets the benefit of the doubt, but in this case, since Steven really started over, I think that it would have been wrong to put it into an arbitration. Jerry Belson made a contribution that was appreciated, but he did not in any way author the story.”

W
HILE
in the throes of making
Jaws,
Spielberg was sure he would never face a more difficult filmmaking experience. But he found
Close
Encounters
“twice as bad—and twice as expensive, as well.”

It was a two-year ordeal of trying to realize a vision of mind-boggling technical and artistic complexity, while at the same time having to coax more and more money out of financially strapped Columbia Pictures. “Poor Steven was involved in a terrible battle with the studio,” cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond recalls. “He was not used to it. It was not pleasant.” At one point, when the studio refused to pay several thousand dollars for a special effect involving shattering glass, Spielberg paid for it out of his own pocket. As François Truffaut observed, “In [the] face of overwhelming hardships and innumerable complications that would, I suspect, have discouraged most directors, Steven Spielberg’s perseverance and fortitude were simply amazing.”

Perhaps the hardest part for a director who acknowledges being a control freak was having to shoot scenes without knowing exactly how Douglas Trumbull’s elaborate visual effects would look when they were added
months later in postproduction. “The difference between
Jaws
and
Close
Encounters
,” Spielberg later reflected, “is that
Jaws
was a physical effects movie and
Close
Encounters
was an optical-effects movie. It meant that for
Jaws
I had to shed blood six days a week—from eight in the morning to eight at night—and for
Close
Encounters
I had to shed blood seven nights a week, from eight at night to eight in the morning, because of the laboratory turnover time. But the problems were exactly the same between the studio and myself, and between the cast and the script.”

“I saw Steve more frustrated on
Close
Encounters
,” says production designer Joe Alves. “It was unlike
Jaws,
where he was dealing with concrete objects. You go out on the water, it gets too rough to shoot, you say, ‘OK, we couldn’t do it, the shark didn’t work.’ It’s
real.
You have
things
to get upset with. The shooting of
Close
Encounters
was more questionable [because of the visual effects]. It’s hard for a director—you have to have a lot of confidence that the stuffs going to happen. So there was tension on the set.”

“If I were Steven, I would have been terrified,” Trumbull says. “I’ll never be able to thank him enough for having the confidence and the patience to see it through and not panic. There was enormous pressure on the production all the time from the studio to keep moving on.”

Columbia had been near collapse in the early 1970s, amassing more than $220 million in bank debt. The First National Bank of Boston had veto power over any Columbia film budgeted at more than $3 million. By the mid-1970s, the studio had begun a partial recovery under the leadership of Alan Hirsch-field, president and chief executive officer of Columbia Pictures Industries, and studio president David Begelman. But the studio’s financial health was still marginal when Spielberg began shooting his commercially dicey sci-fi movie.