Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [100]
Hill revered Howard Hawks and subscribed to one of his principles: “Have three good scenes and the rest of the time don’t offend anyone.” That one scene was worth building upon. Giler mocked the errors in logic. If the alien’s blood was made of acid, then why didn’t it burn through his flesh? His father was a screenwriter and knew how Hollywood looked down at science fiction. “I remember Giler saying, ‘It’s the science-fiction writers, the studio executives don’t want to go to dinner with these loony guys from Topanga or whatever,’” Hill says. “They want to go to dinner with Billy Wilder.”
Giler and Hill knew how to talk to studio executives, and Hill made the argument to the president of 20th Century Fox, Alan Ladd, that if they dressed up this B-movie material with A-movie production values they could fool the audience. “This was a cruder story than Planet of the Apes or Fantastic Voyage,” Hill says. “This was B-movie by its nature. You had to make it better. We could do that. That was our deal, we made things better.” The blockbuster success of Star Wars, another Fox production, surely helped their case. The studio made an offer, with one caveat. Alien needed to be bigger, more than $10 million. Just as when Robert Evans argued that for Rosemary’s Baby to be taken seriously it could not look like a William Castle production, Ladd decided that even though this was Roger Corman material, it could not look like that. It had to be a blockbuster.
No one could believe how fast the tiny monster movie—a man in a rubber suit!—transformed into a $10 million event. For O’Bannon, selling his script was not just good for his career; it was essential for his health. The year 1977 had been a terrible one for his stomach ailment, sending him in and out of the hospital. The studio gave him a screenwriter credit and he negotiated for a say in the look of the film, immediately bringing on his old coworkers from Dune: Chris Foss, Jean Giraud, and Ron Cobb. Still, a pessimist at heart, O’Bannon was sure that his good fortune could not be for real. They were going to change the script, kick him off the set, and attempt to prevent him from using Giger’s designs. He was right about almost everything. It didn’t take long for executives to get nervous—and they had good reason. The movie had no real stars, it had unproven writers, and Giger’s designs were not exactly family-friendly. How were parents who took their kids to Star Wars going to embrace a monster with a head that looked like a black penis? “Alan Ladd thought his stuff was too sexual and disgusting and no one would see it,” Shusett said. “We kept making the case and they told us to shut up about it until we stopped.”
Fox also had a director problem. Hill turned down the job eventually when he realized that it was going to mean dealing with lots of special effects. “That stuff always bored me,” he said. Several other directors turned Fox down. Eventually a newcomer named Ridley Scott took the job. He was known for a sharp visual sense as a talented stager of commercials, but was unproven. He had made an art film called The Duelists, a melodrama set during the Napoleonic wars that gained notice for its elegantly flashy aesthetic. He took the job and the lobbying began. “Dan took me aside, like he was showing me a dirty book,” Scott recalled. “It was Giger’s book. My eyeballs nearly fell out.” Scott promised to make the case to the studio.
That Ladd would be convinced by the enthusiasm of a relatively inexperienced director sounds dubious. But that’s what Ladd says too. Shusett has a different story, saying Ladd told him what happened while riding in a car to the premiere. In this version, the studio, having trouble finding a director, was losing interest fast until Steven Spielberg, one of the many directors who got sent the script, read Alien. He liked it so much that he called Ladd to tell him that he couldn’t make the film due to conflicts with his schedule (he was making Close Encounters