In Steven Spielberg's 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, an ordinary man gets caught up in momentous events involving alien visitors. The film continues to fill Kail with awe.
Kail says that it stands up better than most movies he has ever seen. It doesn't look dated. I think it's a great movie.
The film should be a model for other screenwriters. I don't write for TV or film, but for the beats. It is so perfect. Everything is well-paced.
David Barr Kirtley, host of Geek's Guide to the GALAXY, thinks that Close Encounters is a good movie, but he doesn't like the aliens' behavior.
The film's many mysteries have fascinated Tom Gerencer for more than 40 years.
In Episode 498 of Geek's Guide to the GALAXY, you can listen to the complete interview with Matthew, Tom, andAndrea Kail. Check out the highlights from the discussion.
Kail is on Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
If a movie scene seems long, I will go back and time it for my own benefit as a writer. Every time, it comes out in 3 minutes. Anything that seems long is 3:30. I started timing the scenes as I watched the movie. The air traffic control scene and the fight scene in the house at the beginning are the longest ones. It was very painful to watch. The scenes are usually over long and are usually done in 3:30. Both of them were tense. I thought they did a great job.
Matthew is on Explorers.
I hated it when we met the aliens because I thought they were dumb. I thought there was a smart message in it. It was very similar to the anti-Close Encounters. We expect the aliens to be spiritual, vast, intelligent beings who impart all this wisdom, and they could be just as screwed up as we are. The kid looks at the giant alien screaming at the two children, and he goes, "Oh, that's the dad." He realized that there are messed up stuff all over the universe, not just on Earth. I enjoyed that part of it.
David Barr Kirtley was on Dark Star.
John Carpenter and Dan OBannon were film students at USC. The student film was originally 45 minutes long, and then it was shown to an executive who was interested in making a movie out of it. The movie Alien came from him rewriting it as Alien, and he was like, "Hmm, maybe I should make this not funny."
Tom Gerencer is on a movie.
It is one of the movies that I watch every few years and I absolutely love it. It has a great story. It is a fantasy with a technological setting. A person who is my age grew up watching gladiator movies, video game culture, and religion and is able to pull them all together and make a new, richly imagined world. It was my favorite game in the arcade. When I got my free token for getting an A in school, I would go to the arcade near us and play the game. The video game comes back to me when I watch the movie. It was a lot of fun.
