Close Encounters of the Third Kind with J.D. Amato

Blank Jack with Griffin and David

Black Jack with Griffin and David.

Don't know what to say or to expect.

All you need to know is that the name of the show is Black Jack.

Do

I have to get the I have to harmonize? I have to get the right note. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.

Do, do, do, podcast.

All right, so here's my pitch. Do, do, do, podcast.

Obviously, that's great. But, you know, you sound really posted.
The poster. That's not the voice of someone who's no, no, I think that's good.
I think that's good. The poster, right?

It is an iconic poster in its own right. I'm going to do the tagline.
Podcast. And so here's my, here's my pitch.

Close encounter of the first kind, sighting of a UFO. Close encounter of the second kind, physical evidence.
Close encounter of the third kind, podcast. Well, that's my pitch.

You got to put a little muscle.

Would this be the first time that it's the tagline? No, we often used to do that. That used to be our way in.
JD,

I'm new to the pod. Well, no, here's what you're new to.

You're new to year 10, a decade of dreams.

Blank check, a decade of dreams. And this year, we're pointing back at all our history.
Wait, the beautiful strings in the background.

That's the theme? I'm on the episode

that the theme comes from?

The whole decade is a decade of dreams, or the whole year. The whole year is a decade of.
What if you do this for the next 10 years? But we got to.

We got to point back. Remember when we used to do the tagline? Used to...
you know, focus on the movie poster tagline first. And then maybe, I guess, if there was nothing, we would try a quote.

That's true. I don't remember this.
Here's another thing. Mini-series names used to be riffing on the director's names.
Pod Night Shama Cast.

And then we eventually were kind of like, it's

boring. Couldn't do it with Cameron Crow.
Yeah, Pod Marin Crane. It doesn't matter.
Right. It does matter because in another universe, we could be doing Steve Pod Spielcast right now.
Right.

Which again, you know, there's a reason we moved on because that's just kind of okay. Eight of Dreams is a time to look back.
Yeah, that's fine.

I mean, if you want me to look back, I just want to to look back to the, you know, when we just did Star Wars movies, the prequels, right? Sure. For our first year.
10 years ago.

And so we didn't do quotes at all, usually. Oh, sure.
Right. And there's one episode, I think a really bad one, where we just decided to do like the politics of Star Wars.

I think that was for Attack of the Clones and Star Wars.

Did I show up to a clip show?

Decade of Dreams, like, what's the constant? What's in this box in the attic? Oh, well, look at all these memories.

It's even better than a clip show. It's two guys going, hey, remember when this happened and not cutting back to the clip show? Do you guys remember the first time that I was ever on blank check?

Yeah, it was for Star Wars episode two.

We cut to the clip. No, no, no.
Ben can do all that later, but just decided to dream, so we don't do that. I just want to say for the politics episode.
You're throwing daggers at me right now.

For the politics episode, this ill-begotten politics episode, I believe Griffin just opened the episode by going, politics!

Just yelling, man. Yeah.
And we, you know what? I'm going to make a promise. I will do that again at some point within year 10, decades.
Ben, you didn't start the clock. Oh, David's in a great mood.

I'm in a normal, great mood. The greatest mood.
I will say this. Greatest mood.

To the average person who doesn't know David, they'd be like, David's not in a good mood because he was immediately talking about starting on time and wanting to get going. Yeah.

Well, we're doing that. Having known

David for a really long time, David's actually in a really good mood today. Why am I in a good mood? Or why do you think that? I just think you have a verb.
You have an energy.

You have a life to you that is exciting. Nice to see you.
You heard that verby sigh.

The verby sign you hear that

types of work email you know nice to see you i don't see a lot of like grown-ups right now it's nice to see grown-ups well this is where grown-ups live in the blank check studios entering year 10 a decade of dreams this is where grown-ups live

um this is that's the worst like you know theme park like my this is where grown-ups like who would be drawn to that well good thing this is i guess like a sex club but even then it would be kind of like yeah I hope so.

This isn't a theme park. This is a place of business.
This is like a place of seriousness.

This park is grown up. I used to work at a chess shop a zillion years ago.
Well, that's where

my first job in New York, basically, which was,

it was called Chess Shop. It doesn't exist anymore.
Is it the two competing ones that were across the street from each other? Chess Forum was the spin-off that

employees of the chess shop had started. And I believe Chess Forum still exists.
That was the Patsys?

Exactly. Yeah, Chess Forum still exists.
God bless them. Whereas Chess Shop finally has turned into a sort of different game store.
I don't really know.

There's that weird chain now that's called like Hex and Cross. Yeah, I've seen those.
That's like Board Game Coffee ⁇ Co. or something.
Yes.

But anyway, when I worked at the Chess Shop, which was this sort of shambling institution from back in the day in the village on Thompson Street, we had lots of chess sets for sale, many of them from India, because India is the home of chess sets.

And the boxes would say, like, made with no child labor. Oh, sure.
And you would be like, that's great, but

we have to announce that. Like, what does that mean for all the ones that don't say that? You know, so it's kind of like the sex.
It's affairs of the difference.

Come with your kids, leave with your kids.

I think I've told you that I waited on Gandalfini once because his son used to be really into chess, I think, at some point.

I think Michael, right? I think his son Michael. I think he's only got one child.
He's now a good actor.

And

James Gandalfini was an incredibly nice customer, like polite customer. But

that man standing and waiting,

just breathing and like maybe looking at his watch is one of the more stressful like work experiences where I'm like, yes, yes, your order is here. And I'm like rushing.
And he's just like,

that's me.

Just freaking me out. But I remember that being a pretty small, delicate, cramped store.
Not a big store. Not a huge store.
What year were you working there? 2008. 2008.
Year I moved here.

What are you doing, JD?

Like, could I have waited on you? JD's doing.

I mean, it's very possible. It's very possible.
24 hours. Do you think David sold you a rook? I think David

sold me my first chess set that i ever bought okay what did you do you remember what you bought did you buy like a matte in pieces yep i mean because that was the thing people would come in and say hey i just want like what can i get a chess set for like the least amount of money essentially this is probably a screen memory that i am inventing it's possible but the person i mean you probably hung out in the village a lot back then right the person that i'm remembering who helped me on that day now a long time ago had David characteristics to the point that I'm like, was it David?

I worked there. I mean, like, there's, that's so funny.
You went, can I get a Matt in pieces? And he went,

no, no, the whole thing was like, you knew when people came in. Oh my God, wait, I'm remembering it now.

The person went,

boy, if someday I had a blank check.

I'd get it. I'm pretty sure I was like logged into AIM on the, you know, computer and like

bored out of my mind. Furiously messaging.
Hey, you know what? What a fun thing to look back on as we start our decade of dreams.

You're acting, Griffin, like this is the the first episode of like 2025 which is not just

like the fifth episode it's the fourth i think is this the first time that decade of dreams has been

starting this no i've seen it in a couple other episodes but because of us recording in advance and slightly out of order i didn't i i didn't have the foresight to launch it on the on the dual left episode you probably episode so i'm catching up all right well this is a more nostalgic film anyway this is a film about you waited till you had a friend that would yes and you also maybe that's part of it people would come in and then we'll talk about close encounters people We'll talk about a lot of things.

Well, we got our lot of things episode next.

This is the whole, it's a backwards thing. It's like when we were listening, when there was that Crunch of Doughboys episodes where they were getting ready for Mitch to work.

Yeah, let's just call out that this episode is being recorded the week before Mitch has his colonoscopy.

But it's also

we're doing our silly episode next,

but it'll have come out before this one.

You know what I mean? Yes. So like the sillies, like they'll are front-loaded

for the listener. They've gotten their sillies out, but we haven't.
But yeah, we're like the Rashamon of Dough Voice episodes where you're like, this is day after Kalinoski, day before.

Anyway, people would come in and there'd be three kinds of people. One is a person who's just like, hi, I'm interested in chess.
I have $30. You know, like, what can I get for it?

And it's like, yeah, you just want a mat and some plastic pieces, right? Chess. People come in being like, hey, I would like a nice chess set.
And you're like, great, you want a wooden chess set.

It's going to cost you like $120 or whatever. Right.
Like, you want like a nice wood rosewood chess set. Yeah.
And then some people come in. The Simpson set.
Well, that we did sell. I was going to say

popular. It was a very nice set.
But no, some people come in kind of with like, if you kind of pitch me enough, I'll drop like a lot of money on a slightly sort of absurdly expensive chess set.

But they're kind of testing you. Right.
They're like, so, you know, come on, make me believe that I need to spend like 400 bucks on this like really fancy wrought iron.

Or there was the Bauhaus chess set.

I don't know what just happened. Ben just handed a phone to JD with someone.
He brought up the part in the movie that he wanted to breathe the quote from. Oh, great.

Okay, now we can finally start the podcast. But how do we do this, though? Where's the subtitle? You press play, subtitles around, and I'm going to do it, and you do the feedback.
Okay, ready?

Okay. Okay, this is suddenly a lot of pressure, but we're going to try it.

Well, I don't know where we are in it, but we're going to try this. Okay.

Okay, start with the tone. Do, do do podcast

podcast

do do do podcast

podcast? Why is it southern accent? I'm trying something up a full note

podcast

down a major third. Podcast

now, drop an octave

podcast.

Cool blue, go.

New doo doo podcast.

Foghorn Leghorn.

One of the guys is Foghorn Leghorn, like with glass, big thick glasses. Do do do podcast.

Podcast. Give me a tone.

Read to the second. Up a full tone.

Me to the third, down a major third. Do to the first, drop an octave.

Do up perfect fifth? So to the fifth.

Wasn't that worth it, David? David is now checking. These really two devices.

We're doing the podcast. Yeah, we're doing the podcast.
Hey, David, that also wasn't the section that I was imagining. Well, whatever.
Thank you for pulling that up, though. Thank you, man.
Hey, Ben.

10 years from now, we're going to be looking back on this moment. This is Blank Check with Griffin and David.
I'm Griffin. I'm David.

It's a podcast about filmographies, directors who have massive success early on in their careers and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion products they want.

And sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce. Baby, this is a mini-series on the early works of Steven Spielberg.
And you know it's serious because David has unzipped his hoodie.

He's wearing a sleeveless shirt.

He's wearing a dickhead? I'm wearing a quince shirt. Oh, hey.

This is Steven Spielberg. That's the first.
A mini series on the early works of Steven Spielberg. Yes, the first half of it.
It's called Podoracic Cast. Sure.

Podoracic Cast. I said, sure.
JD is making a face that's like, hmm, yummy, sounds good.

Of all the options, that's what you went with? Make a better pitch because we went through it all.

We went through it all, and you think, oh, there are a lot of options, but then you start working on them. What are you ending with? What are we ending with? Schindler's List.
I heard about it.

Oh, interesting. I would say not to riff on that title, maybe.
No, I'm not.

Steer your riff truck away. But like pod encounters of the third cast.

Yeah, you're right. Actually, you're pod encounters of the cast kind.
It's not until later that he did. Yes, which was fine, you know, but like, kind of like, eh.

But you're like, there are the Indiana Jones titles, there's Close Encounters, and there's Jurassic Park. Otherwise, he has a lot of short titles.
Yeah, what are you going to do with Hook?

You know, what are you going to do with

the Potterland casts? We're not going to do the color podcast. PC, the Padre Terrestrial? I pitched it.
You better believe I pitched it. Yeah, you're right.
That's rough.

PC, the podcast, caster rest of your Indiana Jones and the Temple of Podcasts. Well, yeah, of course.
Yeah, that's probably it. Yeah.

Yeah.

I think Podracast is fun. Podrassic Cast is fun.
And we can maybe have, you know, art like the Al Yankovic album. Yes.
You're right. It's time for our

Al Yankovic. Go on.
What do you mean? Well, remember, he has the one album.

It's called...

I can't remember what it's called even, but the song is just called Jurassic Park.

But the album cover is just like the Jurassic Park logo with you know al instead of a dinosaur i mean you're laughing already yeah ben turned off his mic because he was laughing so much ben's laughing too hard right now uh it's called i mean i i i won't i won't care actually it's called alapalooza alapalooza you know it looks like uh you know i think we're all gonna have a great time it's fun it's fun it's fun i won't hear anything against weird al i think weird al is like one of the few pure i agree kind of i know you agree yeah i'm just saying it out loud Like,

you know how back in the day people would be like, man, if Obama was whatever, turned out to be like cheating on his wife, that would be such a bummer.

Now everyone's like, oh, Obama's probably, everyone cheats on their wife or whatever. Now morals have shifted, I guess.
I'm waiting to see where this is going to be. If Al Yankovich got canceled,

that would put me out so much more than like 99.9% of celebrities, right? Like that's one where I'm like, no,

I have always heard what a great guy he is, and I refuse to believe otherwise. Most celebrities these days, I'm like, yeah, whatever.
Hollywood is a pit of scum, and they're all up to no good.

He's one of the only good ones we got. You know, if he was on Jay-Z's Island or Diddy's Island or whoever had an island,

I don't like it.

JD's doing swerve gestures. Hey, our guest today, return to the show.
A legend across the decade of dreams that we've lived through

from after midnight. That's right.
New credits since the last time on CBS. On CBS.
12:30. Network television, JD Amato.
I'm so glad to be here. I'm JD Amato, and I love movies.
Blank it. Thank it.

JD, I'm so happy to have you here. I'm so happy to see you.

It's been

worse the more we say it. We're going to carve it into the door.

It's been a minute. It's been a minute.

When was it last?

This has basically become a yearly event that tends to happen at the end of the year where we double up

episodes

and a patreon episode where you have this sort of december slot sort of for your choosing yeah i feel like the past three years we've we've tried to schedule something we do more frequently yeah and it hasn't happened and so now it's turned into we just last year was uh we we doubled a patreon record with boy and the heron yep year before that we doubled one with coraline yep And the year before that, I'm trying to think what the last main feed appearance was before the walk, there was a bit of a gap.

Yeah, I mean, you did talking the moon walk with us, and we ranked the walks the year before that. Right.
You know, but you hadn't done a main feed since the walk. But welcome.
This is your one,

eight, nine. This is your 10th

feed episode, main feed. Look at a decade of dreams.
It's all lighting up. It's a decade of dreams.
That's true, Oberd. He's laughing over.
Over the decade, you're about a once-a-year guest.

I'm hearing the strings come back. It's a hit.

10th time for the decade of dreams. 10th time for the decade of dreams.
And a big-ass movie.

And this,

a movie that I'm so delighted to talk about. A big ass movie.
I'm not denying this, right?

Big movie at the time. Big movie in the man's filmography.
Yeah.

Is it the least remembered or discussed of his like totemic top-of-the-pile movies these days? Yeah, but I think that's weirdly only the last 10 years. But 10 years is a long time.

For example, all a blank check contained within it. The strings are back.

I'm just like, I was just considering that because I watched this movie when I was young and I want to hear, obviously, because my dad showed it to me as this kind of like, I am now showing you a really big movie for me, right?

Exactly with my mother as a child. Yeah.
You know, here we go. And we can talk about what I thought of it when I was a kid, but, you know, whereas now I feel like it's like,

whatever, you know, below your Jurassic Park, your Indiana Jones,

I think all that stuff. A parent who is vaguely interested in movies and trying to show their kids important things

puts like Indiana Jones

Jurassic TT. They're even saying Lincoln bridges five.
Oh, but I think they're even saying like, hey, someday you'll be old enough to watch Jaws. Like they're calling the shot of Jaws.

They're pointing off to Jaws in the distance. Someday you'll be able to watch the Fablemans.
Well, that's, you have to really grow up. You show a kid Fablemans too early.

It might score him for life, turn him into a filmmaker. Yeah, exactly.
It's not like this is a forgotten film. No, I just feel like it's a slightly less discussed film than its heyday, I guess.

I don't know. And I, my experience on this watch of it is that weirdly, in school, I remember there being a lot of learning a lot of information about this movie.

And so when you like in film school, you're saying not in like elementary school. No, no, no, and film school.

And I was like, oh, yeah, I've, I remember a lot about the, learning about the making of this film. And then I was like, wait,

are any of those things correct? And I sort of had, sort of, had this skepticism over my

Spielberg movies. That's right.
The lore gets only

printed a little bit. And there was one professor that was the one that would talk a lot about it.
And so I was sort of like, do I trust this guy? So then I was like, let me actually dive into.

I read the making of book and I read the Baliban diaries.

I'm eager to talk about.

Do they always begin with like, wake up, comb comb beard?

Yeah, that's most of it. The beard looks soft.

That's what I'm saying. I want to know how is he maintaining that film?

Yeah. But in reading about all of the development of this and what happened,

I was struck by how actually

important this film was in Spielberg's career. And

I guess, and to your point, I think it has fallen in the folds of an otherwise Sterling career.

Maybe not all the way in the folds, but I think people don't, this is such an important movie in his,

it is his launch. Well, also, look, and his lunch.

I don't know. The smile that David gave at me.
I was just really, really searching for some kind of sandwich joke I could make, but I couldn't, I couldn't.

You look at like the first decade of Spielberg's directing career, right?

Dual Sugarland. Okay, that's like developmental years, right? Yeah.
Then

just straight through Jaws, Close Encounters,

1941 is at least a big flashy bomb, right?

And then E.T. Raiders.
No, Raiders E.T. I'm sorry.
Yes. But like those four movies, I think were held on vaguely equal

sort of esteem. Jaws, Close Encounters, Raiders ET is what you're saying.
Right. This guy has made four Blockbuster masterpieces.
And it does feel like of those four,

this one's fallen out a a little bit where it feels like it's more the egghead pick. It's more the egghead pick.
It's got, it doesn't have action in it.

It's, you know, it's in the best way cheesier already, you know, like not cheesy, maybe, but like it's very sentimental. And so it's also, it's in a certain way, it's like

less emotional than a lot of, I don't know, it's funny how much this feels like a key Spielberg text and you watch it now. And there are like parts of this movie that almost play like, like Verite,

you know, that feel very stripped down and a lot of the emotion is kind of like subtextual interesting it doesn't go for like

do you disagree i kind of disagree i can hear both sides yeah but i also think based on what happened with jaws and what a disaster the production was and how successful the film

yeah i mean and to have cameras there to see it all that's the worst part of it and not intervene But if this didn't go well,

that would have been who he was is this sort of like...

I think then it would, if, say, right, say this movie is some sort of giant bomb, it would be like, okay, buddy, back to, you know, make, make me a thriller, make me a creature feature, make me, you know, not like, okay, anything you want.

