“We make our own electric light here, and we are not very good at it.  Pray, don’t be alarmed if they go out altogether.”

Should I ever get to meet with a Producer and discuss an idea for a film, here would be my pitch:

We need a biopic about Boris Karloff.

The overall subject has proven popularity.  Both Ed Wood (1994; dir. Tim Burton) and Gods and Monsters (1998; dir. Bill Condon) found critical and popular success, especially after hitting the home video market.  They each won Oscars.  While not about this actor they did look at Bela Lugosi and James Whale respectively, two sides of a still incomplete triangle which can only be finished by looking at Karloff.

And the best part?  Cast Hugh Laurie (TV’s “House”) as Karloff.  He has the look, the talent, the accent and even a bit of the lisp.  He’s perfect.  With the right screenplay and director he would surely win an Academy Award.

Since I brought it up, I suggest Steve Kloves for the screenplay and Martin Scorcese as director.  Their combined love of not only film, but also the creative process would surely draw them to this project.

Trust me.  It’s a good idea.

Just watch Whale’s 1932 film The Old Dark House and you’ll see what I mean.  While it would be easy to compare Karloff’s performance here to his work in Frankenstein (1931; dir. James Whale), to do so would be both unfair and unkind.  Karloff deserves careful viewing.  Granted, in both films he plays a mute with monstrous physicality, but in this film he is no simple-minded innocent newly born to the world, but rather a man with no voice existing with a strong sense of duty and a deep emotional need to be wanted and useful.  He simply can’t express his desires which builds frustration and leads to alcoholism and violence.

But Karloff’s performance is not the only creative achievement in this rich film.

The Story:  Three friends travelling in the English countryside during a torrential rainstorm become stranded overnight at, yep, an old dark house.  Inside the house they find the Femm family, who are all retirement age or older.  No kids.  No lineage.  Be thankful.

And that’s it.  I prefer to focus on a couple of specific moments in the film rather than the whole story.  To say more would be to spoil the experience, and while I always assume you have seen the movie in question, there are just some lines across which I will not go.

If the story sounds familiar, it is.  There are seeds of many other films here, including The Haunting (1963; dir. Robert Wise), and Psycho (1960; dir. Alfred Hitchcock).  But it’s important to remember that this is one of the first films (if not the first sound film) to explore this story.

Never forget the timeframe of a film’s production.   Sound in movies was barely five years old in 1932, so the art of sound effects was literally still in its infancy.  Still, the greatest art often comes from limited resources.  James Whale’s singular ability to constantly thrill audiences was unheard of at the time.  Yet he remained consistent with his talent, creating films we still love today such as Frankenstein (1931), The Invisible Man (1933), and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

Observe the sequence in Rebecca Femm’s (Eva Moore) bedroom.  Her room is dark (she doesn’t like electricity) and filled with mirrors that are so old they are warped, creating a funhouse effect when one looks into them.  Whale cuts between the mirrors while Rebecca delivers a fire and brimstone inspired monologue.  So we have her warped face in a mirror and the hellish dialogue.  Now add in the sound of whistling wind in the background.  And don’t forget, there’s another person in the room.  Margaret Waverton (Gloria Stuart) is one of the stranded.  She’s in Rebecca’s bedroom changing out of her wet clothes wearing just her slip, looking and feeling very vulnerable.  Add it up: the warped face; the candle-lit room; the dialogue; the wind; and a mostly naked bystander.  All of these elements work together for less than sixty seconds, but that’s all it takes to create a well-earned moment of suspenseful dread.

Imagine those sixty seconds and know that Whale and his team kept that same level of creativity for the entire running time of 75 minutes, a very standard length back in the early days of sound.

I also have to mention Ernest Thesiger who plays Horace Femm here and would go on to play Dr. Praetorious in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).  He’s perfect (as always) playing a man so afraid of a person imprisoned somewhere on the mansion’s upper floors that he won’t go upstairs, not even to help other people.

