Bass’s vision and the imagery with which he presented his ants remains as mesmerizing today as it did when it first premiered. Phase IV will continue to echo within our genre memory because the film taps into a primal, ecstatic fascination with ancient, alien or otherworldly, and unknowable intelligence, one that is indifferent if not downright inimical to our existence.
Cue the organ music. *
A Boy and His Goblin: E.T.’s Creepy Origin Story
One evening in 1955, a remote farmhouse in Christian County, Kentucky, received an unsettling visit from a gang of otherworldly creatures. The arrival of these child-sized goblins was heralded by strange lights flashing in the sky—observed by a number of local residents and even the police. But the goblins chose only one particular family to terrorize, the Suttons. They lurked in the bushes around the Suttons’s farmhouse, jumping out from shadows, swarming around the house, emerging in windows. The family became so frightened they tried to chase the creatures off with shotguns. Named “the Kelly-Hopkinsville Encounter” after the names of the two nearest towns, the story is a famous one among alien hunters and UFO enthusiasts.
The Zodiacal Light, 1882. One of approximately 7,000 illustrations created by the French artist and astronomer Étienne Léopold Trouvelot.
Steven Spielberg learned about the case while he was conducting research for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), one of the most beloved of alien-contact movies. The story stuck with him, and as he began to formulate his ideas for a sequel to Close Encounters, he returned to it for inspiration. Close Encounters concludes on a note of wonder and connection; this next movie would explore the unsettling and occasionally terrifying side of visitors from other planets.
Perhaps having enjoyed enough attention for one lifetime—both terrestrial and extra—the Sutton family would not grant permission for their story to be made into a movie. So Spielberg and his collaborator, a production designer named Ron Cobb, hired a young screenwriter to create a script that drew some inspiration from the Kelly-Hopkinsville Encounter while fictionalizing the details as much as possible.
In 2014, Rick Baker revealed an amazing series of behind-the-scenes images from his work on the “Night Skies” alien crew. “I was so excited to be working on this project, to be able to design different alien characters of the same race,” Baker wrote. The characters he created all bear a strong resemblance to one another (and to the future E.T.), while simultaneously expressing a range of personalities, from the cute, friendly Buddee to the sinister Skar.
The resulting screenplay by John Sayles was titled “Night Skies.” Ryan Lambie on Den of Geek describes the script as “grisly yet sometimes quirkily funny.” The family is visited by five bug-eyed, short-statured aliens: “Hoodoo, who appears to have hypnotic powers. A pair of mischievous creatures named Klud and Squirt, a young, wide-eyed alien named Buddee, and the scariest member of their group, Skar, who can mutilate with a touch of his long, bony fingers.” The story centers on the family’s children, a teenage girl and two younger brothers.
With the “Night Skies” script in hand, Spielberg and Cobb began storyboarding it. They worked well together—Cobb was gratified to see that Spielberg appreciated his ideas, and together they built on Sayle’s script. Then Cobb got an unexpected offer: Spielberg asked him to direct it.
Cobb told the Los Angeles Times: “Everyone in Hollywood is waiting for the phone call that will change his life. How many people does that happen to?” It seemed like he’d just gotten it.
Meanwhile, Rick Baker, the world-famous designer of special effects, started working on the bug-eyed, goblinesque aliens. His preliminary budget for a Skar prototype was $70,000.
But then . . . things got complicated. The next part of the story depends on pure serendipity. Spielberg was in the process of filming Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), starring Harrison Ford. Ford’s girlfriend at the time, screenwriter Melissa Mathison, was spending a lot of time on the North Africa–located set. Spielberg shared some of the script with her. Mathison’s feedback cut to the emotional core of the story: the scenes that brought together the childlike alien Buddee and the family’s youngest son. Perhaps . . . that should have been the real story all along.
