The Semiquincentennial Movie Project is an ongoing celebration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. During the course of this project your humble blogger is choosing a movie a week to represent each of the 50 states in the Union, as well as a movie scheduled for 4th of July weekend that will represent the nation's capitol, Washington D.C. The order of the weekly entries will coincide with the order of each state's entry into the fold (although, not necessarily coinciding with the date of their entry into said fold).
Week #45: Wyoming-
The state of Wyoming was established on July 10, 1890
Details about Wyoming:
State bird: western meadowlark
State flower: Indian paintbrush
State tree: cottonwood
Additional historical trivia:
Nellie Tayloe Ross became the fist woman ever elected to be a state governor (By only a few days. She was followed the same year by Miriam Ferguson, who was elected governor of Texas the same year.)
First, the story behind Close Encounters: The original story started out under the title Watch the Skies, and originally was going to be about UFO enthusiasts. Then it was going to an entirely different story, one about an Air Force officer whose job was to debunk so called "sightings", but had a sighting himself, and was actively trying to blow the lid off a cover-up.
The eventual story that was filmed had a lot of trouble, mainly from the government and the military. The Air Force and NASA both refused to get involved. NASA even went so far as to send a memo to Spielberg suggesting that the project be cancelled, basically telling him it would be akin to "career suicide", I guess.
Of course, that wasn't the case, it turns out. After Jaws was such a big hit, Spielberg was granted carte blanche to make whatever he wanted, and with a budget of $19 million he created what turned out to be one of the biggest money makers of the year, just coming in behind Star Wars and Smokey and the Bandit.
As far as the cast was concerned, Dreyfuss was not the first considered for the part of Roy. Some rather big names turned down the role, including Steve McQueen, James Caan, Robert DeNiro, Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman and even Jack Nicholson. Of those I think Hoffman is the only one who could have given a performance that made the character believable. The others would probably have brought too much of previous roles to the part, and made the innocent Roy a different character all together.
Meryl Streep and Amy Irving auditioned for the part of Roy's wife. Terri Garr, who eventually got the role, originally wanted to play Jillian, but Melinda Dillon was cast instead.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977):
Close Encounters doesn't waste much time getting to the story. The opening credits feature only the title, two stars (Dreyfuss and Truffaut), the director of photography, Vilmos Zsigmond, and the director, Spielberg. Then it jumps right in to the film. (Less than 1 minute into the start...)
The film opens on the Sonoran desert in Mexico, where a flight of missing airplanes that disappeared in 1945 have reappeared. Despite the fact that 30 plus years (at the time) have lapsed since their disappearance, they are in pristine 12945 condition. Only the planes have reappeared, though. There is no sign, as yet, of the missing crew. And the flight had disappeared off the coast of Florida, but now it;s in the heart of Mexico.
In a remote are of Indiana a young boy, Barry (Cary Guffey), awakes to find all his toys going haywire. He gets up to investigate and finds he has guests in the house (although at this point we can only speculate, since we don't see what he sees...) He wanders outside, and his mother, Jillian (Melinda Dillon), who only sees her son wandering outside, gives chase.
Meanwhile, Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) gets a call about power outtages and has to go out to check them out. He gets hopelessly lost (This is pre-GPS... he has only a slew of fold-out maps to help... even I would probably get lost, and I have an innate sense of direction.) While parked ("you're in the middle of the road, you jerk") he witness one of the first of the many UFOs we will see in the film. He also discovers a band of people, along with Barry and his mother, on the side of the road, waiting for something. (Maybe it's that traffic jam of UFOs that just went by...?)
It gets even weirder.
In the middle of the Gobi Desert another mysterious appearance, a ship. Yes, I said a ship. Not a space ship. Just a regular WWI era cargo steamship, but not on the water, in the desert miles from where it too had disappeared years ago.
There suddenly seems to be a rash of reappearances of missing transport vehicles, all of which had coincidentally disappeared years before in that mysterious area we call the Bermuda Triangle. The question as to why they are reappearing now is a mystery (at least to those witnessing it, although not to us...)
Roy and Jillian both seem to be having an obsession with recreating something from some vision they have, which, as it turns out, seems to have been instilled in them from the aliens. It is the area we know as the Devil's Tower in Wyoming. They eventually both come to the conclusion that they are being drawn to this area by these unseen forces.
At the same time, government agencies also come to realize that something big is going to happen there. And as usual the government has no scruples in deterring others from the site. They manufacture a ruse that there has been some chemical spill accident and evacuate the countryside, as well as set up elaborate roadblocks and subterfuge to prevent anyone from coming to the area from the outside. All in the effort to keep the public away from the actual truth, the landing of aliens on Earth.
There are a number of parallels in this film to Biblical legends within the film. I have to admit these never occurred to me before I read about them, but in retrospect they do make sense. I didn't connect the facts, but the classic Charlton Heston film, The Ten Commandments, is playing on the Neary household TV, and later, when Roy finally tries to climb the Devil's Tower, there seems to be a lot of relationship to that classic story. Roy can be seen as Moses, the Devil's Tower could be Mt. Sinai and the aliens could be a substitute for God. Also, when Roy boards the brightly lit alien spacecraft, it could be a parallel to when God took Elijah up in a golden chariot.
The movie is an excellent look at the loss of innocence. There is something childlike about Roy as he gradually realizes he is on the verge of a new learning experience and his transition from the ordinary guy to a lucky observer of a new outlook on life feels like the same way when a child learns new things.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind was nominated for an astounding 8 Oscars, but lost in nearly every award in the voting to either Annie Hall or Star Wars. In fact, the only Oscar category it did win was for Best Cinematography, coincidentally the only category in which it was NOT competing against one or the other of those aforementioned films. It did win a second Oscar, a Special Achievement award for sound effects editing.
The film consistently ranks high in many lists of the greatest movies of all time. It ranks #64 on AFI's 100 Years, 100 Movies list. It's #44 on a list of Rotten Tomatoes best science fiction movies. On that site it garners a 91% Fresh rating. As noted above, it's $19 million budget was recouped in multiples, bringing $309 million at the box office. Whenever some one reissues it for theater it consistently sells out the theater. New viewers, people who were not even alive when it first came out, find it just as impressive as those of us who were lucky enough to be around for it's premiere.
That wraps it up for this week. Drive safely, folks... and keep watching the skies. Not all those aliens out there are bent on the destruction of mankind. Some actually have our best interests at heart.
Quiggy
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