Movies - Night Skies

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	Movies - Night Skies

Night Skies was a sci-fi horror suspense thriller film that was never made.

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 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.

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 rip-off 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 Kevin McCarthy's last line in Invasion of the Body Snatchers
. 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 descibed 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.

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