Trivia for
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) More at IMDbPro »

• Paul Schrader wrote the original script. When Steven Spielberg, changed a great deal of it, Schrader decided to remove his credit. Since the film couldn't be left with no credit for writing, Spielberg claimed it for himself.
  
  
• Real air-traffic controllers were used in the opening sequence. The synthesizer technician/performer was the actual engineer sent by ARP Instruments to install the synthesizer equipment (ARP 2500) on the set. Steven Spielberg watched his expert playing of the equipment and immediately cast him for the role. The name of the ARP engineer is Philip Dodds and he is actually mentioned in the credits.
  
  
• The working title was "Watch the Skies," the closing words from The Thing from Another World (1951). These words also can be heard in the cartoon that wakes Neary.
  
  
• Barry is shown to be surprised by the extraterrestrials. Director Steven Spielberg had two crew members hide in boxes off camera, one in a clown suit and one in a gorilla suit. One popped out, then the other as the cameras rolled, catching young Cary Guffey's bewildered reaction. Spielberg then whispered to the gorilla to remove his mask, eliciting a smile from Guffey.
  
  
• SFX man Douglas Trumbull created the cloud effects by injecting white paint into tanks of salt and fresh water.
  
  
• It is possible to see an upside down R2-D2 (from Star Wars (1977), etc) in part of the large spacecraft that flies over "Devils Tower". The SFX people needed more detail, and so supposedly there are many more such items, such as a shark from Jaws (1975) (also directed by Steven Spielberg), etc. R2-D2 is visible as Jillian first sees the mother-ship up close from her hiding place in the rocks.
  
  
• Steven Spielberg and other producers wanted Walter Cronkite as newsreader for the broadcast that Neary ignores in the living room sculpture scene. However, CBS would not allow Cronkite to take the role, so producers settled on ABC's Howard K. Smith. Unfortunately, the news cutaway scene to Wyoming reporter was filmed before this decision; as a result, the reporter says Order your steak well-done, Walter.
  
  
• Cary Guffey's performances were so good that they only ever had to do one or two takes of each shot he was in. He became known as One-Take Cary on the set, and Steven Spielberg had a t-shirt printed up for him with the phrase written on it.
  
  
• It was one of the first home videos released with NCI Closed Captioning in 1981 by Columbia. When you have your TV set to display closed captions, a closed captioning copyright Captions Copyright 1981 Columbia Pictures Corporation is displayed at the end of the movie. That is present in all versions of the movie including the 1998 re-edit.
  
  
• Michael Kahn's first special effects movie.
  
  
• Unusually for the time, the special effects were produced in 70mm, then reduced to 35mm to match them up the action onscreen and then re-enlarged to 70mm. This made them less grainy than if they'd been shot in the more traditional 35mm.
  
  
• The 2007 30th Anniversary Ultimate Edition is the very first opportunity for people to own the original theatrical print. Up until then, it had never been commercially released before as the Special Edition had always been the version available beforehand.
  
  
• The first collaboration between Steven Spielberg and his editor Michael Kahn.
  
  
• When the aliens visit Jillian's home, there's a shot of the screws in the floor vent unscrewing. This is shown in an extreme close-up. The unscrewing effect is very similar to what we see in the movie version of The War of the Worlds (1953).
  
  
• In the scene where Ronnie cuts out a newspaper article about the UFO sightings, the night after Roy's first glimpse of the UFOs, two identical articles on Star Wars (1977) are on either side of the UFO article.
  
  
• The Mothership is now located at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy annex of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, south of the Dulles Airport, in Chantilly, VA. Visible on it are a miniature R2-D2, a mailbox, a cemetery, and models of the airplanes that were abducted by the ship.
  
  
• To get the spaceships' attention prior to their arrival at Devils Tower, the five notes the scientists play are G, A, F, (octave lower) F, C. When they arrive at the tower and are attempting communication, the notes they play are B flat, C, A flat, (octave lower) A flat, E flat.
  
