The Alien

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The Alien was a science fiction film under production in the late 1960s which was eventually cancelled. The film was being directed by Bengali Indian director Satyajit Ray and produced by Hollywood studio Columbia Pictures. The script was written by Ray in 1967, loosely based on Bankubabur Bandhu (Banku Babu's Friend or Mr. Banku's Friend), a Bengali story he had written in 1962 for Sandesh, the Ray family magazine.

What differentiated The Alien from previous science fiction was the portrayal of an alien from outer space as a kind and playful being, invested with magical powers and capable of interacting with children, in contrast to earlier science fiction works which portrayed aliens as dangerous creatures.

The plot revolved around a spaceship that landed in a pond in rural Bengal. The villagers began worshiping it as a temple risen from the depths of the earth. The alien established contact with a young village boy named Haba (bengali for Moron) through dreams and also played a number of pranks on the village community in course of its short stay on Planet Earth. The plot contained the ebullient presence of an Indian businessman, a journalist from Calcutta and an American engineer.

The Alien had Columbia Pictures as producer for this planned US-India co-production, and Peter Sellers and Marlon Brando acting in lead roles. However Ray was surprised to find that the script he had written had already been copyrighted and the fee appropriated. Marlon Brando later dropped out of the project and though an attempt was made to bring James Coburn in his place, Ray became disillusioned and returned to Calcutta. Columbia expressed interest in reviving the project several times in the 70s and 80s but nothing came of it.

When E.T. was produced in 1982 by the same company that had contracted with Ray in 1967, many, including Arthur C. Clarke, saw striking similarities in the movie to Ray's earlier script - Ray discussed the collapse of the project in a 1980 Sight & Sound feature, with further details revealed by Ray's biographer Andrew Robinson (in The Inner Eye, 1989). Ray believed that Spielberg's film "would not have been possible without my script of The Alien being available throughout America in mimeographed copies." When the issue was raised by the press, Spielberg denied this claim and said "I was a kid in high school when his script was circulating in Hollywood."