'Roswell' and Beyond: An Interview with Paul Davids
Silver Screen Saucers
The 'Roswell' writer/producer talks to Robbie Graham about UFOs, Hollywood, Vincent van Gogh, and life after death...
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| Davids in his office with the star of his 1994 'Roswell' movie. |
“My
daughter screamed at me: ‘Daddy, get upstairs! I see a flying saucer!’” Even by
phone, it’s clear that Paul Davids is almost reliving the event. On February
25, 1987, the author, screenwriter and producer was at home in his office, hard
at work on the script for what would become Starry
Night – his whimsical fantasy film about Vincent van Gogh.
“My
daughter was in her room on the second floor. My son was home. She was nine. He
was six,” Davids recalls. Perhaps understandably, his daughter’s initial flying
saucer alert was dismissed out of hand, Davids envisioning a Good Year Blimp
sailing blandly over the valley – he was far too busy for blimps. His daughter became
hysterical. “She said: ‘Daddy, get up here! I mean it! It’s a flying saucer, I
mean it! Get up here right now!’ He did as he was told.
Before
that day, Davids had not been a believer in UFOs. “It wasn’t until the moment
that I set my eyes on it that I took anything seriously about this at all. But
when I saw it, my reaction was ‘Oh, my God.’” Davids and his children stepped
out onto the roof together, awestruck. “It was there,” he says, “descending
from a high dramatic cloud. It approached us when we were out on the roof. And
then it hovered above our two front trees out over the road in front of our
house. It was at least the size of the cockpit of a helicopter.”
Disc-shaped?
I ask. “Yes. Absolutely classic saucer. Very clear. It was sort of a dull grey,
and it had a dome on top meeting like an upside-down plate. No portholes. It
did not make a sound.” Davids and his children watched the object for several
minutes and felt that whoever was piloting it was staring right back at them: “It
seemed to be aware of us by its movements,” he explains. “It took a position in
a little space between the leaves of the trees, but there was still eye
contact. It seemed deliberate, and it hovered there.” The object came to within
500 feet of their position before it “swooped down” across the valley. “Then, in
the blink of an eye it was gone... It just wasn’t there anymore.”
Fate
had dealt Davids his hand. “That was how it started,” he says, “that day, at
four o’clock, my life changed.” His sighting that afternoon would start a
seven-year chain reaction involving long-buried truths and Hollywood legends,
and that would eventually play a major role in the popularization of a word
that has since captured the imagination of millions: “Roswell.”
~
Paul
Jeffrey Davids grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, watching sci-fi B movies and making amateur
sequels with his friends using 8mm movie cameras. “When I was young I never
really had any belief that there were extraterrestrial craft visiting Earth,”
he tells me, “but I was an avid science-fiction enthusiast and loved movies like Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, War
of the Worlds, and The Thing from
Another World. But I never read the UFO books when I was younger.”
In
1969, Davids graduated from Princeton University with a major in Psychology and
immediately after became one of the first fifteen students chosen to attend the
American Film Institute Center for Advanced Film Studies in Beverly Hills. He
spent two years there alongside future Hollywood luminaries Terrence Malick,
David Lynch, Paul Schrader and Matthew Robbins. Later, Davids began working for
the famed talent agent Paul Kohner: “I was involved with people like William Wyler,
Charles Bronson, and John Huston – right at the twilight of the old Hollywood.
I was right in the middle of that,” he reminisces, fondly.
With
the 1980s came the Transformers, and Davids worked as a production coordinator
and writer on the popular animated TV series that ran from 1984 to 1987. He
points out that his name is on more than 75 of the original Transformers cartoons and he is clearly
very proud of his role in helping shape the mythology that would give rise to
one of the most popular franchises in movie history. His work on Transformers had just wound down by the
time of his UFO sighting in 1987 and the time was ripe for a new project –
though he could not have known then just
how historic that project would turn out to be.
“I
couldn’t dislodge it from my mind,” says Davids of his saucer sighting. “It
became a focus of my attention for the months that followed. By the end of that
summer I think I had bought and read a couple hundred UFO books.” Not content
with consuming the literature, Davids also sought direct input from those in
the know, including Robert Wise, the legendary director of the 1951 flying
saucer classic The Day the Earth Stood
Still. “He met with me in his office in Beverly Hills,” Davids recalls, “and
he wanted to hear all about my sighting. He told me he absolutely did believe
that the saucers were real and that some of them were extraterrestrial. He
believed it not because he had seen one, but because of all the information
that had come to him while he was making The
Day the Earth Stood Still.” Wise told Davids that scientists and engineers
from Washington had taken him aside during filming and talked to him about
UFOs. “What they told him convinced him that the government took this really
seriously,” says Davids, “that some of these craft were visitors from space.”
