 Starring: Richard Dreyfuss, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon, Francois Truffaut, Cary Guffey
Director: Steven Spielberg
Year Of Release: 1977
Plot: After an encounter with a UFO, Roy Neary finds himself getting increasingly obsessed with a strange mountainous shape he can’t get out of his head, which begins to put severe strain on his marriage. As more sightings of alien spacecraft take place around the world, and governments struggle to understand, Roy and other people who’ve close encounters find themselves drawn to Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. |
Although Close Encounters Of The Third Kind wasn’t the first film be released in different versions of different length (it was quite common in the past, for example, to have a longer roadshow version that was released first, before a shorter edition made the rounds of normal cinemas), it is probably where the modern obsession with Director’s/Extended/Special Edition versions of movies started out.
When Steven Spielberg first began making Close Encounters, he wanted to release it in the summer of 1978, but due to Columbia Pictures having money troubles at the time, he was pressured to get everything done and the movie in cinemas by November 1977. Because of this – as well as budget and scheduling issues – the director had to rush the shoot (which wasn’t helped by the fact he kept changing his mind about exactly what he wanted), couldn’t film everything he wanted to and ended up with a movie he felt was incomplete.
However he had little choice but to release the film, and luckily for him, audiences didn’t seem to notice the problems, as it became one of the highest grossing movies of the decade. Spielberg still wasn’t happy though, and a couple of years later, he convinced Columbia to give him some more money so he could go back and complete the film in the way he’d initially intended.
The studio agreed to this with one proviso. In order to try and lure audiences back into the cinema, Spielberg had to tag on an extra bit at the end, so that we got to see inside the alien spaceship as Roy Neary enters it. Although the director didn’t really want to do this, he nevertheless agreed, just so he could get the other bits he wanted in the can.
Spielberg managed to round up most of the original cast, shot some new scenes and re-edited much of the rest of the film. While most of the changes were relatively small, he added an entire sequence in which the ship the Cotopaxi is discovered in the Gobi Desert, as well as removing and shortening quite a few other scenes, adding to a few and generally giving the whole thing a bit of an overhaul and tightening it up. Indeed, Spielberg’s new version was, and still is, rather unusual for actually being shorter than the version that was originally released.
The result was then released in cinemas in 1980 as the ‘Special Edition’, at which point Spielberg announced that from now on this was the only version of the movie he thought was the real one, with the 1977 release just being a work-in-progress. Columbia seemed to agree, as for well over a decade the Special Edition was the only one available, and they even went as far as destroying all the original prints of the movie, except for a few kept in the studio’s vault for historical interest.
It was the first time in the modern era something quite like this had happened, where the studio allowed a director to go back after they’d completed a movie, to film some extra bits and tinker with it, especially so close to release of the original version.
Although initially this didn’t start a big trend of directors reworking films after they were released, what it did do was set a template, so that as home video took off and studios realised the potential cash benefits of producing new versions of movies, Close Encounters was held up as the model that proved it could be financially viable. Columbia spent $2 million creating the Special Edition, but it grossed over $15 million just in the US, making it one of the top 50 films of 1980, only three years after it had been the second biggest movie of 1977 (behind Star Wars) in its original version.
Close Encounters was the prototype, with other movies like Blade Runner and later Star Wars following in its footsteps with Special Edition/Director’s Cut release, until we get to today, where we have a slightly ridiculous situation where distributors sometimes have two versions of a film ready to go from day one (particularly for horror films or raunchy comedies), releasing one into cinemas, while holding back an extended cut for the DVD on the hope it’ll encourage more people to buy it.
However, despite Spielberg saying that he considered the 1980 Special Edition version of the movie the only ‘real’ version of Close Encounters, that didn’t stop him going back and having another go in 1998. This version was titled The Collector’s Edition, and reinserted much of the footage lost between the original and Special Edition cuts (such as Roy throwing throws dirt, plants and bricks through his kitchen window so he can build a replica of Devil’s Tower in his living room as his family leave), while removing the scenes at the ends inside the spaceship, which Spielberg never particularly liked anyway.
The 30th Anniversary DVD and Blu-ray release a couple of years ago included all three versions of the film (marking the Original Cut’s first foray onto DVD, having never been on video either, although it was included in an early 90s laserdisc release). It’s interesting to be able to compare and contrast them, because while not drastically different to one another, the original cut is more intimate and focuses on Roy Neary’s rather disturbing breakdown, while the Special Edition is more typically Spielbergian and in awe of the alien visitors and grand-scale special effects, with the Collector’s Edition being a bit of a merging of the two.
However, if you’ve ever wondered where the modern love of releasing numerous versions of movies comes from, Close Encounters is the picture to point your finger at. It’s still unusual for a filmmaker to be allowed to go back after the fact and film new scenes for their flick, but with do-overs in both 1980 and 1998, Close Encounters helped prove to Hollywood that there was money to be made in going back and releasing new versions of movies that had already been and gone from cinemas.
TIM ISAAC
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