In the late 1970s/early 1980s, Steven Spielberg was developing a movie that ultimately would never get made. And yet, from a different perspective, it actually would get made… as a bunch of other, quite famous films. We’re talking Gremlins. We’re talking Poltergeist. And we’re talking E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
“It was a dream team of people working on this thing. It was going to be a horror movie about these evil aliens, or mischievous aliens, that come to this rural farmstead and really mess with this family – they really fuck with this family,” explains movie journalist and author Max Evry, who just released a book about the film called Stranded on Earth: How Night Skies Became E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
Dream team is putting it lightly, as Night Skies had Spielberg producing, John Sayles scripting, production illustrator Ron Cobb expected to make his directorial debut, and Rick Baker designing the aliens. And of course, Kathleen Kennedy was also onboard, as she was working for Spielberg at this point in her career and would soon get her first full producer credit on E.T.
I recently spoke to Evry, who is also an occasional contributor to IGN – and who you may recall was also the author of that very popular book about David Lynch’s Dune, A Masterpiece in Disarray, from a couple of years back. We discussed how Night Skies went from alien horror movie to the family-friendly mega-hit that was E.T., how Poltergeist and Gremlins were born alongside its development, and how Stranded on Earth is, as the author puts it, “a hard R-rated book about a children’s movie.”
From Close Encounters to a ‘Famous Clusterfuck’… to E.T.
Stranded on Earth begins with a look back at Spielberg’s earliest filmmaking endeavors as a teen, including a film called Firelight which he made for $500 and which actually got a theatrical release – in the wunderkind’s hometown for one night, at least (the director’s semi-autobiographical film The Fabelmans recreates this moment from his life). The film was an early example of Spielberg’s interest in UFOs and the creatures behind them.
“We’re dealing with Spielberg, we’re dealing with aliens, so we got to go all the way back to when he was 15, 16, making his first sort of feature film,” says Evry. “It was like this two-hour epic that he made when he was a teenager, and that story is really fun. It sets up the way that Spielberg deals with aliens throughout his career, because it’s like Martin Scorsese and gangsters. Spielberg has used aliens as a vessel for whatever kind of creative mood he happens to be in. I don’t believe – and there are many people who corroborate this in the book – he has a firm belief one way or the other about alien visitations and things like that. I think it’s just a great tool that he uses to explore different subjects.”
Of course, Spielberg would have great success with 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the book recounts the filmmaker’s less than enthusiastic plans for a direct sequel to that film. That’s where Night Skies comes into the picture.
“They spent close to a million dollars developing this thing. Some people in the book described it as kind of a weird science experiment, like maybe it’ll go, maybe it won’t. But it was heavily developed, and I think would’ve been a great movie,” says Evry.
This was all going on during a very memorable time for Spielberg, because he also had the infamous misfire 1941, a World War II-era comedy starring an ensemble that included John Belushi, hit theaters in 1979. As Evry puts it, the film was “a famous clusterfuck … a nightmare production where he was essentially going crazy with this thing, and it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. … It hurt his reputation a lot, and it sort of showed he wasn’t bulletproof.”
The fallout from 1941 would impact how Night Skies – and then as it morphed into what would become E.T. – was viewed by the studios.
“There were a lot of people who thought he might be done,” he says. “So even after this project evolved from Night Skies to E.T., it became almost like this nuclear football where Columbia had it and then they just decided they didn’t want it and they gave it to Universal. Universal was kind of like, ‘Eh. We’ll do it, but you have to raise the money through a bond company. We don’t want to directly fund it because we don’t want to be responsible if you go over budget again.’ It was this interesting period where it was like the last time people didn’t trust Steven Spielberg.”
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