Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [99]
The first emerged out of the egg as a “small, octopoidal creature,” as O’Bannon described it in the letter to Giger, and he sent along a very crude drawing of a round egg with a small shape popping off the top. O’Bannon says the least about the second, the one that busts out of the body. And the third, the full-grown beast, is simply called a “profane abomination.” The producers suggested an oversized, deformed baby. O’Bannon wrote Giger to tell him about that idea, but added that the Swiss artist should feel free to follow his own inspiration. O’Bannon understood that he couldn’t just have the usual monster for this movie. Since the idea of a shape-shifting creature had been downsized to a man in a costume, O’Bannon knew that the monster, more than any other part of this movie, needed to stand out, to horrify, to be a work of innovation.
With that freedom, Giger designed something that had not appeared in a movie before. The slithery, metallic-colored beast flashes mouths of teeth inside other mouths of teeth jutting out of a sharp, protruding skull resting on a grotesque body filled with vaginal crevices and lines of ribs. It was obscene and impossible to classify. It looked crustacean and reptilian, human and machine, a cross between a dinosaur and a snail. In the spirit of a monster from Lovecraft, it had elements of everything but the whole seemed completely original.
After getting the artists on board, O’Bannon, with the help of Shusett, finished the script and sent it to Roger Corman. The producer made what was for him a generous offer: $750,000. O’Bannon was thrilled. But Shusett argued that they should shop the movie around. Star Wars, the summer blockbuster of 1977, had just opened. It shifted the interest of fans from horror to science fiction, and the fact that Corman offered to buy it so quickly made him think that others would, too. Shusett was right. At 20th Century Fox, Alan Ladd Jr., who green-lit Star Wars, was looking for another space epic.
Ladd hired a trio of seasoned filmmakers—David Giler, Gordon Carroll, and Walter Hill—to come up with a darker science-fiction story, one that married spaceships with the ominous terror of horror. Carroll, twenty years older than his partners and friends, was the canny producer with an eye on the balance sheet, while Giler and Hill brought enthusiasm and a certain buzz. Giler was a comic television writer transitioning into film. Hill was more accomplished, with exciting, hardedged screenplays of movies such as The Getaway and The Drowning Pool already to his name. Known as a crafter of economical stories with tough-guy dialogue, Hill believed in men of action and he shared John Carpenter’s interest in keeping character mysterious.
“Look at the western,” explains Hill. “A guy comes into town, a stranger, seems to have a purpose. He is incredibly interesting. As soon as you understand his purpose, he becomes vastly less interesting. By the end of the film, he’s bland, a nice man.”
Hill and Giler sold themselves to Fox as writers who could give a script some punch and get rid of all the filler. They had their chance to deliver when Mark Haggard, a USC friend of O’Bannon’s, paid Hill a visit in his office at Fox to hand him the script for Alien and ask him to direct. Hill had never heard of these novice screenwriters. They had no agents or lawyers. But he was looking for a science-fiction story so he took it home and, on a hot day, with Jimmy Carter drawling his speech at the 1976 Democratic convention in the background, he got a quarter through the script before calling Giler. He told him it was terrible but there was a great scene where