59 Fun Facts About Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Which studio let Close Encounters go before Columbia picked the project up?

20th Century Fox. It parted with Spielberg's UFO project a few years before releasing Star Wars, and Columbia ended up with the biggest hit in its history to that point.

Which actor plays Roy Neary, the Indiana everyman whose life is upended by a UFO?

Richard Dreyfuss. He heard about the project for months on the set of Spielberg's previous film and campaigned for the lead until the director gave it to him.

What is Roy Neary's job at the start of Close Encounters?

Electric-utility lineman. Called out to a blackout, he gets lost and stops to read his map; the headlights behind his truck then rise straight up as the roadside mailboxes rattle.

Near which Indiana city does three-year-old Barry Guiler live when he is abducted?

Muncie. The scene was shot far from Indiana: the Guiler farmhouse was a real house outside Fairhope, Alabama, the state where the film's biggest sets were built.

Close Encounters' climax takes place at Devils Tower, a real monument in which state?

Wyoming. The crew did film at the real tower, but the landing strip hidden behind it existed only as a giant set built inside a hangar in Alabama.

Who composed the Close Encounters score, including its famous five-tone motif?

John Williams. He and Spielberg worked through about 300 five-note combinations before settling on the one the film's scientists send to the visitors.

In Close Encounters, what does Roy Neary sculpt into a mountain at the family dinner table?

Mashed potatoes. He only gets the shape right the next morning, when he tears the peak off a clay version in frustration and the flat top is suddenly the mountain he keeps seeing.

Which celebrated French film director plays the scientist Claude Lacombe?

François Truffaut. It was his first role in another director's film, and he used his free time on the shoot to write the script for his own next picture, The Man Who Loved Women.

Claude Lacombe in Close Encounters was modelled on which real-life UFO researcher?

Jacques Vallée. Consulted by Spielberg, he argued against showing visitors stepping out of a spaceship, wanting the mystery left stranger; Spielberg kept his crowd-pleasing ending.

The title Close Encounters of the Third Kind comes from a UFO scale devised by which astronomer?

J. Allen Hynek. Hired as the film's technical adviser, he also slipped into the finale: he is the bearded scientist with a pipe who steps forward for a closer look at the visitors.

In UFO research, what defines a close encounter of the third kind?

Sighting of the craft's occupants. The first kind is a close-range sighting and the second leaves physical traces; Columbia paid the scale's author for the title and hired him as an adviser.

Which effects artist built the smiling alien at the end of Close Encounters?

Carlo Rambaldi. Spielberg brought him in to build the visitor of the final close-ups, a mechanical puppet with a moving face, nicknamed Puck on the set; he later built E.T.

Which effects pioneer supervised the visual effects for Close Encounters?

Douglas Trumbull. The 2001: A Space Odyssey veteran had turned down George Lucas's Star Wars, pointing him to his former assistant John Dykstra instead.

Which Star Wars character is hidden on the Close Encounters mothership model as an in-joke?

R2-D2. Many of the model crew had just come off Star Wars; they also tucked a mailbox, a Volkswagen bus and a tiny cemetery among the mothership's lights.

Where is the original Close Encounters mothership model on public display?

The Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center. The glittering model was a change of heart: Spielberg first pictured the ship as a huge black shape and had already filmed its shadow crossing the landing site.

Which Star Wars concept artist designed the Close Encounters mothership?

Ralph McQuarrie. Spielberg had dropped an earlier design for a more flamboyant one, and the model shop built the finished ship from McQuarrie's artwork.

Spielberg said what sight, lit up at night, inspired the look of the Close Encounters mothership?

An oil refinery. By his account he drove past one while filming abroad, its pipes and towers ablaze with light, and wanted the top of his ship to look the same.

What mark does Roy Neary's first UFO encounter leave on him?

A sunburn on one side of his face. The same mark is on the old man in the opening scene, who tells the investigators that the sun came out at night and sang to him.

In Close Encounters, what is the name of Barry's mother, who shares Roy's visions of a mountain?

Jillian. Where Roy sculpts the mountain, she draws and paints it again and again, and both finally recognise it when the real thing appears on a television news report.

Which actress earned an Oscar nomination as Barry's mother in Close Encounters?

Melinda Dillon. She was cast only days before her scenes began, after Hal Ashby, who had just directed her in Bound for Glory, heard Spielberg was stuck and recommended her.

Who plays Ronnie Neary, Roy's increasingly exasperated wife?

Teri Garr. She asked to play the film's other female lead, the mother of the abducted boy, but Spielberg insisted she was his Ronnie.