What do you want to do? Yeah. And I think the success of this, because also I didn't realize what a huge

learning about where the industry was at the time was very interesting and also very comforting because we're in a dire industry place right now in film and television.

Great, no problems at all. Not for podcasting, but sure.
But to learn. Are Cravens out there hunting?

Although, by the time this came out, that movie is whatever. I have tickets for Kraven

tonight. Craven has been out for, I think, four days.
I bought tickets for Craven and 40X. It is playing in 40X one time a day, 10.20 p.m.
Yeah. And his first one.
Well, he hunts at night.

This is true. I didn't know this was a movie.
Yeah.

Like, you're saying we're telling you it's a movie that this is the first time. You're familiar with the word.
There's like posters. I have not seen this movie.

Not only that, it's been pushed back so many times. This movie's basically been advertised for two years.

I did not know about that jd uh you're familiar with craven the hunter his work i yes uh you want to take a stab at who directed the craven the hunter movie i have no idea i don't even know who we're going to tell you

just knowing nothing about it just who would you think would direct a craven the hunter movie a solo craven the hunter movie where they're legally not allowed to say spider-man

uh i can't even imagine

of course jc chandor director of margin call a most violent year and all is lost triple frontier no way Who's playing Craven the Hunter? Aaron Taylor Johnson. Of course, your favorite star.

The most hunt,

hunty.

He's always on the hunt. Audiences are on the hunt for his next great picture.
Fascinating. Audiences are on the hunt for a different ticket.
Well, yeah, that's what actually happened.

Seeing Wicked a fifth time. Right.
Like, they're like, they see the Craven the Hunter ticket and they're like,

they turn right.

Anyway, industry's going great now. And in 1977, also going great is what you're saying.

To your point, he had a blank check in a way that i would argue to a certain degree 70s new hollywood is a little bit more directors carving out control of their own career rather than just you're slotted into the studio system you're assigned movies right

he's like in the early days of like jaws is undeniable what do you want to do well and we'll get into the development of it i'll crack the dossier but it does feel like this movie is him being like what if i'm not trying to make jaws again what if i'm trying to do something else and it working is the thing that kind of is like okay he expanded he showed us he can do what he wants so i read i read the the ray morton close encounters of the third kind the making of steven spielberg's classic film book

and what i

based on that

what i gleaned is it wasn't a blank check it was no he no not quite he sold paramount on this being a 2.8 million dollar movie and then just kept being like we need more and eventually it was like kind of this like $20 million sunk cost thing where they were like,

all right, we think this is going to be good. So we'll keep writing the check.
But like, if it's horrible, we're fucked.

Like we have put so much into this in a way that I'm like, I think it was a weird bet that they kept raising the stakes on.

Yes, I agree with you. I do think they wouldn't have.

They wouldn't have stayed by for that if he hadn't made draws.

That's the way in which it's a blanket.

Now, obviously, he eventually becomes, it's funny that his early career is defined by these movies that went over budget and schedule and stuff because he became this very like no i don't do that i'm on time i i go under budget but that's raiders is what right like he was also very young he was quite young only seven

seven years old no he was very but like Early in his career, it's like, Jesus, this Spielberg guy, this better fucking work. Like, and then 1941 is the one where it doesn't.

And Spielberg himself is like, okay, I need to storyboard everything like really closely. I need to get my budget under control.
I cannot become the guy who always goes over budget.

He did it three times, but two of those

was so wildly successful that people were fine with it. I mean, fine with it.
Let's, they tolerated it because the bet would pay off.

The first time that bet doesn't pay off, people are like ready to shut you down. Yeah, it was fascinating.

So I've got a question for all the gamers gamers out there and I'm pointing at you, David. Are you seriously gonna miss out on Alienware's biggest gaming sale of the year?

I mean, these are Cyber Monday prices we're talking about. So it's not just another sale.
Yeah, I took a look and this is some pretty big bang for your buck.

You know, it's Alienware with some of the most advanced engineering out there with systems at the top of every reviewer's lists. And what about a gift for yourself?

Give yourself a new Alienware 16 Area 51 gaming laptop. I mean, this thing's got performance at the absolute next level with Intel Core Ultra Process.

And even better, you can get it during Cyber Monday. Plus, you can save on all kinds of displays and accessories like the Alienware 32 4K QD OLED gaming monitor for ultimate visual fidelity.

These really are incredible deals on PCs with otherworldly performance. So I'd visit alienware.com slash deals soon and grab what you can before the lowest prices of the year go dark.

Bong,

David. Yep.
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When did you first see, before I crack the dossier, when did you first see Close Encounters, or if you have a memory of that at all, or what's your experience with the movie? so strangely

i can't even pinpoint how or why this is one of my earliest movie memories i i can believe it again again generationally for us the parents this was a big movie maybe i don't know yeah and i remember watching it with my parents when i was i think too young to see it and it it felt like a very serious horror movie in a way yeah that was my memory of it too like i of course i have memories of seeing disney movies and things like that before this is the the first sort of like adult movie that I can like remember seeing.

And I, it, I had a lot of fears around it. It felt like scary.
It was a scaring fear. Like, do you, it sort of scarred you slightly? Or

I think it might have. Well, not scarred me, but I think it, it, it,

it had an impact on me. It's also like a sad grown-up movie.

This is the thing, because this is my dad showed me this movie probably way too young for the exact same reason of like, well, I really, I want you to see this one.

And then I think I remember him kind of being like, yeah, I guess we got to ride out a lot of stuff you're not going to care about or understand before we get to the end, which I think you'll like, you know, like of like all the grown-up feelings.

The wild thing for me is I think I was like five or six, maybe seven at the oldest. I remember it playing on the Disney channel, my mom being like, oh my God, close encounters.
We need to watch this.

Right. And sitting there and watching it with her.
I remember being totally locked in the whole time. I bring this up only because I feel like within that same

if not the year before, my mother rented Star Wars and was like, you should watch Star Wars. And I tapped out in the first five minutes.
I was like, yawn.

She might have even done the same thing with Indiana Jones. When you're a kid, you never know when like something will disappear.
But she was like, you're not paying attention. This is Star Wars.

And it was just like playing in the background. I didn't really watch until the re-release.
I'd certainly seen E.T. I think it was all in on E.T.

But this was, I believe my mom framing it to me as like, oh my God, that's on TV tonight. This is the other alien movie by the E.T.
guy. You need to see this.
This is important.

And, and, and the child abduction sequence is the thing that always like lived in my brain very large. But I remember sitting through the whole movie, being engaged.

Like, I don't, I don't present this as some sign of maturity.

I almost was more looking back on it and being like, right, in an era where only Disney makes children's films in the 1970s, where there were not a lot of movies made explicitly for children or families, period.

This was like seen by small children. Absolutely.
This is a right, a PG movie or whatever. I mean, yeah.

Even a G, I don't know. My flashbulb memories of movies as a kid.
I remember coming down

from my room and my parents were watching Return of the Jedi and Job of the Hutt was on the screen and it freaked me out. Yeah, well, he's no good.
He's no good. He's a gangster.
Excuse me.

He's a businessman. And he is

a bad man white, thank God.

what scared me about Jabba was not that he was a gangster. It was not.

It wasn't his crime. Oh, I guess you love criminality then.
Oh, so you want to tax him? I guess you love racketeering.

Desert racketeering. And then I have this flashball memory of sitting on the couch next to my parents during the child abduction scene of Close Encounters.

And it's funny because I don't think I, I think I watched it then. It had a big impact.

And then the next time I watched it was I

had my same experience. We went and saw it when they re-released for the 40th anniversary.
I checked. So that was 2017, two years into our decade of dreams.

And yes, I had the same thing where I was like, the movie lived really large in my mind.

I was eager to see it again because I was like, this is one of the Spielberg masterpieces I haven't revisited since leaving this huge impression.

I think both of us walked out that screen being a little like, that movie's weird. It's different than the movie I remember.
That was the thing.

Because everyone just remembers the kid abduction in the last 20 minutes. Yeah, and still I think that's what most people.
And then, I guess, mashed potatoes.

I was going to say all the obsession stuff. Yeah.
And when you're a kid, your perception of the characters and how they're behaving is different than your perception of it as an adult. The big thing.

Which is my opinion of these characters as an adult is, I would say,

I'm much more critical of the adult characters in this movie than when I'm a kid. I'm just like, oh, the adults must be doing the right thing.
And now I look at it and I understand more of it.

It's not a movie about them doing the right thing, to be clear. But no, when you're a kid, you're just not a musician.
No, Spikely made a medal about that.

If that's what you're looking for in your movie going experience, about people doing the right thing. Spikely made one of the best films on that side.
Always do the right thing. Yeah.
Well, no.

Always Spielberg made. Do the right thing Spikely made.
Right. Yeah.
That's a good point. Yeah.

Steven Spielberg, I'm going to take you all the way back to his childhood, something he's never discussed. I just want to ask one thing before

we dig into the dossier. Which version did all of you watch for this episode? For this episode, I watched the director's cut.

uh i guess the most recent cut my dad definitely showed me i guess what was the the special edition or whatever the sort of like uh

i think that's what he showed me back in the day have you not seen it at all between childhood i think i'd seen it one more time in between it's it's it's definitely not one of my movies but it's also it is quite lodged in the brain i guess for the same sort of childhood reasons but no i have the 4k it's been sitting on the shelf

and i did you get the box that plays the music or the steel button? Oh, I didn't get it. I have the steel button.

One where you push the button, you'll never believe what sound comes out of it.

Can I pay you to get it? Red X's cotton joke.

And

wait, I can't even. Oh, this time I watched the director's cut, which I don't think I'd ever seen before, probably.

The one that's sort of like sort of like the special edition with a little stuff out. Well, we'll get into the differences, but my belief is that because the special edition

was what was in circulation for a long time. Right.
That was the one he wanted out there for a long time.

Well, I think even when he regretted it, it took a while for him to be able to do the new version. So I think I must have seen the special edition originally.

We saw the director's cut at the re-release. So I watched theatrical last night.

I watched whatever Apple had. Interesting.
Probably the theatrical. I don't, honestly, I don't know.
Couldn't tell you.

Couldn't tell ya, but listen, what's important is that when Steven Spielberg was a child, one day,

this is his Arizona era, so I guess he's a young teen,

his dad woke him up in the middle of the night, rushed him out of the car in his pajamas, and they drove, you know, for like an hour, half an hour to the desert.

And then there's a lot of people on the side of the road laying down, and they lay down too, and they watch a meteor shower. And, you know, his dad, obviously, this big nerd, sort of a Paul Dano type.

kind of haunted, sort of feels like Seth Rogen cucked him at some point in his life.

and how would you describe his mom?

You know, kind of just like this like willowy, energetic, pixie-cut, Michelle Williams type.

Okay, um, Mabel Man. And like, one of his sisters definitely is like a Julia Butters type.
Oh, sure.

That gives me a lot to go off of.

Uh, an indelible memory for Spielberg. Both, both his dad kind of behaving in this maniacal way, I think, like, which I think was not what his dad was usually like.
Yeah, right.

But then obviously, the majesty of the night sky and, you know, the other worlds. and of course i think what then happens is his dad starts being like so what's happening is meteors are

you know and spielberg's like shh like

the majesty of the night sky is what i'm taking away from this his dad was a nerd yeah paul dano yeah i saw the movie um so when uh he's 17 years old steven spielberg makes a movie called firelight which you cannot watch but it's like a two and a half hour amateur science fiction epic uh screened in his town pay tickets right it's the last thing he makes before before he, you know, gets his bindle and goes off to California to make real movies.

Yeah. Yeah.
It's like the end of his sort of teenage amateur. Amblin is the first thing that he's like showing to studios to try to get hired.
And his dad helps him make firelight, I believe.

Yeah, I mean, you know, again, in the Fablemans, I mean, sorry,

that's not a movie that exists.

In reality, you can see like, you know, how the community would pitch in his friends and all that shit, right? Did he dreams? Are we doing a bit where we pretend the Fablemans doesn't exist?

I don't know. I was like, Are you going back to the

play?

His dad was like a Paul Dano type. I'm not saying Paul Dano would ever play, of course not.
Um,

and uh, in 1970, apparently, Spielberg wrote a short story called Experiences. Do you guys know about this? No, uh, which was sort of like a Lover's Lane set.

You know, it's like a small Midwestern town, and it's kids at Lover's Lane watching a meteor shower. So he's plucking memories, okay?

Uh, and uh, then post-Sugarland Express, Spielberg's thinking about UFOs again and maybe is like, should I do a UFO movie?

Should I, he wanted to maybe do a documentary about UFO, like, you know, abductee type people, you know, people who, you know, 50s, 60s said they were abducted, realizes quickly, like, I'm going to need some money, right?

I can't just fucking fire light that. Well, the thing I read was that he, he sort of goes to Columbia.
They're interested in the idea of him doing a UFO film. He has that in development.

And then he's sort of like, the vision I have in my head would require so much money. I couldn't do it for $2 million, say, which is maybe what they would give me now.

So then he starts reconceiving it as like, do I do it as a fake documentary? Do I do it in the style of newsreel footage? Like, he's trying to figure out a Cloverfield approach almost.

Probably to save money as well as anything else. Save money.
Yes. He's like, I, no one's going to give me the resources to make the vision I have in my mind.
Connoisseur, may I add some context?

He also told a story on a Tom Snyder interview that I watched last night. Well, well, well.
He was a

Boy Scout and he was like very into it, would go every single weekend to go camping. And the one time he was sick and missed it, they had a UFO experience.
Fuck.

The rest of the troops. Or at least they're all like, we saw this.
They witnessed some kind of weird light. And there were like 30 witnesses.
And that always really stuck with him. Yeah.

In the book, it references that

he has several instances throughout his life where other people saw UFOs and he was supposed to be there. Right.
He was,

including during the making of this film. Well,

when he's making this film, he's stirring it up in people's brains too, right? He's suggesting it to people.

Okay, so he throws the alien idea vaguely at Gloria Katz and Wheeler Hayek, who wrote American Graffiti. They're like, eh, we don't care.

throws it to Paul Schrader, very young Paul Schrader at that point. Paul Schrader, I think, did, you know, was somewhat involved in the crafting of this script.

And in 1973, he signed a development deal with Columbia for a movie called Watch the Skies, which is largely on the strength of Duel.

Right. And

right. It wasn't at Fox,

which I guess

I don't know why Fox would have been the first choice, but whatever.

Michael Phillips and Julia Phillips, who had just made The Sting,

really liked duel. And so they come on as producers.
They're obviously hot producers. Julia Phillips wrote the famous book, You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again.

She's a legendary Hollywood figure,

exposed the fact that some people do cocaine in Hollywood.

Crazy stuff.

And some people eat lunch.

And some people will never. Some people.

And it's set to be made in 1974, but then Spielberg gets put on Jaws. The script is seen as a picture of the game.
He's got his universal deal. If they want to put him on something, he's got to do it.

And I think both Spielberg and the Phillipses are like, this script needs to bake. It's not, we're not quite right.

But also at that time, it was much more like he wanted to make a movie about like the government hiding.

It was going to be more of a Watergate-style conspiracy thriller.

So what I had read about was that the original premise was that it was about a guy who worked for Project Blue Book, and his job was to discredit. people who had seen UFOs.

Someone would say, I've seen a UFO and this guy comes in to debunk. Yes.
Yes. And then he sees a UFO

and then his whole life is turned turned topsy-turvy and he has to figure it out. They wrote a draft of it and then were like, this is boring.
I think they were like, and then had Schrader do a verse.

And apparently Schrader's. Oh, sorry.
Do you want to? Oh, it's okay. No, you go ahead.

Sorry, I thought you were done with the script session of this. I'm never done.
Keep going. I mean, well, I will be done, but the boy, uh-oh, the bar is pretty small on this one, JJ.

No, you're like, that's the original script. And they decide

that, well, I guess that Watergate's passe. Like, it's that quickly.
They're kind of like, eh, there's been a lot of conspiracy.

Well, the Schrader version apparently is this like hyper-religious pseudo. I can tell you that it was called Kingdom Come.

And Spielberg says it was one of the most embarrassing screenplays ever professionally turned into a major studio.

You might be surprised to hear that it was a film about a man struggling with guilt. Yes, it was

Schrader was like,

I don't think the script is good, but I deserve credit for changing Spielberg's mind on like, it shouldn't be a Watergate thriller, essentially.

It should be about someone having a spiritual experience, which is what the movie is, you know, definitely on that track. I feel like in Schrader's draft, it was a cop.

Like, Spielberg, after that, he, he doesn't want to write the film. He's bringing so many other writers in.
It's shortly after that that he's like, let me just fucking try it.

But the other thing that's happening is these earlier drafts are coming through. He's like, that's not right.
That feels too rote. What am I like trying to get at that I can't express here?

But also every draft he's getting is like, they're never going to to make, give me the money to make this at the level I want.

Because I think what he's very aware of is not wanting to make something that feels like a sci-fi B picture.

Like his whole vision for this, before he can even figure out what the story is, is like, can you make something that feels tangible and real and feels like kind of a quote unquote accurate representation of what a UFO encounter would feel like.

Look

rather than saucer men from Mars. Paul Schrader, there is no point in Paul Schrader's life where he is a particularly commercially minded writer, obviously, or director.
Master Gardner,

right? Like, and Schrader is like, I mean, like, the epitome, of course, being Schrader's exorcist movie, where he's like, Studio, do you like what I made? This, like, very quiet throw.

And they're like, is anyone even going to get exorcised? Are there demons? Where's the blood? Not only that, they're like, we need to establish a new way of telling you we don't like your movie.

I also feel like for the first movie to unexist.

For Schrader, I feel like he made that weird move towards the mainstream when.

boy.

No, this is serious. Yeah.
He made that move towards the mainstream. This is very serious.
When he was fighting the turtles under the dock, of course.

And then the dock fell on him and the moose fell on him. Right.
And then he became super

Schrader. Yeah.

That was a pretty mainstream sell-out move to become Super Schrader. Yeah.

What if the Turtles had said that? Like,

you're selling out. Like, Super Shredder is coming at them.

This is so mainstream of you.

What if the movies were like, yeah, the ninja struggle movies are good, but why are they fighting Paul Schrader?

He's just like, God is real. God is dead.
He's just screaming about God. Well, look, Paul Schrader's had a lot of ups and downs in his career, right?

