 In 1967 , Ray wrote a script for a film to be called The Alien , based on his short story " <unk> <unk> " ( " <unk> Babu 's Friend " ) , which he wrote in 1962 for Sandesh , the Ray family magazine . Columbia Pictures was the producer for what was a planned US @-@ India co @-@ production , and Peter Sellers and Marlon Brando were cast as the leading actors . Ray found that his script had been copyrighted and the fee appropriated by Mike Wilson . Wilson had initially approached Ray through their mutual friend , Arthur C. Clarke , to represent him in Hollywood . Wilson copyrighted the script credited to Mike Wilson & Satyajit Ray , although he contributed only one word . Ray later said that he never received a penny for the script . After Brando dropped out of the project , the project tried to replace him with James Coburn , but Ray became disillusioned and returned to Calcutta . Columbia expressed interest in reviving the project several times in the 1970s and 1980s , but nothing came of it . When E.T. was released in 1982 , Clarke and Ray saw similarities in the film to his earlier Alien script . Ray claimed that this film plagiarized his script . Ray said that Steven Spielberg 's movie " would not have been possible without my script of ' The Alien ' being available throughout America in mimeographed copies . " Spielberg denied any plagiarism by saying , " I was a kid in high school when this script was circulating in Hollywood . " ( Spielberg actually graduated high school in 1965 and released his first film in 1968 . Besides The Alien , two other unrealised projects that Ray had intended to direct were adaptations of the ancient Indian epic , the Mahābhārata , and E. M. Forster 's 1924 novel A Passage to India . In 1969 , Ray released what would be commercially the most successful of his films . Based on a children 's story written by his grandfather , Goopy <unk> Bagha Byne ( The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha ) , it is a musical fantasy . Goopy the singer and Bagha the drummer , endowed with three gifts by the King of Ghosts , set out on a fantastic journey . They try to stop an impending war between two neighboring kingdoms . Among his most expensive enterprises , the film project was difficult to finance . Ray abandoned his desire to shoot it in color , as he turned down an offer that would have forced him to cast a certain Hindi film actor as the lead . 
