Hopkins And Strieber Movies Sidebar

By Sean Casteel

In anticipation of the August release of M. Night Shyamalan’s crop circles thriller “Signs,” starring Mel Gibson, we spoke to veteran UFO authors Budd Hopkins and Whitley Strieber, both of whom had their nonfiction books on alien abduction made into feature length films. In Hopkins’ case, the CBS miniseries “Intruders” first aired in May of 1992, while the theatrical movie of Strieber’s bestseller “Communion” was released in November of 1989.

Both Hopkins and Strieber told “UFO” that they felt the film treatments of their work were only partial successes. However, the stories they had to tell about the ups and downs of moviemaking, as seen from the author’s point of view, offer a rare glimpse behind the scenes of the uneasy marriage between the UFO phenomenon and Hollywood’s version of reality.

Budd Hopkins

Along with being a well-known modern artist, Budd Hopkins is the author of three seminal books on alien abduction, “Missing Time,” “Intruders,” and “Witnessed,” all of which broke important new ground and are considered classics in the field. Hopkins’ foray into the television business with “Intruders” taught him a few things about how the entertainment industry actually functions.

“It’s fair to say that I understood that the book was going to be dramatically altered,” Hopkins said. “What actually happened is that Tracy Torme, the screenwriter, turned what was essentially a story involving quite centrally Debbie Jordan [the woman called by the pseudonym “Kathie Davis” in the book “Intruders”] and myself, and split us into two different characters. The Debbie Jordan part was split into two different women and my part was split into two different men. In one of them I was made into a psychiatrist, and in the other I was made into a sociologist who was an oddball and an academic. Neither one was an artist.

“So in a way,” he continued, “the screenplay sort of reached for more texture. But it doesn’t bear much resemblance to the book, in terms of actual plotline and characters. But what I liked about it was that it was emotionally quite true. It was very true to the kinds of reactions that people go through when they’re having these experiences-the self-doubt, the signs of trauma. Afterwards, if I had to give it a grade, I would have given it a B-plus. Which was a lot better than I thought I would end up feeling about it.”

Hopkins was asked at one point during the making of the miniseries to give a demonstration of his hypnotic regression technique with a real-life abductee.

“The director and the relevant cast wanted to see,” Hopkins said, “how the hypnosis went and how it was carried out and how people reacted, etc. And Richard Crenna [the actor playing the fictional psychiatrist half of Hopkins] obviously wanted to capture my rhythms and moods and mannerisms in doing the hypnosis.

“So there was a young woman,” he continued, “who lived in Los Angeles and volunteered to do this for me. It was a very strange experience, because hypnosis is of course a very intimate one-on-one situation. And I’d never done it with an audience, a real audience who were watching, observing and taking notes. But it went very successfully. That was probably the most interesting special event in the whole episode.”

Hopkins also brought along some of the audiotapes of his original hypnotic regression work with Debbie Jordan and played them for the director and cast.

“In one of them,” Hopkins said, “which is extremely moving, she is inside the UFO, inside the craft, and she’s been pregnant. And this is the scene where the fetus is taken away from her. There’s a long pause where she doesn’t say anything. And I say, ‘What’s happening, Debbie?’ And she says, ‘Nothing, nothing.’ I remember watching her face and she was beginning to weep, but she wasn’t moving her face. I said, ‘It’s better to tell me what’s happening.’ And she cried out, just really bitterly, she cried, ‘NO!’ She said, ‘It’s mine! It’s not fair! You can’t have it! It’s mine!’

“It’s still difficult for anybody to hear this tape,” Hopkins went on. “There was hardly a dry eye in the room. During the actual film, the young actress who played half of Debbie cried out with those same words. I said to her later that I was amazed at the power of that and that it was so literally in the script. She said it was not in the script. She said, ‘I just improvised those lines because I remembered the tape.’ The director left them in because they were so powerful. So this is a case where the actual memory of listening to an audiotape of the abduction overrode the screenplay and produced an extremely dramatic moment.”

Currently, Hopkins is as busy as ever doing hypnotic regression sessions with abductees, and he and his wife Carol Rainey have co-written a book called “Sight Unseen,” which he says presents new scientific evidence for the UFO abduction phenomenon. The book is due out in late fall from Pocket Books.

Hopkins also intimated that he has recently come across new witnesses in the Linda Cortile abduction case, the subject of Hopkins’ “Witnessed, The True Story of the Brooklyn Bridge Abductions.” Hopkins said he intends to write up a report on the new material and send it out to the mailing list of his Intruders Foundation, the nonprofit abduction research organization he heads.

Whitley Strieber

Whitley Streiber’s first-person account of his abduction experiences, “Communion,” was number on “The New York Times” bestseller list for several weeks in the summer of 1987. Strieber would follow up that first mega-hit with several sequels, and he remains one of the most credible voices in abduction literature. The making of the movie version of “Communion” was problematic at best, Strieber told “UFO.”