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| Behind the scenes: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) |
Though
he didn’t know it yet, Davids was already on his personal road to Roswell. For
further input about his sighting, Wise referred him to his friend Roy Thinnes –
the star of the iconic 1960s UFO-themed TV show The Invaders: “Bob Wise told me that Roy had developed a personal
interest in really investigating UFOs
in the course of playing this role. So the next thing I know I’m talking to Roy
Thinnes.” The actor duly prepared a report about Davids’ sighting and sent it
to the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies in Chicago where it was received
by UFO investigator Donald Schmitt – one of only a small handful of people in
the world at that point (including pioneering UFO researcher Stanton Friedman)
who were taking an active interest in the long-dormant Roswell case, which
involved the alleged crash and retrieval of a craft of unearthly origin in the
deserts of New Mexico in early July of 1947. The Air Force had officially
explained it away as a “weather balloon,” but the residents of Roswell had for years
been whispering a rather more interesting story.
“Don
came to visit me on his next trip to Los Angeles,” Davids continues, “and he
told me that he and his friend Kevin Randle were going to reinvestigate the
Roswell Incident – go down to Roswell and try to get to the bottom of it. And
they asked me: ‘are you interested in a movie deal about this?’” It turned out
Schmitt and Randle had a seventeen–page treatment for an unwritten book about
the Roswell Incident. The book, they said, could be movie gold if only someone
would option it. A mere $25 sealed the deal between Schmitt, Randle, and Davids
– a deal that provided for payment of “real money” once a network or studio
became involved, if ever.
Davids
accompanied Schmitt and Randle on a number of their visits to Roswell to
interview the town’s old-time residents. “I drove them from witness to
witness,” he explains. “I heard from the townspeople; from the former military
people, from the people who’d been involved in the radio broadcasts at that
time; from people who knew the rancher Mack Brazel [who discovered the
wreckage]. Believe me, it’s convincing. It is really, really convincing that a flying saucer from another world did crash
in Roswell in 1947 and the people there were coerced into silence.”
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William "Mack" Brazel and Don Schmitt at the debris site in Corona, New Mexico. Photograph courtesy of Kevin Randle.
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Schmitt
and Randle’s groundbreaking book, UFO
Crash at Roswell, was published in 1991, by which point Davids had already
spent two years pitching his movie adaptation to studios and TV networks. “Everyone
said no,” he sighs. I enquire on what grounds the suits were rejecting his
pitch. “A lot of them said ‘this Roswell Incident never could have happened or
I would have heard of it.’ They also were afraid of getting egg on their face,
so to speak. And they were afraid somebody connected with it would say that it
was all made up. So they backed away and wouldn’t give us a deal.”
Finally,
after around forty rejections, David’s Roswell
pitch was picked up by HBO, only to be dropped again after 18 months of script
development by Arthur Kopit – one of Davids’ co-writers on the film. As the
production moved into its casting stage, the plug was unceremoniously pulled.
Davids and his core team were summoned before HBO bosses and told: “Sorry guys,
we gotta let you know we’ve decided not to make the movie.”
Davids
was dismayed at HBO’s reasoning: “They were going to make another flying saucer
movie – a remake of The Attack of the 50
Foot Woman, starring Darryl Hannah – instead of Roswell. That was the wisdom of HBO at that time.” But where one door
closed, another one opened as the premium cable network Showtime enthusiastically
added Roswell to its production slate.
“And that was the turning point,” says Davids, “because they really wanted to make it, and they
poured resources into it. It was fabulous.”
Davids
played a major role in shaping the film’s narrative structure, central to which
are themes of time and memory. “I came up with the whole concept about this
being a reunion at the military base – it would all be done as a flashback.
Jesse Marcel [the original Roswell whistleblower], all these years later, he’s
going back and meeting with all the different people he knew then, trying to
put together pieces of the puzzle.” A formulaic approach, perhaps, but, in the
reliable hands of director Jeremy Kagan (and old friend of Davids’), it served
well the complex and controversial source material. For Davids, the purpose of
his Roswell movie was not just to
entertain, but to educate – to bring the Roswell Incident to wider public
attention in a powerful and comprehensible form.
