Night Skies - John Sayles and Rick Baker

John Sayles and Rick Baker

Spielberg at first wanted Lawrence Kasdan to flesh out his Watch the Skies treatment into a fully 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 spoof 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 the last line in The Thing from Another World). 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 Tobe Hooper, best known for directing and co-writing The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, direct the film. 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 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 described 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 an approaching hawk. Although there were some differences over the new concept, Spielberg and Sayles parted amicably and the film project continued on.