Sure. There was like, you know, the kind of like 90s period where he wasn't like financeable and he went back in time to feudal Japan

to fight the Ninja Tradeless

there.

Which wasn't a great decision.

And then eventually, you know, he goes back in the shadows, shadows. But then he came out of the shadows.
He came out of the shadows. Look, Schrader says that his idea was for a modern-day St.

Paul named St. Paul Van Owen, who is the debunker.
He's still got that concept, but then he has his own encounter.

And basically, Schrader says, like, the only thing, like, the idea of the mountain, like, the sort of, like, that was in my... idea.
So like that, Spielberg used that.

But then he says, what I had done was write a character with the resonances of Lear, a Shakespearean tragic hero. And Stephen couldn't get behind that.

I said to him, I refuse to send off to another world as the first example of Earth's intelligence, a man who wants to go and set up a McDonald's franchise.

And Spielberg said, that's exactly who I want to send. But that's

the other thing. We had this instructive ideological disagreement where Schrader's like, no, it should be a modern Lear.
And Spielberg's like, no, it should be like a guy in a flannel shirt.

Like, this is a Frank Capra thing. I want an every man.
There's two big things that come out of that, right?

One is Schrader makes this film where it's like a man's looking for meaning in like the response response from the skies and the aliens, and then he finds that he has to come in to terms with the spiritual crisis inside himself.

That's the answer. Spielberg's like, I don't want to make that, but you're right.
This should be more of a spiritual thing. Like, I want it to actually be about the aliens and not the guy.

But that's the advance that gets made, right?

And then the second advance is he's making these films, he's going through these scripts and these story ideas where it's someone who has a role that is integral to the interaction between humans and UFOs.

Someone who works for the government in some capacity or this or that. And he's like, no, it should just be some guy.

There's this sort of like contagion-like thing of this where it's just like, make the movie about just people experiencing this.

I also feel like conspiracy stuff on the edges, like the missing. Well, that's the contagion part of it, exactly.
Right, right, right, right,

to me.

I feel like this is also

the first,

this is a total just me, my own taste here, but I think it's the first Spielberg that we see Spielberg diving into the self to make a movie. And it's not

a capital M movie. It's him being like, there's, I mean, we can get into all of that.
But do you know the three screenplay credits he has on his own films? What are they?

Close Encounters, AI, and Fablemans. Right.
Like, something's very instructive about those being the three.

I also, later I want to go over, I have a whole Spielberg theory of

types of movies. The thing about those three credits is with Close Encounters, he says, look, I only wrote it because I couldn't find anyone who would want to write it the way I wanted to write it.

So I had to do it myself. But no, there is no doubt that many, many people worked on this script.

Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins from Sugarland Express, John Hill, David Guiler, Jerry Belson, Schrader, like, and Schrader.

And Julie Phillips in her memoir says that she kind of put pressure on people to back off re-arbitration.

Schrader says, I withdrew from credit arbitration, which I regret because like I would have made a lot of fucking money if I had my name on that thing.

But it is Spielberg's script. Like, I think everyone who worked on it will still say, like, it's his script.
Whereas

his work on it kind of helped him get there. Right, exactly.
Right. AI, it's like, well, that's kind of Kubrick's movie.
And Spielberg puts it together and makes it work.

And that's why he gets the credit, I guess. Fabelman's, he wrote it with Eric Roth, right? With Tony Kushner.
Sorry. That Dank S.
Kush.

But I think the commonality between those three films is it feels like with all three of them, even though AI is starting with someone else's material, it's like there's a feeling of what I want to capture here that I cannot figure out, and I can't tell someone how to best, right?

Like, usually, I can, but usually, I can hire someone and give them a very clear, like, marching order.

Those close encounters in AI feel like there's some form of therapy of him just needing to like pull something out to get it there.

And then Fableman's is him like hiring Tony Kushner to be like, This one's so painful. I need you to literally sit on the other

stories, right? And how

I get this, Distill it. Right.
I feel like

it is no secret that Steven Spielberg's divorce that he experienced as a child.

He got divorced young, like five, six. Yeah.

Had an impact on the types of stories that he's telling. And I think you can go through and pick out the films in Spielberg's careers that are in some way reckoning with that element of his life.

What are the things you would pick? Okay.

Go ahead. I made my list.
Yeah. I have to look at it.
I want to see if I agree. Okay.
I think Close Encounters is the first obvious one. Right.
E.T.

Oh, yeah?

Is that one present in that one? Poltergeist. Sure.
I mean, not.

Goonies.

Empire of the Sun. Yeah, yeah.
A little bit at least. Last Crusade.
Yeah, sure. Hook.

Jurassic Park. To some extent.
Saving Private Ryan.

Where's that one? Where's the divorce in that one?

I think there's... A lot of people get divorced from their lives on Omaha Beach.

And I think that is the melding of the two versions of it because it's about this feeling of sense of self and family and being alone and

the fantasy of rescue.

That's true. I mean, it's a movie I love to think about in that way.
The amount of these films that in some way deal with the separation of parent and child.

Or like, yeah, creation of new family units, things like that. But Saving Private Ryan has that thing of like the government intervening and being like, we can't

use such a mother a fourth

AI. Yeah.
War of the Worlds

and the Fablemans.

Yeah, he kind of takes a divorce break after War of the Worlds. Maybe he's even like, Jesus, enough with this.
But also, I want to be clear.

That is not a criticism. I think I, I am someone that believes that when it's a little bit in Lincoln.
A little bit of that in Lincoln.

Yes. I think when artists tell the same stories or have the same themes recurring in their work, often that's levied as a criticism of his.

And I'm like, that's what I think is interesting because it means there's something there.

It's the thing that annoys me about like YouTube accounts that are like, he kind of redoes the same stuff. And I'm like, yeah, you're talking about an artist.

Prosto, it's even Spielberg. Like he's done it in such wildly different ways.
And it's been seen by so many people. Right.
He's not just making like autobiography every time. Right.

And that's what I think is interesting is it's like, oh, he's going to make his Peter Pan movie. And it's like, well, it actually ends up being about this theme.

He's going to make his movie about Rope. Well, and and it all gets pulled back towards the magnetic core of these things that he's trying to work out unconsciously.
So like, again, in my assumptions.

Yeah, yeah. Analysis of his work in like the 70s, 80s, even through the 90s is just like, man, this guy really never got over his parents getting divorced, which I think was a

very fun thing for people to try to like.

Yes. But also it's just like.

I guess, you know, in the same way that he was like the first generation of filmmakers who were raised on TV and shit like this, you know, that he represented these cultural shifts.

It's like divorce was becoming more commonplace. He's one of the first major filmmakers who was able to make personal films, go through an experience like that.
It felt sort of novel.

Whereas today, you'd be like, yeah, a lot of people get divorced. What are you talking about?

But, but we now look back on it, and you're like, over the years, more and more details came out where it's like, it's not like what fucking shook him to his core is just that like his mom and dad stopped being married.

Like all the weird wrinkles and the things that I think you see in like close encounters him trying to work through, which is like, why did my dad like leave and kind of never re-engage with us?

You know, which he ultimately comes to realize as an adult was like a combination of shame and protectiveness and whatever.

But at the time, the shit like in close encounters where he's just like, I would never make that movie that way today. I'd never have him just leave his fucking kids behind.

I think that's what's so interesting about this movie. And that comes from a place in his journey with all of that, where he's just like, this is what it looked like to me.

Like my dad just got fucking, like, walked onto a spaceship and I don't fucking know what was driving him. It made no sense what was pulling him out of the house.

I also think there's a universality to that feeling. No,

the street is called universal. Yeah.

And this is a Columbia feeling. This is a Columbia picture.
So there's more of a Columbiality to that. That's actually pretty foolish of you to say when you've read two books on the movie.

I think there's a Columbiality to these films, though, where it's not just about.

What if I did that as a a critic? I'm like, this is a foxy movie. He's like, you mean it was released by Foxy? Yeah, this is foxy.

This thing's foxy.

It's not too late to start doing that.

You're just going back to work now. I know.
And in your paternity life. I do that with the two Fox movies a year or whatever we're going to get new.
Yeah.

Yeah, you just call this movie completely through the Lionsgates.

Locks shattered. Locks shattered in the Lionsgates.
The Lions are out.

There's a universality to it. Beyond it being his personal experience, these movies all touch the zeitgeist in a major way because these feelings of

child-parent dynamics and feeling alone or the world feeling out of control and feeling small and large at the same time are things that are universal.

So even if it's coming from a place that is a specific core feeling of his, I think, what?

David said Columbia again. I can't help it.
It's such an easy joke.

It's not. It's barely a joke.
That's why it's easy. I think it's going to get really funny if we say it a couple more times.

No, I think you're right. And there's something interesting.
I don't know. This like really worked for me on this rewatch.

It's a great movie for like melancholy people in their 30s as well. And also people who are dealing with,

who think too much about the state of the modern blockbuster. Not that this movie was a traditional blockbuster, but you watch it and you're like, this was a gigantic movie, right?

Imagine, huh? What the sting was? The state of the modern blockbuster. I think, David, I think they're in most states.

It's not bad. And I appreciate you trying to jab me back.

But

I don't know. I think we could do better.
Is it Craven's only playing in Oklahoma? No, it's playing all 50 nifty United States.

You know, you're just watching it, this contemplative movie that's mostly kind of a bummer.

And, you know, it's so boring to say, but they wouldn't make it like this. But this is what's so fascinating about it.
I mean, like, blank, maybe the check wasn't blank, right?

But like, he has a certain control of the checkbook at this point. He's going through this development process in a wonderkin state of just like, this kid's got a lot of potential.

We're willing to hear him out. He's got these two producers supporting him who then immediately win best picture.
So that gives him extra force, right? But in this pre-Jaws era, he's like, ah, fuck.

Can't put my finger on what it is. Revolving door of writers.
My vision's too big for the budget. I don't know.
I'm frustrated. They hand me Jaws.
Jaws is a blockbuster.

Then he goes back and is like, I'm ready to make this my next movie. I now see that.
Columbia is like wetting their lips. They're like, fuck, we lucked out.
We have him next movie.

We already signed the deal. We got the next Spielberg blockbuster.
And he's like, I don't want to make it like a kind of blockbustery thing. And they're like, please make Jaws with aliens.
Right.

And he then has this new confidence to be like, I'm really going to get into my feelings. Well, so let me get back to the dossier.
So he meets this guy, Dr. J.
Allen Hink

from Northwestern.

Hey, Chicago boy. Yeah.

Evanston, but still, you know.

Who I guess is sort of an inspiration for like this kind of debunker character they were originally going to do.

He's the one who

has the three kinds of encounters, right? The first kind, second, kind, third kind that Spielberg uses for the title. Good title.
Because up until that point, it would still watch the skies.

Yeah, which is fine.

Or Schrader's movie that was called whatever, like St. Paul Reborn or like, you know, jerking off onto the cross or whatever Schrader has to do.

Close encounters of the third kind is just such an evocative title that just was so mature for you to explain that to me.

And the tagline is what you read, where it's just like a tagline being like, let me tell you what this is. Well, is kind of intriguing.
I also read that they had to

originally,

it was Watch the Skies, then Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And then the Northwestern guy was like, that's my thing.
Close encounters of the third kind. You can't use it.

And that's when Spielberg and the Prussian were like, well, what if we pay for the rights to your book and then you come work on the thing? And he's like, okay, I'll do that. Classic Hollywood style.

Yeah.

So

obviously, Steven Spielberg is like, well, I had such a good time working with my friend Richard Dreyfus. He'll be the lead of my movie.
Not at all. Easy.

He had told Richard Dreyfus on the set of Jaws, like, here's a movie I'm, you know, working on. Yes.

And Richard Dreyfus spends the whole time on Jaws when he's not, I guess, being like, I'm sunburnt and this this sucks. And fuck you.
He's like, I want to do that movie. I'm your guy for that movie.

But Spielberg is like, no, you're Hooper in Jaws. Like, so I can't think of you as fucking another, you know, another character.
Which we'll talk about this in the Raiders episode.

But like, Lucas had the same thing of like, I don't want to be reusing the same guys. I think part of that is probably,

once again, this sort of new kind of auteurist generation, as much as they adored people like John Ford and Howard Hawks and whatever, we're probably like a little weary of being like,

we don't want to be in a factory line where we're making four movies a year and we're working with the same star and some of them mush together.

No, but I think the other thing is Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, etc. And because Steven Spielberg's first choice of the part was Steve McQueen.

I think he's like, I want to work with the movie stars that I fucking love. Like, I'm hot stuff.
Right. Can I have Steve McQueen, please? Yeah.
And Steve. He's got Richard Dreyfus at home, literally.

He's on my couch.

Exactly. Steve McQueen reads the screenplay and then agrees to meet with him.
And they meet at a bar called The Dune Room.

And there was a fist fight, apparently, and Steve wanted to break it up. And I assume Steve had like a kind of a cool coat on and maybe smoked some grass and was like, hey, your script's cool.

Which, Steve? You're saying Smith had a cool coat on?

I'm sure Steve

tried to break someone.

I mean, and like, it's so fat, you know. And McQueen is basically like, I can't cry.
Like, on film. Yeah.
I just am not going to be able to play this character.

Like, I'm, there's a, you know, there's a

self-awareness with McQueen, I think, which is always true, where he's just like, I can really just do what I do.

You're not going to, you know, chisel away at me and somehow get me to turn into a new kind of actor.

What's interesting is also 1977, this same year, Sorcerer, which is William Friedkin's blank check movie, coming off a big best picture win and such, the studio really wanted Steve McQueen for that.

And he put his foot down and was like, fucking star of Jaws, Roy Schider. And Friedkin always says that he regretted it, that he was just like, I thought Scheider was the right guy for the role.

And Scheider was awesome. He was incredible in that movie.
But it is, it's interesting to imagine McQueen making a movie like that, be it Close Encounters or Sorcerer, like a new Hollywood movie.

Because here's the thing. Like, Sorcerer is a new Hollywood movie that his type fits into.

That's not asking McQueen to do something outside of his movie star persona, whereas Close Encounters wouldn't work. It would be a calamity if he were.

It probably wouldn't work unless, what if it worked? Wow. Cool to imagine.
But yeah, it probably wouldn't. Sure.
But I think that's an entirely different character.

The script would have to be rewritten so thoroughly. Yeah.
And also, like, why are there talking cars in this universe would be the big question.

Great point. Kachow.

So Spielberg then goes to Dustin Hoffman. He goes to Al Pacino.
He goes to Gene Hackman. He goes to a lot of like the new Hollywood people.

Makes sense. They all turn him down.
So finally, with his tail between his legs, he's like, you know what?

Richard Dreyfus is the modern Spencer Tracy, and I'll just hire him because Dreyfus is great everywhere. Time is like ringing his doorbell.

Please, Stephen.

And,

you know, Richard Dreyfus is really good in this movie. He is phenomenal.
And obviously he wins the Academy Award this year for the Goodbye Girl, but it's a combo award.

I never put that together somehow. It makes his best actor win make a lot more sense when you consider this movie comes out in the same year and is such a blockbuster.

The other thing that I, in looking at the Oscar year, couldn't believe was that this wasn't nominated for best picture. It wasn't.
They gave the sci-fi spot to Star Wars.

I really feel like that was fascinating. Like just enough of a stretch for the Oscars to recognize one sci-fi movie for best picture and it's going to be Star Wars.

That thing is the global phenomenon of the world. That's what's wild is like in any film gets the directing knob.
Right. Whereas Jaws, they did the opposite.
Jaws, they gave him like the blockbuster.

Look, your film was so big, we have to give it a best picture nomination, but you're not serious enough for best director. And then this time they flip it.

They don't give the goodbye girl, which got a best picture nom. They don't give Herbert Ross the, you know, Spielberg comes in for Herbert Ross and director.
Yes.

But Herbert Ross was nominated for the turning point. He made two best picture movies that year.
That's why. That's why.
That's why. No, it's very...
bizarre to me.

There's a certain part of me that's like, you know, Annie Hall wins this year. People are like, Star Star Wars should have won, not just because of modern cultural reappraisal of what do you have.

But because,

but a lot of people go, like, Star Wars was so transformative for the industry.

There'd been no movie like that before, not just because of its success and what it pioneered technology, but that film is so culturally important that feels like the more meaningful best picture win.

I rewatched this last night. I'm like, this would have made sense as a best picture winner.
It's also interesting that there's two sort of seminal sci-fi films that happen the same year

fork the genre in totally different directions right like one of them is just like we're going total space opera like childhood fantasy mythic and the other one is like this is the first real alien movie you know in its approach they famously like wanted to swap their back end points on the movies because each guy was convinced that their movie was going to flop and the other guy had a hit.

And they both had the feeling of like, they're not both going to work. Audiences are going to want one or the other.
And it's insane that they both worked.

And you're like, if Star Wars hadn't come out this year, Close Encounters would have been the highest-grossing movie of all time.

Is that right? Maybe. I mean, I think it outgrossed Jaws at the time.

I don't think so. But it was a big hit.
It made $116 million. Jaws definitely made more than that.
And like Exorcist and Godfather had as well, I think, right? Well, Close Encounters was humongous.

It was a big movie. It was a big hit.
I just want to say about Annie Hall. Yeah, you know, not to say, but like that movie was also revolutionary.
And like it's winning for the exact same reason.

It's a revolutionary movie. Sure.
And it's being recognized as such. And it movies like that also didn't really win best picture.
It's a crazy year. What's all the nominees that year?

Annie Hall's weird is it's like a couple seismic things and then a couple things that are so forgotten. Annie Hall, Star Wars, and then three,

the Goodbye Girl, which is a

bit of a stretch as a best picture nominee in my opinion, but was a huge hit comedy.

Julia, which is like, you know, a solid Fred Cinnamon serious, you know, based on a true story movie, World War II movie, you know, like that's, that's a, and then the turning point, the ballet movie with Anne Bancroft and Mikhail Baryshnikov, which got a ton of noms and no wins, you know, not as well-remembered.

But Julia, like a classic kind of 70s Oscar movie that just has disappeared a little bit. A lot of people.
It's forgotten.

I think it's kind of hard to find it these days, but wins best supporting actress and

actor. Turning point and goodbye girl feels like the classic.

You look at 70s, best picture lineups, and you're like, three like maverick, exciting totemic movies, and then like this shit, you know, not to be dismissive, but that's where you're just because Goodbye Girl is like, you get it.

