Movie busting the saucer cover-up supplanted by saucy remake.
5/12/2000
Flying Saucers over Hollywood! by filmmaker Paul Davids offers a rare glimpse into the great Hollywood UFO films.
One of the little known stories of Hollywood UFO lore is that in 1993, HBO suddenly axed its production plans for ROSWELL, THE MOVIE when several male executives got swept away with the dream of blowing up Daryl Hannah.s slender figure into gargantuan proportions. HBO picks and chooses its original movies with extreme care, and could not tolerate the notion of producing two UFO films in one year. The network had already spent close to half a million dollars developing my film, ROSWELL, when the remake idea for ATTACK OF THE 50 FT. WOMAN was proposed to them. Naturally, ATTACK OF THE 50 FT. WOMAN, one of the cheapie cult classic sci-fi films from the 1950s, had a saucer as part of the plot. In the remake, a saucer's beam fertilizes a wealthy woman's physical and emotional growth, and her newly acquired strength enables her to exact neo-feminist revenge on her annoying husband.
There was no way that HBO was going to develop two films, in the same timeframe, that featured a flying saucer in the plot. ROSWELL, with its UFO crash at Mac Brazel.s sheep ranch, became the sacrificial lamb.
ATTACK OF THE FIFTY FOOT WOMAN, as campy and corny as it was, proved to be a major draw for HBO. So, they cried no elephant tears about losing ROSWELL, even though it went on to become a prestigious Showtime film that was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best TV Movie of the Year by the Hollywood Foreign Press. However, once ROSWELL was sold elsewhere and became a huge TV event of its own, the parent company of HBO, Time Warner, wasted no time in grabbing back the title and central events for the Warner Brothers TV series from Jonathan Frakes, titled, with extraordinary originality, ROSWELL. Frakes, though known for his acting in STAR TREK, THE NEXT GENERATION, is even better remembered in many quarters for his role as the host of Bob Kiviat.s Fox special, THE ALIEN AUTOPSY: FACT OR FICTION?. (The answer to the program turned out to be fiction . at least for the Santilli footage that was the basis of that show).
One of the bleakest days of my life was the day I got the news that HBO was putting ROSWELL into "turn-around." Turn-around is one of those technical Hollywood terms meaning the studio that nurtured and paid for your project suddenly turns against you and decides to hang you out to dry from a very high clothesline. I remember how dark things seemed at that point, and how incapable I was of conceiving that the very threatening rain cloud over my head had a silver lining. If I could have only seen six months into the future, I would not have been depressed at all. I would have realized that soon after, HBO.s competitor, Showtime, would pick up the pieces of my project, my life, and fulfill what, at that point, was my greatest dream. Even to think such a thought at that point seemed mad folly and pure wishful thinking. But sometimes our fondest dreams come true just when we are about to give them up for lost.
ROSWELL, The Movie was one of those Hollywood projects that was nearly impossible to get made because no one would touch it with a fifty foot pole (no pun intended). However, once it proved a success, on came an avalanche of producers and studios rushing to imitate it or cash in on its popularity. Out came related TV series (DARK SKIES and the X-FILES Roswell-mania plotlines), knock-off films, and major blockbuster movies that incorporated the Roswell Incident in the theme or story (such as MEN IN BLACK, INDEPENDENCE DAY, and even THE ROCK). Then, of course, came ROSWELL the series. By the way, I am offering to donate all my earnings from the TV series and Viacom.s sequel of it, to the first person to send me a self-addressed, stamped envelope, care of AlienZoo. I understand that, with new banking rules, you can cash a check for "zero" in any bank in the U.S., even if you don.t have an account at the particular branch.
Perhaps it wouldn.t have been so bad being dumped for Daryl Hannah if getting to the point of earning that privilege hadn.t been pure Chinese water torture. To explain, I have to go back a few steps and explain how ROSWELL is the film that didn.t get made about five hundred times before it finally did. It all started in about November of 1989, two and a half years after my daylight disc sighting of February 25, 1987. My daughter was the first to see the flying saucer just before 4 p.m., and she called me to come look at it from her window. We stepped out onto the roof with my son and watched for about five minutes as a domed silver disc approached us (within a few hundred feet) and then departed. We.ll save that story for another time - it.s been summarized in a few articles in UFO Magazine, and it is the subject of an upcoming book I'm at the verge of completing, called DADDY, I SEE A FLYING SAUCER!
In November 1989, I signed a deal memo with Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt (then director of special investigations for the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies) for an option to a book they had not yet written. They had a 17-page outline for the book that eventually was published by Avon as UFO CRASH AT ROSWELL. I had recently completed my work as production coordinator of THE TRANSFORMERS show, having spent nearly two years with Optimus Prime and Megatron, as Autobots and Decepticons had taken over my life and home. After about 90 half-hour, animated shows, I was exhausted with animation, and the dream of making ROSWELL as a movie began to take over my life.
