TORONTO -- Four years ago, screenwriter Leslie Bohem's phone rang. The person on the other end of the line introduced himself as Steven Spielberg.

"I thought it was a prank," Bohem says. "I said 'No it isn't.' Since then I've been told people hang up a lot, like they don't believe it."

But indeed it was the master filmmaker himself. It seems when he likes something, he grabs the phone and makes a direct call. And he liked Bohem's scripts for the action films Daylight and Dante's Peak.

At their first meeting, the man who created Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind and E.T. pitched the idea of a 20-hour TV mini-series about UFOs and alien abductions.

What did Bohem know? At that point, only what he had seen in Spielberg's own movies. But then began a series of meetings that produced draft outlines and character development and finally a television mini-series called Taken.

The mini-series proved to be epic in the Spielberg tradition and late last year helped the Sci-Fi Channel in the U.S. dominate the cable ratings for the first time ever. Overthe next 10 weeks, beginning tonight at 8 p.m., CBC-TV will broadcast all 10 episodes as part of a summertime break from its usual all-Canadian prime-time schedule.

The plan was to acquire a strong product to build an audience leading into the fall season, but CTV may have already scuttled that idea by programming its new hit, Canadian Idol, at the same time.

But Taken does have Canadian content. The $40-million US project was filmed entirely in B.C. and features several prominent Canadian actors in the cast.

Alonso Oyarzun, a West Coast character actor with a recurring role in several of the episodes, says it was a monumental production that required plenty of acting in front of green screens (where alien beings and spacecraft special effects would be inserted later).

"You could definitely feel it was something big."

But Oyarzun said Spielberg himself never actually came to the set, despite rumours and sightings. In fact, he says, fellow Canadian cast member Matt Frewer even took a camcorder around to interview local townsfolk.

"And they went on with, yeah, that they saw Steven Spielberg, that he was great and blah-blah-blah. So I'm pretty sure that when it comes out on DVD that it'll be in there."

Bohem says Spielberg was very hands-on but made three other films himself while Taken was being shot.

Actually, he's glad the boss didn't make an on-location visit.

"I think if any of us had seen Steven on the set, we would have known we were doing something really wrong."

Taken follows three generations of three American families whose members over the years are abducted and experimented on by the alien occupants of visiting spacecraft. It spans six decades, from the 1940s to today, and incorporates all of the familiar UFO history and mythology, from the Foo Fighters (UFOs spotted during Second World War aerial dogfights over Europe) to Roswell (the alleged crash and capture of a saucer near the New Mexico town in 1947) to crop circles to the alien greys (the little grey creatures with big heads and eyes, a common look that has been handed down from eyewitness accounts to Close Encounters to The X-Files.)

There's also the coverup, a recurring plot turn that reveals the American military to be more inscrutable and duplicitous than the alien visitors.

"The intent right from the start was that this was a modern mythology," Bohem says from Los Angeles. "We didn't feel that we had licence to make any of it up on that level."

He says key events in the 20th-century UFO mythology feed into pop culture, which in turn feeds back into the myth.

"It wouldn't be fair to go 'Well our aliens are seven feet tall and have tentacles.' Because that's not what people say they saw. They say little grey men."

Is Bohem, a mythology major in college, a believer now? He says if aliens exist, that would be incredible, but that if there is no other intelligent life in all the universe but us, it would be even more incredible.

"The more that you research something like this, and the more that you see that really credible people who aren't trying to do anything but tell you something they truly believed happened to them, are telling you this, you kind of go 'There's something going on here.' "

But like Spielberg's own milestone films, it wouldn't be enough just to dramatize a history of alien abduction allegations. Taken also had to have strong characters, and Bohem, who wrote all 10 episodes, made sure of that.

"I can't speak for Steven, but I've certainly seen all his movies and I know that that's what impels them -- you know, they have great characters.

"Really, I'm hard-pressed to think of anything that lasts that didn't. I mean character is the basis of any good story."

Bohem says the mini-series was a career landmark for him.

"I'm proud to be part of the heritage. How great to be part of a legacy with the guy that in many ways created the genre."

He says he is now in consultations with Spielberg about doing something else on an equally large canvas. But, although Taken's ending leaves the possibility open, he insists it won't be a sequel.

At least not yet.

WHO'S WHO

Some of the characters in Taken:

- Dakota Fanning (Allie): Narrator and eventual star at the finale is nine-year-old Fanning, memorable as Sean Penn's daughter in I Am Sam. She emerges as a messianic product of human-alien crossbreeding.

- Eric Close (John): One of the first alien visitors in human guise. Coincidentally, Close starred in the short-lived NBC series Dark Skies in 1997, which also tracked the history of UFO sightings and alleged encounters from the 1940s to today. To complete the link, the first episodes of both Taken and Dark Skies were directed by Tobe Hooper.

- Joel Gretsch (Owen Crawford): Gretsch plays a psycho U.S. military officer who'll stop at nothing, including murder, to hush up the alien spacecraft crash at Roswell, N.M., and try to catch the children of alien-human matings.

- Catherine Dent (Sally Clarke): Dent plays a neglected country wife who finds an injured alien in her barn. She nurses the being -- in human form -- back to health, falls in love and bears son who develops alien powers and becomes a key figure lin the drama.

- Matt Frewer (Dr. Chet Wakeman): Frewer plays the cynical and eccentric Dr. Wakeman, who knows all the alien secrets and may be even more inhuman than the aliens he tracks and studies.

- Heather Donahue (Mary Crawford): Donahue plays a ruthless woman who, like her lover Dr. Wakeman, will stop at nothing to be in on the whole conspiracy.

IF YOU WATCH

What: Taken, 10-week, sci-fi mini-series, produced by Steven Spielberg

When: Starts tonight, 8 p.m.

Where: CBC-TV