By JOHN SAYLES (197?)
His name may not appear anywhere on it, but make no mistake: Mr. Steven Spielberg was the guiding force behind this late 1970s screenplay. Inspired by a Spielberg penned treatment, it was conceived as a darker variant on CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, but got only a single draft before Spielberg decided to scrap the project in favor of a more family friendly alien movie. A shame, because while E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL was pretty damn good, NIGHT SKIES (in which the term “ET” was first coined) could well have been better.
Spielberg’s smartest move here was the hiring of the novelist, screenwriter and director John Sayles to pen the script. Sayles was known primarily as a genre specialist in the late seventies and early eighties, with credits that included PIRANHA, THE LADY IN RED, ALLIGATOR, BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS and THE HOWLING (during which time he was also gearing up for the non-genre affiliated indies for which he’s since become famous). Sayles put his skills to good use in NIGHT SKIES, a brisk and efficient thriller that never rises above B-movie level (the likely reason Spielberg abandoned it).
In the opening pages we’re introduced to the teenage Tess and her autistic brother Jaybird, along with their Montana based family, which includes her boyfriend Von, their father Ed, mother Ruth, mother-in-law Gram and younger brother Watt. Sayles sets up the personalities and dilemmas of this clan with admirable economy (horror novelists would do well to study this script) while keeping the overall focus on the steadily developing alien invasion narrative, which manifests itself first in a series of horrific cattle mutations that occur in the area, followed by the sighting of a flying saucer and some alien point of view shots (with the proviso that “Some thought should be put into exactly what an ET’s POV should look like…It will have to be something that doesn’t confuse or disorient the audience too much”).
The ensuing invasion, aspects of which were subsequently worked into the scripts of E.T., POLTERGEIST and GREMLINS, takes the form of several alien critters, each of whom is given a name—Buddee, Squirt, Skar, Klud and Hoodoo—terrorizing the family’s ranch house. Jaybird, in a foreshadowing of the Elliot-E.T. dynamic, turns out to have a special connection with the critters, and ends up playing a crucial part in the script’s climax—which, being a Spielberg project, is optimistically resolved.
None of the ETs are afforded much in the way of physical description or personality (with those things left to Rick Baker, who put in over a million dollars’ worth of alien design work on NIGHT SKIES), and nor is the human-ET showdown that comprises much of the second half of the script as exciting as it could have been (given the oft-repeated “STRAW DOGS with aliens” tagline). Those, however, are problems I’m confident would have been fixed in succeeding drafts. What we’re left with is a skilled and intriguing screenplay that’s still very much a first draft effort.