Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [59]
Harris bought Dark Star but he didn’t keep it for long. He was mired in a divorce proceeding and money suddenly became an issue, so he sold the film to Bryanston Distributing, a small, mob-run company that bungled the release, sending it to over forty theaters in Los Angeles without doing a proper marketing campaign. On opening night, Carpenter and O’Bannon went to a theater in Hollywood and asked the ticket taker: “How’s the audience?” He said, “What audience?” What upset O’Bannon even more was their reaction: they sat silent, no laughing. In his mind, they missed the point. This was supposed to be funny, absurdly so. No one got it.
Soon after the movie was made, O’Bannon began telling their friends that he did so much work on the film that it was misleading for Carpenter to call himself the director. He said that he was as responsible for what was on-screen as Carpenter was. Carpenter knew the value of being seen as the auteur, and when word got to him about what O’Bannon was saying, he wasted no time clearing it up. He took O’Bannon out to a restaurant, told him that he was the director and no one else, and then said that they needed to stop working together.
“This really stunned me,” O’Bannon recalls. “John taught me a lot about human nature. People will do terrible things to other people in order to grab all the cookies and run away with it. Up to that point, I had a naive notion that if you’re real good friends with someone, you will be loyal forever. Not based on much, mind you. John taught me it’s not true. Some people will just cut your head off, run away, and not look back.”
Dark Star was not a hit in 1974, but it was still an effective advertisement for two upcoming talents. Carpenter moved on to writing scripts and O’Bannon also struck out on his own, but without a directing credit to his name or the help of any producers. Harris found work for Carpenter, but when the ambitiously experimental director Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo) contacted the producer because he was so impressed with the special effects of Dark Star that he wanted to hire O’Bannon for his new adaptation of Dune, Harris resisted, saying he would only give him his number for a price. Jodorowsky found another way to get to O’Bannon. Dune included some money up front, and an opportunity to work with some of the most talented artists in the world, so O’Bannon left town and flew to Paris for one of the happiest periods in his young life.
Dune was one of those storied projects that quickly developed a reputation among fantasy fans as the greatest movie never made. The director began with the idea of finding the most talented visual artists in the world, putting them in the same room, and letting the best ideas win. He signed up Salvador Dalí, added the French artist Moebius (Jean Giraud), the British illustrator Chris Foss, the Swiss surrealist H. R. Giger, and then traveled to America to recruit Ron Cobb and O’Bannon. Most of them sat in that room (Dalí stayed away) hashing out designs in a chaotic creative environment that O’Bannon found quite instructive. Here was how movies should be made, he thought, starting with design and artistry—not meetings of producers looking for something to sell.
It was thrilling for this Missouri native not only to live in Paris for a few months but to get treated as a VIP, staying in fine hotels and sending assistants on missions to find him bottles of Coke. Writing letters back home to his old girlfriend Diane, he described himself as a giant in a city of small rooms, portions, and side streets. In the manner of a novice tourist, he explained the mundane differences in culture as something much more macabre and uncanny.
Everything is distorted, unfamiliar and disorienting. You can’t understand what anyone is saying, and the walls are closing in. Sensory overload. And, like acid, you can’t come down. Incidentally, the women here—Les Parisiennes [sic]—are all ugly. I don’t know why everybody is always yelling about how beautiful French women are. They don’t look a bit like Bridgette