Variosity Vault

Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a 1977 American science fiction drama film written and directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Richard Dreyfuss, Melinda Dillon, Teri Garr, Bob Balaban, Cary Guffey, and François Truffaut. The film depicts the interconnected stories of Roy Neary (Dreyfuss), an everyday blue-collar worker in Indiana whose life changes after an encounter with an unidentified flying object (UFO); Jillian Guiler (Dillon), a single mother whose three-year-old son Barry is abducted during the same UFO manifestation; and Claude Lacombe (Truffaut), a French scientist pursuing a link between recent unexplained scientific phenomena across the globe. Close Encounters was a long-cherished project for Spielberg. In late 1973, he developed a deal with Columbia Pictures for a science-fiction film.