You're like, yeah, it's a fun comedy that made a lot of money. But you'll see these things that are so exciting and feel like revolutionary, and the industry is like finding itself anew.

And then there's stuff that feels like kind of middlebrow, even if it's good.

But anyway, close and kind of anyway, but

he hires Dreyfus to finish that point. And then, of course, he had written the part

of

Claude, Claude Lencombe for Francois Truffaut, one of his heroes. Yes.
I don't know if it's hypocryphal, but the story I had always heard was that Spielberg saw the wild child. Correct.

And was one of the only movies that Truffaut had acted in before. Right.
And was like, this actor's great, writes a letter to Truffaut and is like, I have a part for a Frenchman in my movie.

Who is that guy? And he was like, that's me. That's not, well,

I've heard Spielberg tell you all that story, but Spielberg loves to kind of create cuter versions of stories. Yes.

He figured he was a little too scared to ask Truffau, is what he says here in the dossier at least. And so he writes it, sort of thinking of Truffau.
Then he goes to Paris.

He meets like Gerard Deferjoux and Philippe Noire and Jean-Luc Trentignon, you know, all these, you know, guys.

And before he's going to offer it to Trentignon. And he's like, let me just, I'll just fucking do the Hail Mary.
I'll just ask.

And he sends Truffaut the script. And three days later, he gets a telegram that says, Dear Mr.
Spielberg, I read the script. Where do I report for costume fittings? Sincerely, Francois Truffau.
Cool.

It is cool. It is cool.
I love Francois Truffaut very much. One of the first directors I ever had a meaningful relationship with.

And it's very interesting, having read the Bob Baliban.

diaries and hearing all this, like

for everyone, having Truffaut on set was like this.

In a way i also think

what i was gleaning was that like spielberg felt like he had to be on top of his game because truffaut was there yes everyone was like keeping him correct everyone was like we have to really do good because truffaut is here uh and i was trying to think is there a modern

director who would be the modern director that isn't an actor, but that would act in something and people would be like, oh my God, can you believe?

Scorsese, I mean, there's also like Sidney Pollack, when he was sort of in his grand old man face. He's less of a totemic director, but like I think

having him on set, I think he's has more had more of his own integrity as an actor and a little bit less as a director. Something like Michael Clayton, like I'm sure people are

serious. But I think to some degree, he's showing up and people are like, Sidney Pollock, God, he's a good fucking actor.

Like he's a great director, but this guy's got an incredible resume just as a supporting actor versus Scorsese. If he's on set, you're like, this is fucking Scorsese, the king of movies.

Seth Rogan, there was a piece in Vanity Fair about the Apple Plus show that I guess will probably have come out by the time. Yes.

That's about the collapse of the entertainment industry with Seth Rogen playing a studio executive.

And they got a lot of people to play themselves in. And Scorsese's in.
And he was just talking about that feeling of like, we wrote a part for Scorsese. He agreed to do it.
We were thrilled.

He shows up on set. We were like, fuck.
Now we have Scorsese on our set. Like, he's going to be judging us.
We have to do this correctly.

And he was like, at one point, I saw him in the corner and he was muttering to himself. And I was like, is everything okay? And he was like, yeah, you were doing the wrong thing.

And I didn't want to say it because I thought it might like infantilize you. So I just like held back and said it to myself.

And then you guys came around and you figured out and you started doing the right thing.

But like that exact experience of him just sitting there and being like, I'm just here to act. I'm not going to like weigh in.
But they're like, we know he knows the answers. He's got it figured out.

This movie has, just because we're billing boys, some of the weirdest billing of all time. In the opening credits, it is starring Richard Dreyfus with Francois Truffaut as Lacalm and

those are the two names. Fascinating.
Yeah, which you just don't see that structure ever. And then on the poster, it's only marginally different, which is

starring Richard Dreyfus, also starring Terry Garr and Melinda Dillon with Francois Truffaut as Lacombe.

Terry Garr?

But the billing of of this movie is like Richard Dreyfus, one of the stars of Jaws, the man who's going to win best actor this year, and Francois Truffaut putting multiple circles around his name.

I mean,

he's a weird kind of get. He's interesting.
Terry Garr, Spielberg loved her in a coffee commercial. Melinda Dylan, they were like close to production and hadn't cast that role.

And Hal Ashby had just worked with her on Bound for Glory and recommended her. And,

you know,

she turned out to be the perfect choice. I was she gets an Oscar nomination.

Balaban Griff Spielberg liked in Midnight Cowboy. Yeah, he's great now.
And he liked the idea of him with Truffaut. He was like, that's a funny team, like, looks-wise.
He spoke French, right?

But then,

of course, Bob Balaban speaks French. He speaks every romance language.

Well, to be clear, JD's been referencing it, but Balaban kept diaries while he was filming, largely about his experience just with Truffaut, but also being part of this major movie.

And then those were published in the wake of this movie being a seismic blockbuster, which you read for this episode. Yeah.
And then to be clear, they have a $2.7 million budget.

And as you mentioned, it went up to five and a half, and then seven, and then nine, and then eleven and a half. And it ends up at 19.

Uh, and Columbia was basically like, if we had started at 19, the movie never would have been made. Yeah.
Right. Like, we didn't have the money for that kind of movie.
Like, that wasn't the problem.

Also, Columbia was in a bad place. And this movie is so successful that it's credited with saving Columbia from the brink.
Right.

Very interesting studio that's like had weird peaks and valleys over the years.

That was like kind of like a trashy studio back in the day, and you know, then there's yeah, anyway, uh, I want to call out as well.

Uh, there's a great Douglas Trumbull quote talking about how overblown the budget got in this movie, where he's like, We had a three million dollar budget just for special effects, you could make a whole movie with just that.

And I'm like, I did the math on adjusting for inflation in 1977, 3 million today

would be 15 million dollars.

The notion of him saying, like, it's insane how much we're spending on special effects well since you since you've comedies have 15 million dollar special effects budgets now that the doug on the low end yes is fascinating so one thing on that that was funny is that reading in this this one book they were talking about how

um when they're figuring out the budget for the special effects they're like how much will this cost And he was like, I think it'll be like $6 million of special effects.

And the producer was like, she was like, no,

you're going to tell them it's $1 million

because otherwise they won't approve it. And then later you're going to tell them, oops, it costs more and we'll keep upping it.
Yeah.

And apparently she was like, this could end my career right now, but like, otherwise we won't get this done. Yes.

So the fascinating thing also is Douglas Trumbull didn't want, he wanted to be doing his own stuff. He didn't want to be working on other people's films is what I

glean from reading these books. Always.
Every Douglas Trumbull, quote, has that energy to it. But do you know why he ended up doing this movie? Why?

It gets back to some blank-check lore that is very wonderful. That, of course, we're going full circle here.
It's a fun show scan. Yes.
Hell yeah.

So hi, Fred. Hi, Fred.
Frank shit, Ben.

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So Lucas wanted Trumbull to do Star Wars. Yes.
He was like, no, I'm all in on Show Scan, baby. Yeah.

Then Spielberg reached out and was like, hey, can you help? And he was like, no, I'm all in on Show Scan, baby.

And then they were like, Spielberg was like, but we're shooting the film, the effects in 65 millimeter, which Trumbull was like, I need 65 millimeter equipment.

I'll do your movie if I can keep the 65 millimeter stuff. And Spielberg's like, done.
And so he was like, fine, I'll do it. So I can steal that stuff for show scan.

Show scan, Ben, is Douglas Trumbull's vision for. We definitely discussed on our funeral for frames.
I'm sure we did. But this is a decade of dreams.
So it's time to look back. Decade of dreams.

Just saying people want to listen to more.

It was his, he had

done studies and found that the audience's emotional reaction to film peaked when it was 60 frames a second.

And he was like, at 24 frames a second, the audience's subconscious is aware that it's a movie and it distanced itself. And at 60 frames a second, they are most emotionally overwhelmed by cinema.

And so he's like, cinema needs to be 65 millimeter, like IMAX, a little shorter than IMAX, and high frame rate. And this is his thing in the 70s.
He is like all in on this.

This is like the most important thing. Because it's really what he's saying is like, it should hurt your head to watch a movie.
It's not emotions.

Because this is what, you know, Ang Lee or whatever, they're like, yes, yes, yes. And people are watching.
And they're just like, ah, but I just too much.

I just love that, like, throughout the history of cinema, there's these like Hellraiser ads. There's other

guy trying to unlock the puzzle box of high frame rate. And everyone's like, no, we don't want this.
And everyone's like.

These people are like, we have to try. It always ends the same way, too.
But this is what I love it. It's great.
It's incredible.

What's fascinating about it is that like when high frame rate does finally have its moment of experimentation in popular cinema, that is because of the digital conversion, right?

Like high frame rate film never becomes a fucking thing.

There are like test things that Douglas Trumbull does that are screened like occasionally, you know, there are times it's used in like theme parks or whatever, but it like never works for narrative film like distribution and exhibition.

He spends decades on this. Even when things are starting to go digital, he's like, I've come up with show scan digital.
I'm going to be the guy who cracks it. He never, ever cracks it.

Douglas Trumbull is like the greatest special effects artist in history, maybe, or at least in the conversation. Basically, anytime he does something for hire for other people, it is like historic.

He wins multiple Oscars. His career spans from like 2001 to the tree of life.
He's like

deeply like knowledgeable in every single form of how you could possibly approach visual effects. And yet, anytime he's like offered a job, it's like, I don't want to be doing this.

I have my own shit to work on. And his shit, nobody wants.
No one wants his technology. And when he directs his own movies, people die.

Like the balance between his career, where he's just like, ah, these jobs taking me away from my work. And the jobs are 2001, Star Wars, Close Encounters.
And then his work is always like non-starter.

It's wild. It's a wild career.

We love Douglas Trumbull. If there was something I should check out

of his work. I mean, most famously, 2001 Space Odyssey.
Yeah. I mean, it's like of his own work.
Yes. None of it.
Really? It's really. I mean, not to say rude, but it's like, it's experimentations.

It's like odds and ends. Yeah.
Well, he is a, he is a great mind in problem solving and creative ways to do things.

And I think his legacy is marked in the things that he helped make amazing and not necessarily his own, his own works.

So

the only thing about production that I want to emphasize that is kind of funny is like Spielberg's like, this would have been a really tough and hard shoot, except I just made JAWS.

So it seemed a lot easier. Yeah, right.
Because the set didn't move around like on the water. You know, like, it's like, I had already gone through JAWS.

But there's this audacity to Spielberg that I really respect that I think he holds on to for a lot of his career, which is he's this young filmmaker.

who is like, no, we're going to build the biggest set that's ever been built. No, no, no, no, we're going to use effects that have never been done before.

That is an audacious way to craft a career is to be like, I'm going to jump into the deep end on things that budgetarily and scale-wise haven't been done before. And I'm just going to like

assume it'll all work itself out. There's that.
And I guess, you know, if it's not a blank check status, it's at least him sort of, I think, operating under the assumption that like, I made JAWS.

However poorly this goes, someone will hire me to do something after this. You know, like maybe they never give me this level of freedom again.
Let me take the swing. Right.
Absolutely.

And there's like that new Hollywood sort of like part of it is this sort of like, hey, I'm just going to take this big old swing and I'm going to do this thing and I'm going to do this thing over like those guys all sort of trying to one-up each other in terms of how audacious they can be.

Another thing apparently Spielberg would do Relatable King is that him and Wilmos Gigmund, the cinematographer,

which movie's only Oscar or won an honorary.

It won a sound effects editing honorary award back before they would like officially have that category right and it won't be cinematography it's the only competitive way um spielberg every night would see like one or two movies a night and like write down more ideas and sketch stuff and stuff and interesting i did notice that the ufos look like the letterbox logo um and uh at one point the original analog letterbox spielberg is complaining about the schedule or something and a gat in the old gaffer earl gilbert like a you know old hand was like spielberg if you stop watching those fucking movies every night we'd be on schedule

They shot in Mobile, Alabama,

which I guess is

they needed to control the weather

and use this giant hangar. They had this giant like security detail and this massive set and these giant, I mean, there's no space big enough, right? Exactly.

And then they're originally just going to shoot that stuff in Mobile. And then they're like, well, if we're doing all these parts, why don't we just shoot the whole thing here?

But then they do find Devil's Tower, Wyoming for

the big location shoot outside that they realize they're like, we should do that on location.

So it's weird that they found that late in a way. And then they like build the, you know, sculpturing and stuff around Devil's Tower, like having discovered it as a location.

I mean, there's a lot of fascinating aspects to this production, but another one is this, I mean, it still exists to this day, but these movies where people are sort of like making it up while they're in production.

Right. Like they didn't know what the mothership was going to look like, and they had a lot of different ideas.

And then Spielberg sees this big, like, refinery in the San Francisco Valley, and it's like that, like, you know, big spokes and stuff.

Or the refinery, I think, was when they were shooting the stuff in India. Yes.

Well, I guess, yeah, he saw a refinery. But it's

then he sees the San Fernando Valley and he like superimposes, like, what if we had this structure on this structure? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But like, I mean, the ILM documentary gets into a lot of this, but like in this era, these guys, these directors would go to Trumbull or people like Trumbull and go like, here's what I'm thinking.

After everyone else had said, that's impossible. I don't understand what you're saying.
I don't know how I'd begin to approach that.

And Trumbull's a guy who's kind of activated by like, I'm going to pioneer something new here.

And they're figuring it out in real time.

So there's like the whole process where like, let's hope this works, but no one has a concrete idea of how they're going to get there until it actually happens.

Well, that's a part of this that I think is very interesting. Is

I mean, we, I sorry, I don't want to interrupt. No, no, go ahead, no, no, no, no, no, we've talked about how

the core of this movie feels like it is about the childhood feeling of

divorce and loss and confusion, right? And family members acting irrationally, you know, like, yeah. And watching the film now as an adult, right,

I have a low opinion of our main characters.

Especially Dreyfus. Especially Dreyfus.
But also it's funny. Rewatching the scene of

the abduction, the kidnapping of the child, I have this feeling where I'm like,

she kind of gives up. There's like, there's a, there's not really a resiliency there.
Like, like she, it's.

As a kid, it felt like this scary thing where these aliens were stealing this boy. And then watching as an adult, you're kind of like, wait, she's kind of letting them

like, it's, it's, the dynamic is different. It's, yes, I agree.

It's fascinating also that when she's reunited with her son at the end, I think the first thing she says to him is something like, oh my God, I looked everywhere for you. Do you remember that?

Do you, did you see me looking for you? And so there's this like, she's like, needing him to validate, like, I didn't give up. Did you see mommy running after you?

There's this like strange energy of these sort of delinquent or not resilient parents.

That is like this theme of the film. And when you watch the movie through that lens, it's sort of like the first,

you know, 70% of the movie feels like it is like

what a divorce feels like or what a family schism feels like from the POV of a child, where it's like adults acting strange, the home becoming an unstable place, yelling, arguing, people doing things who I don't understand why.

The home is no longer this like clean, safe place. Now it's infected with all of these things and ideas.

And obviously the movie is this buildup to this like, you know, 25-minute super sequence that takes place in the top of Devil's Tower. And that's the showpiece of this whole movie.

It all builds up to that. And that has to work.

But what's so fascinating is that reading about the making of and like the diaries and all of this stuff, as a viewer, that big finale on Devil's Tower, that is the film. That is what makes it, right?

If that wasn't there, that whole first part of the movie, it would be not remembered a this great film not to diss this movie in comparison to close encounters close encounters is tough but midnight special the deaf nichols movie which is a very close encounters-y movie right like it's also about disparate characters being linked to this weird and you know yeah i also i i re-watched super eight last week

obviously very spielbergian yes and i feel like that movie gets compared a lot to et in particular and and more of the amblin produced films and things like that's got the child adventures right but there's like a lot of close encounters in the structure of that movie, even if it's pushing more towards the nakedly child perspective emotional stuff.

But like Midnight Special is a movie where the, in my opinion, the ending is not spectacular enough or arresting enough or whatever.

And that's why you exit kind of being like, I don't know if I'm going to remember that movie. Like interesting.

Right. Close encounters.
It just absolutely delivers on the finale you want to leave feeling ecstatic. But here's what's fascinating.

Throughout the production of the film, Spielberg seemed not to have a vision

for that ending.

Like the joke is throughout the thing, Dreyfus and Baliban and Truffaut are like, what are we looking at? And Spielberg's like, I don't know.

I have no idea what the aliens look like, what the spaceships look like.

There's all these things in the production of it where they change what the alien looks like like four different times, which is why in the final cut, there are like four different types of aliens, because every time Spielberg is like, ah, which I kind of like, which I think is great.

It's funny because there's a making of documentary where he, I think it's a retcon. This is just my theory, where he's like, well, you know,

on Earth, we have all different types of races of people. And so I want to have the aliens.
And I'm like, based on the production diary,

you kept changing what it was. That's a good justification delay.
But I think it's so fascinating then that he is so dead set on this film and has such a clear vision for it.

Except for the thing he seems to actually care least about is the aliens, the spaceships, what that all is, how that works, because the core of it to him is

the human experience. The ending rocks, but the ending is not plot heavy or like it's nothing really happens in the ending that's like, and now everyone's, everything's been totally explained.

Because I don't think that's the thing. The ending is just like the aliens are real.
Here they are. And they had abducted the guys.
And good news. They're nice.
They seem really nice.

This movie is better

for Spielberg not having gone through therapy at this point in his life.

Like, everything that's interesting about this movie is him, like, trying to translate something that he can't even totally justify.

Well, that's my scorching hot take here is that based on everything that I've read and seen of this, I don't think he was ultimately not compelled by the aliens or any of the stuff.

He was compelled by all of the build-up to that. And that was the story that he wanted to tell.
And this was kind of like...

What he knew as a storyteller he had to deliver on, but it didn't feel like it actually, that didn't come from his heart and soul the same way the the rest of it felt

like specific and natural. Like, well, okay, so the movie, the, you know, the real like incubation point for this as an idea is the meteor shower experience with his father, right?

And like capturing something that felt the way that felt to him as a child on screen, which part of that is like, could I make this happen visually? Could I, you know, whatever.

So there, it starts there, right? And then he goes through so much wrestling of like, what is the story around this?

And then the story he lands on that only he ultimately can like really wrestle into a script is something that then means more to him to the end than the ending.

Ben, just to clarify, wishful Ben, Hosley, Decade of Dreams, that's the nickname we're going for with for this episode. Just to jump ahead,

this movie comes out in 1977. It's a huge hit.
Columbia Pictures really wants a sequel. He does not want to do it.
He plays around with it. He's just like, leave it where it is, right?

