CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND is Steven
Spielberg's extraordinary film about a man named Roy Neary (Richard
Dreyfuss) who becomes obsessed with meeting extraterrestrials after
encountering a UFO on an abandoned road one night. Against the wishes of
his wife (Teri Garr) and children, Neary, along with another witness to
the sighting (Melinda Dillon), travels to a mysterious mountain where
the government has built a landing strip hoping to attract the aliens.
Director François Truffaut costars as Claude Lacombe, one of the
organizers of the project. Spielberg hoped to follow up the huge success
of JAWS with a low-budget film that would be an easy shoot, but, thanks
in part to the complicated special effects, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS quickly
snowballed into being an expensive endeavor but a commercial and
artistic success. No one who has seen the film has ever looked at a
plate of mashed potatotes the same way again.