  
• The entire landing strip complex behind Devils Tower was actually constructed and filmed in an abandoned aircraft hangar at the former Brookley AFB in Mobile, Alabama.
  
  
• Steven Spielberg knew only vaguely what the mothership would look like when he was filming the live action scenes. Basically he decided it would be big and hulk-like, and very dark. While filming in India months later he drove past a giant oil refinery every day and was inspired by the many lights and pipes and outcroppings on the rig to change the look of the spaceship. He now decided it would be brightly lit, which is how it appears in the final film, even though the footage of it casting a dark shadow over the crowd had already been shot.
  
  
• The federal agent-types on stage with Lacombe during the auditorium scene where he teaches the hand signals were real federal agents. Similarly some of the extras who played scientists in the end sequence were real scientists.
  
  
• The final sequence as well almost every scene that takes place at night was filmed at a giant airplane (not dirigible as is often stated) hanger in Mobile, Alabama. The heat was unbearable, although it did not actually rain in the hanger as is often erroneously reported - the crew was only told that such a condition was possible because of the great humidity. There was a constant effort to get every arc light available to the location to film the reflections of the UFOs. Many lights in retirement from the Technicolor era were brought out of mothball for the spaceship sequences.
  
  
• All of the stars in the background of the night shots, as well as many distant trees, hills, roads, etc. were special effects and not real. This is true even in non-special effect shots, such as when Neary's truck is just driving along country roads.
  
  
• Many techniques were attempted to portray the aliens, who were played by little kids in rubber suits. One involved shooting them at normal speed while they moved through a sea of mimes dressed as technicians. The mimes would make slow motion movements so that when the film was sped up, the mimes looked normal and the aliens would appear to run about with super-human quickness. Flailing their arms and long hands about, they would somewhat resemble bugs. Another idea was to suspend them on wires and have them fly. The mothership was supposedly in a lower gravity field (this line remains in the final cut of the movie as the ship lands: Watch for dizziness and low gravity.) and Neary was even supposed to float up as he walked into the ship at the end. All of these ideas were eventually cut.
  
  
• The film holds the record for most cinematographers on a production (11, counting the Special Edition).
  
  
• Steven Spielberg had approached Steve McQueen, Dustin Hoffman, and Gene Hackman for the role of Roy Neary. Jack Nicholson was also considered.
  
  
• During the dinner scene just before Roy piles on the mashed potatoes, you can hear the little girl say, "There's a fly in my potatoes." This was unscripted and almost caused the rest of the cast to laugh. The scene was kept as-is.
  
  
• Steven Spielberg cast Teri Garr in the film after seeing her work on a coffee commercial.
  
  
• The film originally ended with the version of When You Wish Upon a Star used in the film Pinocchio (1940), but it tested negatively in previews and was cut. That is why Roy Neary was trying to convince his family to see that film together just before the blackout. The song remains incorporated in the John Williams score, though. A toy can also be heard playing the song's melody right before Roy rips off the top off his sculpture.
  
  
• Became the first films to have director's cut re-editing made when Steven Spielberg wanted to improve his original vision.
  
  
• Stuntman Craig R. Baxley was injured during the sequence where the police cars are chasing the UFOs on a mountain road. This stunt called for him to skid around a turn, go through a fence and over an embankment, but Baxley was traveling too fast, and he overshot the area where he was supposed to land. His car landed too hard and, even though he was wearing a helmet, he received head injuries. He was hospitalized for several days.
  
  
• Stanley Kubrick was so impressed by Cary Guffey's performance that several years later he wanted him for the role of Danny Torrence in The Shining (1980).
  
  
• A model miniature was used for some of the shots in the climactic scene. At least part of the illumination coming out of the ship was created by a set of Christmas lights strung up on the back of a metal plate, behind little tiny alien figures, creating the silhouetted look we see. This was composited into a shot with real-life actors.
  
