As we get ready to launch the TIFF Cinematheque retrospective Close Encounters: The Cinema of Steven Spielberg, we invite you to revisit our FilmArt columnist Craig Caron's deep dive into the story behind the world-famous logo for Spielberg's bar-raising blockbuster.

In the early ’90s, while Steven Spielberg and the SFX team he had assembled for Jurassic Park were in the process of figuring out how to bring their dinosaurs to life, the crew charged with marketing the forthcoming film were facing challenges of their own. To begin with, the film’s title had little traction in the marketplace: the Michael Crichton book on which the film was based had been a hit, but it had still only sold a few hundred thousand copies to that point. Secondly, since Crichton had not opted to more straightforwardly name his book Dinosaur Park — or even Billy and the Cloneasaurus — the title would have to be contextualized for a public that would largely not know what the word “Jurassic” referred to. And lastly, Spielberg himself had compounded the challenge by insisting that none of the film’s dinosaurs should be glimpsed in the marketing materials prior to the movie’s release.