The
production process itself was relatively smooth, although not without its share
of intrigue. Suspicious happenings were evident even before Showtime accepted
the project. “While we were under development at HBO, I began to notice strange
goings-on with my phone,” Davids explains. “Weird clicking during conversations
about the film; on several occasions obvious sounds of a third party being on
the line; and, most notably, a call being abruptly disconnected during a
conversation about the evidence for alien bodies.”
Don
Schmitt had told Davids at the outset he believed his line was tapped, and
Davids felt that he, too, had become a surveillance target: “The weird phone activity
seemed to spread from Don to me and others involved in the film.” More
troubling to Davids were the inquisitive strangers: “There were people who
‘popped into my life’ trying to become new close friends as quickly as
possible who seemed to be trying to lift sensitive information about
the production from me in suspicious ways.” On one occasion, some strange men
in a car snapped some “quick stolen photos” of Davids and Schmitt while
they were driving together. “These were not paparazzi,” he says, “the
circumstances were suspicious yet done in an obvious way as if someone wanted
us to know we were being watched.”
This
is juicy stuff, and I’m hungry for more production anecdotes. I note that the
lead actor in Roswell, Kyle
MacLachlan, had already dealt with the UFO topic in season two of David Lynch’s
Twin Peaks, which featured a plot
strand about Project Blue Book. The film’s other star, Martin Sheen, meanwhile,
has always been known for speaking his mind on controversial political issues.
Did these men share with Davids their personal perspectives on the Roswell
incident and UFOs more generally?
“Neither
of them is a good poster child for the UFO cause,” he replies, disappointedly. “Kyle
kept his personal opinion separate from the character that he was playing and
he didn’t engage the subject. He never came forward and said ‘I believe this is
true.’ With all respect to Kyle, you kind of felt he’d been coached not to say
something that could turn him into a kook.”
And
Martin Sheen? “Wonderful man, great actor, wonderful to work with,” Davids
enthuses. “His main interest at that point, as far as I could tell, was
Catholicism and the Marian sightings – the apparitions of the Virgin. He spent
more time talking to me about that than I could talk to him about UFOs.”
This
line of conversation prompts Davids to recall an awkward exchange he once had
with legendary sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury, who he describes as “an arch skeptic.”
Davids was sat next to Bradbury at a luncheon when Ray Harryhausen got his star
on Hollywood Boulevard. Both Rays had agreed to help Davids in the production
of his documentary that was to become the 2006 Saturn Award-winning The Sci-Fi Boys, but Bradbury was
displeased to learn of Davids’ involvement in another movie: “When he heard
that I had made Roswell he started
yelling at me! He started attacking me! Saying ‘what are you doing making a
piece of fiction like that and trying to pass it off as something that’s true?’
I was so taken aback. I said ‘Mr Bradbury, with all due respect, have you heard
what the witnesses really said? Do you know
the case?’ He said, ‘I don’t have to now the case – I know it didn’t happen!’ And I said, ‘Mr Bradbury, can I ask why
you’re so sure?’ He said, ‘Because I’m Ray Bradbury! They would have told ME!
You think this would have happened and they wouldn’t have told ME!? You’re
crazy!’” Davids chuckles and sighs: “Pride and ego.”
~
Today,
the Roswell Incident of 1947 is considered by UFO researchers to be the most
significant event in the history of the phenomenon, and it makes sense that it
has permeated our cultural fabric in the form of movies, TV shows, comic books
and video games. But are there any other historical UFO-related events that
would lend themselves particularly well to a Hollywood dramatization? Davids
certainly thinks so, with one case in particular standing out as a
yet-to-be-made movie classic: “I think that the untapped gold would lie in
Rendlesham Forrest.” He is, of course, referring to the Bentwaters case, which,
although featuring no UFO crash/retrievals, involved multiple military
personnel – including a Lieutenant Colonel – witnessing spectacular UFO
incursions at a highly sensitive US military base on UK soil over three nights
in December, 1980.
Our
discussion about unproduced UFO movies reminds Davids of his own project in
this subgenre that failed to launch. He had a long-term working relationship
with the outspoken Mars anomalies researcher Richard Hoagland: “We wanted to do
a film about the face on Mars and we had a deal at RKO to do it, I was going to
direct it, it was far along in development.” Unfortunately, the creative
director at RKO with whom Davids and Hoagland had been working left the film
company unexpectedly. “All of the films he’d been developing were dropped,”
says Davids, in a sharp tone of frustration. “So we did not get to make that
movie.”
