Book Review | Travails with the Alien: The Film that was never made and other Adventures with Science Fiction

Book: Travails with the Alien: The Film that was never made and other Adventures with Science Fiction
Author: Edited by Sandip Ray
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 213
Price: Rs 699 

Whose spacecraft loses its way on its intergalactic travels and lands in a small village in rural Bengal. The film, based on a story that Ray wrote himself, was to be made into a Hollywood film in 1967 (and its Bengali version called Avatar!) with Peter Sellers playing an Indian. But it never got made owing to a shifty associate producer who seemed to have been cheating Ray.

The story doesn’t end there – in 1982 came Steven Spielberg’s E.T., with a strikingly similar storyline. A case of plagiarism? Ray himself felt E.T. could “not have been possible without my script of ‘The Alien’”, which had been available in mimeographed copies through Hollywood. This book presents the entire saga – Ray’s original short story, the initial treatment of the film, script, along with interviews, stills and newspaper reports of the era.