Word: spielbergisms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Spielberg the film is a culmination of fantasies he has been nurturing since childhood. Always fascinated by UFOs, he still regrets missing a scout troop outing at which his friends claimed to have seen a blood-red orb looming in space. Firelight, a 2˝-hr. amateur effort he made at 16, dealt with an invasion of monsters from another planet...
...five-month period in early 1976 and took more than a year to edit. The locations?several of them deserts?spread from California to India; the launching-pad set in Mobile, Ala., used in the film's climax is six times as large as Hollywood's biggest sound stage, Spielberg "was forever screwing up schedules like a whirlwind," says Melinda Dillon, the film's female lead, recalling the strain. "He worked all night, every night?catching a few hours' sleep when he could. He had his Winnebago trailer set up to screen films, and he was always running...
...after criticizing the Ku Klux Klan in an Alabama newspaper interview, received a death threat and had to be whisked away for two weeks. Dillon's son received a kidnaping threat that brought in the FBI. Then, late one night, shooting halted abruptly so that everyone could observe what Spielberg believed to be a UFO cruising the sky. "Everyone was lying there on their backs with binoculars," says Dillon. "I remember thinking that if there were extraterrestrial beings up there observing us, they would think that earth creatures were flat beings with strange eyes." The object turned...
...Despite Spielberg's preoccupation with UFOs in Close Encounters, he prefers to call the film an "adventure thriller" rather than science fiction, and he may have a point. The movie's conception is pure Hitchcock?on an intergalactic scale. The hero, Roy Neary (Dreyfuss), is a Middle American variant on the kind of man-in-the-middle played by Gary Grant and James Stewart in films like North by Northwest and Vertigo. A power-company worker who lives with his wife (Teri Garr) and three kids in Muncie, Ind., Roy is engulfed one night by phenomena he cannot understand: searing...
...Spielberg tells this tale with a virtuoso's confidence. He sweeps across continents with abandon, cuts from image to image with natural grace and creates terror even out of such found objects as household appliances and store-bought toys. He also laces the film with humor. In the grand Hitchcock manner, he loves to show his characters passing over clues that are staring them right in the face. For Dreyfuss, he has written throwaway lines that highlight the absurdity that is implicit in Roy's wild dash for the unknown...