  
• The John Williams score was created before the film was edited. Steven Spielberg edited the film to match the music, a reverse of what is usually done in film scoring. Both Spielberg and Williams felt that it ultimately gave the film a lyrical feel.
  
  
• Claude Lacombe (François Truffaut) is based on real-life French UFO expert Jacques Vallée.
  
  
• The organization that Claude Lacombe (François Truffaut) leads is called the "Mayflower Project". Its flag is a white one with a black triangle on it, and it can be seen in the secret reunion scene (where Lacombe explains the manual signals for the musical notes) between the American and France flags.
  
  
• While Roy Neary is talking with his wife, Ronnie, by telephone, the TV set in their living room shows an episode of the soap opera "Days of Our Lives", just before of the CBS News about the train accident (when Roy discovers the meaning and location of the Devil's Tower National Monument).
  
  
• J. Allen Hynek was a famous ufologist and too the creator of the diverse kinds of contact with extra-terrestrial life, explained in the book "The UFO Experience: A Scientific Study" (1972). First kind: sighting of an one or more UFOs. Second kind: observation of physical evidence of extra-terrestrial visitation. Third kind: contact with one or more extra-terrestrials.
  
  
• Bob Balaban had not spoken French since high school. When Spielberg, over the phone, asked if he did spoke French, he answered in bad French that he did not speak much, half hoping that someone in the room, overhearing the call, could at least know enough French to hear that he was no good at it. No one did.
  
  
• Richard Dreyfuss's father was an extra in the film and spent six months on location; however the scenes in which he appeared never made the final cut.
  
  
• The last scene to be filmed was the opening scene in the desert.
  
  
• While no part of the film was actually shot in Muncie, Indiana, a production team did visit for local details and props, such as the pull-down map of Muncie that Roy consults in his truck. They also visited the bookstore of Ball State University for university memorabilia, such as a fraternity "BSU" paddle visible on Roy's wall, and the red-and-white "BallU" (or U-Ball) T-shirt worn by Roy in the shaving-cream scene.
  
  
• The huge success of the film made a popular icon of its signature logo, a black-and-white image of a highway receding towards a glowing horizon at night. In 1978, an enterprising group of students from the College of Architecture at Ball State University in Muncie, IN, manufactured and sold a small production run of black T-shirts emulating the logo and typeface of the original, but reading "MUNCIE INDIANA: A Gross Encounter of the Worst Kind." Sales were going well until stories about the shirts appeared in local media, prompting complaints from Columbia Pictures, which was offended about the logo, and the Muncie City Council, which was offended about the slogan.
  
  
• The Jaws (1975) theme can be heard when the mother ship is communicating with the base at the end of the movie, right before the release of the human prisoners.
  
  
• Steven Spielberg's dog can be seen during the release of the humans from the mother ship sliding down the ramp. The dog was also seen in Jaws (1975) as Brody's dog.
  
  
• The UFO landing site built for the movie was 27 m high, 137 m long, and 76 m wide, making it the largest indoor film set ever constructed. The structure included 6.4 km of scaffolding, 1570 square metres of fibreglass, and 2740 square metres of nylon canopy.
  
  
• Towards the end of this film, Roy Neary, played by Richard Dreyfuss, is asked what his birth date is. He replies that it is "December 4th, 1944". This is actually the birth date of Lorin Dreyfuss, who is Richard Dreyfuss's older brother.
  
  
• François Truffaut was continually trying to improve his English during production, and he was self-conscious of his heavy French accent. When he delivered the line "They belong here more than we" (after he learns the Army plans to dust the mountain with nerve gas), several crew members thought that he had said "Zey belong here, Mozambique." Several T-shirts were printed with this quote as a joke. When he heard about this, Truffaut supposedly burst out laughing.
  
