A Tale Of Two Steves Pt. 3

I guess you’d call this a newsletter but I prefer to think of it as a series of articles. That way I feel more like Carl Kolchak. In fact as I type this, I imagine an irate Simon Oakland standing behind me staring at his watch pressuring me to make deadline. Anyway, this "series of articles" started because I am fascinated by how certain movies came to be. The minute, often mundane reasons great things come to fruition.

Godzilla exists because, on March 1, 1954, a Japanese fishing boat named the The Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon No. 5) drifted into the fallout zone of an American nuclear test near the Marshall Islands. The entire crew returned with severe radiation sickness, and with its entire haul of fish irradiated. This event happened to occur at the very same time a producer for Japan’s Toho studios named Tomoyuki Tanaka had a film fall apart. Scrambling, he combined the news story with the recently released American film The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and before you know it, a mighty cinematic franchise was born. Star Wars came about because, so the story goes, George Lucas wanted to redo Flash Gordon but couldn’t obtain the rights, so he took the notion of a serialized space opera, threw in a little of Akira Kurasawa’s The Hidden Fortress, slathered on some of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey and viola! Twenty-two years later? Jar Jar Binks! We’ve been talking about ET, which has a very interesting origin story., in that it was two other movies first (and later became four different movies).

It was the summer 0f 1980, and Steven Speilberg was eyeball deep in shooting Raiders Of The Lost Ark. He was on the rebound, smarting from the lackluster response to his 1979 World War II comedy 1941 and eager to restore the luster to his rep. He was also, despite 1941, still hot as balls in the business (“Kolchak! You can’t put that in the paper!”) and was already thinking what to do after Raiders wrapped.

One project on the burner was Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, Part 2. At least that's what Columbia Pictures wanted. According to an article by Ryan Lambie on the always excellent Den Of Geek, Speilberg was not a fan of the idea of a sequel. That said, he wasn't happy with Jaws 2 either. He had had no involvement in that film and felt that, were the Close Encounters saga to continue, it would be better if he had some hand in the final product.

Enter … an astrophysicist! Prof. Joseph Hynek had been attached to the US Air Force in the 1950’s as an advisor on UFO phenomena. Initially a skeptic, Hynek’s views softened and changed as he began interviewing more and more UFO eye witnesses. Again, according to Lambie’s article, it was Hynek who devised the “close encounter” classification levels that gave Speilberg’s earlier film its title.

Hynek told Speilberg about a particularly hairy close encounter of the third kind that supposedly took place when some not so friendly extraterrestrials laid siege to a farmhouse in Kentucky, circa 1955. It was a widely reported incident with multiple, consistent eyewitness accounts. Fun fact! One alternate theory is that the family was beset by owls. Just like in The Staircase. Owls!

Speilberg warmed to the idea if a darker take on the Close Encounters story. Basically, an alien invasion story like the 1950’s alien invasion films he grew up with.

Now remember, all this is going on while Speilberg was shooting Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Although Speilberg had his issues with Jaws 2, he was a fan of Piranha, a Roger Corman produced, low-budget comedic spin on Jaws written by John Sayles and directed by Joe Dante.

Speilberg contacted Sayles and asked him to write his Kentucky farm family vs. aliens story. He also contacted Rick Baker, then preparing to head off to London to make the landmark An American Werewolf In London, to develop some aliens that were more feral and action-oriented than the ethereal figures created for Close Encounters by Carlo Rambaldi (remember King Kong ’76?).

Halfway through the shooting of Raiders, and well into the development of Night Skies, Speilberg had an epiphany and pulled out of the project. As quoted in Lambie's Den Of Geek piece, "I was in between killing Nazis and blowing up flying wings and having Harrison Ford in all this high serialized adventure.... thinking, "I've got to get back to the tranquility, or at least the spirituality, of Close Encounters."

What happened? He let Harrison Ford's girlfriend read the script. That's what happened.

Next time…