Bill Lancaster The Thing (1982)
William Henry Lancaster (1947–1997) wrote the screenplay for The Thing (1982). He was the son of Burt Lancaster — the four-time Academy Award–nominated actor and one of the dominant American film stars of the 1950s — and he wrote two produced features in his career: The Bad News Bears (1976) and The Thing (1982). Both are durable, both are spare and unsentimental, and both are about small groups of people who are bad at being a team.
A childhood polio survivor with a different kind of career
Lancaster was born in Los Angeles in 1947 and contracted polio at age three. The illness gave him a permanent limp and altered the trajectory of a childhood that would otherwise have been organized around the physical-action register of his father's career; he turned to writing instead. He was a working magazine and newspaper journalist through his twenties before The Bad News Bears (1976) — a Walter Matthau-led story about a children's baseball team — established him as a screenwriter with a particular talent for ensembles in which nobody is the protagonist. (wikipedia)
How The Thing came to him
Universal hired Lancaster in 1976 to adapt John W. Campbell's Who Goes There? The project moved through several drafts and several attached directors over the next four years; Lancaster's final shooting draft, dated 1981, was the version Carpenter and Cohen took into production. The screenplay's defining choices — the twelve-man ensemble with no central villain, the dog-thing kennel transformation,b12 the blood-test sequence as the post-midpoint approach's specific tool,b32 b33 b34 the open endingb40 — are all Lancaster's.
"Bill's screenplay was the reason I made the film. It was the cleanest first draft I had ever read. Twelve men, no women, no escape, and a monster you cannot see. Every page was the page I would have written. He was a real writer." — John Carpenter, Cinephilia & Beyond (2018)
"I wanted the audience to be the thirteenth man at the table. The whole movie is built around this question: who do you trust when you can't trust anyone?" — Bill Lancaster, Cinefantastique (1982)
The dog-thing was Lancaster's structural innovation
Campbell's novella opens with the camp already in possession of the alien remains and works through who has and has not been imitated; Lancaster's most important structural change was to put the audience inside the camp at the moment the malamute arrives, and to defer the reveal that the dog is the Thing for the entire first act. The audience watches the dog drift through the corridors for almost half an hour before the kennel transformation in beat 12 confirms what they have been suspecting.b8 b11 b12 The structural payoff — the audience knows something is wrong but does not know what — is one of the cleanest examples of Lancaster's writing.
What Lancaster wrote after
The Thing was Lancaster's last produced feature. He developed several projects in the 1980s — including a never-produced sequel to The Bad News Bears and a never-produced biopic of his father — and worked principally as a screenwriter for hire, most of his output in development hell. He died in January 1997 of a heart attack, age forty-nine.
"Bill was the most disciplined writer I ever worked with. He was also the most stubborn. He would not write a part of the story he did not believe in. He would not put a woman in The Thing because there were no women at the South Pole stations in 1981. He was right." — Stuart Cohen, on the producer's blog The Original Fan (2010s)
Selected filmography
| Year | Film | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1976 | The Bad News Bears | Walter Matthau, Tatum O'Neal |
| 1978 | The Bad News Bears Go to Japan | (story credit only) |
| 1982 | The Thing | Carpenter |