In 1990 and 1991, I took numerous trips to Roswell with Randle and/or Schmitt, and I participated in their process of seeking out witnesses and researching the case. While the book was being written, I wrote a first-draft screenplay. The approach was markedly different than what the film eventually became. I began with two investigative characters, based on Randle and Schmitt, as I used ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN as a model to cast them into Woodward and Bernstein roles in the Roswell investigation. Though much of the structure was later cast aside, there were many scenes and aspects that always remained - most notably, the alien autopsy scene at the Roswell base hospital, and the photographer in the autopsy room who discovers that one of the "dead" aliens is really alive. I eventually played that role in the film, a wonderful "gift" director Jeremy Kagan bestowed on me in appreciation for my having brought him the project and nurtured it with him through our many frustrations. That role eventually won me my picture in TIME magazine, in the publication's Roswell cover-story article of the summer of 1997.
Not only did I have the screenplay to present to production companies and studios, but I soon also had publicity materials for the soon-to-be published Randle and Schmitt book. And then there were galleys, which were being kept under wraps as much as possible. At that moment (the early 1990s), the many dimensions of the Roswell story had not been told, as Randle and Schmitt were about to unveil it. (Later, of course, they amplified their research and theories in a follow-up book, titled THE TRUTH ABOUT THE UFO CRASH AT ROSWELL, which was published in hardback by M. Evans.)
For all you would-be Hollywood writers and producers reading this, I would like you to hear it from me: ROSWELL was rejected about one hundred times over the course of nearly two years. The project went to every studio, every production company, and every major actor I could think of. In some cases, it went not once, but twice. I would wait until the executive who turned it down was either fired, resigned, or changed divisions within the company, and then I would go back to get rejected again. Somewhere in my attic is a box of rejection letters, which would make a fascinating but very sad book.
I never could have invented all the reasons I was given for why they would not make the film, or why they believed NO ONE should make the film. The primary reason was basically: "If this had really happened, how come I never read about it in The New York Times?" When we tried to explain the nature of the Roswell coverup, they always asked, "Yeah, but then where are the bodies?" When they learned we weren.t sure, and that we definitely couldn.t get them into the secret facility where they were stored in order to see them, they turned the project down. It was a crisis of belief. People were not willing to make any leaps. One of the biggest fears was that if they made the movie and it turned out to be a hoax, they would have egg on their faces. That was especially exasperating. Hollywood is all eggs. Woody Allen proved that in ANNIE HALL. And usually the eggs are scrambled. Go to see just about any movie to prove the case in point.
Reading between the lines, the main reasons no one was interested in ROSWELL were that I wasn.t able to guarantee Sylvester Stallone or Charles Bronson to play Jesse Marcel. Those were the days when people still remembered films like ROCKY and DEATH WISH, and were still looking for "the next one."
Things took an upward turn one day at a birthday party. The party was for Frank Daniel (originally Frantisek Daniel), the Czech filmmaker (who contributed to SHOP ON MAIN STREET and CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS). Frank had come from Czechoslovakia to become the first Dean of the American Film Institute Center for Advanced Film Studies, before later moving on to become Dean of the NYU film school, and later Dean of the USC film school. Frank, who passed away a couple of years ago, was one of my beloved teachers from AFI. He was one of the most creative, open, accepting, jovial, constructive, positive, and life-affirming people I have ever known. He was a great mentor for young screenwriters and directors, and both Jeremy Kagan and I had studied under him. At the birthday party, I ran into Jeremy again after not being in touch with him for years. Jeremy made THE CHOSEN, HEROES, and THE JOURNEY OF NATTY GANN, as well as many excellent TV films.
At the party, I pitched ROSWELL to Jeremy. He immediately loved the concept. Jeremy never had exposure to the world of UFOs. He knew little about the case studies or the battles between debunkers and proponents. I was the first to tell him about Area 51, and he had never heard of a .Grey,. or an alien abduction. In fact, he never tackled a film of the science-fiction genre. He was known as a character director, an actor.s director.
What immediately fascinated him about ROSWELL was the human aspect - the theme about sorting out memories of an episode in one.s life from long ago and trying to determine the truth of it, when one only knew a small part of the truth. He loved the fact that nothing about the Roswell Incident was black and white - it was open to debate and conjecture. Where was the truth? How did one define it and find it? How does one make peace with one.s past, after undergoing public humiliation, as Jesse Marcel did? Jeremy and I had our first meeting on ROSWELL within a week (he read the material in a few days), and for the next several years, hardly a single day went by when we did not plan it, plot it, discuss it, and try to engineer the making of it. Jeremy had a special relationship with HBO, having made several HBO original films for an executive there named Bob Cooper. He felt he could "lay it off" - that.s another "technical" Hollywood term, which means getting a company to make a deal.
