Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [60]
Along with these observations, O’Bannon was bursting with enthusiasm over the designs of Foss, Giger, and Giraud. “Apparently doing ‘Dark Star’ wasn’t such a bad idea after all,” he writes, adding, “I feel like I’ve breached some kind of barrier.” The only less than gleeful note of the entire message was when he mentioned that he heard Carpenter was working on a low-budget movie. “So he’s got Winkless working on it, has he? Chummy . . .”
In general, however, O’Bannon’s crankiness was gone. On Dune, there were no limitations, few discussions of money, and lots of brainstorming about design. It was a free-flowing creative bull session. Moreover, the quality of the artists impressed O’Bannon. Of all the work he saw in Paris, what stood out most were the slithery industrial designs of Giger.
Ever since his childhood in the mountainous region of Chur, Switzerland, Giger took his early phobias (snakes, worms) as inspiration for his nightmarish drawings and sculptures. After the suicide of his girlfriend around Easter of 1975, his work darkened even more. He painted grotesque, sexually aggressive monsters with bodies that looked like skeletons with giant phallic heads. O’Bannon was fascinated by these images and upon meeting Giger found common ground in an appreciation of H. P. Lovecraft.
But brilliant designs couldn’t save Dune, which collapsed due to money problems, sending O’Bannon back to Los Angeles. He slept on the couch of his friend Ron Shusett and talked about collaborating on making a new monster movie. Studios turned down O’Bannon and Shusett’s early script for Alien (then called “Star Beast”) because they couldn’t figure out the special effects, so O’Bannon went back to a second similar script with more modest ambitions. The monster was a parasite in space and would attach itself to a crewmember of a ship exploring the universe.
O’Bannon was sidetracked again when he received a call from George Lucas, who wanted help with computer graphics on Star Wars. For three months, O’Bannon designed some of the animation for the movie, a crude early form of computer-generated special effects that included the display that reveals how torpedoes will enter and destroy the Death Star. O’Bannon built on similar work he had done in Dark Star and would repeat again later in his career. While it paid the bills, he received very little notice for it.
At the same time, John Carpenter was working steadily in and out of Hollywood, penning a script for John Wayne and the thriller The Eyes of Laura Mars. He also started shooting Assault on Precinct 13, his first film since Dark Star. His success was not lost on O’Bannon. In his crowded galaxy of resentments, red-hot fury at Carpenter was the Sun. At film school O’Bannon didn’t just respect him, but there was something more emotional as well. He was in awe of his confidence, his ability to charm girls, the ease with which he went through life. O’Bannon kept a close eye on what Carpenter was doing, and was torn when Carpenter invited him to a screening at a theater in Hollywood of Assault on Precinct 13. O’Bannon ended up attending reluctantly.
Assault was in the style of classic westerns like Rio Bravo, but refashioned into urban warfare. It told the story of good guys and bad guys joining forces to defend a police station. The bad guys resembled the violent mobs of Night of the Living Dead but with gang members standing in for the zombies. The intruders, an ethnic mix of bedraggled toughs, were unstoppable and indistinguishable. Putting the ideas about character and monsters that he had discussed at USC into practice, Carpenter created a chaotic world, dominated by an unexplainable evil. In its most notorious scene, a gang member takes out a pistol and shoots an angelic blond girl holding a vanilla ice cream cone in front of a white truck for no reason, except that she was there. The audience surely expected the kid to get away with a brief scare, since killing random children seemed impossible. Frighten them, even possess them, but in the end,