And speaking of the cast, just look at these names:  Melvyn Douglas, Boris Karloff, Gloria Stuart, Ernest Thesiger, Lillian Bond, Eva Moore, Raymond Massey, Elspeth Dudgeon, Bember Wills, and Charles Laughton.  Listing names feels like filler to me, but here I am doing it because it’s that impressive.  You might not know all of them, but you recognize some of them.  They were all familiar faces to audiences in the early 1930’s.

I’m not in the habit of suggesting which movies to see and which to avoid.  Give this one a chance, especially if you’re a fan of Whale’s other horror films.  It represents a creative apex for not only the artists involved, but for early sound films as well.

I am often asked about my reaction to Jar-Jar Binks (Ahmed Best).

Having grown up in the 1970’s and 1980’s I can assure you the Star Wars Saga was a really, really big deal.  It’s hard to describe that time when George Lucas’ epic space opera/western/fairy-tale/fantasy-adventure ruled the world without using phrases such as “life-changing,” “epic vision,” and “totally radical.”

It was so popular that dance clubs were playing disco versions of the theme (a common practice at the time, but reserved still for just those films that were popular enough), and we all envisioned Tony Manero hustling to that beat (Mazel Tov! to anyone who “got” that reference).

Yet many adults in my life during that summer of 1999 felt put-off by The Phantom Menace.  To them it felt slow, over-plotted, wooden, and yes even a little boring.  Everyone could pretty much agree the Pod Race was great, and that final lightsaber duel was equally fun.  But that sense of magic and awe was gone, and they couldn’t understand why Lucas would ruin his story with this videogame-looking imitator.

Here is how I always answer their criticism:

For a very unfortunate, but good, reason I could not attend an early screening of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.  I even missed opening weekend.  Instead I went on an afternoon in the middle of its opening week.

For a school day, the theater was well-attended. Some parents had even taken their kids out of grade school that day and brought them for an early movie.  One such young boy and his father were sitting just in front of me, and I enjoyed the kid’s quiet comments (and that he was doing his best to stay, well, quiet).  He was very excited and so was his father.  My own children were still years ahead of me then, but I could remember how it felt to sit down for my first screening of The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 and so I better understood their anticipation.

The movie started and I quickly became very involved with the worlds onscreen. Lucas and his extraordinary team had created something of a visual masterpiece.  I did hear the boy gasp during the pod-race, whisper “oh no” when Darth Maul attacks Qui-Gon in the desert, and even laugh during Jar-Jar’s Buster Keaton-esque ballet with bombs in the final battle, and during Binks’ Harold Lloyd moment on the turret of a tank.

And then Darth Maul re-enters the story yielding that double-bladed, red lightsaber. When he ignited that sword, the Jedi activated theirs, and the music swelled with that rich, ethereal chorale, the young boy turned to his dad and in an uncontrollably loud voice proclaimed “Dad, this is so cool!”

That boy felt what I had felt at his age, and it was what my disappointed friends had expected to feel again.  When the film did not give it to them, they decided it was a bad movie.  But that’s not fair.  It had been sixteen years since Return of the Jedi and we were not children anymore.  To be that much older and still expect the same reaction of course brought disappointment.

I am neither a filmmaker nor a critic, but I am a champion of Film. Overall reaction to The Phantom Menace and its critical problems have slightly improved over the past fifteen years, but it’s still very trendy to trash the entire prequel trilogy.  Critical opinion, while sometimes immediately accurate, does often change with time.  What was once thought of as awful can someday be seen as beautiful.

Which brings me back to Jar-Jar Binks. No, he’s not beautiful.  If you want to see a fully-realized CGI character, watch Andy Serkis as “Gollum” in The Lord of the Rings (2001 – 2003; dir. Peter Jackson).

But with Jar-Jar I’ve met very few people who shrug their shoulders with a simple, yet ambivalent, “eh, he’s okay” reaction. It’s pretty much either hatred or humor.  Either way you felt something for a completely imaginary CGI character.

Think about that for a moment. You felt something for a full-motion animated character, and it wasn’t a traditional animated movie.  Within a live-action film, nothing like it had ever been attempted before (James Cameron’s T-1000 could be the closest relative, but that character was deliberately one-dimensional and still primarily realized onscreen with a human actor).  Using Ahmed Best’s talented and careful movement as inspiration and guide, Lucas got an emotional reaction from us.  Good or bad, we felt something.