Spielberg agreed. The final scene in “Night Skies” leaves Buddee stranded on earth, abandoned by his fellow aliens. Mathison intuitively understood this wasn’t the end—this was the beginning. She started writing a script. Eight weeks later, she had a script of the movie that would become E.T. Spielberg loved the story so much he decided he wanted to make it instead of “Night Skies,” and direct it himself.
Columbia Pictures, having already invested around $1 million into “Night Skies,” wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about scrapping it entirely. But Spielberg prevailed. This new film he’d envisioned ended up being made by Universal Pictures, who paid off Columbia for their initial investment. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial was an instant and overwhelming success, becoming the highest-grossing film of the decade.
The “Night Skies” script never became a movie, but bits and pieces of it ended up in several other famous films, including Poltergeist and Gremlins.
Ron Cobb, who missed his opportunity to direct “Night Skies,” was not a fan of the E.T. movie. However, there was a silver lining. His screenwriter wife took a closer look at his contract and found that his kill fee entitled him to one percent of E.T.’s massive profits. E.T. is still making money . . . so that phone call actually did change his life.
Baker, who developed the alien for “Night Skies,” did not make out as well. There were disputes about compensation; Spielberg wanted Baker to make a cuter, cuddlier alien, but Baker had already spent a lot of time on the creepy one, and requested more budget before starting over. The conflict turned acrimonious and Baker was locked out of the project, a lasting source of bitterness for him.
In 2014, Baker shared some images of his original model, with the moniker “E.T.’s dad.” “They turned around and took my stuff, altered it slightly, and made one of the most incredible movies in history,” said Baker in The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made by David Hughes. It’s quite easy to see how his original design influenced the alien we would all come to know and love as E.T., and though we’ll always be happy to have E.T., it’s a pity we never got to see his horrifying ancestor on the big screen. *
The Overlooked Genius of Space Island One
Very few people remember Space Island One, but for those of us who watched all twenty-six episodes, this hard-SF show about people living on a space station left a profound impression. Where other science fiction shows offer explosions and fight scenes, Space Island One is packed with complex characters, grounded scientific dilemmas, and a powerful message about the dangers of capitalism.
Space Island One’s regular cast was made up of Judy Lee, Angus Macinnes, Bruno Eyron, Julia Bremermann, Kourosh Asad, and Indra Ové.
Space Island One was a 1998 British-German co-production that originally aired on the British channel Sky One. The show was created by Andrew Maclear (who’s best known as the photographer who took several iconic pictures of John Lennon and Yoko Ono). It follows the intrepid crew of the Space Station Unity, an advanced scientific installation owned by a faceless corporation known only as “the Company.”
This show gets a bad rap as a snoozefest—and it’s true that a handful of episodes, including the pilot, feel seriously clunky. But at the same time, this show features some of the strongest writing I’ve ever seen on television, including scripts by beloved novelists Stephen Baxter and Diane Duane. (And the second season is notably better than the first.)
And even at its worst, this show takes great pains to depict plausible science, and to keep the focus on developing its characters, decisions that pay off massively. One long-running storyline on the show, for example, involves veteran NASA astronaut Walter Shannon (Angus MacInnes) dealing with bone density loss as a result of too much time spent in space—a situation that has no easy answers.
Speaking of Shannon, he’s a great example of how this show builds its characters over time. At first, the lone American among the crew, and the oldest crewmember, comes across as a buffoon, and another major storyline involves Shannon secretly wasting the space station’s resources on calling phone-sex lines back on Earth, a huge and hideously expensive waste of bandwidth. But over time, Shannon develops so many layers, and shows so much unexpected warmth and valor, he grows into one of the show’s most lovable MVPs.
But almost every character on Space Island One gets a challenging storyline. Scientist Harry Eschenbach (Julia Bremermann) inadvertently becomes pregnant, and winds up having the first baby born in space, which becomes a media circus. Her fellow scientist, Lyle Campbell (William Oliver) appears to be one of those cute, awkward nerds who populate television shows everywhere—until Lyle gets into a relationship with another scientist, and things take a dark, startling turn.
