Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [33]
O’Bannon played a version of himself in the movie as Pinback, a bitter, angry, bearded eccentric who delivered rambling monologues to the camera in a spirit similar to Bloodbath. But he spent most of his time working on the production. O’Bannon loved drawing sketches of spaceships and faraway planets and aliens, but his ideas about what made effective designs evolved due to a friendship with Ron Cobb, a local illustrator at the Los Angeles Free Press whom he sought out for help with Dark Star. Cobb, a political cartoonist and devotee of Isaac Asimov, fell in love with the space program and believed strongly that science fiction needed real science to remain relevant.
In general, very little effort was made in movies and television shows at this time to approximate what real space travel was like. The consoles in Star Trek looked flimsier than the stuff in NASA photos, the rooms too big, and the problems of gravity never figured into the plotlines. O’Bannon and Cobb collaborated on some of the computer-animated displays that managed to give the movie a remarkably high-tech-looking control panel. To get people to believe in the fantasy, Cobb argued, the movie “needs to have a sense of where technology is going. We need to do real science to reclaim a sense of awe and wonder without resorting to the supernatural.”
Carpenter also insisted on a level of detail in design. His friends occasionally blanched at the intensity of their two leaders. Winkless, for instance, was recruited to help re-create the starry background of space using a black, shiny paper that unfurls on huge rolls. His crude special effect did not fool anyone; when someone opened a door and a gust of wind flew by, the paper flopped around. Carpenter was furious. “He wouldn’t talk to me for years,” Winkless said. “I would see him and he would refer to it, needling me.”
Carpenter and O’Bannon got along because they were both perfectionists, intensely so, and by the end of the shoot, they were proud of the film. Even if it wasn’t 2001, it could kick-start their careers, which they were both mapping out. They talked about making a similar science-fiction story set in a spaceship where a crew discovers a menacing alien, inspired by The Thing from Another World. O’Bannon actually wrote the first half of a script. “While we were in the midst of doing Dark Star I had a secondary thought on it,” he said. “Same movie, but in a completely different light.” This movie was a Lovecraftian vision of space, and O’Bannon would direct. This half-finished screenplay would become Alien.
Along with their colleagues, they saw themselves as part of a new movement to legitimize fantasy films. Carpenter and O’Bannon couldn’t wait to take what they learned working together and start making movies. “Working with John was a lot of fun. It was a terrific experience. It was afterward that things fell apart,” O’Bannon says, adding, “He didn’t have disdain for me. It’s just that he had no personal interest in me. I was an object—like a toaster. I was someone who was willing to work real hard and then when the toast was done, he was through.”
CHAPTER FOUR
ASSAULTING THE AUDIENCE
I think it’s crazy—all that blood and violence. I thought you were supposed to be the Love Generation.
Estelle Collingwood, The Last House on the Left
WES CRAVEN was convinced he was going to Hell. Growing up in Cleveland, he learned about horror at home. Money was tight. Craven was only three when his father died on a loading dock of a company that made parts for airplanes, and the memory that stuck was of his boiling