Hello,

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I'm Simon Fairhead, a London-based writer.

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When I was around 10 or 11 I asked my mum if she would take me to see Close Encounters at the cinema. She said no, because we'd just been to see Star Wars and I don't think she enjoyed the queues.

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I caught up with Close Encounters of the Third Kind on TV a few years later, one of those bad conversions they did for films on TV in the early eighties, and it was chopped up by adverts, and it was probably on at Christmas so there were distractions throughout. Nevertheless, it had me hooked in a big way.

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I was also a huge fan of UFOs at the time. Still am, but in a healthy, sceptical way. I've seen a couple of spooky things in the skies over Norfolk where I grew up, and in the early eighties there was the Rendlesham Forest incident, next to a US airbase that made the news all over the world.

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Anyway, cut to a couple of years ago, and I decided to write a sequel to Close Encounters. There was a re-jigged special edition of the movie in 1980 that added a few more special effects and took us inside the sparkly mother-ship, but I wanted to ask the question - "What if they brought Roy Neary back to Earth years later with an urgent mission to save the planet?"

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So, that's what I've tried to do. Anyone who knows anything about making movies will tell you this is a monumentally stupid thing to do. I don't own the rights to the title, the characters or anything to do with the movie, but it felt like a story that needed to be told.

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I've had a couple of attempts at selling it. It has gone to Dreamworks SKG, Steven Spielberg's production company, and was immediately rejected because I don't have a screenwriting agent. Fair enough. Then I sent it to Richard Dreyfuss' house in California, where it vanished without trace.

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I sent it to Mr Dreyfuss (who played Roy Neary in Close Encounters) because I read a long article about how he got the original role, about how pro-active and cocky he was, how he kinda nagged Spielberg into giving him the part, and so I thought if I can get Dreyfuss on my side, he might at least get the screenplay in front of someone who would at least read the damn thing.

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Still waiting. 

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Anyway, having this screenplay sitting on my computer is not doing anyone any good, so in what may prove to be my second monumental mistake, I'm going to share it with the internet.

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I first set up an awful page on Facebook which is not a great platform for publishing screenplays, so now I have created this website to show it in its true glory. If you happen to be a Dreamworks SKG lawyer, this is just a bit of fun...

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To read Close Encounters 2 - The Return of Roy Neary, click on The Screenplay button to download.

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ENJOY!