A case for Satyajit Ray and a lesson for screenwriters

Before I start writing the review of Satyajit Ray’s book, ‘Travails With The Alien’, may I take a few moments to gush about how beautifully this book has been produced? Laid out with care and printed on superb quality paper, this book could very well be the annual special of an art magazine or a limited edition catalogue of a groundbreaking publishing house.

The designer, Pinaki De, deserves applause for a fantastic job. Now, to look inside this book: ‘Travails With The Alien’ is a book about deception and heartbreak that follows the journey of what could have been Satyajit Ray’s first truly international film from its inception to the point it got nipped in the bud. Satyajit Ray needs no introduction. He is the director of films like The Apu Trilogy, Charulata, Mahanagar, and Ashani Sanket, apart from being an author of several books for children, including books in the Feluda series, Feluda, a detective Ray created, also featured in his films Sonar Kella and Joy Baba Felunath. Ray’s father was the author and poet, Sukumar Ray; his grandfather was Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury who founded the Bengali children’s magazine, Sandesh, in 1913; and his granduncle was Kuladaranjan Ray, who translated Jules Verne’s classic novel ‘Mysterious Island’ into Bengali.

Though Ray is known for his films on social and political themes, love for science and speculative fiction had been ingrained in him right from his childhood. Ray’s son, Sandip Ray, himself a well-known filmmaker, the Member Secretary of the Society for the Preservation of Satyajit Ray Archives in Kolkata, and the editor of this book, writes about his father in the foreword:“As a schoolboy, [Ray] was deeply fascinated by the stories of Jules Verne and HG Wells, which germinated his interest in [science fiction]…With the urge to feed Sandesh [when Ray, along with poet Subhash Mukhopadhyay, revived Sandesh in 1961], his childhood love found a creative outlet as stories using all kinds of staple science fiction themes.”

One of the science fiction stories that Ray wrote was Bonkubabur Bandhu – Bonkubabu’s Friend – which was published in Sandesh in February 1962. An English translation by Indrani Majumdar of this story has been included in this book. The main character in this story is a schoolmaster named Bonkubihari Dutta, called Bonkubabu by everyone. Bonkubabu is a good teacher and he teaches his students about the world, but he is a slightly timid man who is teased by his friends in their village, Kankurgachi, and his ideas are laughed at. One day, the villagers of Kankurgachi see a light moving in the sky. Bonkubabu’s friends talk about aliens and spaceships and how aliens are of “Caucasian origin” and would land only in a “Western country”.

Bonkubabu negates this idea and says that an alien might very well land in their village, Kankurgachi, at which everyone laughs and makes fun of him. Humiliated, Bonkubabu leaves the gathering. On his way back home, he sees that an actual spaceship has landed in a pond in the middle of a bamboo grove. He meets the alien, Ang, who has come from the planet, Craneus. Ang knew 14,000 languages spoken in the solar system, 31 languages spoken on planets outside the solar system, and had been to 25 planets. He gives Bonkubabu a telescope-like object through which Bonkubabu could see polar ice caps, polar bears, walruses, the forests of Brazil, an anaconda and piranhas. Before leaving, Ang encourages Bokubabu not to be meek and mild. This meeting with an alien changes Bonkubabu’s life. The next day, at the gathering, he lambasts his friends for laughing at him and not taking his ideas seriously. This was the story that Ray wished to turn into a film. He intended it to be an international film made in India with international actors.

This book has the screenplay treatment of the film that was to be named ‘The Alien’. Ray recorded the travels and travails of ‘The Alien’ in the essay, ‘Ordeals of the Alien’, published in The Statesman in October 1980 and reproduced in this book. Ray wrote the screenplay of ‘The Alien’ in 1967 and found a collaborator in Sri Lanka-based European film producer, Mike Wilson, through the noted science fiction writer, Arthur C Clarke, who too was based in Sri Lanka. Wilson had produced a Ceylonese version of James Bond, named ‘James Banda’. Wilson represented Ray and ‘The Alien’ in Hollywood. Ray, already a huge name in the West because of his critically acclaimed and award-winning films, found a warm reception in Hollywood.

Columbia Pictures, a big Hollywood studio, agreed to produce ‘The Alien’ with Ray as the director. Stars like Peter Sellers and Marlon Brando agreed to star in the film. But a deception from Wilson made everything fall apart. Through the executives at Columbia Pictures, Ray came to know that Wilson had pocketed even Ray’s part of the advance for the film. The last straw was when Ray noted that Wilson had mentioned himself as the co-copyright owner of the screenplay of ‘The Alien’ despite having contributed practically nothing to the screenplay.

Disillusioned, Ray returned to Calcutta. Despite this, Columbia Pictures was willing to revive the film and their advice to Ray was to persuade Wilson to pull out. Ray wrote to Wilson, and he called Ray “a thief and a slanderer”. ‘The Alien’, the film, was never made. Ray recalls all of it, his experience in Hollywood, the shallowness of a star like Peter Sellers, and more in his essay, ‘Ordeals of the Alien’. Reading this essay is heartbreaking. More bitterness followed for Ray when he saw Steven Spielberg’s film, ‘ET: The Extraterrestrial’, which was released in 1982, and found several similarities between Spielberg’s film and his own screenplay of ‘The Alien’.

Even before ‘The Alien’ was abandoned in the 1960s, mimeographed copies of its script had already been circulated in Hollywood and it was assumed that one of those copies had been read by Spielberg who took some elements from ‘The Alien’ and used those in ‘ET: The Extraterrestrial’. It was a bitter experience but Ray decided to not pursue plagiarism charges as he did not want to be seen as being “vindictive”, though he felt that Spielberg ruined his chance of making the film “because then people will say it came from Spielberg.” Ray said this in an interview with journalist Aseem Chhabra in 1983. Chhabra writes about that interview (and how he decided to pursue the ‘The Alien’ story after reading Ray’s interview with Sumit Mitra in India Today) in his essay, ‘Ray and the Alien’, included in this book. One thing I noticed in Chhabra’s essay (which made me hopeful 50 years too late) was that a copy of the screenplay of ‘The Alien’ was also in the office of Merchant Ivory Productions; that is, had they chosen to, Merchant Ivory – already a name to reckon with in Hollywood in the 1970s – too could have produced ‘The Alien’.

But maybe ‘The Alien’ was never to be made, though a TV film called ‘Bonkubabu’s Friend’, written by Satyajit Ray and directed by Sandip Ray, was telecast on Doordarshan. The script of ‘Bonkubabu’s Friend’ has been included in this book. With illustrations, screenplays, interviews, news reports, and essays, Satyajit Ray’s ‘Travails With The Alien: The film that was never made and other adventures with science fiction’ is an archivist’s delight.

There are photographs of letters between Ray and Columbia Pictures and people like Stanley Kubrick and Steve McQueen. Also, there are Ray’s photographs from Paris and the US in which he looks a dapper. This book presents Ray’s case regarding ‘The Alien’ very well and the feeling that I had while reading this book was that if something like this can happen with Satyajit Ray, then it can happen with anyone.