But he was like, I still have some regrets about the movie. And there's some shit I didn't film that I wish we could have because of schedule and budget.

And there's some changes I'd want to make in editing and some things with the characters I dislike now. Would you give me money to do a special edition and you can re-release it?

Which was the first time that ever happened. It's the sort of invention of that.
He created the thing, right? So they give him money.

He goes back, does additional shooting like two years later, a year later. I think it comes out in 1980, right? It kind of says, like, I really wasn't finished with the movie.
It is 1980.

And the trade-off is, we'll give you the money to do this and we'll put it back in theaters and all of that, allow you to recut it.

But part of it is you have to use some of this budget to do more crazy effect shit. We want to go inside the spaceship.
And that's like the marching orders from Columbia. Interesting.

So then they shoot this new footage that's even crazier effect shit, right? They put that in theaters. It makes a lot more money.
It gets good reviews. That's the version circulation for a while.

For a long time. Then over time.

Okay. I must have just saw the original cut.
The main one now is the director's cut. So then over time, Spielberg is like, I regret that.
I wish we hadn't gone inside the spaceship.

It removes some of the mystery for me. And then in the 90s.
Yeah, what does he do in the ship? He just stands there and you just see cool set stuff. I'll pull it up for you.
Fine.

The effects are incredible. It looks good.
It looks amazing.

I've been on the record saying I want to get abducted. Of course.
Like, I'm dying to. But you're not going to because you're putting it out there.
You know what I mean?

You got to play hard to get it. You want it too bad.
You want it too bad. But it is the thing where I'm like, then what happens when you get on the ship? What do you do?

Do they serve you lunch i don't think so i think you might

so ben in the 90s he's like i'm still not happy with it going inside the ship was a mistake some of my reshoots were a mistake there are things i cut out i wish i could put back in and he gets sony for an anniversary to let him do his final director's cut that is a mashup of the two he resets some things back from the theatrical He takes out some of the extra stuff, notably the inside of the spaceship.

That is the version that mostly exists in circulation now. It sounds like that's as close to a finished version as

the 4K. I think maybe the Blu-ray has this feature as well.
I know the iTunes version has this.

If you buy it, they have a feature called a view from above where you can actually compare the three versions through branching timelines and it like makes an interactive thing of like explaining to you this shot shorter, this here.

You can just watch the clips, compare them all, whatever. The point of all of this is

there's this part of Spielberg that was just like, fuck, I didn't, what is, I can't, like for decades after this movie, still being like, what's the thing I didn't quite get at, right?

And a lot of these changes go back and forth of like, I think I didn't make this guy likable enough. I didn't justify his obsession or the dissolution of the family or why he leaves or all this stuff.

The big scene he adds in the special edition that is then is carried over is this fight that he, Terry Garr and Richard Dreyfus have in the shower, where she comes in, he's like muttering to himself, and she's trying to break through to him and the kids are screaming because he was like, it was too abrupt before that he's just building the thing in the home and she's just like, I'm fucking out of here.

And he doesn't chase after them really, you know, he's like freaking out, but he lets it happen and doesn't follow up with them ever again.

And he was like, I need this scene where Terry Garr is trying to break through and he's sort of transparently saying like, I don't know, I don't know what's going on with me.

He felt the need to explain to make this guy more likable.

And I'm like, the whole thing that's interesting about this movie is that this guy is annoying, but also that I think I viewed this film the same way as a child.

This is a movie about the anxiety of the family falling apart, right? Being taken away, all of this sort of shit. Now I think this movie is about being a grown-up and not knowing how to be a grown-up.

Like that is the commonality between these characters. That is the thing that Spielberg's commenting on.

And he's talked about that it wasn't until ET and his experience working with the kids on ET that he was like, huh, I actually think I could maybe be a parent.

But up until that point, he was like, I will never have kids. And part of that is I think he's like, my parents fucked me up.

I don't want responsibility. I just want to like, and I don't want to fuck my kids up, my imaginary kids up.
There's that, but the other part of it is he's like, I want to be part of the circus.

I want to make movies. I want to go around.
I don't want to be tied down to shit. Right.

That part of Spielberg is like, really big in this movie.

This kind of like sad, lonely kid who isn't over like what happened to his family when he was young, but also doesn't know how to be a grown-up in the present tense.

And it's just like, let me just like fucking make stuff and like go on adventures and just sort of like follow the light and see what happens. That part of it's really interesting to me.

And the other thing that kept coming up, I was reading, I don't know if you came upon this in either of the books you read, JD, but that he talked about when he was trying to find this movie to people, he kept citing when you wish upon a star.

Yeah. And he was like, I want to make a movie that is the way that song feels.
Yes.

That he was just like, I'm not literally trying to interpret anything from that, but there is like a feeling of like there's something magical, but something also deeply sad and wistful in that song.

And I want the entire movie to have this tone. And in the three cuts, he's like changing how much he directly points at When You Wish Upon a Star.

In a theatrical cut, like Niri is introduced with a music box of Pinocchio playing the song.

And then he's arguing with his kids that he we should go see Pinocchio because Pinocchio is being re-released. Be magical.
Right.

And in that first version, the test screening, the end credits played over When You Wish Upon a Star.

And the audience laughed and he was like, I got too much.

Right. It's just funny that AI, the next movie he writes, of course.
So it's, you know, absolutely.

But then the special edition, the footage when he's inside the ship is orchestrated with John Williams' version of When You Wish Upon a Star.

Like there was this thing of him looking back to this, what was clearly like a seismic movie for him as a child that activated something in him emotionally that he could not quite process, and that he's just telling everyone, make a movie the way this song feels.

And they're like, the way it feels to you, bro.

I hate the mothership sequence. I like it.
I hate it because I really like it. Wait, the sequence inside the side.
Oh, sorry. Because I really, yeah, what if I was like, I hate the end of this movie?

I was like, I was like, that's a wild.

No, him going in because to me, it is like he makes an incredibly selfish decision.

It's the kind of this is kind of an ultimate boomer movie in that way of like the fantasy of like, what if I just fucking did get in the spaceship and left?

And what if the military gave me permission? Yeah, and what right, I get permission. What if it's triumphant that I do this?

What if like what if the government says it's good that I go away from my family? Which is

another thing, it's telling exactly telling what about what if Francois Truffaut gives me permission to leave my family forever, yeah.

Like, it's it's it's so telling of his mindset at the time, yeah, exactly, Of, like, kind of forgiving a person for doing that or trying to understand why they would do it.

Um, and then, like, just seeing Dreyfus in the ship going like, oh,

you know, while you see a bunch of cool shit, I'm like, no, he needs to vanish. And it's like, we just don't know.

His line was always, it takes away the mystery. It does.
He's right. Good, good, eventual realistic.
This is the thing with Spielberg. This is the one movie he fucks with a lot.

And then when he only know E.T., when he fucks with E.T., which is when George Lucas is sitting in the bathroom with his special edition, you know, pills, being like, come on, Steve, do some special editions.

And he does the E.T. Special Edition.
It's like, worst mistake I ever made. But this is why I did fuck with that movie.
The weird scene where E.T. says, My clonky, and then shoots it.

Like, the E.T. Special Edition stinks.
And Spielberg, to his credit, is like, I never should have done it. And I'll never do shit like that.
I agree, but what I'm saying is. Don't they have like E.T.

like running and stuff? And like, yeah, and like there's an extra sequence with CGI.

And of course, he changes the guns to flashlights and all this shit where it's like, no, don't mess with your movie. But that's like Close Encounters,

he kept going back to because he felt unsettled, right? The difference with E.T. was he was sort of like, I guess this is the thing to do now.
And he tries to-and then immediately is like, wrong. No.

Whereas Close Encounters, there is a part of him where he talks about today where he's like, it's unfinished. You know what?

I'm not going to futz with it anymore. The director's cut is probably the closest I'll ever get, but there are parts of this movie that still irk me.

What if you do it or reshoot now with Dreyfus now, and Dreyfus gets to just kind of talk about issues? What if it's five minutes of Dreyfus to the camera? It's just a bunch of these aliens sitting in

a little like alien theater, like sitting in their seats. And they're kind of like, you can tell they've been like here for a while and they don't want to.
And just Dreyfus monologuing to all of them.

And there's on the ship. And he's just

been going on and on. You can tell all the aliens are wearing a dress.
Right.

And then Spielberg is like dragged on stage uncomfortably. And Dreyfus is like, the shark didn't work, right?

I don't know why I'm in the spaceship now.

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Close Encounters of the Third Kind, though. We're talking so much about the big sequences.
And I love this movie. I think it's a five-star movie.
I agree. I think it's a great movie.
I agree.

But it is one of those movies where when you watch it again, you're like, oh, yeah, this scene.

Right. We're setting up an air of mystery.
Oh, and there's another one of these. Oh, and then there's another one.

There's nothing wrong with those scenes. But once you've seen the movie and you know where it's going, you're kind of like, yeah, I get it.
The plane is missing. Yeah, you know, okay, you know.

I see, I felt differently, and I had this experience. This is going to be the wildest comparison of movies, is that

me and my friend recently re-watched 8 Mile. Okay.
A movie I probably haven't seen in 20 years. I haven't seen since it came out.

Okay, the funny thing about 8 Mile is there's like two or three scenes that you remember, and then there's like 80% of the movie that you're like, oh, isn't most of the movie just kind of them hanging out?

Like and bouncing each other's balls and stuff.

It's a weird

local politics kind of

class struggle. In my memory, it's a good movie.
I love movies. I think movies are great.
But it's so funny because I had that feeling watching this a little bit where it was like,

oh, right. This scene.
Oh, I forgot there's all of this. Eight Mile is kind of like Saturday Night Fever, where you're like, oh, it's remembers this iconic thing that's triumphant.
We all loved it.

We had a great time. There are three scenes and images that get replayed all the time and parodied.
And then you're like, all the movie in between, everyone forgets what it actually is.

People arguing with each other and shit. Here's what I'll say, though, because I don't,

my opinion is not that Close Encounters is Eight Mile.

I actually, all of the scenes that I was like, oh, right. I really like in Close Encounters.
I like the buildup. I think the buildup is.
I like it too.

And I found myself recognizing in the buildup of Close Encounters what a wonderful, amazing filmmaker Steven Spielberg is. And he does specific things so well that no one else does at all.

And I say, I think a lot of them are on display in Close Encounters in a really good way. What are some moments that are you're thinking of?

I like when the spaceship goes da, da, da, ba, bah, have you

mentioned that part? I've heard of that part.

That hurts hell. And that's what I'm thinking of.
I like when Truffaux eats a big plate of snails. And he doesn't do that.
It'd be funny if you did, though.

I'm trying to think of a French thing for him to do. I like when Truffaut and Dreyfus touch fingers and they glow.
Okay, so I think here, I had some notes written down that I'll pop open.

There's some very, there's things that I love about Spielberg and the things that are like very Spielberg-y things.

So number one is

the opening sort of like prologue scenes are very Spielberg, and and I like them a lot where it's like you're learning about the

lore, the extraterrestrial missing flights and the bombers and the Bermuda Triangle and stuff. And it's done in a very Spielberg-y way that

it's these tricks that he does over and over again. Like he does the thing where it's someone speaking in a foreign language and like they're clearly like worked up about something.

And then like the translator turns and is like,

he says that they come from this, you know, whatever like that. That seems really cool.

But that's a trick.

That's a trick that spielberg does constantly yes where it's like someone's explaining something and someone like very dramatically like sums up what they're saying not just is it not not not only is it a trick he does it's a trick that people then copy yeah so much like over the years and even just like i feel like people still try to replicate the feeling of spielberg family scenes in this era where he gets like the chaos of a house full of handfuls and like beleaguered stress out parents like the second you get into the nearie household and it's just like everyone yelling at the same time you know which et is like that too and i remember as a kid being kind of again kind of disturbed by it being a little too real like because i'm watching these movies because i'm a kid and kids are allowed to watch these movies right because it's like well steven spielberg you know but mostly the movies i watch do not have that sort of sort of close to realism to them you know they're not disney movies read something from the sight and sound when i was talking earlier about this movie almost at times feeling like sort of verite yeah and obviously there is the Spielberg, like big emotionality, but the moments like Truffaut with the plane out in the desert, you know, like shit like that feels like classically Spielberg, what we see for the rest of his career.

And then there are other parts of it in like the human drama of this movie that feel very different.

His quote from Sight and Sound, the year this movie came out, the months leading up to its release.

This movie is more like the French Connection, as brutally realistic within a dramatic storytelling structure.

I think our film does to UFOs what the French Connection said about crime in the streets and narcotics in New York City. It's more of a movie than it is a film, really.
It's quite entertaining.

It's about people and not events, but it's about people who are innocent until they are ensnared by the event and then have to rise above it. I don't think that's an apt,

you know. I don't think, I think he's maybe wrong in a way.

Still wasn't quite clear on what the movie was.

That's Spielberg. But I also think what Spielberg is trying to do there a little bit probably is trying to be like, this FYI, this is not going to be an adventure movie.
Like,

God is God's alien warning.

And with the alien coming out and giving a monologue on humanity's purpose, you know, like he's just trying, I guess, to be like, no, no, no, it's more grounded. It's more grounded now.

Saying that and then being like, it's like one of the most grounded, you know, then that's maybe a mistake. Cause no, this wasn't.

Watching it, I was like, aside from the key, obviously, like, incredibly Spielberg-y movements, I was like, what, what is the movie this is reminding me of watching it?

And I was like, oh, the answer is it feels at times like an Alan Pakula movie. Yeah, sure.
Like there are elements of it being a sort of like just the facts process.

This is how it played out, where it does almost feel like this movie is a like dramatic retelling of how things really happened, right?

Like this is a ripped from the headlines movie four years after there was a UFO encounter.

The Spielberg thing is like that he's like, well, no, that, but also that it's like, so what happened?

It's like, what happened was the aliens were so nice and we had this moment of transcendent, beautiful communication with them, and it was great.

Goodbye. Like, you know, it's like you're like, wait, what? You know, like, what's

so weird? There's no guns. It's like weird.
But there's no movie. It's kind of cool.

No, it's super cool, but it's like,

it's like crazy. But see it.
Yes. I had never seen this movie before.
Did you watch it last time? Oh, you'd never seen it before. I've never seen it before.

I would have thought maybe just because I know your dad's kind of like a sci-fi head or whatever. I love UFOs.
I don't think my parents want to encourage the abduction.

To your point, Ben, running around in the middle of the day. Was this a

obsession of being abducted.

To your point, Ben, there is a quote in the dossier

from Spielberg talking about how a miffed he is that he's never had a UFO encounter. Much like you, where he's just like, can you believe I'm the one guy who's never

deserve it? Yeah. He said, I deserve it.
Yeah. You know, he does.
He deserves it. But Ben, what are you thinking? Yeah.
There's no guns. There's no threat.

They're not like planning to somehow use the technology like to kill people and cause harm it's like

they just want to play the piano no i know how much did you know about it going into watching it not very much at all but did you know like the reference did you know like the

no you just know

what i'm saying i do think this movie has a little less cultural hook you know than it did 20 years ago but it did for yeah it did for 25 definitely a lot more cultural hook than hook well certainly good point i'm trying to which is the other movie you wanted to do on this show we we said spielberg and you said well close encounters or hook you you got bumped for well you didn't get bumped you said you said two movies well you texted us and said i can't believe i'm being bumped i wasn't gonna bring any of this

because hook is being discussed on episodes before we get to hook and you're a hook you're pro-hook right i'm pro-hook i hook was a there was a few movies that i watched a lot as a kid right you're you're it's you're the perfect age for hook yeah uh labyrinth was a movie that i watched like you you know, every week.

I don't see that movie in your current like interests or obsessions at all. That's weird.
Yeah.

And then Hook was another one that I watched a ton of times and I loved and I still have a fondness for. And it's, it was only as an adult that I realized that people are like, Hook is a bad movie.

And that was like a shocker to me. I mean, I think for you, it's like when we had Emma Stefanski on about Treasure Planet and she was like, I didn't realize this movie was a bomb, right?

Like, you know, it's like there's generations where they're just like, oh, I just grew up watching that movie. It was fun.
It was great.

And then I'm a grown-up and people are like, you know, that movie was of disappointment, right? Yeah. And so Hook was near and dear to me.
And it's something that I think is often maligned.

And

now more beloved.

Is it? I think so. Is it coming back to our generation? Our generation when we

dredged it higher. Throwing out the Spielberg spreadsheet to people, possible guest ideas.
Like four or five people lined up and were like, blank or hook. I love hook.
Give me the hook.

I'm ready to defend hook. Maybe partially knowing that Dave and I dislike it.
We've certainly talked over the years about how we're not as pro-hook.

Now, I'm not pro-hook because he's a dread pirate, okay? And I don't support that kind of behavior. I'm pro-hook because I think kids need to be kidnapped.
Yeah, he's a really, Hook's not a cool dude.

He kidnaps children. He kidnaps children and then like basically becomes their parent.
Yeah, I was excited to talk about hook. I think because you guys, I know canonically you are anti-hook.

And so I wanted to defend it. I'm like, but also,

I'm anti-hook, but I've seen it 20 times. Also, I have an obsession with an aspect of hook that I, I, I, my one request was that you would talk about this during the hook episode.

Do you want to put it out to us now to make sure we talk about it in the episode?

Okay, there is a trend in hook that I'm, uh, if, if I, if I had to go to grad school, it would be about trying to unearth the sort of like,

this trend in park and where it came from and track it and where it's gone now, which is the clubhouse for kids with skate ramps. Great.
Yep. We'll talk about it.
We'll talk about it.

And Hook Turtles being another conflict. Ninja Turtles being one of them.
Double Dragon. Yeah, Pulse Roll has one in the middle.
Every kid's fantasy, right? Hackers.

There's a lot of them. And there's a period of time where they came and then they went away.
And I'm fascinated with where they started, where they came from, and where they went.

We will discuss this. I found a quote I wanted to throw out because it goes back to like this movie not setting the aliens up as a conflict at all, right?

Like the movie is entirely about the way these human beings process the idea of the existence, the proof coming closer, right? Like the wake of it, the sort of yearning towards it.

Yeah, it's like the aliens don't come out and then say, oh, by the way, here's what we're interested in. Right.
We don't know. There's no explanation.
We just know they exist. There's no antagonism.

