Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [32]
The wandering plot followed a spaceship going on bomb runs, and on the second one, an explosive gets stuck in the exterior of the ship and one of the crew has to crowbar it out. O’Bannon immediately saw the possibilities for dark humor and some intellectual gamesmanship. O’Bannon proposed the perfect ending for an absurdist science-fiction epic. “What if it’s a talking bomb and he has to argue it out of exploding?” O’Bannon proposed. Carpenter laughed. He thought movies worked best when they are emotional, not intellectual. But it was better than anything else they had, so he agreed.
With a computerized voice that evoked HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the bomb says it will explode in minutes. Then in a flight of fancy, the crew attempt to talk the bomb out of it, engaging in a duel straight out of Philosophy 101. “How do you know you exist?” Lieutenant Doolittle asks the bomb, trying to undercut the point of exploding. Eventually, the bomb, confused, doubts its own mission and retreats, only to decide for relatively random reasons to explode anyway. O’Bannon’s eccentric satiric sensibility pushed the movie in a more comic direction until it became something closer to a spoof.
At the time, Dan was sleeping with Diane Rasmussen, an irreverent, beautiful, and married blond assistant to a dean at the school. She received plenty of attention from boys at school, even O. J. Simpson, who approached her inside a supermarket with a bunch of friends, tossing a come-on in her direction. When she showed off her wedding ring, the whole group yelled “Awwww!”
Diane was more interested in the film students, partly because she was married to one and occasionally acted in films. Many at USC were a little surprised that she then gravitated toward O’Bannon. “It seemed kind of like he was a vampire taking advantage of this beautiful woman,” Narelle jokes. But Diane’s marriage was growing distant, and as the daughter of a man who worked at NASA, she was also drawn to the beyond. She was infatuated with O’Bannon’s dark sense of humor and loved spending evenings laughing wickedly. One time when they were lounging in bed, Dan took a felt-tip marker and drew a tattoo on her butt that read PROPERTY OF HELL’S ANGELS. She thought it was hilarious and decided as an experiment not to wash it off. “I won’t shove it in my husband’s face,” she explains, “neither will I hide it: let’s see if he notices it. Well, the sad fact was he didn’t go there, and I knew my marriage was a dead dog.”
Another time in bed she recalls O’Bannon discussing his struggles with Carpenter, which often resembled the quarrels of sibling rivals. As they worked together on the script, some tension developed between the two friends. Carpenter and O’Bannon could be competitive. Diane remembers O’Bannon telling a story of sitting at a restaurant with Carpenter with a bowl of hot pepper in between them. O’Bannon picked one up and popped it in his mouth, and despite the fact that it burned, he boasted that it was nothing, challenging his friend to try two. Carpenter did and gasped. That made Dan laugh.
But on set, they worked beautifully. Carpenter played the stoic leader while O’Bannon threw out ideas feverishly, working as a one-man brainstorm and utility man. O’Bannon acted, did sound design, edited, and created the futuristic design with almost no money. He turned a box of Styrofoam into a space suit, ice cube trays into control panels. A tool to learn French pronunciation became