If you've read this blog for a few years, you already know about My Tiny Obsession -- the one infatuated more or less with discovering that the motion picture includes one of my national magazine articles as a briefly seen prop.
Magazines and newspaper articles about the UFO subject remained quite popular in the seventies, as impressive UFO activity continued to enjoy media coverage. Hardly surprising, then, was the emergence of Spielberg's carefully crafted UFO film. (Unfortunately, its magnificence on screens around the country was dwarfed somewhat by another little motion picture entitled"Star Wars, which saw release at about the same time and captivated theater audiences incredibly.)
From the earliest days of motion pictures production crews usually printed their own mock-up (phony) articles, magazine covers and the like -- for the most part -- when the visualization of published material was necessary as background in various scenes. However, in regard to Close Encounters it would be obvious to UFO article writers of the era that Spielberg's prop department actually used real UFO articles appearing at about the same time the movie was being shot, or inserted thereafter during post-production.
Of course. . .of course. . .authors' names did not appear in the brief scenes where said articles appeared. In my case, the title page of my Argosy UFO magazine article, "How to Conduct Yourself Inside a UFO" appeared upside-down, the large white circled UFO term readily visualized. My name appeared at the bottom of the page, but of course that was not to show up in the movie.
The article was not my best, but the graphic created by Argosy's art department was apparently just what Spielberg's project needed. No residuals for me, no name listed, just a page cemented throughout cinematic eternity in a few frames of film. Just call me Mr. Miscellaneous, along with the other writers whose names were obliterated for the sake of art. Heck, we writers didn't even get as much as a "close encounter" on the casting couch:):):):)
