A fun piece of trivia: one of J.J. Abrams’ first professional gigs was writing the music for Don Dohler’s 1982 horror cheapie “Nightbeast.” Dohler, as B-movie fans might know, is the creative mind behind “The Alien Factor” and “Galaxy Invader,” movies that were filmed mostly in the woods. Abrams has since become one of the preeminent makers of big-budget mainstream blockbusters (he has directed one “Mission: Impossible” movie, two “Star Trek” movies, and two “Star Wars” movies), so it’s fun to picture him as a teen handing over tapes to a hard-working schlockmeister like Dohler.
Abrams stuck with it, though, and eventually sold a film treatment to screenwriter Paul Mazursky when he was still in college. That treatment became Arthur Hiller’s 1990 comedy “Taking Care of Business” with Jim Belushi. Abrams continued to rise through the ranks of Tinseltown from there, penning the scripts for films like “Regarding Henry,” “Forever Young,” and, uh, “Gone Fishin’.” By the early 2000s, Abrams had enough clout to launch his own studio and co-created the hit spy series “Alias.” 2004 then saw the debut of an even more successful Abrams creation with “Lost,” transforming him into a permanent Hollywood fixture.
Around the time he was developing the script for the “Lost” pilot, though, Abrams got the kind of phone call most Hollywood types dream of receiving. It turned out that Steven Spielberg was angling to make a modern redux of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” and wanted Abrams to write the screenplay. As he explained in a 2011 profile in Vanity Fair, Abrams was flattered yet had the moxie to turn Spielberg down, preferring to focus all his attention on “Lost” instead.