Johnson was met at the airport by friends of his mother, and each day
was dropped off at the American Society of Cinematographer's club-
house in Hollywood, where he would meet Lightman. "He showed me
pictures of the old brilliant cinematographers and equipment. Then he
said, `Let's start going on our adventures.' I met Bill Abbot, who did the
effects for Tora! Tora! Tora! and many other movies, and the grand master
of effects, Linwood Dunn, who started on King Kong and did It's a Mad,
Mad, Mad, Mad World, all the way up to the original Star Trek TV series.
He is just a genius." An early inventor of visual effects, Linwood became
a mentor for Johnson and the two remained lifelong friends.
As much as it thrilled him to meet these legendary filmmakers,
Johnson's heart was set on meeting Douglas Trumball. "That was the
whole reason for this trip--because I'd seen his work on 2001. I had
to meet him." Finally, with the week passing rapidly, Lightman called to
say, "Tomorrow we're going down to the set of a movie called Close
Encounters of the Third Kind. It's the next film for this young director
Steven Spielberg, who did Jaws. Doug is working on the film."
"We go down to the visual effects stage in Marina Del Ray, a building
known as Future General, Doug's company at the time. We walked in
and it was just magic." Everywhere, it seemed, were FX people working
on various visual effects. One of the first things to catch Johnson's eye
was a big, black-draped stage with a giant Plexiglas aquarium. Using a
layer of fresh water over a layer of saline solution, the look of cumulus
clouds was being created by pumping white shoe polish between the
layers and letting it float over the layer of salt water. Using fiber optic
probes, different colored lights were fired to create the effect of UFOs
hiding in the clouds. Fascinated by what he was seeing, Johnson hardly
noticed the man dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, sneakers, and a ball cap,
who sat down beside him and offered a can of Coke, then yelled "Cut!"
"The lights come on and everyone looks at me like I said it. I said, `No,
no' and I point to this guy sitting next to me. That's when I notice two
very important things: his baseball cap says Jaws and his face is Steven
Spielberg." He tells them to set the shot up again and turns to me and
says, `You're Pat, right?' My jaw is hanging open and I say, "Yeah . . . ."
And he says, `I'm Steven.' I go, `I know.' He gets up and says, `Herb told
me you guys were coming. Come on and I'll show you around.'"
For the next couple of hours, Spielberg gave Johnson and Lightman a
personally guided tour of the effects facility. "He's showing us the minia-
tures, the storyboards, the matt painting department, and talking about
the design of the mothership and where he got his inspiration. I didn't
really understand the full measure of what a director was yet. To me,
Steven Spielberg was more of an executive. I didn't realize he was
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