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Started by Quirkafleeg, 27 February, 2006, 03:03:14 PM

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Batman's Superior Cousin

I can't help but feel that Godpleton's avatar/icon gets more appropriate everyday... - TordelBack
Texts from Last Night

The Doctor Alt 8

Dan O'Bannon: Sci-Fi writer


Dan O'Bannon was never quite famous, but his name was revered by fans of science-fiction cinema. He wrote Alien (1979) and Total Recall (1990), worked on special effects for Star Wars (1977), and collaborated closely with John Carpenter on his debut film Dark Star (1974), in which O'Bannon also played one of the main characters.


He was a purist, keen to defend the artistic and narrative integrity of his films. He repeatedly fell out with collaborators, responding to a critic's negative comments on Alien with a long letter of agreement. "The script that was committed to the film was self-contradictory, confusing, one-dimensional, clichéd and bargain-basement as science-fiction," he wrote in a letter to Starburst magazine. He blamed the producers.


Most viewers seemed to think Alien worked well enough — the film was an international hit, spawned a franchise, proved enormously influential and currently figures in the Top 50 films of all time, as voted for by the public on the Internet Movie Database website. Its success helped generate interest in O'Bannon's other projects and he might have made more were he a little more ready to compromise his visions.


Born in St Louis in 1946, he studied film at the University of Southern California, where he met John Carpenter. Dark Star began as a student film about four astronauts whose job it is to travel through space blowing up unstable planets. They are accompanied by a pet alien, a beachball with claws. O'Bannon and Carpenter wrote it together and financed the original 45-minute, 16mm version themselves, with Carpenter directing and O'Bannon doing virtually everything else, including acting, editing and production design. There was not much action, but a lot of humour and imagination — the ship's captain is dead, but still conscious in the freezer, and the alien beachball is becoming increasingly belligerent. Carpenter described it as "Waiting for Godot in space". Producer Jack H. Harris put up the money to expand it into a feature film for commercial release.


Carpenter went on to become one of Hollywood's top directors. O'Bannon meanwhile worked on digital visual effects for Star Wars and determined that he would like to do another science-fiction film about an alien on a spaceship, but with the focus on horror rather than comedy and a purpose-built alien rather than a modified beachball.


He and Ronald Shusett co-wrote Alien and they pitched it as "Jaws in space", though O'Bannon said his creature had been inspired by earthy bugs and the life cycle of parasitic organisms. "One thing I realised hadn't been exploited in science fiction movies were the physical aspects," he said. "The real world offered many examples which were extremely loathsome, and I thought, if it's good enough for Mother Nature, maybe it will work on an audience. One review said that watching this movie was like turning over a rock and finding something disgusting. That was a pretty good description of what I was going after."


They almost signed to do it as a low-budget feature with Roger Corman, but Walter Hill got involved as producer, reworked the script and steered it into production at 20th Century Fox. Key changes included changing the sex of the main character, played by Sigourney Weaver. O'Bannon also got one of the most memorable aliens in cinema history, designed by H.R.Giger.


O'Bannon was one of the writers on the cult sci-fi animation anthology film Heavy Metal (1981) and he and Don Jakoby co-wrote Blue Thunder (1983), a hit thriller with Roy Scheider as a police helicopter pilot. There was a spin-off TV series, to which O'Bannon also contributed, though he was unhappy about changes in the original script.


He wrote and directed the zombie horror film The Return of the Living Dead (1985), which again put a heavy emphasis on black comedy. It was a hit, there were several sequels and it retains a passionate following, though it was one of only two films O'Bannon directed. He worked with Jackoby again on the space vampire movie Lifeforce (1985) and the remake Invaders from Mars (1986).


He also continued to work with Shusett, on an adaptation of "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (1966), a Philip K. Dick story about implanted memories. Shusett had been working on it since before meeting O'Bannon. It was eventually shot as Total Recall with Arnold Schwarzenegger and was a major hit. But O'Bannon fell out with Shusett over the ending and again he was unhappy with the final film.


Other credits include Screamers (1995), another Philip K.Dick story that he adapted. He had been suffering from Crohn's disease for years. He is survived by his wife and son.


Dan O'Bannon, writer, was born on September 30, 1946. He died on December 17, 2009, aged 63


uncle fester

He left a bloody good mark on the film world...

Roger Godpleton

Alexander McQueen at age 40.
He's only trying to be what following how his dreams make you wanna be, man!

Batman's Superior Cousin

I can't help but feel that Godpleton's avatar/icon gets more appropriate everyday... - TordelBack
Texts from Last Night

Albion

Walter Frederick Morrison, inventor of the Frisbee.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8512198.stm
Dumb all over, a little ugly on the side.

