EMI Films (Produced by Julia Phillips and Michael Phillips)

In the 1970s, Michael and Julia Phillips were the dynamic duo of movie producers, responsible for The Sting (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976). Those films alone would have secured their place in the hallowed halls of cinematic awesomeness, but in the same decade, they decided to team up with then-newcomer boy-wonder director Steven Spielberg to make a movie that would eventually be called Close Encounters of the Third Kind, one day to be their third entry on the National Film Registry's list of "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" films. (Source).

The Phillips were in on CE3K from the beginning, back when it was just a concept sketch titled Watch the Skies and wasn't a sure thing. Thinking back on their collaboration, Spielberg noted that the Phillips told him to keep his focus on the script and how he wanted to film it; they'd worry about financing the project. That turned out to be way more difficult than the Phillipses expected.

The concept was initially sold to Fox, but Alan Ladd Jr., then head of creative affairs at Fox, wasn't as convinced about the Phillips' choice of writer, Paul Schrader, as they were. Around this time, Spielberg began filming Jaws and had to push back working on Watch the Skies. Eventually the deal with Fox fell through, but the Phillips managed to find distributors with Columbia Pictures. (Source)

Spielberg returned to working on Watch the Skies after spinning celluloid into box office gold with Jaws. His success with the killer shark gave Columbia great confidence in his abilities and allowed him incredible creative control as a director.

But Close Encounters was the most expensive Columbia had ever made. Producer Julia Phillips had to lie to studio execs about how much the special effects were going to cost; otherwise, she thought, they'd never greenlight the project. (Source) In fact, the studio was so financially strapped and the film so bloated that Columbia might have collapsed had the film flopped. (Source)

We know how things turned out, seeing as Columbia is still around, but the risk the film represented for the studio caused it to be strict on deadlines. Thinking back on the film 30 years later, Spielberg reminisced that the strict timeline didn't allow him to "shape the film properly" and that "some of the effects are brilliant but some of the effects we could have done better on if we'd had another month or two." (Source)

Considering how awesome the final product is, we'd be interested to see what that month or two would have done.