  
• In the beginning of the film in the Sonoran Desert, from inside one of the World War II airplanes, they pull out a calendar that looks vintage from 1945. Across the grid of the days of a full month on the calendar is plainly seen a light blue logo from the defunct Security National Bank (which did not exist in 1945, either). In the fall of 1972, Security National Bank issued a 1973 calendar that corresponded exactly, month by month, day by day, to the 1945 calendar for fun. Thus, this unique idea was a promotional give away to the bank's customers. The props crew for CE3K probably could not locate an authentic 1945 calendar, so instead they utilized the fake vintage calendar, which was not hard to find in 1976.
  
  
• Look for the same "Devils Tower" geological formation that John Ford used in My Darling Clementine (1946) - that's where Steven Spielberg got the location idea.
  
  
• The humans communicate with the aliens by making music with their computers. Writer-director Steven Spielberg's mother was a musician and his father was a computer scientist. Spielberg himself had not thought of this until it was pointed out by James Lipton in an interview on "Inside the Actors Studio" (1994).
  
  
• CE3K was partly inspired by an experience from Steven Spielberg's childhood, when without advance warning, his parents rushed the children into their car one night, drove to an area where many others were gathered, and watched a spectacular meteor shower.
  
  
• Eliott Keener was supposed to have a role as one of the people being evacuated from Devils Tower, but all of his shots were cut out except one where you can briefly see his elbow.
  
  
• The hand signals used by the aliens are actually used by classroom teachers to teach the solfege scale. They were invented by the Reverend John Curwen, an English Congregationalist minister, and then adapted by composer Zoltán Kodály.
  
  
• Director Trademark: [Steven Spielberg] Jillian is a single mother, and Roy leaves his family to follow his intuition.
  
  
• In the scene where Barry (Cary Guffey) says, "Toys!" as he looks out the window and spots the UFOs, Steven Spielberg actually pulled out a toy car behind the camera to cause Barry's unexpected one-take reaction.
  
  
• Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond overexposed the scenes with the extraterrestrials deliberately so they would appear fuzzy and diffuse. When producer Julia Phillips saw the footage, she thought he'd made a mistake and ordered the film re-processed so that the aliens came out with a normal contrast, and their rubber heads and suits were obviously fake. She then told Zsigmond he'd botched up the filming and it looked awful. The upset Zsigmond told the lab to reprocess the film the way he originally said and everything looked fine in dailies the next day.
  
  
• Actor Bob Balaban kept a diary of behind-the-scenes events during production. This diary was published to tie-in with release of the film.
  
  
• Dr. J. Allen Hynek (who created the CE3K and other UFO report classification schemes) makes a cameo appearance near the end of the film during the return of abductees just after one of the infamous Flight 19's pilots was announced as having returned. Hynek is smoking a pipe.
  
  
• According to Julia Phillips in her autobiography "You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again", she and the studio did not want to meet Richard Dreyfuss' price of $500,000 plus gross points to play Roy Neary and offered the script to Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, and Gene Hackman. Pacino wasn't interested, and Nicholson thought that any actor would be overwhelmed by the special effects. Hackman turned down the role because he was in a troubled marriage and could not spend 16 weeks outside of Los Angeles on location-shooting. The studio suggested James Caan, but his agent wanted $1 million plus 10% of the gross. Phillips went back to Dreyfuss and cut his deal back a bit, and he became immortalized on film as Roy Neary.
  
  
• Tuba player Jim Self is the "musical voice" of the mother-ship in the climatic scene when the big ship comes down on Devils Tower. Steven Spielberg and John Williams chose the tuba as the voice of the mother-ship because the difficulty of playing the instrument added a human characteristic to the aliens.
  
  
• Steven Spielberg was eager to show François Truffaut the giant landing site set, hoping to impress the other director. Truffaut didn't seem to be impressed at all. Spielberg and his crewmates later realized that Truffaut was used to directing movies in small, intimate settings, and Truffaut simply could not grasp the scale of the landing site. When he went into the set of the hotel room where Jillian watches the Devils Tower newscast, Truffaut stood in the middle of the room, raised his arms up, and said, "Now, THIS is a set!"
  
