Steven Spielberg and Close encounters of the Third Kind
François Truffaut and Steven Spielberg on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
After finishing Taxi Driver with producers Michael and Julia Phillips, they told me that they wanted me to do their next film: Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Soon after I met with Steve – as he was then known. This was in pre-production and he asked me to design a logo that would be a beacon for the film. This has since become known as branding.
From reading the script I gleaned a very scientific ‘look’ for the logo using a gothic style with unique curves were straight corners usually were. It worked great combined with horizontal striations that broke up the letters and gave it a mysterious unknown feeling. Quickly I designed a t-shirt with the logo on the front and its abbreviation on the back that the film became known as in production: CE3K.
Then I designed elegant – and expensive – stationery that all production correspondence was used for with beautiful linen embossed gray paper and the logo engraved and embossed on the top, with matching envelopes. A logo sticker was also printed that was stuck on every single piece of equipment and shipping crate and cargo box – everywhere that gave the crew and everyone who came in touch with the production a really strong identity to grab hold of and know the feel of the film.
So the production went off to Georgia and other locations to shoot and upon their return Steve called me to begin designing the titles for the film.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind stationary
While he was editing at his Marina Del Rey home with his editor Michael Kahn I would come to see sequences he wanted to show me in order to glean some concepts and ideas. Eventually Steve decided that he wanted to do all of the location and subtitles from his original negative to a new first generation dupe negative that had recently been developed by Eastman called CRI (Color Reversal Intermediate).
This allowed for a much better quality ‘dupe’ or duplication from the negative since it bi-passed the intermediate ‘IP’ or inter-positive step that required an inter-positive negative to be made from the original then copying from that intermediate onto new negative stock making it a full generation from the original.
The CRI was considered only a half-generation loss and looked much better with less grain and contrast buildup. Its drawback was that it endangered the originals negative to copy directly from it to new negative film stock.
Well, that didn’t deter Steve and he demanded of Tom McCarthy, Columbia’s head of Post Production, that he be allowed to use that method of compositing titles.
Fortunately, since Tom knew and trusted me he approved but required that I personally supervise the process. So, every day we were compositing titles, I was to meet the MGM lab driver bearing one reel of cut negative. I would sit right next to the camera as the optical effects cameraman composited the location titles from the original negative to the new dupe stock. It worked great and Steve was very happy.
During my months on the film, Steve called me saying he wanted me to meet with Bob Cort, the VP of Advertising at Columbia, to discuss the ad campaign. The next day in Cort’s office he showed me the largest collection I’d ever seen of advertising ideas for CE3K – full page newspaper ad mockups stacked up against the wall that came out about four feet. He explained that he had hired every major and minor advertising design studios in New York and LA to present concepts. And, that Steve had seen – and rejected – all of them.
With that Steve told Cort he wanted me to take a crack at it. Well, since I was so familiar with the film and had designed the logo and had a feel for what Steve liked, I wound up designing the entire campaign, using the key art I had developed for what became known as ‘The Road and the Glow.’ I did the poster, the billboard, the lobby cards, all of the newspaper ads, the game box, the novel of the film, even a version of the titles traveling that were used in the trailer. Everything.