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It may be about belief. It is certainly about box office. Peter Chernin, the 20th Century Fox chairman, didn't see a holy white light when he gave the green light to ID4; he was thinking grosses. Michael Sullivan of UPN didn't have religion in mind when he put four sci-fi shows on his network; he was thinking demographics. "Sci-fi has traditionally been a cult item, and 20 years ago, networks had to draw a mass audience. Now with the networks' share of audience diminishing, that core audience becomes more significant," he says. And NBC's Warren Littlefield was not looking for metaphors when he programmed an entire Saturday evening of fall shows with spooky themes. He was listening to the voice of his 11-year-old son, to whom the fantastic is as real as it is to Gibson. "I can't get him to watch a classic western on television," Littlefield says and repeats this recent conversation. Son: "So let me get this straight. The horse doesn't fly?" Father: "No, it just rides across the desert." Son: "I'm outta here."
It's the TV producer's job to keep kids and adults glued to the screen. As The X-Files' Carter easily admits, "Our goal, first and foremost, is to scare people." It's the modern movie director's job to package an old idea with zippy effects so that the audience will think it's seeing something new--and be blown away. During the cold war, even the cheesiest sci-fi filmmaker, like the legendarily dyscompetent Ed Wood, had some moral admonition in mind ("He tampered in God's domain"). Now it's size that counts; sense and scruples don't. As Spielberg says, "If the '70s and '80s were the era of the What if? movie, then the '90s are the era of the What the heck! movie. We say, 'Hey, this is so beyond our logical grasp, so out of this world, that we're just going along for the ride.'"
Emmerich, 40, the conductor of ID4's wild ride, is a can-do scholar of Hollywood moviemaking; he has built a reputation for efficient melodramas on modest budgets. (For all its locations and effects and the mandatory cast of thousands, ID4 reportedly cost a thrifty $71 million.) Emmerich first fell under the spell of science fiction as a boy watching U.S. films as well as local sci-fi TV shows in his native Germany. "For me," he says, "going on a science-fiction movie set is like visiting toyland. You see, my brother trashed all my toys when I was a kid. It's very Freudian. For my movies you can blame my brother Andy."
Emmerich made his early films in Germany--and in English, for the world market. In 1989, after a clever Spielberg-rip-off kids' fantasy (Making Contact) and a comedy about moviemaking (Ghost Chase), he directed Moon 44, an outer-space Dirty Dozen with a story line that would recur in ID4: for a desperate space battle, a former combat pilot must assemble a ragtag band of flyers, including a loser with heroically suicidal tendencies. Devlin played the computer-nerdy male ingenue; after Moon 44, he and the director became filmmaking partners.
Their first U.S. project was Universal Soldier, a hearty exercise in RoboCop sadomachismo that starred Jean-Claude Van Damme. Then, in 1994 Emmerich and Devlin did Stargate, about a secret government agency detecting signs of extraterrestrial life and discovering that the pyramids were made by aliens. With Kurt Russell as the director's standard rogue grunt, the film was a surprise hit.