Dan O'Bannon Alien (1979)
Dan O'Bannon (1946–2009) wrote the screenplay for Alien (1979) from a story he developed with Ronald Shusett. He had worked his way to Alien through John Carpenter's Dark Star (1974) and Alejandro Jodorowsky's aborted Dune. The film made his career and the franchise it launched eventually paid for his medical bills.
Dark Star was the trial run for everything Alien would do better
O'Bannon co-wrote and edited Dark Star (1974) with John Carpenter at USC, playing the part of Sergeant Pinback. The film is a low-budget comic riff on existential boredom in deep space — a four-man crew, twenty years from home, blowing up unstable planets while losing their minds. It contains, in embryonic form, several elements that would later define Alien: a working-class crew on a long-haul mission, a cramped industrial spaceship, an alien creature loose in the corridors. The alien in Dark Star is a beach ball with claws. O'Bannon spent the rest of the decade trying to imagine what a creature would look like if it were taken seriously. (wikipedia, imdb)
Jodorowsky's Dune introduced him to Giger and to the design language he needed
After Dark Star, O'Bannon was hired by Alejandro Jodorowsky to handle visual effects for an adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune. The production assembled a remarkable team in Paris — Moebius, Chris Foss, H.R. Giger, Pink Floyd — and then collapsed for lack of financing in 1976. O'Bannon returned to Los Angeles broke, homeless, and carrying the visual residue of months looking at Giger's biomechanical paintings.
"When I got back to America I was still haunted by his work. It was on my mind, and when we sat down to do Alien I ended up visualizing the thing as I was writing it — I found myself visualizing it as a Giger painting." — Dan O'Bannon, Monster Legacy (2015)
He wrote the script on Ronald Shusett's couch
O'Bannon crashed with Ronald Shusett, a young writer-producer who had optioned a Philip K. Dick story (We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, the basis of Total Recall). The two revived an earlier O'Bannon script called Memory and started working on a spec horror picture set in space. The working title was Star Beast.
"StarBeast is one of those titles that you think of and then you... you throw them away... One morning at three o'clock, [in] Ronny's apartment, I'm typing away and the characters are saying the Alien this and the Alien that — and suddenly that word 'Alien' just came up out of the typewriter at me." — Dan O'Bannon, Monster Legacy (2015)
Shusett supplied the chestburster — O'Bannon supplied the cosmic horror
Shusett's contribution was the central conceit: an alien that gestates inside a human host and bursts free. O'Bannon recognized it immediately as the spine of the film. His own contribution was tone — the deliberate Lovecraftian framing, the indifferent universe, the corporate setup, the sense that the crew were stumbling into someone else's catastrophe.
"This is a movie of Alien interspecies rape — that's it, that's scary, because it hits all of our buttons, all of our unresolved feelings about sexuality." — Dan O'Bannon, Monster Legacy (2015)
"One especially insightful critic... wrote that Alien evoked the writings of H.P. Lovecraft... that was my very thought while writing. That baneful little storm-lashed planetoid halfway across the galaxy was a fragment of the Old Ones' homeworld, and the Alien a blood relative of Yog-Sothoth." — Dan O'Bannon, Something Perfectly Disgusting (book) (book, not available online)
Hill and Giler rewrote, and O'Bannon fought back through arbitration
Producers Walter Hill and David Giler, through Brandywine Productions, acquired the script and rewrote it. They added the Ash subplot — one of the film's strongest elements — and tightened the dialogue. O'Bannon resented the rewrite and contested credit through Writers Guild arbitration. The Guild awarded him sole screenplay credit; Shusett got shared story credit. Hill and Giler received producer credits and no writing credit on screen, though their changes are visible throughout the finished film.
The career after Alien stayed in genre
| Year | Project | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1974 | Dark Star | Co-writer, editor, actor | Carpenter collaboration |
| 1979 | Alien | Screenwriter | Career-defining work |
| 1981 | Heavy Metal | Writer (segments) | Animated anthology |
| 1981 | Dead & Buried | Co-writer | With Shusett |
| 1985 | Lifeforce | Co-writer | Tobe Hooper |
| 1985 | Return of the Living Dead | Writer, director | His only feature direction |
| 1990 | Total Recall | Co-writer | With Shusett — the Memory material finally produced |
| 1994 | The Resurrected | Director | H.P. Lovecraft adaptation |
Return of the Living Dead (1985) is his most personal film — a horror comedy that he both wrote and directed. Total Recall (1990) finally produced the Philip K. Dick adaptation he and Shusett had been carrying since the mid-1970s. He continued writing through the 1990s and 2000s while battling Crohn's disease, which had afflicted him since adolescence. He died in 2009 at sixty-three.