Ilene Kahn, an executive at HBO, worked closely with Jeremy before and admired him greatly - and it so happened that Ilene was a friend of our family. For some reason, in all my efforts to launch ROSWELL as of then, I had not thought to contact Ilene. (I probably did not know she was at HBO at that point.) Between Ilene.s efforts on our behalf, and Jeremy.s conversations with Bob Cooper, we soon had a deal at HBO. That was about mid-1991.
The deal was a typical studio development deal. Jeremy and I had a deal to develop the story treatment as we conceived the film together. (It grew and changed considerably from my first draft script). At that point, we had a sort of ROSHOMON structure in which the Roswell story was told three ways in one film. We were going to dramatize the government version, then the Jesse Marcel version (in which it was a saucer from space), and finally, a conspiracy version in which one of the aliens survived. Bob Cooper then brought in the outstanding playwright, Arthur Kopit. We were delighted that Arthur was challenged enough by the idea and material (and by the Randle and Schmitt book, which was then still unpublished) in order to commit to come aboard. The three of us brainstormed for weeks. I have many fond memories of those story conferences in Jeremy.s home office (then in Hollywood) and around a swimming pool. When the idea struck that the film should be structured around a military reunion at the Roswell base, attended by elderly Jesse Marcel, who was trying to unravel the truth about the decades-old incident, we suddenly had a gold mine. All of the answers in telling the story and making the film flowed naturally and readily from that approach - even though it introduced some fiction into the tale. But there WERE reunions at the base for many years, and so we were merely taking dramatic license in placing Marcel at one of them as a detective-like character, trying to unravel what had really happened.
HBO had us continue to develop the project for one-and-a-half years. There were eight drafts in all. The fifth draft was the one that Jeremy, Arthur, and I liked the best. That one eventually became the basis of the film we made for Showtime. But HBO kept changing its needs and requirements. Drafts six through eight took us somehow farther from where we wanted to go. They suddenly decided that the demographics of their audience was getting younger, and they wanted to introduce some young graduate students working on SETI research in the present, who first hear about the Roswell Incident while camping near Area 51. It was a terrible mish-mosh. We had no choice but to change the story to their specifications. Jesse Marcel didn.t even come into the screenplay until about page ten.
During all this time, they were putting Randle and Schmitt (and me) through a bit of hell. HBO didn.t want egg on its face, either. So, we had to attend conferences to provide them with the evidence that the incident happened as reported in Randle and Schmitt.s book. They actually went over the evidence, bit by bit. They listened to the tapes of the testimony. They did breakdowns of how much evidence there was for a flying saucer, how much for bodies, how much for the possibility that one alien was alive. Then they hired an independent investigator and sent her down to Roswell to talk to the witnesses on their behalf, to try to substantiate the Randle and Schmitt claims. When the investigator wasn.t persuaded of the evidence for various details, they put pressure on us for script changes. An HBO advisor who had major Washington contacts attended some of the story conferences. He was no help to us. We thought on several occasions that he was going to kill the project. He clearly was not advising that they proceed.
Then Bob Cooper and executive Richard Waltzer almost reluctantly approved the script to be sent to a few leading men to try to get a commitment. Note that you can.t even get a leading man to READ a script past page 10 if his character hasn.t come into the story yet. We were turned down by a couple of actors we approached.
Then came the horrible news. I think it was Ilene Kahn (always our friend and supporter) who broke it to me. HBO had become enamored with .another. flying saucer movie. Daryl Hannah was in it. They decided they preferred to remake ATTACK OF THE 50 FT. WOMAN rather than proceed with ROSWELL. We were put into turn-around. We could have the project back, if we could get another studio interested (which almost never happens). The new studio could then negotiate with HBO to pay HBO back for its costs. Then we would be free to make the movie elsewhere.
The story of how we picked up the pieces and six months later were making the film for Showtime is a tale for another day. But the moral about Hollywood - think about this next time you see a re-run of ATTACK OF THE 50 FT. WOMAN - is that the execs at HBO placed a higher priority on bringing the size ZZ bra to America than on uncovering an incredible part of hidden American history. Don.t ever let anyone tell you that sex doesn.t sell in Hollywood.
Until next time, this is your AlienZoo Hollywood correspondent reminding you to log back on next Friday, to join us for the next installment of FLYING SAUCERS OVER HOLLYWOOD!