  
• The situation on U.S. Navy Flight 19, from which the airplanes that appear in the Mexican desert came from, disappeared off Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in December 1945. No trace has ever been found of "the Lost Flight 19" which left the Naval Air Station near there in 1945.
  
  
• François Truffaut's English was not strong. In order to get through some of his scenes, he stuck pieces of paper with his lines on them on various objects where he could read from them but the camera would not pick them up. In one case, as he arguing stands face to face with an Army officer (who has his back to the camera), he is in fact reading his lines off a card pinned to the man's chest. (He had shown the same trick being used with an actress who was having trouble with her lines in his own La nuit américaine (1973) (Day for Night), in which he played the director of the movie-within-the-movie.)
  
  
• Gillian's phone number, seen when she tries to dial for help when the aliens come for Barry, is 311-555-2368. This number frequently appeared on phones in Bell Telephone print ads around the late 1960s. Area code 311 is not an Area Code in North America, and it never will be.
  
  
• According to the book Reel Gags by Bill Givens, The Grateful Dead singer Jerry Garcia was an extra during the scenes in India, and he can be seen in a crowd shot.
  
  
• Steven Spielberg has confessed that if he had a chance to make this movie today, Roy would never have abandoned his family to go to outer space. Source: "Spielberg on Spielberg", 2007, TCM
  
  
• This is essentially an adult rethink of "Firelight", a movie that Steven Spielberg made when an adolescent. He even gave Douglas Trumbull and Vilmos Zsigmond notes that he'd made at that time, for their work on "Close Encounters of the Third Kind".
  
  
• From a budget of $18 million (sizeable at the time), this went on to become one of the top grossing films of the 70s.
  
  
• Six "wrap parties" were held before CE3K completed its production, since Steven Spielberg was continually revising his vision of the film.
  
  
• Steven Spielberg repeatedly watched John Ford's The Searchers (1956) while he was making the film.
  
  
• Jerry Belson, Matthew Robbins, Hal Barwood, David Giler, and Walter Hill all worked on the screenplay at some stage.
  
  
• Most of the UFO miniatures were filmed in dark smoke-filled rooms to give them a halo effect.
  
  
• The small aliens in the film were played by local girls aged between 8 and 12 years old. Girls were used instead of boys because Steven Spielberg felt that they moved more gracefully.
  
  
• The release of the Blu-Ray Ultimate Edition in November 2007 marked the first time that a Steven Spielberg film was released in high definition.
  
  
• Steven Spielberg was originally aiming for a Summer 1978 publication for CE3K, but Columbia Movies - which was on the verge of bankruptcy at the time - spurred him to finish it for the Fall of 1977. This meant that Spielberg felt rushed, and that he had important left elements out. Because of the large success of CE3K on its first theatrical run, Columbia was happy to give Spielberg another $2.0 million to film the interior of the alien spaceship for "The Special Edition". In retrospect, Spielberg now acknowledges that doing all of this addition was unnecessary.
  
  
• Melinda Dillon - who earned an Oscar nomination for her performance - was not cast until the weekend before she was due to begin filming.
  
  
• No one was more surprised than Steven Spielberg when his first choice to play the Frenchman - François Truffaut - said yes to appearing in his first American film.
  
  
• From the beginning when he took the part of Lacombe, François Truffaut made it quite clear that he working strictly as an actor, and he had no interest in helping out as an assistant director.
  
  
• The iconic five-note melody was a chance arrangement that both John Williams and Steven Spielberg happened to like out of hundreds of different permutations.
  
  
• Richard Dreyfuss had become quite interested in the ideas behind of "CE3K" when he had heard Steven Spielberg talking about them on the set of Jaws (1975). When Dreyfus heard that casting for "CE3K" was underway, he began a concerted effort to persuade the director to take him on.
  
