Wolfgang Petersen has his next project lined up: The Grays, based on a novel by crazy alien abductee Whitley Streiber. I guess this is what happens when you make Poseidon, a movie that sank faster than the titular ship (take that Richard Dreyfuss, you punching bastard!).
Streiber used to be a regular writer of horror novels, such as The Hunger. But then he was ‘abducted by aliens’ who traveled across the universe in a desperate effort to get inside human buttholes, and everything changed. Streiber became an evangelist for the abduction experience, and for a while rode that wave as it crested in the popular consciousness. Then The X-Files came to an end and everybody stopped caring about that stuff, and even people like me, who had been into it, began to think that psychosexual issues could explain why some people were getting anally ravaged by tiny little spacemen.
But Streiber hasn’t given up; instead he’s taken his alien obsessions into fiction, where he can write all the totally nutty shit he believes and claim it’s all pretend. Thus The Grays, which is about a millennia long alien plan to create a super-intelligent human who can become the suppository – sorry, depository – of all their intergalactic ass-lovin’ knowledge. There’s military intrigue and other shit in there as well, and the aliens from the Roswell crash are involved.
Peterson will start directing the film this fall, according to Streiber’s official site, with a release date of 2008 or 2009 eyed. Let’s hope the aliens don’t reveal themselves before then, otherwise the wind will be taken out of the film’s sails. And sales. But maybe they are the only answer for Belladonna’s terrible, career-ending case of ass herpes.