I
offer that perhaps this was a lucky escape on his part – Mars being perennially
toxic at the Hollywood box-office. “There
have been a lot of problems,” Davids acknowledges. “John Carter! I don’t think anyone now is racing to make another
Mars movie.” He does, however, hope that cinemagoers might someday see a movie
about the famous UFO contactees of the 20th Century, such as George
Adamski and George van Tassel, who claimed personal interactions with
enlightened space folk bringing messages of peace and brotherhood. “I would
have loved to have been the one to make that,” he says, wistfully. “It would be
wonderful to have a film about Adamski. It would be a great subject matter and
it could be done.”
~
Our
conversation shifts now from the past to the present and to Davids’ latest TV
project – a documentary feature for the SyFy channel. “It’s called The Life After Death Project. I think it
is the most sophisticated look at the evidence for life after death that has
been put together so far in a film.” This is a
deeply personal project for Davids, who has always been fascinated by the idea
that our life-essence survives beyond corporeal death. “It’s based on a real
case involving one of my mentors, the late Forrest J Ackerman, that touched my
life very, very deeply,” he tells me. “In the old days they called it
spiritualism... getting messages from the dead, and it was all dismissed as
hokum. But they threw out the baby with the bathwater. There’s a lot of real
data there. There is a real psychic effect.
The case is made that there is something in our personality that survives.”
Though
very few in the UFO community are aware of it, Davids’ other great passion in
life, besides film, is painting and drawing, and he recently launched a new
website – pauldavids-artist.com – showcasing
his artistic accomplishments. “There’s about 25
years of work on there,” he notes. “A lot of my earlier paintings have been in
exhibitions, but my last ten years of work has not yet been seen. Now it can be
seen online.”
Davids
has been painting for as long as he can remember, but it was not until the late
1990s that he truly threw himself into it. In 1999, he directed Starry Night – the van Gogh film he’d
been penning at the time of his life-altering UFO sighting. The iconic Dutch
painter lodged himself deep in Davids’ psyche: “He just caught hold of me,” he
says “and I just started painting and producing a large body of work.” Starry Night sees Vincent van Gogh –
unappreciated in his own time – drink a potato potion he acquired when painting
‘The Potato Eaters,’ which causes him to return to life in modern-day
California where he discovers that his paintings are revered as masterworks.
Today,
as a filmmaker and artist, Davids shows no sign of slowing down. “I’m still
operating with the same pace and energy and excitement as I did when I was 35 or
40,” he declares, with the vim and vigour of a 35 or 40 year old. “Nothing’s
changed for me.” His fascination with the UFO enigma is also as strong as ever.
Davids’ sighting that fateful day in 1987 opened his eyes to a world hidden
from public view, buried beneath sixty years of government denial and ridicule.
“When will they ever decide to tell us? What will it take?” he asks,
rhetorically. The culture of secrecy still agitates him: “I think the whole
cover-up is a disgrace,” he fumes. “I’m opposed to it from top to bottom. So
that’s why I made the film.”
The
film, it should be noted, was a huge success, both commercially and critically,
not only significantly increasing Showtime’s subscriber base, but also
garnering a Golden Globe nomination for best television movie. “I think the
impact was considerable,” says Davids of Roswell.
“It was enormous. Millions of people saw it. Millions.”
I
ask if the word ‘Roswell’ would be so culturally resonant today had he not so
memorably contextualized it in his 1994 TV movie. “Not as much,” Davids replies,
without hesitation, although he acknowledges that the immensely popular TV show
The X-Files, which premiered a year
before his movie, also played a major role. “But The X-Files wasn’t just about Roswell,” he stresses, “it was all
over the place dealing with a lot of different things. Roswell was just a little
part of it.” Other entertainment products throughout the 1990s also were
contributors to the popularization of the Roswell story, most
significant among which, according to Davids, were the 1996 blockbuster Independence Day, the Dark Skies TV series, which ran from
1996 to 1997, and the instantly iconic 1997 Will Smith vehicle Men in Black. “By that time, Roswell was
a national institution,” Davids observes. “If it’s a myth – which I don’t
believe it is for one minute – it is now a national myth massively engrained
into the public consciousness, as much as any other story from the history of
our country.”
It’s
hard to argue with that statement, and it’s harder still to underestimate the
seminal role Paul Davids played in that engraining process. Almost twenty years
after he produced it, Roswell – a
film that very nearly never was – today stands as testament to the fact that
the right movie, at the right time, can help redefine popular understanding of
historical events long shrouded in the fog of official obfuscation.
