‘Alien’ writer Dan O’Bannon dies

O'Bannon in the early 80's.

Dan O’Bannon, the unassuming sci-fi screenwriter and quirky horror specialist behind the “Alien” film franchise, died Thursday at St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica after a 30-year battle with Crohn’s disease.

via ‘Alien’ writer Dan O’Bannon dies.

I haven’t read a ton of screenplays, because why would you do that, but back when I was scribbling out my own uninspired scripts, I would read whatever I could get my hands on. I read both Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs before the movies came out. I read Taxi Driver, the only script I’ve ever seen that had chapter headings (it worked). I also read a lot of scripts that are still stuck in development hell, like Oliver Stone’s The Demolished Man, a sci-fi version of the western Shane written by David S. Goyer long before he became one of Hollywood’s high-paid go-to guys, and an amazing never produced sci-fi script that was a sort of cross between Frankenstein and Robocop, with heart! And a twist of lemon. Many of the scripts I read back then were good. A few were really good. And two were great. One of them was Taxi Driver, and it’s no secret that Paul Schrader is one of the greatest screenwriters of the 20th Century. But the other was Alien.

Alien, 1979.

Like many current Hollywood heavyweights, O’Bannon went to USC where he met John Carpenter, with whom he collaborated on a forty-five minute student film called Dark Star. Carpenter made short films the way that I made short films; they were way too long. But unlike me, he was smart (or driven) enough to find the money to expand the thing to feature length, and the resulting film, on which O’Bannon served in many capacities (including lead actor), won an early ‘Saturn Award’ for effects.

That project lead to a paying gig, though not a good one. O’Bannon was hired to help bring Dune to the screen, but the project quickly fell apart. On the heels of that disaster, O’Bannon wrote the story for Alien, along with low-budget genre scribe Ronald Shusett (Dead & Buried, Above the Law, and, with O’Bannon, Total Recall, not so low budget after all). O’Bannon wrote one part of Heavy Metal (now being remade by David Fincher et al), a funky mid-80’s Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Fun House) flick called Lifeforce, and two films that sound related but aren’t: Screamers and Bleeders. In later years, he made a (undoubtedly very good) living as an uncredited script doctor. To paraphrase Barton Fink, you can’t throw a rock in Hollywood without hitting an uncredited script doctor.

Having written such a fantastic screenplay early on, I’m not exactly sure why O’Bannon languished for the rest of his career in the B-movie lowlands. It could well be that his Alien script was really just the foundation for Ridley’s film. If so, it was one hell of a foundation. Here’s the first page of the script that I have:

“ALIEN”
by
Walter Hill
and
David Giler

Based on a screenplay
by
Dan O’Bannon
Story by
Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett

SOMETIME IN THE FUTURE:

INT. ENGINE ROOM

Empty, cavernous.

INT. ENGINE CUBICLE

Circular, jammed with instruments.
All of them idle.
Console chairs for two.
Empty.

INT. OILY CORRIDOR – “C” LEVEL

Long, dark.
Empty.
Turbos throbbing.
No other movement.

INT. CORRIDOR – “A” LEVEL

Long, empty.

INT. INFIRMARY – “A” LEVEL

Distressed ivory walls.
All instrumentation is at rest.

INT. CORRIDOR TO BRIDGE – “A” LEVEL

Black, empty.

INT. BRIDGE

Vacant.
Two space helmets resting on chairs.
Electrical hum.
Lights on the helmets begin to signal one another.
Moments of silence.
A yellow light goes on.
Data mind black in b.g.
Electronic hum.
A green light goes on in front of one helmet.
Electronic pulsing sounds.
A red light goes on in front of the other helmet.
An electronic conversation ensues.
Reaches a crescendo.
Then silence.
The lights go off, save the yellow.

INT. CORRIDOR TO HYPERSLEEP VAULT

Lights come on.
Seven gowns hang from the curved wall.
Vault door opens.

INT. HYPERSLEEP VAULT

Explosions of escaping gas.
The lid on a freezer pops open.
Slowly, groggily, KANE sits up.
Pale.
Kane rubs the sleep from his eyes.
Stands.
Looks around.
Stretches.
Looks at the other freezer compartments.
Scratches.
Moves off.

INT. GALLEY

Kane plugs in a Silex.
Lights a cigarette.
Coughs.
Grinds some coffee beans.
Runs some water through.

KANE
Rise and shine, Lambert.

INT. HYPERSLEEP VAULT

Another lid pops open.
A young woman sits up.

LAMBERT
What time is it?

KANE
(voice over)
What do you care.

Minimal, evocative, economical. You see that character description for Kane? “Pale.” That’s it. Now a days the screenwriters would say: Kane, a pale, fragile, plucked bird of a man whose intense eyes and craggy lines betray a life of hard living tempered by an ultimately sensitive, even womanly soul. But don’t tell him that. When this boiled chicken isn’t drinking whiskey (neat), or whoring, he likes to take long walks on the beaches of Andromeda, naked to the waste, nipples hard and pointy as choral spikes. Kane likes the feel of galactic sand under his feet; it reminds him of his youth, the only time in his life he felt really, truly alive. Or some such shit.

My only gripe is that, chances are, if you were sent into deep dark space in hypersleep, the coffee you’d make once you woke up would not need to be ground. The shelf life of whole beans in two weeks. Maybe space acts as a preservative.

Dan O’Bannon, dead at 63.