Our ability to respond to and accept Gollum could not have been so successful if Jar-Jar had not come first.

I think of the Star Wars Saga as one movie.  I’m a big fan.  Back in that theater during the summer of 1999 and within that boy’s reaction to his father, George Lucas, Ahmed Best, and the production team can find the greatest reason to feel proud of their accomplishments.  Because, yeah, it really was so cool.

“I know this sounds crazy, but ever since yesterday on the road I’ve been seeing this shape. Shaving cream, pillows…Dammit! I know this.  I know what this is!  This means something.  This is important.”

The key to Spielberg’s most personal film fits not with the spaceships, aliens, and government conspiracies. Those elements work, to be sure, but what Close Encounters of the Third Kind expresses better than any of his other films is how marginalizing and lonely it is for others to doubt us, and how powerful it is when that doubt transforms into astonishing affirmation.

At some point in our lives we learn a Truth that no one else around us understands, and we want to share it, shout it, and maybe even shake just one person into understanding it. Later the Truth might seem less important, even ridiculous, but in the moment there is nothing more vital.

Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) understands how it is to know such a Truth, and how it is to be doubted by everyone around him. He is an electrical line worker for a township near the Indiana/Ohio state line.  One night, while responding to an endless number of power emergencies, he experiences a close encounter (of the second kind, just to be clear).  A light from an apparent UFO shines upon Roy and his truck so brightly that Roy gets sunburn on one half of his face (“He looks like a 50-50 bar!”).  The truck’s fuel gauge goes crazy, items float freely, and a mild hum permeates the air.

He also receives a vision. An image of something he does not know, but absolutely believes is real, records itself upon his mind.  The image becomes his obsession and the key motivation for his subsequent behavior.  He can neither erase it nor ignore it, all while absolutely needing to learn what it is.  Roy imagines the object everywhere:  in shaving cream, in pillow cases, and (most famously) in the shape of his mashed potatoes.

He absolutely knows that both his vision and his close encounter were real and even when his wife (Teri Garr) begins to think him crazy he cannot lie about it, though he almost stops discussing it ever again. Only after he nearly abandons his dream do we finally get to share the moment when his belief receives undeniable affirmation.  It’s a moment I will not describe, but it’s in this moment that Spielberg’s film achieves its greatness.

The movie could have ended with Roy’s epiphany and it would’ve been just fine.  But Spielberg never aims for just fine and he leads us forward beyond epiphany into revelation.  And when the mothership soars from behind Devil’s Tower we know we will not, we cannot, forget such images.  It is a ballet of light requiring no dialogue but only music to move us through to the story’s miraculous conclusion.

About that music, John Williams’ score is one of his very best. His famous five-note leitmotif for the mothership acts as the aliens’ collective voice.  And what audacity!  The film builds an entire conversation between the humans and the visitors with an escalating series of notes.  My very basic comprehension of the close relationship between music and math helps me understand this sequence, but regardless it feels like real dialogue (better even than can be found in most other movies).

It’s no spoiler to tell you the aliens in this film do not come to Earth to conquer, but rather to learn and share. Exactly as I imagine our ideal selves, the visitors apparently wish to exchange knowledge and experience for mutual betterment. Like Roy they have a Truth to show us but more than that they wish to learn some Truth from us.

Every actor is on mark. Dreyfuss is the Spielberg Everyman here and his choices are exactly right.  When detained by the authorities in Montana, carefully listen to how he builds his long list of questions.  His transition from anger to assertive demands is so simple but so correct for that moment.  Melinda Dillon (as Jillian Guiler), who provides her wonderfully loving and thoughtful delivery, has probably the most difficult role as a woman who receives the same vision as Roy but whose obsessive motives are far more personal.

There are hundreds of motion pictures that give us the ancient, archetypal story of “the person no one will believe.” Many of them are good; some even great, but no other film so completely engages our emotions of fear, confusion, and awe while leading us to an uplifting catharsis.

Because, in the end, we too have had a close encounter. We not only witness Roy’s triumph, but we experience our own as well.