  
• Early concepts for interpreting the aliens included marionettes, sped-up hyperactive children, and an orangutan on roller skates.
  
  
• The nine-inch-long model of the "Mothership" that was used in the final sequences was kept locked up in Steven Spielberg's garage to help prevent stories about it from appearing in the media before the publication of CE3K.
  
  
• A highly detailed miniature and the filming technique "forced perspective" were used to create the effect of an ocean freighter left stranded in the Gobi desert.
  
  
• The making of CE3K was the only time that François Truffaut acted in someone else's film.
  
  
• Melinda Dillon was cast largely at the suggestion of director Hal Ashby. He had heard that Spielberg was having difficulty casting the part of Jillian, and Ashby had just completed his movie Bound for Glory (1976) with her in the cast - and liked her work. So Ashby sent Spielberg a couple of film reels containing her acting. Umpon seeing those, Speilberg hired Dillon immediately.
  
  
• For the scene where Richard Dreyfuss appears to go weightless in his truck in his first encounter with flying saucers, his truck was put on a turntable and rotated 360 degrees.
  
  
• The first time the original theatrical version of the film was made available on home video was a Criterion Edition Laserdisc, released in 1991. Before that, the only version available was "The Special Edition".
  
  
• The mother ship appears to be covered with millions of tiny lights. This effect was achieved through utilizing aerial view images of the San Fernando Valley at night.
  
  
• Neary also references Walter Cronkite when he's being interviewed saying, "You think I investigate every Walter Cronkite story there is ... huh?!"
  
  
• Despite the title "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", Barry and the other abductees were actually involved in a case of "Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind", which means being abducted by extraterrestrial beings. However, among other problems, the phrase "Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind" had not been invented yet, and it was unnecessary for Spielberg's use.
  
  
• The scene where Jillian grabs Roy's hand while he is hanging onto the side of the mountain right before they see the landing site resembles that of Cary Grant's hanging on Mount Rushmore before he is helped up in the film North by Northwest (1959). Also, Mount Rushmore is only about 90 miles away from the Devil's Tower.
  
  
• The darkening sky and the shape of the clouds forming in the scene before Jilian's son gets abducted by the aliens resembles that of the "Angel of Death" in The Ten Commandments (1956) that comes into the sky before the slaying of all the firstborn of Egypt begins. Also, Roy and his family are watching this movie on TV before he is called to work after the power failure.
  
  
• Neary gives his date of birth as December 4, 1944. This is also the date of birth of Richard Dreyfuss' older brother Lorin Dreyfuss -- and, by coincidence, a year and a day before the disappearance of Flight 19, on which the lost planes in the movie are based.
  
  
• The reporter who is seen doing the report at the Devil's Tower (on TV in Roy Neary's living room) is named John Lindsay, a real reporter who had been the anchor at WLWI (now WTHR) in Indianapolis, Indiana, for a few years just before the filming of "CE3K". Roy's house was supposedly in Muncie, Indiana, which is within the viewing area of WTHR.
  
  
• The film's title refers to a classification system created by astronomer/UFO enthusiast J. Allen Hynek. A close encounter of the first kind would be the sighting an extraterrestrial spacecraft; the second kind involves some kind of physical evidence (a piece of metal of an unknown alloy or an unknown device left behind by one); the third kind is that of seeing an actual alien being. Close encounters of a fourth kind is when someone is abducted by aliens, though this term was not coined by Hynek.
  
  
• During the very beginning of the "space show" at the end of the film, the various dots (ships) during their tricks in the sky, form the "Big Dipper", right before the people begin to clap and cheer.
  
  

• SPOILER: As the returned abductees emerge from the belly of the "Mothership", their names are read out over a PA system. One of the names is Ken Swenson, who in reality was one of the model-makers working on this film.
  
  

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