“I spent a lot of time on the set,” Strieber said, “and it was one of the worst experiences of my life. I am a very orderly soul, and that set was in chaos. Most of the actors disbelieved my experience and had not the least interest in portraying it with any fidelity, except for Chris Walken [the actor who played the part of Strieber]. He didn’t believe me, either, not for a moment, but he is true enough to his craft at least to try to be faithful to the subject. But his idea of what I was like turned out to be a bumbling, self-obsessed nut.

“Actually, I’m compulsively self-effacing,” Strieber continued, “and though I do bumble a lot-the kitchen fire has been a feature of my life for years, as portrayed in the film-I am like a storm trooper when it comes to work, and I have not the faintest interest in seeing myself on video. He portrayed me as having a camera pointed on myself at all times. In reality, I rarely look at my TV spots, not because I dislike them, but because the whole process isn’t interesting to me. It’s a chore.”

Strieber faced problems similar to Hopkins’ in terms of the movie’s faithfulness to the book, in spite of the fact that Strieber wrote the screenplay himself.

“The screenplay that I wrote,” he said, “and the movie that was made were two different things. The screenplay was faithful to the book, but the movie was faithful neither to the book or the screenplay. The family scenes were preserved from the screenplay, so they worked pretty well and were pretty accurate. However, it was assumed that anything Chris Walken adlibbed would be ipso facto better than anything I had written, so he was free to adlib anything he pleased, and he did a lot of that.

“Also, since nobody believed that my experience had really happened,” Strieber went on, “they felt free to change my story when it came to close encounters. Also, the budgetary problems meant that some scenes had to be changed, like it or not. The result was that the close encounter scenes are mostly so far from what happened that it isn’t even possible to discuss the differences in detail. Anybody who wants to know what happened should read the books.”

Still Strieber was impressed by the acting capabilities of Walken and Lindsay Crouse, who played Strieber’s wife Anne.

“They are superb actors,” Strieber said, “and it shows. A lot of the fun of our relationship comes through, as does the sense of oddness when it came under so much pressure. For thirty-one years now, we’ve been extremely happy, and laughter has a lot to do with that. That was true then and it’s true now. I am an unintentionally funny person. I don’t want to be, but I have turned on the self-cleaning cycle with a roast in the oven. I cave ceilings in on myself when trying to make repairs. I’m also forgetful and often have to call home to find out why I’ve gone somewhere. Anne, by contrast, is totally buttoned up, and the way we interact, given these differences, makes for a lot of laughter. They got that.

“They also got the horror of what happened to our relationship when I suddenly became a gun-toting paranoid. I actually bought a Benelli Riot Gun. I still have it. The change in me was so radical and so unexpected that it terrified Anne, and they captured that, too.”

Strieber said he would like to take another shot at doing a film version of “Communion.”

“I would love to make a movie of ‘Communion,’” he said. “That hasn’t been done yet. There is only half a movie there-our family life and the pressures on our family. Who would get scared about a bunch of aliens that look like they were bought on the Internet and blown up? One nice touch, though, at the end-I think it ends well. Philippe Mora [the film’s director] captured the ambiguity of the experience, the sense of question that I was left with, and have lived in ever since. If he’d had a decent budget, my guess is that he’d have brought off the whole film beautifully.”

Meanwhile, Strieber continues to work on new projects.

“I am currently writing a book,” he said, “called ‘The Path,’ which is about the inner meaning of the Tarot and the lifelong path I have taken based on it. It will be sold only over my website, available before the end of June. It compliments my book ‘The Key,’ which is also sold exclusively over the website.

“In October, Pocket Books/Simon and Schuster will release my new novel, ‘Lilith’s Dream.’ It’s fiction, but it’s about the real evolutionary forces that have formed mankind and how they work. That’s its ‘inner’ story. Outwardly, it’s the tale of an ancient being from the Pleiades who has been living in isolation on Earth for thousands of years, and must now emerge into the modern world. How does an ancient goddess deal with things like cars, taxes, TV and cops?”

Strieber said that the book he co-wrote with Art Bell on apocalyptic weather patterns, “The Coming Global Superstorm,” is being made into a TV movie and a feature film, but there is no definite schedule for the project at this time. He is also at work on a sequel to his first novel, “The Wolfen,” due out a year from October, if he actually writes it, he said. Strieber continues to operate a web site at “unknowncountry.com” that receives 14 million hits a month, making it the largest of its kind in the world, and his radio show, “Dreamland,” is now heard on 200 stations nationwide on Saturday nights.

So while Strieber complains of things like special effects done on the cheap and Hopkins has trouble relating to his own role as an abduction researcher being split down the middle, until a UFO lands on Hollywood Boulevard in front of a startled camera crew, we will most likely have to be satisfied with only a partial cinematic retelling of the truth at work in the defining mystery of our age.

THE END