Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [29]
This morning we were discussing green cheese and the man in the moon and kindred subjects. During the discussion the boy came up with the startling information that the man in the moon so loves green cheese (of which the moon is composed) that he eats up the whole moon every twenty-eight days or so and has to order a new one. So far as I know this little notion is original with him. He says he never heard it anywhere. Not bad, huh?
Two years later, there is the first mention of the macabre when Danny tells his father that he had an idea for a horror play. “Then nature asserted itself and he had to go to the toilet,” Thomas wrote of his son. “I’ll tell it to you while I’m on the toilet. Don’t tell me when you’re not listening. I want to talk on anyhow.”
Dan O’Bannon was a chatterbox. His elementary school teachers liked him but with some reservations. Every year, they would praise his intelligence and artistic talents but lament his lack of effort. If he worked hard, Thomas suggested, he would become just like the three or four other top students in the class. “On the other hand, in the role of the bored genius he stands out alone,” he wrote of Daniel at ten years old. “As an artist he is the unquestioned head of the class.”
It was this need to be alone in the spotlight combined with a paranoid fear of failure that helped define O’Bannon. And while his father saw this early, O’Bannon until the end of his life blamed him for a difficult childhood. “My father was a hillbilly,” he says. “And he was unstable.”
O’Bannon enjoyed social interaction but was not very good at it. Graduating from high school in 1964, O’Bannon left home for art school, one of many worlds where he discovered that he did not fit in. He hated the teachers, thought the students self-involved and smug. At the school paper, he wrote film and theater reviews, including a treatment of John Frankenheimer’s Seconds that argued that directors use mocking self-parody to cover up their mistakes. “If you take yourself seriously, you better be good.” He also demonstrates interest in the drama of Edward Albee and describes the heroine of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as “disgustingly sexual.”
Besides coming to the realization that visual arts would not pay well, O’Bannon had begun looking more seriously at other media. After reading an advice column in Playboy that suggested film school, he saw his future more clearly. At USC, O’Bannon was a hippie in style more than substance. Rallies were not his thing; nor was pacifism. When the criminals came to get him, he wanted to be prepared. He sympathized with the protesters at the Democratic convention, but his days as a liberal ended when he discovered gun control. O’Bannon loved his firearms. He considered anarchism.
O’Bannon didn’t have enough money to make his own films, so he worked with other directors. First he worked as an editor on a socially conscious movie about race directed by David Engelbach called Street Scene, about a white woman whose car breaks down in the ghetto only to see a black man become the victim of bigoted violence. O’Bannon was not impressed. “The story is tendentious, a good example of a political opinion from someone who doesn’t know enough to have one,” he says. Then he tried to get on the crew for a movie based on Charles Whitman, the sniper who killed sixteen people from the top of a tower on the campus of University