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15: Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Manage episode 503535890 series 2912522
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Tola and Tim welcome our long time collaborator Guy Ellis, composer and performer of our theme and outro songs, to discuss "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," including being homesick, Balok's All Hour Disco and Discount Delicatessen, Guy eating his dessert before dinner, Disco Versions of Theme Songs, Bob Balaban vs Wallace Shawn, saying "Present Day" in a film, the Raiders Connection, teasing the audience visually, fearless three year olds, the director putting his finger on the scale, the great character actor Roberts Blossom, the ubiquity of the Close Encounters theme, all the people who turned down the role that defined Richard Dreyfuss' career, manifesting what you see in your artist's inner eye, Douglas Trumbull's mist machine, Guy's band Cloud Cover, the Kodály music language, the challenge of interspecies communication, solving everything w/ LLMs, the baud rate of baleen whales, the Deep Space Network, cartography's moment in the sun, the pure awesomeness of Devil's Tower National Monument, Tola forgets the name of amazing author N. Scott Momaday (who Tola heard lecture at the University of Minnesota in 1997 and who recently passed away), Tola's love for Melinda Dillon as an actress and incredulity that she didn't become a giant movie star, Kraftwerk cover bands, speculation that having a competent government would be nice, faking a plague (D'oh!), embarrassing your spouse in front of the neighbors, reminiscing about when there were only four news channels, competent investigators, Tim's grandfather and Rockwell International, Merle Haggard, sneaking the Jaws theme into the sound mix, floating oil refineries, musical communication, the refreshing lack of a sequel to this movie, capturing and bottling up pure concentrated wonder, "Fifty Solutions to Fermi's Paradox" by Stephen Webb, debating the existence of aliens, living in the celestial equivalent of North Dakota, and seeing movies when you're young versus later in life.
Final score: science 60%, fiction 87%, and film 96%.
Next time on the Monte Hall Effect: the 2025 film "The Fantastic Four: First Steps."
Special Guest: Guy Ellis.
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