There's never even really a feeling of antagonism. It's just about the idea of, can we make that connection? There is a review, I think it was from the time by Charlene Engel.

Or no, I'm sorry, this was in a book she wrote called The Films of Steven Spielberg.

She said, close encounters suggest that humankind has reached the point where it is ready to enter the community of the cosmos.

While it is a computer which makes the final musical conversation with the extraterrestrial guests possible, the characteristics bringing Niri to make his way to Devil's Tower have little to do with technical expertise or computer literacy.

These are virtues taught in schools that will be evolved in the 21st century.

I think there's this feeling in that movie that speaks to like culturally what was going on in the 1970s, which is just like reality is getting overwhelming and people kind of almost wanted some sense of divine intervention like that, where it's like, you know what?

Maybe it would make more sense if suddenly our like understanding of the universe was expanded with concrete proof.

Because we're suddenly getting inundated with too much news and like, you know, everything was just like all the things that we are now like fucking drowning in today were really starting to rear their head at that point in time.

And this is people who like in that sort of way, what was going on in that moment of people who dreamt of like dropping out of society. It's like, there has to be something more.

There has to be a better explanation. And this movie's tension is just, can we like touch that membrane? Can we just get there?

Piggybacking on that, but then also about the hook versus close encounters. To be clear, close encounters wasn't like, I don't know, I guess I'll do that.

This is a Close Encounters a movie that is very near and dear to me. Like I said, it's one of my first adult, my

grown-up film memories.

Simultaneously, I'm currently working on a project that has very similar themes that has caused me to dive very deep into this world.

And a big aspect of my childhood was centered around a fascination with extraterrestrials and aliens and reckoning with those ideas.

It was also just a time, the X-Files and, you know, like it was a time of fascination with that stuff. And so I think if we're talking about the sort of like

symbolism and sort of like cultural semiotics of extraterrestrials and aliens and what those represent, I think there's a really interesting,

there's a lot of interesting patterns in the evolution of extraterrestrials throughout art and cinema, especially movies, because movies become this vessel for them.

And when you think about alien stories, so much of it is about seeing, hearing, experiencing that, which is like movies are a perfect place for that.

But Close Encounters is a slight pivot in that culturally from what had been going on before that. But tying back to

the whole point of aliens, I don't know if you are like this, Ben. I was obsessed with aliens as a kid.
I remember one of my,

it was probably fourth or fifth grade, we were assigned that we have to do our first big report paper

where we have to do a project on something scientific or whatever we like you have to have a thesis statement and this and you have to have sources and

i was like clearly i'm going to do mine about aliens and a real scientific thing of which there's going to be you're going to you're going to i'm going to research this and i'm going to figure it all out oh yeah because as a kid i was like why would i you know

You're not going to do it about like gravity. Yeah,

Rebecca over there is doing a thing about the blue whales.

That sounds kind of cool, actually. Yeah, yeah and will is doing a thing about um you know the how canada's government is different the united states or whatever and i'm like whales

drop

i'm like these dumb dums don't realize you could be doing something about aliens here yeah and i'm gonna get to the truth of it you're gonna crack the case and i remember our our school library had a little section that was like maybe like four books wide about aliens and extraterrestrials.

And I remember being very excited to read all of these because I was a kid that wanted to learn about ghosts and monsters and aliens and magic and all this stuff. And I had this,

I would say, a repeating experience where I would dive into something and then be sort of disappointed.

I remember as a kid being like, I want to learn how to do magic, like how to have magical powers. And then reading books on how magic works.
I'm like, these are all like.

It's mostly just tricking people. It's just like tricking people.

And I was like, oh, no, I want to learn. It's not like a book is like, here is how to become a wizard.
Yes. Here is the spell that you say that makes the coin disappear.

It was like, no, you just just put it in your pocket when they're not looking. And I was like,

what the? And then, you know, you read these stories about Bigfoot and this and that. And then you're, you sort of, even as a kid, start seeing the sort of, I don't know that this is all lining up.

Uh-huh. Okay.

And my experience with extraterrestrials doing this report was, and me and my friend Dale, we both chose the same topic and we were doing this research together and we were reading all of these now that are very famous.

The classic players, the classic counters, the abducting stories and all that. Right.

And throughout my life, the more

starting at that moment, I gleaned this. And only more now have I sort of come to understand aspects of it or make my own assumptions about it.

But a thing that I noticed even back then was I was like, interesting. A lot of these people

who had these experience also had very deep trauma in their lives. Benny and Barney Hill, right?

The most famous abduction story of all time, where it's like, right, they were an interracial couple, like they'd experienced so much discrimination, right? Like there's all this, right?

When you learn about them, you're like, right, this was like an incredibly complicated story. Yes.
Outside of we got abducted by aliens. And there's a lot of skin thing.
Yeah. Yeah.

And there's a lot of these stories where you hear these amazing experiences they had with aliens or abductions. And then

secondary to that, you also weaved into those stories is also, oh, this incredible trauma that this person went through in their life. And that, that pattern sort of repeated itself.

And so I have this sense that oftentimes the extraterrestrials or those experiences end up being ciphers for these sort of traumas that we can't, in the same way that

a lot of otherworldly things become these projections of these aspects of ourselves or our experiences that we don't know how to reckon with.

And so, to what you're saying about what's going on culturally at the time, there is something interesting about the fact that

Spielberg makes a film where

there is all of this

complicated, difficult stuff happening

with families and, you know, in the, the, the, the, the world of close encounters. But the result is, it's, oh, it's these benevolent aliens that are just there to be our friends.
Right.

This is a movie that is scary and foreboding for 75% of its running time, but then the answer in this sort of people later sort of decry kind of spielbergy way is like, no, no, it's all good.

Which is a cultural relief. It is.
I mean, to be like, all of these scary, foreboding things happening, both in your personal life and globally, are actually part of something that's benevolent.

And ultimately,

you could cut every visual effect shot out of this movie, and it would read as a pretty, I think, thorough and like accurate portrayal of someone having a psychotic break and someone dealing with a fallout of trauma of losing a child.

Right. If you remove any proof of the supernatural, it's like a collective hysteria.
Their behavior makes sense as that. And like Terry Garr believes him, right?

And is like accompanying him to these, like, sort of trying to get acknowledgement, you know, in the wake of this event that happened to him.

But then what really causes the family to like unravel isn't that she

thinks it's, it's almost not played as he's getting so obsessed with this thing and she has to leave in revolt. It's like, it's scary that he can't function anymore.

It is like living with someone with like

a borderline personality. Exactly.
And you're just like, their behavior is now inexplicable and extreme. And I don't think he can watch the kids safely.
And like, right. The movie is them.

Of course, the military is like, yeah, we'll create this cover story of like, people can't come here because there's a toxic leak.

But then all they're all saying like, but there will be people who come because there always are.

And again, if it's a movie where there are no aliens, it's a movie about how the military is like, don't go there. It's dangerous.

And some people are going to go to the thing because of that, like out of interest, right? Like, no, no, no, you're hiding something from me.

Anyway, this is like like a cultural thing that maybe wasn't depicted in films up until this point, like this notion of our relationship to you. Like,

obviously, there have been alien movies and alien invasion movies and stuff, but like, yeah, had there really been like an alien abduction movie, like movies about the phenomenon of people saying they've had an experience with UFOs, like that feels kind of new.

I think so. I'm not,

I always wish I could build a sort of, you know, a timeline before one of these these episodes being like, where had there, because there's things like Slaughterhouse 5 that has like aliens in them, right?

Like, and there's a movie of that.

But yeah, I don't think there's much.

But like, this is the first movie that's basically, let me say, I, it feels to me like this is the first movie that is in conversation with the culture of like folklore of UFO abduction and like encounters and this being a thing that like the fringe press is starting to report on.

Yes, right. Yeah.
An interesting aspect to it

that I don't know if that was intentional or not, is that there are aspects to the

finale of this that Spielberg intended or he had wrote of his own ideas of, oh, we'll have this happen and this happened and maybe the aliens can do this and that.

And there's a lot more complicated aspects to the aliens.

Like there is a whole section where there is these tiny glowing cubes that went and attached themselves to everyone and then went inside everyone's bloodstream. And

there was a whole zero gravity thing and different kinds of aliens and all this stuff going on. But ultimately, it felt like he ended up, he kept deferring back to whatever there was,

whatever aspects were part of the collective storytelling of actual ET encounters or people's, you know,

believed experiences with those, which I think is actually very interesting because that means that that ties in more, I think, with that sort of emotional experience of what aliens represented versus if he had invented his own thing.

That's very getting into lore and you're

not specific creativity. And it might not connect.
It might not be as everlasting as it is now because that's it's it's based on whatever was going on in the cultural zeitgeist.

With James Lipton, the greatest moment in the history of Inside the Actor Studio. You know what I'm talking about, right? Where Lipton's talking to Spielberg and he says, like,

I have the exact.

Okay. Well, your father was a computer scientist.
Your mother was a musician. When the spaceship lands, how do they communicate?

And Spielberg, I mean, you got to watch it, really, to watch it dawn on Spielberg. It's incredible.

Like, I can't replicate him realizing something he's always known as like, I'm melding my parents, right? But he literally says, like, I've never thought of that. He says, thank you for that.

Thank you. Like, you know, like that's completely right.
But it's, it's this being the unresolved man movie, right?

It's why it's always going to sit weirdly with him because this is the movie that comes out of him not having figured out all the shit in his life.

Like he's like speaking things that are so unsettled in his mind and in his heart.

I also, you know, how much of this is once again, like sort of Spielberg myth-making, but he says, I think especially when it was the earlier versions of the like sort of Project Blue Bookie versions of the script, and he was reaching out to the government and trying to get like, you know, I want to make this accurate.

Like, what is your own, what is the government sort of protocol for dealing with these types of claims and things like that? And they kept on being like, don't make this movie.

And like NASA wrote him letters and they were like, if you make this, we think it will have like a damaging effect on the public.

And he was like, that was the thing that made me feel like I was onto something good and made me double down twice as hard as, like, I have to make this.

I don't read the implication of that being, hey, Stephen, you're getting too close to me. No, it's like we don't want kids Naruto running at Area 51.

It'll be a hassle.

Making the movie in this sense feels like it's validating to people who want to believe. Yes.
More than it's revealing a truth.

It's like this movie is sort of saying, like, maybe if you like feel it, if, if the mashed potatoes are like telling you, go out to the desert and see what happens.

But then what I think is good is that he ended up not piling, I mean, this is silly to say because this whole special effects finale and all this stuff, but to me, there's not enough artifice piled onto it to snuff out the

what I think lasts about this film, which is those very human, very relatable sort of traumas and experiences that the story is actually telling.

The fact that we don't have answers to any of these things, the fact that the aliens don't really communicate, the fact that we don't get answers to those questions, I think makes this film work really, really well.

Say, hi, here's why we took all those people. We're so sorry.
They just show up and say, we are here and we hear you and respond in kind. Like, that's pretty much it.
And come with us. Right.

You know, but they also would literally say none of that. They don't say words.

What is so profound is like, you have this need to jump all the way to the end, but like all the way to the end. it's the whole movie.
Hey, we're going to go through some of the film scene by scene.

But you have

the ramp come down and the first reveal of the alien is like this bizarre spider-like, like it looks like a marionette.

It's moving very strangely, and then it like kind of slowly unfurls itself and looks like the most classical, like

gray sausage. It's like a Carlo Rembaldi creation, right? Like he was involved.
Yes, and they also hired Bob Baker to help try to figure this out. But not Bob Barker.
No, Bob Baker famous Marionette.

From Bob Baker Marionette Theater in eastern Los Angeles.

No, this is important, David. David, I'm going to the bathroom.
No, you're not. David, you're going to stay here and learn who Bob Baker is.
David, man, if you're in the bathroom, I'm running away.

This is unbelievable. Every fucking time he does this, and he's acting like this is some shit we do to him.
Or are you guys doing this thing where you team up? And we act like, no, David.

These are important artists. David, if the Atlantic.

if the atlantic if the atlantic if the atlantic is not is not of of the ilk enough to respect bob baker disregard entire art forms you're disregarding entire art who's bob baker i'll wait what a good question he's a puppeteer guy who did a lot of marionettes like cool puppet shit and he did a lot of cool puppet shit for movies and tv show and then eventually opened up a little theater in los angeles where you can go see marionette shows oh yeah like uh and kind of in highland park yes in Highland Park.

A friend of mine, who I stay with when I'm in LA, lives very close to the airport. The theater was at risk of closing, and then there's a big fundraising effort.

Now it's had this like incredible Second Life, and all the shows sell out. And it's

celebrities who like sort of support it financially, and it feels pretty set. And it's like this beautiful, like, here we study and refine this one very particular ancient art form.

I've reset a place where toilet noises happen in the background.

That's the worst thing. Wait, what happened? We're talking about the beautiful career of Bob Baker.
Bob Baker.

And as Griffin, as Griffin was, the jazz was hitting and the like poetry.

It was off his tongue as he's getting into

the life and the career of Bob Baker. We hear the toilet flush in the background.
Flush, some stinky dookie going down the pipe. There's no stinky dookie.

And then that's the smelliest pee I've ever come across.

Okay, now that Griffin's taking this to a weird place. I'm sorry.
Bob Baker.

But anyways, it's a great little marionette theater that they have these shows that feel like you're being time traveled back to

the 1960s. But that makes sense because it does feel like when he first comes out, it looks puppeteered like a marionette.
Then he unfurls into this sort of like animatronic state.

Then you have these small children, you know, in these costumes fixed, just clearly just kind of like waddling out with these heads, right?

And then you go back to the main alien, and he has like one non-verbal sort of like hand signal

smile exchange. Of course.

But I'm saying, like, there's no dialogue. There's no monologue.
It is all just like these two species like observing and acknowledging each other.

And you're still like, I don't really understand the relationship between this one tall one and the munchkin ones. You know, I have no idea what their intent are.
They're returning some people to us.

They're taking some new people aboard. Everyone's just kind of like nodding and like, then ramp goes up into the sky.
Movie over. Well, the kid says bye.
The kid says bye.

And also, the one thing that I might not do if I'm Spilberg is that the tall alien kind of smiles, which you love, but you're almost like, I don't think I need him to smile. I already get

the effect. It's a cool effect.
It's a cool effect. But it is kind of like, yeah, we get that they're free, you know.
Among those aliens,

kind of like dogs, smiling is actually really aggressive. That's an aggressive thing.

Oh, so you think it's like a Mars attacks thing where it's like, that's actually them communicating like, we're about to nuke you. We're going to take off from space and obliterate this.

When those aliens show their teeth, it's a sign of aggression. What are some other scenes we haven't touched on?

Because obviously, close encounters, I feel like everyone is like, mashed potatoes, abduction of the child, the ending.

Those are the big three remembered scenes. Him building the devil's tower.
Yeah, the mashed potatoes.

No. Oh, and also the crazy sculpture.
That's that whole

pillow. It's freaky.
I will say that the early scene of the, we're talking about the foreign language. And it's like, what do you say? he said that scene true

came out and it spoke to him

the sun came out at night and sang to him i have the line i have a very distinct memory of us going the 40th screening and after he has the like sunburn on half of his face from the ship you going really good halloween costume i view it is but no one remembered anything just red shirt half burned face um i'll also say spielberg is i think one of the best directors at showing people listening

so one of one of the great but also listening. Oh,

at Famu, a film school in Prague, there was a professor that I, that was where I did my study abroad,

Mark Yika, a cinematographer,

cinematography professor, who gave me a very harsh note because the script that I was working on had a moment where you see a character have a feeling or an idea. And he was like, never.

Show someone have an idea. Only show the actions that are a result of the idea.
And I was like eviscerated in front of the class for that.

And it was funny because I was watching Close Encounters and I'm like, Spielberg's always showing people have that idea. It's also one of the things he's seeing people listen and think.

I don't understand film school. Not that I think it's like stupid.
I just have never been able to, because I don't understand people being like, you cannot do that.

I'm like, there's always an example of someone doing whatever, breaking whatever rules.

Well, Famu was fascinating because this sort of the Czech cinema universe, they had a lot of rules that, because for them,

what was taught to us was that cinema was a

both a political and a social tool that as artists, you had to use responsibly. And because of that, here's the here's the ways that you do it.
I mean, I looked it was a completely different

because NYU was like, well, yeah,

be an artist. And going to FOMB, they were like, no, this is what films are about.
This is how you do them. This is how you shoot them

was very fascinating. It's a good, right.
It's a good other perspective. But that, like, I mean, the, the main three adult characters in this film, right?

Like, the three main threads that converge by the end are Truffaut, Melinda Dillon, and Richard Dreyfus. One of the three performances, yes.

And I want to talk about Melinda Dillon a bit in particular. But

Truffaut doesn't speak English, right? Has like five lines where he maybe like cobbles together some English.

That is, in the dramatic setup of the movie, a performance that is mostly going to be about listening.

It's mostly going to be he's going to blather things in an excitable tone in French without subtitles, have a very calm man just kind of like flatly relay them.

And most of this performance is going to play out on watching his face process that he's reacting.

But this is my point. It's like Spielberg's like just showing off at how good he is at doing this.
Truffaut was writing a book about acting, he claimed.

And that's why he took the part is that he could explain the experience of being an actor. There was also an abandoned film.
He wrote The Man Who Loved Women while he was filming this.

That makes sense because it comes out around the same time. Another movie that he never ended up making that I want to say was about acting.
Yeah.

Maybe some of which ends up going into the soup in Last Metro.

But it's funny because in all these interviews, people are like, I think he just wanted to do it, but he had to get killed with an excuse. Yeah, he was a little bit of doing it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I think this movie was well liked in France, partly because Truffaut was involved, but partly because France was like early on Spielberg in a way.

Like, and like Jean-Renoir was like, he's, I think he is very talented, you know, and that is right. Jean-Renoir was like,

you know, so he's very good. He's like the best of his kind since Milliers.
Right, right. Yeah.
He was like a static. And then eventually, of course, whatever.
I'm sure France got sick of Spielberg.

But now they're probably. But Fableman's was exactly.
No, that's the thing. Like

France fucking single-handedly, only in their countries, made Fabelmans and Drew number two blockbusters.

And it's like our most beloved American auteurs are being like vaguely disregarded by the studios and audiences in France. They're like, we'll take them.

And Jerry Lewis, of course, he's the third one.