Actually, two out of the three main scientists we meet on Space Island One are female, and they’re always shown to be good at their jobs. Likewise, the station’s commander, Kathryn MacTiernan, handles an endless series of impossible situations with firm authority and sly creativity. Commander MacTiernan is the kind of leader who almost never raises her voice, but if you screw with her, she will put you down.
And then there’s the show’s underlying conflict: The station is owned by a for-profit company, which is constantly cutting corners and trying to find more ways to make money off it. The clash between scientific inquiry and capitalist profiteering keeps coming up as a theme throughout the show, until it slowly emerges as Space Station Unity’s defining, insoluble problem.
When Space Island One appeared briefly on PBS in the United States, at first I saw it as “that weird show that’s on before classic Doctor Who.” The talky drama and long scenes where the characters discuss retracting umbilicals and correcting station attitude seemed way too low-key compared to other TV science fiction. But I kept getting sucked into the show’s twisty drama, and its characters kept surprising me. By the time Space Island One reached its shocking conclusion, I had become obsessed. And I’d come to realize that I was lucky enough to see something really special.
Alas, Space Island One isn’t available on DVD, or anywhere else. But you can find all the episodes online, if you search hard enough. And it’s well worth the effort. *
EMILY ASHER-PERRIN
The (Very) Secret Adventures of Jules Verne
Steampunk, as a genre, has arguably existed for well over a century. It didn’t have that name at the beginning, of course, and it didn’t have conventions and rock bands and fashion shows dedicated to its retrofuturistic storytelling flair. In the beginning, it was a peculiar aspect of science fiction and fantasy that imagined an alternate nineteenth century, powered by miraculous steam-based contraptions. It showed up periodically, in the works of H. G. Wells and K. W. Jeter and Michael Moorcock. It reared its head in 1970s Doctor Who serials and The Wild Wild West, in Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky, and the very end of Back to the Future Part III. Steampunk was all over the place, but outside of literature it was often relegated to an embellishment. It made for pretty props, set pieces, and gadgets . . . and that was about it.
Until the year 2000, when a strange little show popped up on the Sci-Fi Channel called The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne.
SAJV—as it was termed by its small but avid fan base—lasted just one season before ghosting us without much fanfare. Creator Gavin Scott came by the concept when he learned that Jules Verne initially wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea out of anger over the Russian invasion of Poland, but was asked by his publisher to change Captain Nemo’s background (from Polish nobleman to the son of an Indian raja) because the Russian Empire was an ally of France. Scott posited that perhaps all of Verne’s “fictional” plots and characters were based on real events, and several different versions of a screenplay emerged. They all failed to find backers, but an early draft sent to George Lucas got Scott a job writing a few episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. After Indy, and some work on Hollywood screenplays (The Borrowers, Small Soldiers), he came back to Verne and cobbled together a group of disparate investors to make what would now be a television series.
The show told the tale of a young, hungry Jules, desperate to make it as a writer and full of strange proposals for steampunk instruments and engines. Verne runs into trouble quickly, however. It turns out that his daydream inventions are the result of this quirky ability he has to see into the future, resulting in a host of nasty customers tracking Verne down to tap his brain for schematics to war machines and other means to dominate a planet. He gets protection in the form of a few new friends, the real Phileas Fogg and Passepartout (of Around the World in Eighty Days fame), and Fogg’s super-spy cousin Rebecca. Essentially, the plot of SAJV gives us a different reason behind Verne’s aborted or heavily altered works; it’s not that he was too young to publish Paris in the 20th Century, as his editor suggested. Rather, if he were to publish it, he would probably attract more attention from any number of living or undead megalomaniacal villains, who would kidnap and maybe torture him for information in order to bring about global domination, or destruction, or doom, or other bad words beginning with d. (Devastation! Drama?)
