Release Year: 1977

Genre: Drama, Sci-Fi

Director: Steven Spielberg

Writer: Steven Spielberg

Stars: Richard Dreyfuss, François Truffaut, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon

The truth is out there, people.

And it's in the mashed potatoes.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind is about the search for that truth. It's the story of Roy Neary, an ordinary guy who has an extraordinary encounter with a UFO and becomes obsessed with figuring out what happened to him. In his quest to solve the mystery, he's mysteriously drawn to Devil's Tower, Wyoming, where he witnesses the arrival of an alien spacecraft and gets a boarding pass to infinity and beyond.

Directed by Steven Spielberg, fresh off his blockbuster smash Jaws, CE3K was a huge success when it hit theaters. It made truckloads of money for its distributor, Columbia Pictures—$132,088,635 to be exact. Lucky for them, since the company was facing bankruptcy in '77 and had risked a then-incredible sum of $20 million on the film. (Source)

Along with Star Wars, released just seven months earlier, Close Encounters heralded "a flood of Hollywood films with killer special effects," an eye-candied wave that Hollywood's still riding today. (Source)

The film scooped up eight Academy Award noms, including Best Director, Best Visual Effects, and Best Music/Original Score. It won only one of the eight, with Best Cinematography going to the late, great Vilmos Zsigmond, but the Academy awarded it a Special Achievement Award for sound effects editing. It also took home a BAFTA for Best Art Direction and two Saturn Awards for Best Director and Best Music (John Williams). (Source)

All in all, not too shabby a trophy case for a sci-fi flick.

Although it didn't spawn a real-world religion like its Force-wielding brethren, Close Encounters has entered our pop-cultural consciousness. People who haven't even seen the film might be familiar with its most iconic moments: the five-note phrase, the mashed potatoes scene, and the UFO designs. It's not as popular today as in the late '70s—likely because the UFO craze ran its course in America—but you can still find it on "Best Of" lists everywhere.

What made the film so much more than a special-effects/alien spaceship romp was the Spielberg magic: the sense of joyful wonder, the focus on an ordinary guy in an extraordinary circumstance, his identification with the child's sense of awe, and the dazzling use of lighting throughout the film.

And including French director François Truffaut as the just-about-perfect UFO scientist didn't hurt, either.

When the aliens finally do get here, we hope they're the Spielberg version: peaceful and soulful, letting us know that we're all one big, happy universe and that everything's gonna be okay. And that our Internet speeds will be off the charts by 2020, guaranteed.

Now, can you please pass those mashed potatoes?

Spielberg 101

You should care because…Steven Spielberg.

Spielberg's probably the most influential and best-known Hollywood director of contemporary cinema. Maybe you're not a fan. Maybe you think he's overrated. But for a moment, we want you to imagine if someone had unironically written that about Michael Bay.

Just think about it.

Whatever your personal opinions on Spielberg's work, there's no doubting his influence on the moviemaking industry. His first major hit, Jaws, practically invented the summer blockbuster, totally changing the types of movies studios invested in and the way they marketed them.

Jaws could easily have been a one-hit wonder for a 26-year-old (yeah, you read that right) director. Close Encounters is the movie that proved Spielberg had his imagination tuned in to the American audience's psyche. It sealed the deal on audiences and critics recognizing a young genius in their midst. Roger Ebert, writing in TIME Magazine, noted that Spielberg's insight was that "there was an enormous audience to be created if old-style B-movie stories were made with A-level craftsmanship and enhanced with the latest developments in special effects." (Source)

In combination with his next mega-hits, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T, the film proved Spielberg's staying power and his talent as a director. Thanks to Close Encounters, not even 1941 could kill this guy's career.

Close Encounters (an early title being Watch the Skies) is also the film that proved Spielberg's talent for directing special effects spectacles, talents he'd use to great effect in later films like E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, A.I., Minority Report, and War of the Worlds. He even experimented with CGI, though the existing 1970s technology ultimately made it too difficult and expensive to use. Spielberg would return to the concept nearly two decades later with Jurassic Park, paving the way for the CGI revolution we know and love-hate today.

In a sense, CE3K is a preview of the rest of Spielberg's filmography. Film critic Angie Errigo summed it up:

Watching Close Encounters is like an entertaining study guide to the filmmaker and his body of work. Not just a signature film, Close Encounters — the only one of his movies before A.I. written as well as directed by him — encompasses all the major themes, concerns and elements that recur throughout Spielberg's career. There are his staple characters (the individual driven on a quest, the sympathetic mother, the lost boy wise-innocent, the untrustworthy, obstructive authorities). There is a transforming experience that creates a need to fulfill a mission or wish. There is the use of bright light as literal and metaphorical illumination. There are rescue, redemption, and affirmation of an individual's worth. (Source)

Spielberg told Roger Ebert that his master image—the one that most expressed how he, as a filmmaker, saw things—was "the light flooding in through the doorway in Close Encounters, suggesting, simultaneously, a brightness and mystery outside." (Source)

For Spielberg, that mystery offered not a threat, but an invitation. The director vividly remembers a night when his father, like Roy Neary, bundled him into the car in the middle of the night and whisked him off to watch something amazing— a meteor shower. His fear turned to awe as he watched the cosmic display.

Fortunately for us, he passed along that childhood experience—and its sense of amazement and wonder—in Close Encounters.

We just have to keep our eyes open and watch the skies.