While the world waits for the chance to check out director Steven Spielberg’s latest alien-related film, Disclosure Day, when it’s released next month, film historian and author Max Evry is looking back at an earlier Spielberg alien classic with the book Stranded on Earth: How Night Skies Became E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which traces the journey from the abandoned alien horror project Night Skies to the creation of E.T.
The hardcover first edition of Stranded on Earth will debut in the U.S. and Canada on October 6, followed by release in the UK and Europe on November 12. The book will be available through major retailers and independent bookstores, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop in the United States, as well as Amazon and Indigo in Canada.
What do we know about Stranded on Earth?
Part film history and part investigative chronicle, Stranded on Earth follows Spielberg’s fascination with UFOs and extraterrestrial storytelling from his teenage feature Firelight in the 1960s through the success of 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The book then dives into the ambitious — and ultimately doomed — production of Night Skies, a dark science-fiction horror film that gradually evolved into the heartfelt classic E.T.
Through extensive research and new interviews with Spielberg collaborators, actors, artists, and industry insiders, Evry uncovers the creative chaos, studio politics, abandoned concepts, and radical rewrites that transformed a frightening alien thriller into one of the most beloved films in cinema history.
Stranded on Earth follows Evry’s acclaimed 2023 book Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch’s Dune and continues his exploration of ambitious, transformative science-fiction filmmaking. The book also examines how the DNA of the abandoned Night Skies project echoed throughout Hollywood, influencing genre-defining works such as Poltergeist and Gremlins while helping shape the explosion of sci-fi horror and fantasy storytelling throughout the 1980s and beyond.
Evry provided the following statement: “For years, Night Skies has been an asterisk in the shadow of that era’s most popular movie. The story of this unmade project is just as fascinating as how E.T. itself came to be. My book explores both, and so much more. As with my book on David Lynch’s Dune, the deeper I dug, the bigger — and wilder — the story became.“
Does Stranded on Earth: How Night Skies Became E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial sound like a book you’d be interested in reading? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
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