Dan O'Bannon

 

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."