I also love that this movie, the beginning part of it, is this parallel cutting between these sort of like disconnected UFO experiences and the family drama because it builds this tension where you're like, I know these things are going to collide and resolve together.

Whatever. But right now, they're very far apart.
Sure. Right now we're in India and now we're in Mobile, Alabama.

And now we're in the military base, and we're in Mobile. And you're like, something's about to happen.
The movie is set in Indiana. It's set in Muncie.
Oh, sorry. Yes, it's set in Muncie, Indiana.

Sorry about that. They shot in Mobile.
Go Muncie. Sure.
Spielberg

works out a lot of stuff that he ends up doing in Poltergeist. A lot of toys going crazy.
Sure. A lot of houses.
All those things. Suburbs being weird suburbs.
He knows how to do that.

Line of mailboxes, wild and out, where you're just like, this is so simple and so effective. Shit like that, of just like the cupboards clacking.

Like, there's the great sort of first melinda dylan and son sequence we're re-watching it i'm like does the kid get abducted this early on and you're like no there's a fake out one and it goes on really

right yeah yeah yeah yeah um that's just

all the stuff that's happening around the house or even just the timing of the lights going out like he's so good at making a scene feel really organic and lived in not staged not expository even if like info dumps are happening And then when something that's just like a little bit supernatural happens, especially when it's like a very unflashy practical effect, it feels so profound in the middle of that.

Yeah, I've got a big bone to pick with the film. What's that? Not enough bones? There's not enough bones, but also there's a scene where

Dreyfus's son

complains that he doesn't understand how fractions work. Yeah.
And Dreyfus has this toy train set. And the son has to do like, I think it's

two-thirds of 60 is what he needs to learn the fraction of.

The toy train comes around

and Dreyfus picks it up and it's three cars. He picks up the three cars and then puts two of them down and goes, imagine this car is 60 feet long.
How much the car would have to be.

You're saying he had the perfect example of the

perfect example. No, he's not that good a dad.
No,

in his hand. And then instead makes it way more complicated.
This goes back to my, the movie's about, I don't know how to be a grown-up. Like the movie is not from this perspective of the kid.

E.T.'s the one where like for how much the abduction is so iconic. Dreyfus is only like 29 when he's making this movie.
Again, he always reads older like because he's got an old fucker face. But like

yeah, like his kids are pretty old for him to be like not even 30. How did he respond with that?

How would Richard Dreyfus respond to me saying that? In that one-on-one interview you did with him?

No, but it makes sense that he was like leaning towards fucking Hackman or whoever, you know, that like the other guys he was considering were all or Hoffman, like, yeah, ornery, older.

It works that he's like an old child, right? Like, it works the weirdness of Dreyfus being like a young dude who has old man energy and doesn't seem settled in either.

And just from that first scene, his response to his son is like, these are your problems. You solve your problems.
I don't want to solve your problems.

Like, he, he just seems so unhappy in all aspects of his life. Hoffman is 10 years older, by the way.
10 years older. That's how, quote unquote, young Dreyfus is in a weird way.

The argument about goofy golf versus going to the movies.

What would you guys have chosen?

When you were a kid.

When I was a kid, I did enjoy a mini golf type thing, but I probably preferred going to the movies.

Ben, Ben's thinking about it.

What's goofy? How goofy we get. It's how goofy.
Warning. It probably won't be as goofy as you want.
What you're imagining, it's not that. Like, goofy means like there's a windmill.

It's not going to be like goofy jail with the zigzag bars.

Melinda did not happen.

Why do I feel like we talked about her? We talked. There was a recent movie.
What was it, though? Because I'm looking at her filmography.

In the last year that we covered, I'm going to figure out what it is. But I feel like she's, she passed away recently.

I feel like she's weirdly a kind of overlooked actress for this era, despite the fact that if you just reduce her to her top ballot work, you're like, she is in a handful of movies that are evergreen.

She's in great movies, like some. She didn't make enough.
She didn't make a ton of movies. Prince of Tides.
Oh, that's what it is. That's right.
And she's good in that. I mean, obviously,

she's amazing and bound for glory. And this, like, you know, and then like I slapshot, she rocks in.
Close encounters, I think, you know, Christmas Story is one of the most watched movies of all time.

But that's the, that's the thing. I've never seen it.

That's the one where I always forget about Christmas Story because I've never seen it. But I know it's a big movie for a lot of people.
I'm like, she got an Oscar nomination for this, right?

Christmas Story.

Absence of Malice. Yes.
Christmas Story is the most, like, one of the most replayed, re-watched.

I completely disconnected that. She's one of the Hendersons, right? She's a mom Henderson.
Yes, John Liftko's wife. But I'm just like, if you just reduce her to

Slapshot, Close Encounters, Magnolia, Christmas Grace. Magnolia.
Right. You're like, those are like, and even Harry and the Henderson's like one step below that.

You're like, those are four of the like most rewatched movies. Yeah.
She's in big movies, but she obviously in supporting roles. But pivotal supporting roles in all four.
I'm pro Melinda Dilla.

I'm just saying there's a reason she's undersung, maybe. But it's maybe the exact effect of you never putting together that's the same person.
Yeah, right. Yeah.
She's so good.

Fascinating. I didn't piece that together.
Have you seen Slapshot Griff? Yes. Slapshot roles.
So good. Yeah.

Dylan. Yeah, but she's amazing in this.
I mean, she lost the Oscar to it's Vanessa Redgrave. I think this is the famous where Vanessa Redgrave maybe didn't accept and

she read out a statement about

Palestine, right? Is that yeah,

incendiary

her statements were

as incendiary at the time. And unfortunately, it probably would be presented as incendiary now.
Unfortunately, as in the time. But, you know,

that's one of those things where you're like, oh, who? Oh, Julia. Well, I haven't seen that, so I can't really weigh in.

I still haven't seen Julia. Maybe I need to watch Julia just to have a better perspective on the 1977 Oscars.

I feel like the big picture and their 77 draft, it sounded like both of them watched it for the first time and kind of dirty wardrobe.

Right. Yeah.
But one of those movies that just, like, you look at the Oscar year and you're like, I guess this was a juggernaut. I mean, it won those two Oscars and it got a bunch of other noms.

It won best screenplay as well, best adaptive screenplay. I don't know.

I mean, but it's, you know, that's the Oscars where it's like, yeah, there was, there was acknowledgement of new stuff and excitement, but also I'm sure there were lots of ordinary old voters who liked a, you know, sturdy true story movie about this World War II.

I don't know. I just like think this was him trying to make something more serious and consciously like,

or if nothing else, make something certainly deeply personal, right?

And like all of his kind of lampshading of lampshading is the right word, but the pre-framing of like, I'm not making jaws again. This isn't a blockbuster.
This is something spiritual.

This is about ideas and feelings and whatever. I look at it now from the modern perspective and I'm like, I can't believe they weren't doing fucking cartwheels and like.

tripping over themselves to give him the Oscar for this. But there was this feeling of like fucking whiz kid Spielberg slow your roll.
Like we're not going to give you everything.

Who hosted those Oscars? Bob Hope? Bob Hope. Yeah.
You know, so it's like, you still got plenty of old fashioned stuff.

This just feels like such a perfect mashup of like everything New Hollywood was exploring and a kind of like old-fashioned movie wonder. Frank Capra asks.
That's that's Philberg for you.

But I'm like, if he gets as, as much as this movie was a wild success, huge reviews, huge box office, if he had won the Oscar for this, the rest of his career probably would have been less interesting.

That might be true. There's something kind of interesting about him after this needing to like sharpen his blade as just like a commercial entertainer.

Then he goes through his weird period of like how do i make grown-up movies and then he finally figures out how to bring the two together the bfg finally we got there

but there's like the interesting 1977 to

2001 space where it feels like he's not trying to make something this overtly i don't want to say personal but in a certain way it feels like revealing again you know like e.t he's like

hey, I'm hiring someone to write the script. I'm adding in a lot of elements that aren't about me.
I'm trying to tell a story. I would say ET is pretty revealing.
We'll talk about it.

Oh, we'll talk about it. Actually, we're going to skip that one.
It's pronounced et

the thing you said with your first comment when you saw the Fablemans and I asked you how it was, and you said, it's like watching your dad cry. AI,

Close Encounters, and Fablemans all have that feeling to me where it's just like, there's something a little bit uncomfortable here about what he's saying to me.

This feels like a little too intimate rather than personal

that I think is a unique power to this one that he then maybe avoids a little bit for the next following two days. I feel like for close encounters,

it's almost like I don't know that it, what it comes off as is that I don't know that he realizes how revealing. Exactly.

That's what's up. Even for the time he doesn't.
I think he does this.

I'm sure he does that. That's the intimacy for me.

Whereas E.T., it's like, it's perfectly packaged. And the other thing is the part of him that's like, oh, fuck, I never quite cracked that neerie character.
His motivation doesn't make sense to me.

He's a bad father. I can't get over this.
By the time he gets to E.T., it's like, I know how to characterize everyone. Everyone's arcs are clean and digestible.

It's from the point of view of children. And this movie is not from the point of view of children.
Although

a part of me

feels like, I was just talking with mutual friend Connor Ratliff about

Weirdly I think close encounters kind of is from the POV of children like I almost feel like all of the family stuff feels more from the POV of the child

especially and then it almost it almost comes off as how a child would view and understand divorce and then like when they drive away is when the fantasy begins of like oh and then like dad's gone because like there's like this he had to go he had to go because there's this like really important benevolent thing that he's doing that's why that's what's going on kiss the lady who is like stirred by the same demons that stir him you know it's sort of that's a really heartbreaking moment in the movie is when he comes home and he's like trying to scrub the burn off and he's like terror garden like you have to come with me right now and she's like what i'm i'm in my sleeping gown and he's like you're always saying we don't go enough play come on go and it like gets her in the truck brings her to the site where robert's blossom is right

and her and the kids yes They don't leave the kids. Right.
And she's trying to provoke him with the like, remember when we used to do spontaneous things like this?

Like you take me to a spot like this and you kiss me. And she just in real time has to work through like,

oh, how they got into this mess. He's

he's gone, right? Like the feeling of there used to be passion in this relationship. Now they're kind of just like worn down.
She briefly thinks he's trying to reignite that.

And then she's like, oh, he's even further away than I thought he was before.

It's his new obsession yes and from that moment it almost feels like she's a little bit not resigned but that she's like i've lost him things haven't been good and now they've become untenable can we talk about the fucking ships i want a spaceship with the ship

these ships are fucking great three little ass ships and then the baby one the baby one's the best one

truly they look fun yes they look fun to drive they're such good designs and

would you you're not a car driver would i drive a spaceship? Absolutely. And they like, I don't like roads.
I love the sky.

It's interesting because, right, there's definitely, I don't know, when you're in the sky,

there's no other go-down axis. There's like a whole other.
There is a whole other axis. That is absolutely right.

And what I like about these spaceships is they tumble through the air. They don't seem to have an upward.
They sort of, there's a spinny guy. They just go whatever direction they want.

Do you know, originally, Spielberg's idea for the ships was that

the ships would present in ways that they thought people would like,

like that, like that, like humans would feel comforted. And so it was the McDonald's arches and the Chevron logo.

And like, they made these ships that were like, oh, it's the McDonald's arches going through the sky and all this stuff. And then he was like, no, this is too.
It's too goofy. This is too.

But they are great ships. They're cool ships.
I mean, I think the mother ship's amazing. It's an you can see it, right? Like the model is viewable somewhere, some museum or something.

It's a Smithsonian, I think, right? It's very cool. It's just lights it's just darkness and lights but it's also a very

city yeah it's like there's all these like spokes and skyscrapers on it that you mean you saw the fucking i just showed you the footage from the special edition but that's like when you're inside the ship you don't see aliens any further you just you just see that it's basically like a city inside

right um it's just crazy to think that trumbull worked on this and star wars and job williams

why did i see that he worked on star wars i knew he turned out

Star Wars. But did he not do any work on it? He probably,

maybe he gets like a thank you for a summary. He jumped in.
He wasn't. He obviously didn't leave.
But famously, he said no to Star Wars. I know that.

The thing I know is that he put R2D2. Tyxtra did it.
Right. Star Wars.
But I think he fucking did some pinch hitting.

I have no idea.

Trumbull put... R2-D2 and the X-Wing on the model.
No, it's a TIE Fighter, I believe. I'm sorry.
You're right. Well, R2-D2 is on the model.
Yes, he just said that. And a TIE Fighter.

He literally said that two seconds ago. And And then I thought you corrected him and said that the fighter.
No, he said an X-Wing. It's a TIE fighter.

Okay. Twin ion engines.
A decade of dreams. I don't like how the alien spaceship is like spotless.

It bothers me. The inside of it.
Yeah, you're talking about the inside, which is right. It's like, get rid of that.
But that's what Star Wars is for. Star Wars is dirty.

Anyway, Star Trek the motion picture is what Trumbull then works on because they're like the 2001 vibes, which that movie has. So was it just him being friends with the Star Wars team?

Yeah, I think it's just a joke. Him putting them on the ship is when they're in production.
I know, like, it's funny.

It's too conversation, but he's also like, no one's telling him, like, hey, years later, there'll be discs and people can go frame by frame and see your little joke.

And I think, you know, he's meaning it is like, yeah, no one will ever catch that. I think it was more the miniatures guy worked on.

I think you might be right. I think you're right.
And then, so, something that I want to talk about is cloud boxes. Let's do it.

This film is one of the innovations in cloud boxes, which is an effect that Spielberg uses a lot and that branches off from here.

So this film has these amazing effect shots where the clouds billow out from the sky.

They sort of, they're first clouds, then ships. Yes.
And this is a film with no CGI in it. It is all practical VFX done through optical tricks.

And the cloud box was this really cool effect that basically Spielberg had this thing where he's like,

I want the ships to be hidden in clouds and for clouds to sort of like form to continue to hide the ships. Because originally the mothership was supposed to be a lack of light.

It was going to be a big black pie plate. Yes.

It was going to be like, oh, the stars go away. And that's what the mothership is, which is why when you watch the finale scene, it's very interesting.

When you learn about the production of stuff and you watch the finale, you realize what kind of a mishmash, because it was such a crazy production.

Well, the backlighting of the aliens is like maybe the single smartest filmmaking decision makes the entire film.

Where every time you see a glimpse, you're like, I can't believe how good that looks. But you're like, if the shot lasted a second longer, the angle was like one degree off.

The only shot that really shows you of the face is like a poop

shot where it cuts between the kid. Barry's face and the alien face really quick.
And it's like, there it is.

It's why the smile is effective for me because it's the one kind of sustained thing along with the hand gesture where you're like, I can't believe this works but there's very dark he's mostly silhouetted like there's a lot of lack of continuity in the in the finale that's very fascinating where it's like um they shot some stuff where it's like oh the mothership comes down and when it was supposed to be a black void you see a big shadow go over everybody and it's like this really great shot where the shadow goes everyone but then in the final thing it's this bright glowing thing and other shots are glowing everything up and you're like wait what that but what I love is Spielberg just like whatever it's more the feeling of it all yes um this is also his first first movie with Michael Khan, who then becomes one of his closest and most important collaborators.

I think their relationship has always just been defined as like they can finish each other's sentences or whatever. It's just like very, very, very tight collaboration.

But also that Michael Kahn is like, this is an emotional art form for me. I do not care about like maintaining continuity or like a sort of cleanness or precision.

It is about like cutting to emotion and story. Like the big one they talk about is like when the mothership rises from above,

it starts low and then comes up over the horizon, but then you see the wide shot and it's larger than the entire mountain and you're like, well, then where was it to come up from?

And Spielberg's like, it doesn't make sense, but who cares? It's better than it lowering. It's rising is better than lowering.

But then you get to like Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park has the thing where like the T-Rex and the rain sequence, you can clearly see the other side of the fence as like forest where the T-Rex is coming from.

And then like five minutes later, they're hanging over a cliff in that exact same spot and all that forest had disappeared.

And like by 20 years later, Spielberg is consciously designing sequences and building sets to ignore continuity because he's basically learned it doesn't matter.

If you're making the audience focus on the right things and you're carrying them along in the story, who gives a shit? Yes. So back to cloud boxes.
It's this effect that I think defines the 80s.

We get it in Ghostbuster. We get it in Poltergeist.
We get it in Close Encounters. We get it in Indiana Jones.
We get it in Neverending Story, we get it in tons of stuff.

They even use it in Tree of Life and all these things. And it's that amazing effect where it's like clouds are like appearing out of the sky and like billowing forward.

It's like fast-motion clouds is what it looks like. It's unbelievable.
But when you think about it, you're like, how did they do that without CGI?

Put a bunch of shit in a box. So what they did, so it came because

I guess Douglas Trumbull was like making coffee and he put cream in his coffee and saw that it like billowed. And he's like, hmm.
And then

his assistant at the time is is this guy, Scott Squires, and was like, hey, go

buy stuff at the grocery store and like experiment and figure some stuff out. And what's cool is this guy, Scott Squires, now has a blog.

It's like an old blog spot where he just tells stories about like the old days of VFX and he has a whole thing about the cloud box and how it came to be.

And so what they ended up doing is they had a tank that was like seven foot by like whatever, like 16 feet or something, this giant tank that, and like three feet deep.

And they filled it with filtered water with salt in it, salt water filtered. And then they put a thin layer of plastic over it and then carefully poured non-salt water over it.

So at the top, because of density, the salt water stayed at the bottom and the regular water stayed at the top. And they very carefully removed the plastic.

so that you had this tank that had one layer of regular water and then beneath it a layer of salt water. And then they got

like tempera paints, you know, like the type of paint that you might use to do like an art project. And they used a syringe and they put it in the water.

And because it it billows out in the regular water, but the salt water is dense enough, but you can still see through it, it doesn't go to the saltwater. It just stays at the top.

And they put the camera beneath it and it looks like it. this cloud thing and it stops at the salt water and keeps billowing forth.
So it looks, and it's just like a beautiful effect.

And it's such a practical, cool thing. And this was where they sort of figured it out and started really doing that.
And similar types of effects have been used with ink and water and stuff like that.

But this cloud box was like the beginning of this effect that then they started using in all these famous movies. And it's such a beautiful, very haunting effect.
Oh, it's so good.

I prefer CG, though. I know you do.
Regular ass CG. I know.
You like

Polar Bear with the Rock. Your favorite part of Star Wars is when, like, the before the scene starts, a robot bonks.

