Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Spielberg began working on the picture before Close Encounters. His pal John Milius (The Wind and the Lion) brought around two young writers with their script about the California invasion scare. "I gagged on it," Spielberg recalls, "but I was leery. When a script is so funny that you gag, that's really the kiss of death because it usually doesn't film that way." But when Milius backed out he took it on. Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, the scriptwriters, flew to the Close Encounters location in Alabama and the three would rearrange schemes and characters. Says...
...Shire is capable of engendering a great deal of sympathetic concern; there is intelligence and vulnerability in her every expression. But there are jarring contradictions in this movie. The worst lies in the sweetness of Shire's manner and the brutal actions required of her by a confused script. The Belushi character perhaps deserves what happens to him, but the sequence is so farcically overstated that it is not much more than a mistake in tone. The rape of Carradine's sanity is not so easily dismissed. It cannot be integrated with the decently questing character Shire...
...image. The trouble was dismissed at first by Jack Herbein, Metropolitan Edison's vice president for power generation, in a memorable engineer's euphemism, as merely "a normal aberration." Reassuring statements spewed from the plant's press spokesmen, sounding as if they were taken right out of the script for the film The China Syndrome, a thriller that depicts nuclear plant officials as placing greed for profits far above their concern for public safety. But if the movie, starring real-life Antinuclear Activist Jane Fonda, is unfair in its villainous caricature of power-and construction-industry officials, its basic premise...
Even as a love story, the film fails. Part of the problem is the stars, who are too bland, and at times charmless, to inspire much audience empathy. A sadder difficulty is the script's uncertainty of tone. Alex's and Sheila's batty home lives are presented in such outrageous broad strokes that the credibility of the couple's supposedly sincere romance is under mined. There are a few funny peripheral moments, especially those that focus on the mores of video dating, but there are also stale gags about wayward cars and coitus interruptus...
Playwright Luis Valdez has tried to shape this tale as a mixture of myth, documentation and fantasy, but he never gets past the ABCs in any category. Edward James Olmos is electrifying as the embodiment of the mythic hero known as El Pachuco, but the script short-circuits him, and he is reduced to cynic snarls and stylized struts. Daniel Valdez is winning as a gang leader with unstained valor. He is stalemated in a TV-style love triangle between his loyal Chicano girlfriend (Rose Portillo) and a Jewish minority-rights defender (Karen Hensel) of inflammable zeal...