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    Dan O'Bannon

    Screenwriter Dan O'Bannon dies after a short illness. Best known for creating the script that would be the basis for Alien and also as famous as Pinback, the slacker astronaut in John Carpenter's Dark Star who tried to curb the spirits of a psychotically zealous beachball with a broom.

    For anyone who owns the Alien box-set Quadrilogy, he also gave good interviews.

    #2
    Dan O'Bannon

    Gawd. I thought you meant someone else.

    A horrible moment.

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      #3
      Dan O'Bannon

      For God's sake change the title of this thread

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        #4
        Dan O'Bannon

        I loved loved loved Dark star as a yoot, still do to a great extent, and I think its fair to say that it's actually measurably more O'Bannon's creation than Carpenter's. O'Bannon built and dressed the sets and executed a lot of the visual effects, as well as writing the story and all the best dialogue, and playing Pinback to perfection. But of course everybody talks about 'John Carpenters Dark Star', and the experience pretty much set the tone for the rest of O'Bannon's career as always the bridesmaid and never the bride.

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          #5
          Dan O'Bannon

          His CV was a curate's egg (and a surprisingly short one), alternating between highlights (Alien, Heavy Metal, Blue Thunder) and tat (Bleeders, Invaders From Mars and the guilty pleasure, Lifeforce), and Dark Star was pretty much a hands-on project for everybody involved seeing as, reportedly, the ship's interior was built and filmed in someone's garage. And, on top of this, his Pinback character was pretty bloody funny.

          And I'm still trying to figure out why the original thread title made people crap themselves with worry. Oh look! He said 'Sgt. Pinback dies!' Oh, admins, please make the naughty man change it!

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            #6
            Dan O'Bannon

            It could be because Sgt Pinback, now just Pinback, is the nick of a longtime OTFer, Ian. The thread title gave me a bloody big jolt when I first saw it, that's for sure.

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              #7
              Dan O'Bannon

              Furtho wrote:
              It could be because Sgt Pinback, now just Pinback, is the nick of a longtime OTFer, Ian. The thread title gave me a bloody big jolt when I first saw it, that's for sure.
              Me too. At first I thought "Shit! Hang on - why is this in film?!"

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                #8
                Dan O'Bannon

                Other Film & TV obituaries that might cause unfortunate misunderstanding on OTF:



                He was lots of different people, apparently. Don't know if they're all still alive, or feeling a bit dodgy.

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                  #9
                  Dan O'Bannon

                  Pictures of Coffy, not suitable for work viewing.

                  Pictures of Costner playing Wyatt Earp, not suitable for viewing anywhere.

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                    #10
                    Dan O'Bannon

                    It could be because Sgt Pinback, now just Pinback, is the nick of a longtime OTFer, Ian. The thread title gave me a bloody big jolt when I first saw it, that's for sure.

                    Ah, okay, point taken. Mind you, that this thread is on the Film forum should possibly have given a hint that it didn't, thankfully, have anything to do with OTFer-related bucket kicking.

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                      #11
                      Dan O'Bannon

                      In a similar vein, I remember being surprised when watching Clerks a couple of years ago and noticing a certain Rick Derris walk into the shop.

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                        #12
                        Dan O'Bannon

                        Sad news. He was one of Jodorowsky's team when they were working on Dune, and (at the risk of flogging a dead horse) you know what happened there.

                        I'm not much of a sci-fi person, but it sounds as if Alien was very much his creation.

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                          #13
                          Dan O'Bannon

                          I'm not dead, but I thought I was coming down with a bit of a cold last week.

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                            #14
                            Dan O'Bannon

                            Lucia Lanigan wrote:
                            I'm not much of a sci-fi person, but it sounds as if Alien was very much his creation.
                            Yeah, it was.

                            O'Bannon wanted to make the horror film equivalent of Dark Star and asked Ronald Shusett to join the project. Shusett agreed but only if O'Bannon would work with him on the script for Total Recall (this was way back in '76/'77).

                            Fox wanted to cash in on the success on Star Wars and O'Bannon's Alien script just happened to be on top of the pile and gave Alien the green light. His script went through drastic re-writes because the producers (Walter Hill, David Giler and Gordon Carrol) thought it was shit but the chestburster scene was too great to ignore. So Walter Hill changed all the characters names, the premise behind the spores, the alien pyramid and added the corporate paranoia sub-plot by inserting the Ash character (something which O'Bannon despised initially as he thought it was unnecessary and compared it to the then Hollywood tradition of putting a 'Russian saboteur' on board)...

                            O'Bannon's realtionship with Hill, Giler and Carroll was tense. Carroll even refused to let O'Bannon watch dailies and if it wasn't for Ridley Scott, O'Bannon wouldn't have been part of the production at all. It was O'Bannon who suggested that they employ HR Giger for the creature concept and Ron Cobb for the technical stuff such as the Nostromo set design. Ridley Scott is known for wanting to keep the original writers on board and basically gave O'Bannon an all access pass on set and allowed him to freely work in tandem with the conceptual designers.

                            O'Bannon loved the movie when he saw it, so much so that he was moved to tears.

                            O'Bannon was a massive sci-fi fan and I'm sure his loss will be felt throughout the sci-fi community. He came across as being a genuinely nice guy in the Alien documentary, despite the fact that Fox tried to screw him...

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