The Fool,Dan O'Bannon :
This Statement is for Posterity.
I just want to say that
I am not Sergeant Pinback.
My real name is Bill Froog and
I'm a Fuel Maintenance Technician.
I've been on this mission now
for 1 year and 3 months.
Pinback's uniforms do not fit me.
The underwear is too loose.
I do not belong on This Mission
and I want to return to Earth.
Commander Powell died today.
We were, we were going into hyper-drive.
And... well he sits right next to me and...
well... something went wrong with the...
When we came out of hyper-drive his seat mechanism
had blown up and he was dead.
Doolittle says he's assuming command
of This Ship and I say that's...
I say that he's exceeding His Authority.
Because I'm the only one with
any objectivity on This Ship
and I should be the one
to assume command!
I'm filing a report on this to Headquarters,
this is a lot of --
I went up to Doolittle in the hall today.
And I said... 'Doolittle.
He said...
And I said, Well...
And he didn't get it!
This Mission has fallen apart
since Commander Powell died!
Doolittle treats me like An Idiot!
Talby thinks he's so smart.
And Boiler punches me in the arm
when no one is looking!
I'm tired of being treated like an old washrag!
I do not like the men on this space ship.
They are uncouth and fail to
appreciate my better qualities.
I have something of value to contribute
to This Mission if they would only recognize it.
Today over lunch I tried to improve moral
and build a sense of comradery among The Men
by holding a humorous round robin discussion
of the early days of The Mission.
My overtures were brutally rejected.
These men do not want A Happy Ship.
They are deeply sick and try to compensate
by making me feel miserable.
Last week was My Birthday.
Nobody even said Happy Birthday to me.
Someday this tape will be played
and then they'll feel sorry.
Diane O'Bannon:
I met Dan at USC.
He was a real standout.
You couldn't miss him.
He was A Wild Man, unbounded
by conventional reality.
You couldn't call him an iconoclast, because he didn't have icons to break.
He could be very offensive, and was frequently offensive on purpose.
He was hot, you know, emotionally hot,
emotionally responsive, very angry.
He was born and raised in rural Missouri and had no television.
They didn't even have
a telephone till he was 10.
They lived in the middle
of nowhere on 24 acres.
And yet he knew all these things.
They didn't even have
a library in the town.
His mother used to send off for boxes
of books, and they would come,
and he would read them,
and then they'd send them back.
Dan was always sneaking
Science Fiction.
His mother always wanted him
to read good literature.
And His Mother would always say,
“You haven't got any of that science fiction in your backpack, have you?
You're not taking that
science fiction to school.”
His Father owned a curio shop,
it was called ‘odd acres’.
There was a sort of screwy-Louie room,
you know, where things were sort of
off-kilter, and everything
looks like it's leaning.
That was growing up in odd acres.
One time his father faked a ufo landing.
And Dan helped him, and then he had
The Press out there, you know?
There's a lot of bugs there.
And he was always very frightened,
in a way, by the sudden appearance
of bugs, like a stick insect and cicadas,
massive invasions in Southern Missouri,
they would have hundreds of thousands of them come out of the ground
and swarm over everything
and then vanish and die.
So these things really
gave him The Creeps.
And he wanted to creep
everybody else out too.
But he was quite
An Artist.
And when he was
thinking of his monsters,
he would sketch them out.
Before "Alien," Dan had written a screenplay called "They Bite."
It was "Alien" before "Alien."
And it involved a cicada-like
creature, but instead of being 13
years underground, it was several
million years underground, and
gradually picks off the people
in the encampment one by one.
It's a version of an alien creature
evolving, needing an evolution, and being destructive in that evolution.
O'Bannon has this great line, says,
"I didn't steal from anybody.
I stole from everybody."
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