Night Skies
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- For the 2007 film about the Phoenix Lights, see Night Skies (film)
Night Skies was a sci-fi horror suspense thriller film that was never made.
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[edit] Origins
Steven Spielberg came up with the idea for Night Skies in the late 1970s when Columbia Pictures wanted a sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Spielberg had no interest in a sequel, but also didn't want Columbia to make a sequel without him, as Universal Pictures had done with Jaws. Spielberg came up with a treatment to a Close Encounters follow-up (instead of a sequel) initially entitled Watch the Skies (which had also been a working title for Close Encounters). Spielberg based the story on a tale of alien encounters he had heard from noted UFOlogist J. Allen Hynek while doing paranormal research for Close Encounters: back in 1955, a Kentucky family claimed that they had been terrorized and held captive by aliens who surrounded their farm and dissected their farm animals. In Spielberg's original treatment for Watch the Skies, eleven malicious extra-terrestrial scientists try to communicate with chickens, cows, and other cattle in an attempt to discover which of Earth's animal species are sentient, before turning their unwelcome attentions on the human family. Fueling Hollywood rumors about the film, NASA announced that Spielberg paid to reserve cargo space for the 1980 inaugural Space Shuttle flight, in order to film the Earth and its Moon from orbit for the film's opening sequence. Spielberg stated that he would produce Watch the Skies but not direct it, as he was under contract to direct his next film for Universal.
[edit] John Sayles and Rick Baker
Spielberg at first wanted Lawrence Kasdan to flesh out his Watch the Skies treatment into a full-fledged script, but Kasdan was too busy writing Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, so Spielberg turned to John Sayles (who had written Joe Dante's Roger Corman-produced Jaws spoof Piranha, which Spielberg had loved). Watch the Skies was renamed Night Skies because someone owned the rights to the words "watch the skies" (which was the last line in The Thing from Another World). Some called Night Skies "Straw Dogs with aliens", but Sayles says his inspiration was the 1939 western film Drums Along the Mohawk. Sayles even named one of the aliens "Scar" (a character who was said to be "a real badass") after a Comanche Indian badguy in the John Wayne film The Searchers. Spielberg suggested that either Tobe Hooper (best known for directing and co-writing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) or Ron Cobb (a cartoonist and special effects artist who had done work on John Carpenter's Dark Star, the Mos Eisley cantina scene in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, and Alien.) direct the film, and Columbia chose Cobb, even though he had no directorial experience. The film was scheduled to begin shooting after Spielberg returned from filming Raiders of the Lost Ark. Spielberg chose make-up and special effects master Rick Baker (who at the time was also working on John Landis's An American Werewolf in London) to design and create the alien creatures. Rick Baker built a working prototype of the lead alien that cost $70,000 and thrilled Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy when they saw a videotape of it in action while filming Raiders in London. In mid-1980, Sayles delivered his first (and in the end, only) draft of the screenplay, which featured five aliens (cut down from the original eleven) including the aforementioned Scar; "Squirt"; and "Buddy", who was kind and befriended the human family's autistic son. Sayles's script opened with Scar (who was described in the script as having a beak-like mouth and eyes like a grasshopper's) killing farm animals by touching them with a long bony finger which gave off an eerie light, and ended with Buddy, marooned on Earth by his mean-spirited peers, cowering under the shadow of a hawk.
[edit] Origin of E.T.
While Baker worked on the aliens, Spielberg was having second thoughts about Night Skies. "I might have taken leave of my senses. Throughout [the production of] Raiders, I was in between killing Nazis and blowing up flying wings and having Harrison Ford in all this high serialized adventure, I was sitting there in the middle of Tunisia, scratching my head and saying, 'I've got to get back to the tranquillity, or at least the spirituality, of Close Encounters.'". While on the set of Raiders, Spielberg read the script to Night Skies to Melissa Mathison (who was there to see her then-boyfriend and future husband Harrison Ford) and she cried after hearing it because "the idea of an alien creature who was benevolent, tender, emotional and sweet... and the idea of the creature's striking up a relationship with a child who came from a broken home was very affecting". When Spielberg came back from Tunisia and Hawaii (where the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark was filmed), he eagerly closed the door on Night Skies and began planning the film Mathison had dubbed ET and Me, but would in only a year and half would be known to audiences all over the world as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Rick Baker, who had spent $700,000 on unused Night Skies designs, models and animatronics, had a huge fight with Spielberg, which lead to Carlo Rambaldi (who had previously done alien creature designs for Close Encounters) doing creature designs for E.T.. John P. Veitch (then-president of Columbia's world-wide productions) and Frank Price (then president of Columbia) were also unhappy with the emergence of E.T. and didn't want to make "a wimpy Walt Disney movie". In February 1981 (six months after Columbia's desire for a Close Encounters follow-up had been fulfilled by Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Special Edition), Columbia put the Night Skies/E.T. project in turnaround. Sid Sheinberg (Spielberg's long-time friend and then-president of MCA, the then-parent company of Universal Studios) bought the Night Skies/E.T. project from Columbia, repaying them the $1 million that had been used thus far to develop the project and making a deal in which Columbia would retain 5% of the film's net profits (Veitch later said that "I think that year we made more on that picture than we did on any of our films).
[edit] Legacy
Although Night Skies did not make it off the ground, it still has a rather interesting and long legacy, as it helped inspire (or at least seemed to inspire) not only E.T., but also Poltergeist (which had a family terrorized by paranormal forces), Spielberg and Mathison's proposed E.T. II: Nocturnal Fears (which had malicious, animal-mutilating cousins of E.T.), Gremlins (which had one innocent and kind member of a species of otherwise mean-spirited creatures), Critters (which had a farm family terrorized by cattle-mutilating aliens), the video game Destroy All Humans!, Signs, and Spielberg's recent War of the Worlds remake.
[edit] Bibliography
- The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made by David Hughes (ISBN 1-55652-449-8)