In Close Encounters, what strange event greets young Barry Guiler when he wakes in the night?

His toys switching on by themselves. Downstairs the fridge has been raided and its contents strewn across the kitchen, and Barry, delighted rather than scared, runs out into the night.

In Close Encounters' opening scene, the lost planes of Flight 19 turn up intact where?

The Sonoran Desert. Spielberg had planned for the planes to be found deep in the Amazon jungle; the scene was rewritten for a Mexican desert and shot on sand dunes in California.

Which vanished ship turns up in the Gobi Desert in the Special Edition of Close Encounters?

SS Cotopaxi. The real steamer vanished with 32 men in 1925 between Charleston and Havana; in 2020 a wreck off St. Augustine, Florida, was identified as the ship, sunk by a storm.

In Close Encounters, what does the string of numbers sent in reply to the five tones turn out to be?

Geographic coordinates. It is the team's interpreter, a mapmaker by trade, who spots a longitude and latitude in the numbers, and a globe is hauled in from a nearby office to find the place.

In Close Encounters, what cover story does the Army use to clear civilians from the landing site?

A train wreck spilled nerve gas. The planners first weigh a flash flood, a plague and anthrax, until the major in charge demands something frightening enough to empty the whole region.

In Close Encounters, a crowd chants the five tones in which country?

India. The scene is set in Dharamsala, in the far north, but Spielberg filmed it a long way south, in a village outside Bombay, with thousands of extras.

How does Lacombe 'speak' the five tones to the visitor in the final scene of Close Encounters?

With hand signs. They are the Curwen signs that the Kodály method uses to teach singing, one hand shape for each note of the scale; the visitor repeats them back and smiles.

Which Disney song shaped Spielberg's writing of Close Encounters and was cut from its ending after a preview?

When You Wish Upon a Star. Spielberg said he hung the story on the song's mood, but a Dallas preview audience snickered at it over the ending, so only orchestral echoes of the tune were left.

Which screenwriter wrote the first Close Encounters draft, Kingdom Come, which Spielberg threw out?

Paul Schrader. The Taxi Driver writer's hero was an Air Force officer paid to debunk flying saucers who then sees one himself; Spielberg wanted an ordinary man and ended up writing his own script.

Which working title for Close Encounters did Spielberg borrow from the last line of The Thing from Another World?

Watch the Skies. The phrase survives in the finished film: as the first lights approach the landing strip, the announcer tells the waiting scientists, 'Okay, watch the skies, please.'

Which star, Spielberg's first choice for Roy Neary in Close Encounters, declined because he was unable to cry on cue?

Steve McQueen. He liked the script, but told Spielberg face to face that he had never been able to cry on film, and the part needed a man who breaks down in front of his children.

Which biblical epic is on the Neary family's television early in Close Encounters?

The Ten Commandments. When his wife protests that the film runs four hours, Roy replies that he told the children they could watch only five commandments.

Roughly what did Close Encounters finally cost to make?

$19 million. Spielberg had pitched it at under $3 million, and the overrun strained a cash-strapped Columbia: by release, the film was widely seen as the bet the studio's future rode on.

Close Encounters earned Spielberg a Best Director nomination but missed the Best Picture shortlist; which 1977 film took that prize?

Annie Hall. Woody Allen's comedy also beat Spielberg to Best Director, and of all Close Encounters' nominations only one, in a craft category, became a competitive win.

Which competitive Academy Award did Close Encounters win?

Best Cinematography. Vilmos Zsigmond took the statuette even though several other cinematographers, Douglas Slocombe and László Kovács among them, shot the film's added scenes without him.

What was Phil Dodds, Close Encounters' synthesizer installer, asked to do?

Play it on camera. Sent by the synthesizer's maker, ARP, to set it up, Dodds became Jean-Claude, the keyboard player of the finale, and ended up in the credits twice, as Philip and as Phil.

Who played the small visitors that crowd out of the mothership at the end of Close Encounters?

Young local girls. Spielberg felt girls moved more gracefully than boys, so the production recruited its little visitors from a ballet school near the set.

To pay for Close Encounters' 1980 Special Edition, Columbia insisted that Spielberg add what?

A scene inside the mothership. Spielberg came to regret it, saying the interior should have stayed a mystery, and he cut the footage again from his 1998 version.

During the police chase in Close Encounters, what do the small UFOs fly straight through?

A highway toll booth. They set off its alarm as they sail across the Ohio state line without paying the quarter, three police cars close behind them.

Close Encounters was Spielberg's first collaboration with which editor, who has cut nearly every Spielberg film since?

