DVD Box Set Stuff (or Close Encounters of the 4th, 5th, and 6th kind)

I know it has been a long, long time since my last gripe. But I'm trying to adjust to the Christmas music that's now flooding our airwaves. After all, this is the holiday season, right?

Well, here's my gripe, and last one for this week. The day after Thanksgiving, I was tempted to purchase the new "30th Anniversary Ultimate Edition" of Steven Spielberg's 1977 sci-fi classic "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". I couldn't wait to sink my teeth into Disc One, which contains, as far as I'm concerned, the definitive cut of the movie. This was the version I remember seeing at the old Sacramento Inn Cinema in Sacramento, CA in 1977, the 135-minute version as originally released. Without repeating what other people have said in certain reviews of this new box set, it also contains the inferior 1980 "Special Edition" (with the otherwise spectacular "Mothership Finale"), and the 1998 "Collector's Edition" (what Spielberg now calls his "Director's Cut", which itself features the best material from the latter two versions).

In a new interview feature on Disc Three, Spielberg mentions "there will be no fourth version". Well, he is wrong. There was a fourth version...as well as a fifth, and a sixth. Why were there so many versions of CE3K? Simple...it seems that Spielberg was never satisfied with a "final cut" he could call his own. The 1977 release, as Spielberg mentions in a previous Criterion Collection LaserDisc, was "a work-in-progress that had never been finished". Here's where the confusion begins...in the Criterion disc, Spielberg says he wanted to release CE3K in mid-December 1977 while Columbia wanted the film released a month earlier in November. But in the 1998 "Collector's Edition" documentary, he states he wanted to release CE3K the following summer of 1978, but was pressed into releasing it in November owing to Columbia's financial problems at the time. Whatever the case, he was not originally allowed to really fine-tune the film as he wanted. He wanted to take out scenes while filming new ones. So it was really his fault that what fans eventually got was a smorgasboard of different versions released to television and video.

By 1983 the "Special Edition" had been on everyone's minds, and for many years was the most commonly seen version. Of course, "E.T." had become the most popular film of all time at that time, so ABC capitalized on that success by creating a version of CE3K using all the footage that was available at the time, save for the theatrical introduction of the Nearly family that was replaced by the longer version seen in the SE. ABC's version ran 143 minutes and was repeated twice over the next decade.

But fans wanted very much to see the original 1977 cut, the one they remembered seeing in the cinemas. When the Criterion Collection slated CE3K for LaserDisc release, what they prepared was...ta-da, the original version...well, not quite. It was a box set that contained two versions of the film. One was an almost-restoration of the original cut, but minus 30 seconds of brief trims Spielberg requested be taken out of film context and placed in uncredited chapters at the end of the appropriate side. Those 30 seconds were replaced by one five-second shot of the UFO shadow as seen in the SE. This, by the way, was the same version that Columbia/TriStar prepared for television syndication.

The second Criterion version was the 1980 Special Edition...well, not quite. It was kind-of-a-do-it-yourself version of CE3K using all the footage that was available in film context, minus the 1977 OV trims, and for obvious reasons I'll explain in a moment, the 1977 theatrical introduction to the Nearys, but otherwise including all the SE scenes (the Cotopaxi scene, Mothership Finale, etc.). Now how could you have created that version? Well, you had to use a LaserDisc player that was capable of programming chapters to play in a certain order (you had to do that to every side...this was, of course, before the "seamless branching" features of DVD). You could probably count this as a sixth variant since it pretty much resembles the ABC cut of the film except in subtle places.

Of course, today with home computer technology and a little know-how which I'll leave you to figure out for yourself, you can create your own "complete edition" using all footage, regular and outtakes. I did, and it was very interesting to say the least.

But all these versions of CE3K are no substitute for what was originally released in 1977, and the one audiences and film critics made into a blockbuster film, the one that saved Columbia from financial ruin. In short, you can't mess with the original. I'm happy that the true 1977 edit is now available on video.

You could say the same about the new "Blade Runner" box set, but that's another story for another time.

Watch the skies, and see ya Monday!!!