A Jules Férat illustration from the Hetzel edition of Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, first published in 1874.
The show had a lofty pedigree for something shot largely on a single sound-stage. It was full of well-known talent: John Rhys-Davies popped in as Alexandre Dumas, père; Patrick Duffy lent his talents to the role of a handsome vampire; Margot Kidder showed up to perform a séance. Phileas himself was played to rigid perfection by Michael Praed, known by many children of the 1980s as the painfully pretty lead outlaw on Robin of Sherwood.
The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne was ambitious to a fault—in its one and only season the characters found themselves time traveling to alternate realities to meet the real Three Musketeers, battling a golem, stopping an assassination attempt against Queen Victoria, accidentally getting involved in both the American Civil War and the Russian Emancipation Reform of 1861, and frequently coming to blows with Count Gregory, a steampunk cyborg in charge of the aptly-named League of Darkness, who desperately wanted to get his hands on Jules Verne’s brain. There was no aspect of science fiction, fantasy, or horror that the show was afraid to tackle, no brand of humor or melodrama that it shied away from.
It was not to be, and largely because the show was similar to Verne himself—ahead of its time. The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne was the first hour-long series to be shot entirely in HDTV format, but none of the networks airing the show had the ability to broadcast in high definition yet. As a result, the series had to be converted down to film, making the episodes over-dark and cheap-looking. The CGI, costumes, and design that the show had poured all its money into emerged on-screen in blurry shades of muted gray.
All that work, lost to the very audience SAJV needed to impress.
But if you looked close enough, all of those flourishes remained. Phileas’s iconic traveling balloon became a decked-out dirigible named the Aurora, a flying Victorian house paneled in rich wood and accented everywhere with brass, full of crystal decanters and patterned china teacups and a workshop for testing various aparatuses. Fogg and his cousin were always lavishly clothed as befitting their station and wealth, and Rebecca’s job as a government agent meant that underneath her clothes, she was always wearing her “practical” leather catsuit—think The Avengers’ Mrs. Peel, but with a corset and Batman’s utility belt. Verne’s inventions and Passepartout’s odd experiments were meticulously rendered and delightful to behold. Even the obvious reuse of that single soundstage and its redressed sets couldn’t dim the show’s dynamism, or its earnestness.
That six-month blip of SAJV’s existence was a heady and exhilarating time for its fans, and it was taken from us far too soon. Due to the large number of investors in the show, th
e odds of getting the rights to put it on DVD and Blu-ray, or bring it to streaming, are slim. But there are copies out there—recorded off the TV and burned onto discs, passed from one enthusiast to another. I have my own precious set, and from time to time, I slip a disc into my DVD player and revisit the odd steampunk adventures of twentysomething Jules Verne and his highly unlikely set of friends. *
James Cameron’s Explorations of the Watery Depths On-Screen and in Real Life
Most people know James Cameron (b. 1954) as the blockbuster director who gave us the beloved science fiction films The Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989), and Avatar (2009), along with the slightly popular Titanic (1997). Avatar’s many innovations in 3-D technology and special effects, combining live action and CGI, made it a landmark film in cinema history—and as of this writing, it remains the highest-grossing film of all time in its earnings at the box office ($2.8 billion). The second highest? Titanic. Cameron broke his own record, which has to be a record in and of itself.
From 1899 through 1910, Jean-Marc Côté and a variety of other French artists imagined the futuristic environs of the year 2000 in a series of postcards. A Monster of the Abyss was one of Côté’s contributions. Never distributed at the time, it was discovered and published by Isaac Asimov in 1986.
Of course, none of this is particularly obscure. But Cameron’s record-busting extends beyond the box office. On March 26, 2012, Cameron made science history. He became the first person to ever make a solo descent to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest point in the ocean—35,787 feet below the surface. Cameron was also the first person to capture this incredible experience on film, and only the third person to ever make the journey.
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