Grant Goggans

Hell, I missed Ian Carmichael.  I contend he was too old when cast as Lord Peter Wimsey, but damn if he didn't do an amazing job regardless.  That was one of the best things the BBC made in the 70s.  What a class act he was.  The climactic scene between him and Paul Darrow at the end of "Murder Must Advertise" is one of the most amazing pieces of TV ever.

Batman's Superior Cousin

Charles Wilson (February 10th) - Texas politician who Tom Hanks potrayed in Charle Wilson's War died from cardiopulmonary arrest.
I can't help but feel that Godpleton's avatar/icon gets more appropriate everyday... - TordelBack
Texts from Last Night

Mike Gloady

Quote from: albion83uk on 12 February, 2010, 01:54:39 PM
Walter Frederick Morrison, inventor of the Frisbee.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8512198.stm
Incorrect.

The answer is Marty McFly.  Thanks for playing though.
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Albion

Quote from: Mike Gloady on 12 February, 2010, 05:22:31 PM
Quote from: albion83uk on 12 February, 2010, 01:54:39 PM
Walter Frederick Morrison, inventor of the Frisbee.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8512198.stm
Incorrect.

The answer is Marty McFly.  Thanks for playing though.

Bugger, I'd forgotten about the arsom achievements of the McFly.
Dumb all over, a little ugly on the side.

Grant Goggans

Here, I'm going to teach y'all something you didn't know about television, and why Carmichael is so important.  I wrote this two years ago:

***

Now, nobody believes me when I say this, but a case can certainly be made that Lord Peter Wimsey is, from a production standpoint, one of the most important TV series to ever come out of Britain.  Here's why.  Masterpiece Theatre was a production of Boston's public TV station, WGBH, and was underwritten by Mobil.  The story goes that in the seventies, Masterpiece Theatre was getting its biggest ratings from two ongoing series which would pop up with new episodes each year: Upstairs, Downstairs and the (annual) Sayers adaptations.  After these finished, executives with Mobil spoke with WGBH about doing more mystery stories.  WGBH didn't feel that Masterpiece Theatre really needed to buy into what few mystery stories were available.  Almost nothing available in Britain in the late 70s really fit the mold, and what little there was - a short-lived series of Dick Francis adaptations and a TV movie of Peter Lovesey's novel Cribb - was really stretching the definition of "masterpiece," although a case could be made for a new series starring Leo McKern called Rumpole of the Bailey...

Well, the story goes, the Mobil exec suggested that if these weren't highbrow masterpieces and not the sort of thing Alistair Cooke would really get behind, why not start a spinoff series to feature those?

So Mystery! debuted in 1980, by which time Cribb had gone onto a series.  These and Rumpole and the Dick Francis adaptations provided the backbone for the series for its first few seasons, but the problem was that the cost of television production in the UK was rising dramatically and international co-production partners were badly needed to finance major new productions, especially as British TV moved away from videotape drama and embraced film.  So by 1983, Mystery! was really looking awfully weak since they just had TV movies and mediocre miniseries that nobody was watching, and so WGBH started looking for ways to invest in new productions that would prop up their umbrella programs, right at the same time that British TV companies started looking for financing.

The first big show to benefit from the co-productions was Granada's Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - the Jeremy Brett series.  To modern eyes, that backlot that makes up Baker Street might look awfully small, but it was a huge international success, and couldn't have been made without WGBH's investment.  Nor could so many series that followed, including Central's Inspector Morse or Granada's Prime Suspect or numerous other shows which the Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery! teams were helping pay for.  Possibly Poirot, Miss Marple and Campion as well, but I'd have to check.  Dozens of major British series of the 1990s had some Boston public TV and Mobil money behind them, but none of the continuing detective shows would have existed at all without WGBH's Mystery!, and that wouldn't have existed without the Ian Carmichael serials.

***

Mike Gloady

In thatcase, I'm very grateful.  Those Jeremy Brett Holmes things are running on ITV4 in the afternoons these days, been feeling very rough the last few days, they've helped.
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johnnystress

Jeremy Brett is Holmes-I love that show

to my dismay they seem to have run out of episodes this morning


on topic

rip Dick Francis

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/7240946/Dick-Francis-tributes-paid-to-peoples-champion.html

Jim_Campbell

Quote from: johnnystress on 15 February, 2010, 08:57:59 AM
Jeremy Brett is Holmes-I love that show

My lovely wife bought me the complete set on DVD Christmas before last. I love my wife.

The thing I particularly like about the Granada 'Holmes' series is that it actually makes sense of the Holmes/Watson relationship. Where previous versions of Watson had always seemed rather, well, dim, this version was a deeply practical man which -- of course -- is precisely what is needed by a man as totally unconcerned with practical matters as Holmes.

Cheers!

Jim
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