Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [95]
“They congratulated me, but I told them: Fellas, it’s over,” Yablans said. “When the studios see how much money you can make with this kind of film, they are going to want to get in on the action and then you will be finished, and that’s what happened.”
One of the first people to see the potential for exploitation was Sean Cunningham, who had not produced a hit since The Last House on the Left. After seeing the movie, he immediately called his friend the screenwriter Victor Miller. They had been struggling to come up with an idea for a crossover hit. They had written a family-friendly movie about a bunch of orphans who start a soccer team, a knockoff of The Bad News Bears. No one cared. Money was running out. Miller had donated blood to earn some cash to feed his family. He was sitting in his home in Stratford, Connecticut, when Cunningham called to tell him that he had an idea that would change his life. “Halloween is making a lot of money,” Cunningham said. “Why don’t we rip it off?”
CHAPTER TEN
STOMACHING IT
I can’t lie to you about your chances, but you have my sympathies.
Ash, Alien
AT USC’S FILM SCHOOL, John Carpenter may have been most likely to succeed, but Dan O’Bannon was the resident genius. A mad, gloomy, dysfunctional genius, to be sure, but still, it was widely agreed by their classmates that his imagination simply worked faster than everyone else’s. He knew this, too, and that was part of why his series of failures during the decade when fantasy films went mainstream frustrated him.
Dark Star, the movie he hoped would launch his career, closed soon after it opened. After a year away in Paris, Dune collapsed and he returned to Los Angeles to find that his old girlfriend Diane, then dating a doctoral candidate at USC, was no longer responding to his advances. That stung. “We weren’t exactly on good terms,” Diane explains, spelling out his attitude: “‘Okay, I’m back now. Drop everything.’ I don’t think so.”
Then he started to notice how Carpenter was being celebrated as a hot up-and-coming director even before Halloween opened. That burned. “Carpenter would call me up and got a big boost over rubbing it in my face that he threw me overboard and he was doing just fine,” O’Bannon says. “It was sheer cruelty.”
But what really made Dan O’Bannon miserable was not jealousy or resentment or disappointment, but rather the awful, wrenching pain right below his navel where he could sense something terrible was stirring. O’Bannon’s stomach had become a source of suffering that took up much of his attention. At first he thought it was a passing illness. Then a doctor convinced him it was appendicitis. But surgery didn’t stop the pain. It wasn’t diagnosed correctly as Crohn’s disease until 1980, but for years the incurable condition disrupted the normal process of digestion, inflaming his bowels, shortening his gut, cutting off the transit of food through his body.
The simple act of eating terrified him, and a trip to the bathroom meant potentially hours of arduous and humiliating pain. The digestion process felt like something bubbling inside of him struggling to get out. This made O’Bannon very nervous about travel or even being far away from a bathroom. Stress made it worse. He thought about his stomach all the time. He kept his disease quiet and worried privately to friends that it would ruin his career. What he didn’t realize back then was that this lifelong struggle would actually be the inspiration for his greatest