Michael Kahn. He got the job only because the editor of Spielberg's previous hit, on loan from an executive post at Universal, left the project as shooting began in May 1976.

In Close Encounters, how does little Barry Guiler get out of the barricaded farmhouse when the visitors come for him?

Through the dog door. His mother has wedged the doors, pulled the blinds and shut the fireplace damper, and she is still gripping his legs when he is pulled out into the light.

Which Spielberg film ranked highest in the AFI's 1998 poll, above Close Encounters?

Schindler's List. It placed ninth, ahead of E.T. at 25th and Raiders of the Lost Ark at 60th; Close Encounters came 64th, then dropped out of the hundred when the list was redone in 2007.

Spielberg said which agency read the Close Encounters script and sent him a 20-page letter of objections?

NASA. Spielberg had asked the agency to help with the film; he said its angry refusal, and the sheer length of the letter, convinced him 'there must be something happening'.

At which New York cinema did Close Encounters have its world premiere in November 1977?

The Ziegfeld Theatre. A New York magazine writer who slipped into a Dallas preview predicted a 'colossal flop', and Columbia's stock dipped; the film then opened at the Ziegfeld and was an instant hit.

Which line does Roy Neary keep repeating in Close Encounters as the mountain shape takes over his life?

This means something. 'This is important,' he adds each time, and near the end Lacombe borrows the same words to defend the uninvited arrivals to the Army major.

The composer slipped the two-note motif from which earlier Spielberg film into the mothership's music?

Williams was nominated for two scoring Oscars in 1978, for this film and Star Wars, and won for Star Wars.

Which president made Devils Tower, the mountain of Close Encounters, America's first national monument?

Theodore Roosevelt. The film's own newscast gets it half right: the reporter credits him but gives the year as 1915, when he had signed the proclamation in 1906.

Devils Tower, the mountain in Close Encounters, is Matȟó Thípila in Lakota, a name that translates as what?

Bear Lodge. The earliest maps used that name; 'Devils Tower' dates from an 1875 Army expedition whose colonel wrote that local tribes called the rock Bad God's Tower.

As Roy and Barry's mother climb the tower in Close Encounters, Army helicopters dust the slopes with what?

Sleeping gas. The major calls it a sleep aerosol already tried on the area's livestock; it catches the third climber, Larry, when he stops to rest, so only two reach the top.

Who plays David Laughlin, the mapmaker who interprets for Lacombe in Close Encounters?

Bob Balaban. He kept a diary all through the shoot and published it the following year, an actor's-eye record of a famously secretive production.

Apollo Creed actor Carl Weathers has a small role in Close Encounters as what?

A military policeman. Rocky was his breakthrough: by his own account he won Apollo Creed after blurting out at the audition that he could do better with 'a real actor' than his reading partner, Sylvester Stallone.

At the Air Force briefing in Close Encounters, what does an old farmer announce he once saw?

Bigfoot. Its foot was 37 inches from heel to toe, he tells the room, and it made a sound he would not want to hear twice; the actor, Roberts Blossom, later played the feared neighbour in Home Alone.

In 1985 Spielberg helped fund a Harvard search for alien radio signals backed by which group?

The Planetary Society. His money went into META, a receiver that scanned 8.4 million radio channels at once; five years of listening logged 37 unexplained signals, none of which was ever heard again.

Fired Close Encounters producer Julia Phillips savaged Spielberg in which memoir?

You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again. Phillips, the first woman to win a Best Picture Oscar as a producer, was fired, by most accounts over her cocaine use; she made no film for a decade, then settled scores in her 1991 tell-all.

Close Encounters was the last film Spielberg directed from his own solo screenplay until which later science fiction film?

A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Spielberg wrote the script himself from a story treatment Stanley Kubrick had commissioned, his first solo screenplay in the 24 years since Close Encounters.

Offered a Disney film by their father in Close Encounters, what do Roy Neary's children vote to do instead?

Play miniature golf. Roy sells the film as 'a lot of furry animals and magic and a wonderful time' and promises to stay neutral, but Goofy Golf wins the vote the moment it is called.

Close Encounters' biggest sets were built inside two disused Air Force hangars in which Alabama city?

Mobile. No Hollywood soundstage could hold the landing-site set, so it went up inside a hangar at the closed Brookley air base, where the shoot ran for months behind tight security.

Running out of money on Close Encounters, Columbia turned for funds to which British music and film company?

EMI. The record giant's film arm put money into the picture when Columbia could not finish it alone; it shares the production credit and, by one account of the deal, profited handsomely.