Cinefantastique Online

Dan O’Bannon, the creator of ALIEN, passed away in a Santa Monica hospital on Thursday at the age of 63; the cause of death was Crohn’s disease.

O’Bannon was one of a seminal generation of film school graduates that included the likes of John Carpenter, Brian DePalma, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg – life-long film fans who grew up loving science-fiction, fantasy, and horror, and embraced the genres in their own work without guilt or apology.

Dan O'Bannon (right) as Pinback

O’Bannon first gained cult status for co-writing DARK STAR with Carpenter, who also directed. The low-budget student film, about an alienated crew on a length space mission to destroy unstable stars, thus paving the way for colonization, features many elements that O’Bannon later recycled in ALIEN, including a menacing alien (although this one is played more for laughs). Besides writing, O’Bannon designed the sets, created visual effects, and edited the film, which turned out so well that it was picked up for theatrical distribution.

After DARK STAR, O’Bannon worked on an aborted version of DUNE, to have been directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky (the autuer behind the midnight movie EL TOPO). When that project fell apart, O’Bannon wound up living on the couch of his friend Ronald Shusett, and set about getting to work on the screenplay that would turn out to be ALIEN – one of the greatest monster movies ever made, and one of the most influential for the next several decades.

Unfortunately, the film’s blockbuster success did not launch O’Bannon’s career the way it should have, perhaps because he burned a few bridges. Before ALIEN’s release, O’Bannon gave interviews (in Cinefantasitque, Fantastic Films, etc) suggesting that producers David Giler and Walter Hill had tried to rob him of screenplay credit. Hill and Giler had done extensive revisions on the characterization and dialogue (which included turning the protagonist into a woman), but the Writers Guild awarded O’Bannon sole screenplay credit (with a co-story credit for Shusett) because the story, structure, and scenes remained virtually unchanged (except for the addition of the surprise twist that Ash turns out to be a robot). Disputes over screenplay credit are almost the norm in Hollywood, but O’Bannon, in the Fantastic Films interview, compared producers to cave men who liked to eat the bone marrow of creative artists like himself.

O’Bannon’s subsequent screen credits tended to be quirky and interesting but often disappointing, usually because of studio interference. For example, the helicopter pilot played by Roy Scheider in BLUE THUNDER was changed from a villain to a hero, which made it difficult to account for why he would use the tituler police chopper to blow up half of Los Angeles. LIFEFORCE (1985) and INVADERS FROM MARS (1986), both written for Tobe Hooper (THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE) were enjoyable but somewhat overblown efforts, made when independent Cannon productions was trying to prove that they could compete dollar for dollar with the major studios. TOTAL RECALL, with Paul Verhoeven directing Arnold Schwarzenegger, was another blockbuster, with lots of interesting ideas left over from the Philip K. Dick source material, but O’Bannon himself blasted script changes the dumbed down the storyline.

O’Bannon made the transition to the director’s chair wit the cult hit RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985), a sort of tangential sequel to George A. Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968). Originally scripted by Romero’s NIGHT collaborator John Russo, the film was rewritten by O’Bannon for Tobe Hooper, who bowed out, leaving room for O’Bannon to step in. O’Bannon’s script cleverly plays on its tenuous connection to Romero’s film, revising the zombie mythology to create something new, which went on to leave its own lasting impression on audiences around the world. (Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Riff Trax audio commentary for NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, in which the former MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 stars attempt to elicit laughter by murmuring “Brains!” every time a zombie appears. However, the zombies in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD do not each brains; that innovation was created by O’Bannon in RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD.)

O’Bannon’s only follow-up directorial effort, THE RESURRECTED (1992), based on H.P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, was less successful. Later screenplay credits include titles SCREAMERS (1995) and BLEEDERS (1997), which left little impression on the public. O’Bannon’s name continued to appear on screen thanks to on-going ALIEN sequels (”based on characters created by…”), but no new screenplays went into production. However, IMDB lists two projects in development: SILVAICUS 3015 and THEY BITE (an old script that O’Bannon described decades ago as a “nasty little goodie”).

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD was the first cover story I ever wrote for the print version of Cinefantastique, but Dan O’Bannon refused to grant me an interview, claiming that the magazine (despite favorable coverage on many of his projects) was out to get him. After elaborating on this theory at length during a phone call, he announced, “You can consider this the interview; you can print anything I’ve said.” He sounded serious, but I did not take him up on the offer.

After the issue was published, I tried to give O’Bannon a copy in person, but he declined, still convinced that the magazine had a vendetta against him. Although he graciously allowed that I personally might not be part of that vendetta, he was disturbed that another journalist (Alan Jones in England) had managed to obtain an interview with him that appeared in the issue. “If they printed one word that I didn’t say, I’ll sue,” he threatened. “I would love to get my hands on Cinefantastique’s assets.” As far as I know, no lawsuit was ever filed. However, years later O’Bannon had his lawyer send a threatening letter on another subject: threatening to sue Cinefantastique for quoting comments that O’Bannon made after a screening of TOTAL RECALL at his alma mater, the University of Southern California. O’Bannon’s lawyer claimed that this represented “copyright infringement – a claim that, if upheld, would have pretty much put an end to journalism.

I include these anecdotes because I suspect they offer some insight into why O’Bannon was not hired more often: diplomacy was not his strong suit. Apparently, O’Bannon was not adept at playing the Hollywood game; even friends and associates described him as difficult. However, O’Bannon’s personal quirks do not absolve Hollywood of under-utilizing this gifted source of imaginative material. In person, O’Bannon was a jovial, articulate raconteur, who loved horror, fantasy, and science fiction, and that love gave birth to at least one certifiable masterpiece that changed the history of horror cinema forever. With O’Bannon’s passing the world of cinefantastique has lost a gifted and creative, if somewhat temperamental artist, who vision and imagination should have been utilized more often by the film industry.

Hollywood Reporter Obituary