So these are the words I would literally say to the people at Universal Studios…
We’re in a forest with these giant trees, when we see all these lights through the trees. It’s a space ship, a bunch of three foot tall creatures with these oddly shaped heads and long necks start to explore the area. One finds a leaf that it starts to examine, but then there’s a light moving toward them. It’s someone coming to investigate,. They run for the ship, and take off, but they’ve left one behind.
Okay so “A Boy’s Life” is the story of a boy and the alien he befriends. The boy, Elliot is cute and sort of curious, but he gets picked on all the time. He’s kind of in the place where he isn’t very sure of himself, until the night when the alien gets stranded on Earth. Elliot comes to understand that E.T. just wants to go home, and Elliot has to decide to help him and risk their being found out, or doing nothing. E.T. fashions a phone to call home out of some toys he finds at Elliot’s house while everyone is out. He sends a message to come get him, but before the pick up, E.T. starts to get very sick. The government finds out that there is an alien living at this house and they want to study it. E.T. only gets sicker and Elliot is tortured by the way they treat him, so he decides to bust him out. He puts E.T. into the basket of his bike and they ride off to the extraction point. The police have blocked the road and they seem trapped but E.T. makes the bike fly and they barely escape. Back in the place where E.T. was left originally, Elliot bids him a tearful goodbye. Before E.T. leaves he asks Elliot if he wants to come, but Elliot doesn’t want to. He’s grown up, he’s not going to take the bullies’ pushing him around anymore.
How would pitching “A Boys Life” change if it were a different genre?
If you were a studio chief what would your to hearing “A Boy’s Life” be?
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3 comments:
If Boys Life were pitched as a different genre. You could actually leave most of the movie the same. Obviously the overall message would change if you wanted to present it as a horror movie. But you could still use the same charecters and the same basic premise that an alien has been left on this planet and he is discovered by a young boy. You would have to make the boy either and evil partner of the alien, or the victim/hero. When i started to answer this question i thought i was going to say the movie would have to be very different. But it's surprising how much of the movie could stay the same if you wanted to pitch it as a horror rather than a family fantasy type movie.
Honestly, if I hadn't seen the movie and didn't know how heart-warming it was, or didn't have any idea what E.T. looked like, I would be a little hesitant about making a movie about a boy and an alien becoming intimate friends. Thankfully, the producer of E.T. wasn't.
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