Yeah, I like to pull out and see more of Moss Eisley. And it's like, like there's like one creature there.
You like when E.T. runs, you listen like when E.T.
runs, yeah. God, I fucking love that.

I make that fucker run. Yeah, um, okay.
One thing, the most 70s part of this movie, because it was a movie that I didn't really remember was a 70s movie. Sorry, what's the 70s?

Um, for some reason, in my head, it's like lodged in the 80s because, like, that's you know carry on more than Spielberg. The AT is an 80s movie.

So, the most 70s thing in this movie is that in the middle of it, they have a shot where a police car falls off a cliff, which is is like that's like the the time the preloaded stuff of the era but it's like well it's a movie so we have to have a car go off a cliff at some point um the other thing i think is very funny that well okay another thing is spielberg we love spiel i love spielberg i think he's great he's wonderful it would be weird if two and a half hours and you were like spielberg this guy in my opinion ah

this is not this is not me trying to get on spielberg he's not great with foreign cultures well i think also the era is not great the The era is not great. Yes.

But like, there's a couple of things in this where it's like some weird stuff. And I'm like, okay.

But you look at Independence Day 20 years later, 20-ish years later, where they're like, America defeats the aliens.

Let's, can we cut to like a, I don't know, Africa for five seconds, where there's some like tribesmen also being like, yay, the aliens died. You're like, and that's enough of that.

That was the third major new thing film for the special edition. It's the shower conversation between Neri and his wife.
It's the end inside the spaceship.

And it's the Gobi Desert thing with the ship, with the ocean liner. Yes.
Which that was the big one where he's like, I had this idea in my head.

No one would give me more money at this point to do an even bigger effect.

And you get the sense that he wanted maybe more of a structure of like, for the first half of the movie, we're watching Truffaut and Balaban follow different strange occurrences before the threads finally converge.

But that becomes like, to your point, David, the way that like all Roland Emmerich movies are structured after this, which is like every 20 minutes, there's a new inexplicable event happening in some other country.

Right. But the other events usually like, yeah, Hong Kong, it gets obliterated.
Moving on back to, you know, like, you know, and you're like, okay, sure, great. I get that this is global now.
Anyway.

And then the last thing that was making me laugh was

that made this like very clearly a 70s movie is that the whole idea is that there's this Project Mayflower, which is these like group of people that have been like selected to like go like be the initial.

Yes. Number one, my question I think is so funny is that they accept all the humans back from the aliens, right? Like all of the people that got gone.
It's a straight trade. They don't look okay.

And no one asks them, like, hey, what happened to you before they send a bunch of humans back in the thing? They take these like traumatized looking people back.

Yeah, but they won't come out being straight out of the world.

But don't you think you'd be like, hey, before we send a bunch of new people on, like, is everything okay in there? Like, did something bad happen? But there's like, welcome, welcome. No questions.

And then the Project Mayflower people that they select to be the representatives of the human race on this ship. It's like 13 people, 10 of them are white dudes.

There's two women and then one black guy. It's a

70s comedy ratio. Rats are representative of the human race.
Right. You know, it's like, oh, we have the best writing staff on our sitcom.
11 white guys and the lady and maybe a black guy can't be.

Right. The wildest thing is that's also like the writing staff of the Richard Pryor show.
Right. Exactly.
But it was like, you're like, 10 white guys named Melvin, Sandra Bernhardt. You don't get

Bob Jim was so funny. And you got to this guy like eating a sandwich.

It's like, they're like, this is going to be the representative of all of you. And

it's like 10 of the same dude. I love those red jumpsuits.
And then the one addition, the last site, like, we need to add another one. And it's Richard Dreyfus.
And you're like, guys, come on.

Can we add one more white dude with really bad energy? Yeah. Yeah.
Let's add a guy who's here who does not seem okay on Earth.

And let's, because also, if you're the aliens, you're probably like, who is this guy?

Who's this like sunburnt guy? A little too eager.

Yeah.

The film was released in November 16th, 1977. It was a huge hit.
Delayed. Was it originally supposed to be a summer release? Correct.

Wait, I was, I, I, was seeing that it was released on December 14th. You are wrong.
It's December 14th when it went wide apart? Yeah, I think it had some exclusive runs, but uh, just

uh, I was being sent a text from someone saying what that people were saying, like this week. Oh, it's the anniversary of when it's it's I don't know what to tell you.
I don't know. Um,

they wanted it to be a summer movie, yeah, and instead they platformed it and did exclusive runs, which is maybe what you're thinking of.

I mean, absolutely to this movie's benefit that it didn't come out in the same summer as Star Wars. Exactly that they had six months later.
It is the second biggest hit of the year after Star Wars.

The other big hits being Saturday Night Fever, Smokey and the Bandit, and The Goodbye Girl.

Worth mentioning what a big

five-year-old Trifus is in two of the five, you know. But it's opening number nine at the box office because, you know, that's how it is back in the day.
So, what's number one at the box office?

A movie that screams number one. The Goodbye Girl? No.
Okay, but it's in that zone? No. No.
Very dark movie based on a bestseller. Okay, opposite zone.

In 1977, it's based on a bestseller.

Is it a non-fiction bestseller? No, it's sort of, no, it's based on

Mr. Goodbar? It's looking for Mr.
Goodbar. There we go.

The movie about a school teacher who, played by Dan Keaton, who has something of a sexual awakening, starts having random sex with people and gets, spoiler alert. Moited.

It is kind of funny that it's like 1977.

It feels like the two big stars of the year are Dreyfus and Keaton for the the combined like goodbye girl uh close encounters annie hall looking for mr good bar which is kind of like a perfect four square of where commercial cinema was in the 1970s well here's another square for you though number two at the box office it's the it's a franchise starter we'll do this franchise one day okay comedy it's a comedy is it uh any which way no no okay it's not smoking the bandits no no austin powers won

what was that reaction you were getting getting ready to say something. No, I was just, no,

I was just like, oh, he's going to do a joke. And then he did that joke.
And I was like, how do I respond to that? No, it was funny.

Just have a laugh with a kind laugh, a chuckle, a smile to a friend. Fair enough.
Is it O God? There you go. Okay, we've got

turns in O God. Have you seen any of the O God trilogy? I have not.

We just feel like we will find them funny, but I think we have avoided actually. I think we might find the first one funny

that will happen. Because there are two sequels.
That it might be a bit of a jelly trilogy. Oh, God, Book Two, and Oh God, you devil.
Okay, I don't know these movies.

It's about George Burns is like, I've God.

Here's the pitch. In 1977, they said, What if George Burns was God? And America like screamed in joy.
They did. More, more, more, more.

Number three, and it's 26th week in the box office, is the biggest movie of the year.

Star Wars. Star Wars.
Star Wars. Star Wars.
Number four. Good movie.

Yeah. Is

the the first movie that Harrison Ford is

after Star Wars? It's not the Frisco Kid. Heroes.
He had made it before Star Wars. The film is called Heroes.
Henry Winkler. With Winkler with like a fright wig.

Winkler's got this crazy hair and Sally Field. It's like a Vietnam sort of coming home type movie.
And Ford's kind of key supporting it.

Have you seen it? I have. Yeah, it's okay.
Fair enough. It's okay.

Heroes. Number four.
Yeah, I don't know it very well. And number five is uh largely forgotten it's sort of like a sports movie it's from a big director with a big star

uh i've seen it it's not bad but it's largely forgotten yes in 1977 it's not bad news bears no that's not largely forgotten i know that's why i'm trying to like what is largely forgotten but you've seen it and it's a big director and a big star yeah but it's like a flop for both of them is telling me what sport it is would that give it away i'll tell you racing it's

a racing movie yes um

and is it is it a mcqueen nope no but it is a star that spuberg went out to for close encounters is it uh

fuck yeah you you probably know what it is but can't even remember the name is it the robert redford one nope no okay it's not paul newman nope i'm trying to think of stars who did car racing movies it's grand priest obviously much earlier um

well that's what i said i'm working through it.

Big star, big director. Big star? Big director.
Big director.

It's racing, car racing. Yep, Formula One.
It's Formula One.

Huh. Do you have any idea what this is, JD?

Well, I'll tell you then. Do you know? I was not paying attention.

It's an Al Pacino movie. And if you don't know after that, then you probably just don't know the name of the movie.

Yeah, what is this? The movie is Sidney Pollack's Bobby Deere folk. I was going to say, I didn't.
You didn't know that was a racing movie. I didn't know it was a racing movie.

You just know, like, the poster. I know the poster of him with like a scarf.
And you know, that's like a classic bad Al Pacino, like Al Pacino movie that didn't work. Right.

In between all the ones that did. I've seen that poster, which is like, I feel like black and white.

Him with a scarf, Sidney Pollock movie. And I was like, that's probably about like a poet or something.
Bobby Deerfield. Okay.
I was almost going to guess that.

And I was like, that will sound silly that I thought that was a racing movie.

Other movies in the top 10. You've got a Burt Reynolds movie called Semi-Tough.
Oh, yeah.

Sports movie, Michael Ritchie movie, where is it? It's a football movie with

Jill Clayberg. It's like a love triangle or something.

I've never seen it. You've got First Love, which is a romantic movie, if that might surprise you.
Okay. With William Cat.
Oh, sure.

Yeah, I don't know. You seem excited about it.

It's got some Cat Stevens songs in it. Oh, well.
I don't know. That must have been novel.

What's up? Young Man Works Through His Feelings while Cat Stevens. I think that is a vibe, yeah.
I feel like you can sort.

I feel like especially this era. I mean, I guess it happens all the time, but like you can sort movies into like, are they part of the future or the past?

I think this is trying to be part of the future, but it's just not a very good movie. And then there are like movies that are trying to be a specific thing.
You know what I mean?

I just feel like drama. As you list these movies, I'm like, oh, these movies are from the 70s and these movies are about to be the 80s.

But you have movies like that almost that are like movies from the past that are trying to dress up like movies from the future where they're like, look, he's got long hair and Cat Stevens is playing.

Right, right, right, right. And you're like, this movie could have been made in 1925.

You've also got the Richard Pryor comedy, Which Way is Up? which is like a it's a remake of the seduction of Beamie. I've never seen it, but it's like Pryor.
He plays multiple characters. Right.
Yeah.

Never seen it. And then you've got Julia, the aforementioned, you know, Lillian Hellman drama.
Yeah. Julia.
Right. The prequel to Julie and Julia.

Decade of Dreams. I'm just calling out other movies we've covered.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Yeah.

Hilariously enough, guess what goes to number one the next week? Hilarious? It's hilarious what goes to number one?

It's making you laugh. Not really.
It was just very exciting.

David's on the floor cracking up. Number one.

The weekend after, which I guess is basically Thanksgiving week, Star Wars. People are just like, let's just go see it again.
Yeah.

You know, it's been like six months and people are like, Thanksgiving. I'm feeling Star Wars, though.
You were actually in that discussion Star Wars.

It probably also, like, that was an era where movies would play for so long that they would refresh the newspaper ads.

By Christmas, to speak to your point, by like the weekend of mid-December, Close Encounters has jumped to number one. So I assume by then it's gone quite wide.

But they probably bought a bunch of newspaper ads where it's like Chewbacca with a turkey. And then people were like, you're right.
I should go again. The Christmas special dropped.

And people were like, ah. And then Close Encounters is number one through February.

like you know because that's how it was back in the day it's like you would have these right you know these giant hits that just played them and there's no ill you know people want to see them go over and over i mean people are big bob balbin fans uh anyway spielberg on reflecting on the movie says uh it's a piece of shit and i don't like it very much that's not he says what you said what you know the thing you said near the start of the episode which is like i was a kid when i made that movie i didn't have a family i didn't have kids so I could understand following your obsession at all costs.

And now I wouldn't. But hey, that speaks to Spielberg's life as well.
I think this this is part of what I find compelling about this movie. And it exists a lot in Sugarland as well.

And then I'd say sort of goes away is like he becomes such an incredible kind of technician of emotion on top of everything else.

Like he just figures out the codex of like perfect narrative arcs for characters and how to express that visually and how to get that performance and all of that.

That I like what I think irks him about this film is that it's like, I didn't make this character work. And I like that it sort of feels like his last kind of deeply unresolved, ambiguous character.

You know, that like,

even when he's making movies about moral ambiguity from this moment on, you always feel the sense of how Spielberg wants you to feel in that scene or that shot.

I also think we've talked about this before, that

when directors are starting their around the time when they get their blank checks or just starting their careers, oftentimes the movie is bigger than them and they're trying to rein it in and wrangle this thing that seems impossible.

Trying to rein it in. My true decade of dreams.
Yes. And

oftentimes I find that in those moments of stress while making something that feels like this is impossible, I'm not going to be able to pull this off is when the only thing you can rely on is truth.

And just like what is inside you. And that makes movies really special and interesting.

And when movies are being like sort of like broken apart at the seams is when the only thing can fill that is either the thing's gonna not work or you have to fill it with truth and that's the only thing you got and i think he finds some of that unbecoming to rewatch yes because also in learning about the making of this the production was crazy the set was insane alabam was fucking dropped down shit in a diary i mean one of the things they talk about is how the the the the weather and how hot and horrible it was and they had hundreds of extras they needed to have and one of the things i think is wonderful about this movie is that they cast locals to be all of the extras and eventually just were like giving people parts because they were just losing people left and right.

So when you watch this film now, it's not, you got some really good faces.

There's some really good faces of people who are just like real people that are not movie stars that will never be in a movie again.

And this energy that comes through that's very, there is an unrefinement to it that I think is.

That mixed with the refinement of Douglas Trumbull and Spielberg, mixed with the unrefinement of this this giant, huge budget thing that's sort of like falling apart at the seams in some places, makes it really amazing.

And in a movie that's sort of about the inexplicable and the unresolvable. And that's one of the one of the Balabin moments that's really funny is he's talking about the aliens.
And so

Spielberg wanted the aliens to be played by

like 12-year-old girls, like dancers.

He's like, just people that are like small, lithe, and will be able to move with some sort of uh a a a femininity that isn't stunt people or whatever and so they cast a bunch of like local dancer girls to be all of the the aliens and they're like i think like nine and ten year old girls but because of that balabin tells this like really funny story about shooting that scene and how the the the girls were really well behaved but they're still kids and so like there's a bunch of takes where it's like First, the idea was that they're going to have them all on roller skates and have them roller skate down so that it felt like they were gliding, but the ramp was too steep.

And so instead, they, all the girls just sort of like tumble and slide down the thing.

And inside that, the spaceship was so dangerously hot that they could only put them in there for a couple minutes and they'd have to open it and then do the scene.

So when it opens up, you just see all these kids sort of like sliding down and like rolling down this thing sort of very unceremoniously. And then they can't really see.

So they're all sort of like moving around. And then he tells a story where like the kids would get bored.

So in the middle of the take, aliens would just start dancing and like doing like disco moves and stuff because they're just like bored. And super like, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut.

Okay, guys, you can't dance in the middle of it. And there's a story where one of the girls pulled off the other one's hand, started hitting her with it.

And it became this like, but when you watch it now, you see that it's not this like refined choreographed. It's like.

a mess of kids that they're just like using the takes where like they're not dancing and hitting each other and being kids. And so it feels like a bunch of like anxious kid energy.

And I think those, those rough edges are what make this really beautiful. And,

you know, I think we talked about this with Burton and other people where it's like, once you get enough control and power and budget, those rough edges get sanded away and it just becomes whatever you want it to be, which is usually within your comfort zone as a creator.

And a lot of really great art and great films, and it's a bummer to say, but it comes from when these things sort of feel like they can barely hold together.

And from those rough edges is where like interesting stuff happens.

And Spielberg is, though, I feel like one of the rare examples of someone who got access to everything and all the acclaim and success in the world and still found ways to stay vital and connected.

And I think part of that is him being smart about knowing how to challenge himself.

The challenge isn't going to come from the limitations of me not knowing what I'm doing or no one believing in me, but can I go into a genre I don't know? Can I try to make the film? fast.

Like, I mean, I do think much like Soderberg, a lot of it for him is like go in and try to game it out on the day and challenge challenge myself to see how quickly I can get through pages, not because I'm lazy, but I need that sort of pressure and struggle.

Yeah.

But it is true. This is one of the last times that he has that.
And even on Raiders, where he's like, I'm trying to be on Rails. I need to come in under budget, under schedule.
That's self-discipline.

He's Lucas is fucking giving him the money for it. Paramount, they got like a sweetheart deal.
He doesn't need to do that. He's proving that to himself.
That changes the rest of his career.

But basically, he gets to do whatever he wants from Raiders on. Yeah.
And here are the budgets blowing up, the set's falling down.

He has no idea what he wants the ending to be, what the aliens look like. And from that, you get this really personal film that comes out that has these elements of truth.
And I think that's,

I think those are really beautiful films when that happens. I agree.
Beautifully said. JD, After Midnight.
After midnight, CBS. People love it.
Yeah. The people are talking.
I see clips.

I don't watch it live. I'm sorry.
We're trying to do fun stuff. We're trying to do cool stuff.
I walk into the office. Everyone's red-eyed.
They're bleary-eyed. Oh, they haven't shaved.

Their shirt's misbuttoned. I go, what happened to you last night? They went, I stayed up after midnight.
Oh, I couldn't turn off the TV. I was watching the show.
I didn't get no sleep.

Taylor Tomlinson, one of the best comedians working right now. She's great.
Wonderful. She's great.
She's incredible.

A fun part of that job is that we're on the Paramount lot. Hey.
And it's very fun. Iconic old movie lot.
I get to drive in. past the Paramount Arches.
We walk past that 10 Commandments tank.

My parking spot is in the 10 commandments tank it's in the tank the tank very cool the truman and then i have to wake walk through fake new york city to get to my office and then our stage is the uh godfather stage thank you for being here jd thanks for having me i'm excited to be back uh i love close town third time you're you're excited to be back six weeks before yeah i this is this is for

the real people the working class the people who not the patreon elites these this is for the episode just has to end jd hates being paywall a mato he's he's got to play both sides.

Yes, I get the Ben is rubbing his temples. Thank you all for listening.
Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe. Tune in next week for 1941.
Yeah, right? Calamity, bounce. Yes, yes, 1941.
Yes.

Yeah. When are the blankies happening?

End of Feb. End of Feb.
Okay, so yeah. Tune in next week for 1941.
Yes.

Which

hopefully will be a good episode. We're working on it.
I'm promising. That's the, we're working on it.
I'm promising it'll be a great episode. You know why?

Because, and as always,

this is a decade of dreams.