Dan O'Bannon, SF and Horror Screenwriter, Passes On

Screenwriters tend to be considered Hollywood's ugly stepchildren, crucial of course for the making of a movie, but not getting as much respect as directors and actors. Dan O'Bannon was the writer of such SF classics as Dark Star, Alien, and Total Recall.

Dan O'Bannon's first film was Dark Star, a quirky, dark comedy directed by John Carpenter that featured a talking, sentient bomb and a bean bag monster. Dark Star was ostensively about a misfit crew in a space ship whose mission was to blow up unstable planets. The subtle humor has made Dark Star a cult classic. O'Bannon himself had an acting role in Dark Star, playing Sgt. Pinback.

Dan O'Bannon's most famous film was Alien, directed by Ridley Scott. It was O'Bannon who created the character of Ellen Ripley, whom Sigourney Weaver played in four Alien films, so far. The horrific story of an unstoppable alien monster destroying the crew of a star ship one by one still has the capacity to cause nightmares, thirty years later.

O'Bannon once summed up his approach to horror in writing Alien. "With "Alien", I figured out quite simply that, as an audience member, what you DON'T see scares you more than what you see. In horror films, the scares that really grab the audience and build the tension for them don't come from the monster jumping out of the shadows! The terror comes from the slow times in between those pay-off scenes in which the characters are talking and planning -- waiting for something to jump out at them!"

Dan O'Bannon also wrote the screenplay for Total Recall, which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone and was directed by Dutch born film maker Paul Verhoeven. Total Recall, set mainly in a Mars Colony, with its themes of identity, human evolution, and planetary destiny still holds up nearly twenty years later. Total Recall is also filled with the sort of ultra violence that Arnold Schwarzenegger made famous during his acting career.

If Paul Verhoeven's directing style, Dan O'Bannon once said, "He's talented and he does have some grand sci-fi visual things to see from time to time, but he's a very flawed director and Total Recall had a lot of pitfalls for him and he fell in most of them. In particular, whenever he started to flounder and didn't know what to do, he would start throwing in violence. He'd say bring in all the rubber body parts and the blood hoses and everything and we'll start ripping people to shreds and squirt blood everywhere. And he'd keep shooting that until he overcame his nerves and got his feet on the ground and would start directing in some reasonable way again."

Other films Dan O'Bannon wrote included Blue Thunder, Invaders from Mars, Lifeforce, and the B-17 sequence from Heavy Metal. Dan O'Bannon also wrote and directed Return of the Living Dead. Dan O'Bannon worked as a special effects technician in a film called Star Wars.

As if typical with screenwriters, Dan O'Bannon is little known outside of Hollywood and science fiction and horror fandom. But without his talent, the films he worked upon likely would not have existed, not to mention have been as memorable as they have become. Dan O'Bannon will be missed.

Source: Dan O'Bannon, IMDB