Creative Screenwriting Magazine: Alien

Thursday, January 1st, 2004

The recent Creative Screenwriting Magazine (Volume 10, #5) revealed some amazing history on how Alien came to be:

The largest change the project underwent happened before it was even scripted — converting it from a World War II horror film to a sci-fi thriller. In the summer of 1976 Dan O’Bannon took the opening of his screenplay Memory and stitched it onto the second half of his WWII story Gremlins, which featured lethal gremlins infiltrating a B-17 bomber during a bombing run. O’Bannon then changed the B-17 into a spaceship and wrote a treatment titled Space Beast, which he then expanded into the first Alien script.

Addendum: I took a photo of the physical artifact:

Posted in Media, War | 5 Comments »

Comments

Adar says:

October 31, 2019 at 1:03 pm

Willian Shatner did a Twilight Zone about a gremlin sabotaging a commercial airline far earlier.
Isegoria says:

October 31, 2019 at 1:14 pm

Yes, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” is one of the classics.
Kirk says:

October 31, 2019 at 1:26 pm

Isegoria, have you got a link to the actual article? Trying to find it on that homepage is a freaking nightmare.
Isegoria says:

October 31, 2019 at 1:42 pm

I’m afraid I read the article in a physical copy of the magazine, and I couldn’t find an online copy anywhere — so I took the physical magazine off the shelf and photographed it.
Kirk says:

October 31, 2019 at 3:09 pm

Thank you for that… That’s something about Alien that I did not know, and it fills in some interesting blanks about the storytelling.

Dan Kurt: The tyranny of the IQ curve strikes again: too many of our youth are going to college Dan Kurt
T. Beholder: It’s so much worse than this. Too many game designers make something that confirms their biases and never stop to question their assumptions. Too many game designers make something that they THINK will confirm their biases. Then never bother to analyze what actually goes on and why, until it turns out the result either does not work this way, or is broken outside their pet scenario. Nor even test extensively by people unfamiliar with their notions of how it “ought” to work. The best will...
T. Beholder: Introduction of field fortifications greatly changed the game in this aspect too. The infantryman can compensate for troublesome march with tenacity in defense. That is, the soldiers could run in the open, but as long as cover is not obviously useless, they naturally don’t want to leave it when the situation is bad enough as it is. So it may take much more of motivation to attack, but retreat is also inhibited. Of course, exhaustion on a march still matters. The first iteration of “Defence...
Alex S.: I also noticed that persons that are excessively social stop thinking by themselves. They look like they are part of an organism and not an individual anymore.
Bomag: Probably something here about video overtaking the written word.
Jim: lol
Phileas Frogg: Alan Bloom was right again. The minds of this new breed are incapable of sustained thought, not by nature, but by habit.
Phileas Frogg: Worse than I thought, much worse than I hoped. The mismanagement of what should have been an irrefutable centuries long lead on the rest of the world following WWI and WWII ranks among the most criminal events in human history. America’s fall is mirroring it’s rise: METEORIC.
Bob Sykes: Kevin Walmsley, on his YouTube channel “Inside China Business,” provides short analyses on what is going on in the Chinese economy. The Chinese lead in nearly all manufacturing and technology sectors is stupefying. And it is growing. A substantial majority of the best technological universities in the world are in China. Listen and weep, https://www.youtube.com/ @Inside_China_Business
Remlar: “I absolutely love this perspective! It’s so refreshing to see a focus on growth and recovery. It’s important to remember that setbacks can be stepping stones to greater things. With the right mindset and support, anything is possible. Keep pushing forward; you’re doing great! I can’t wait to see where this journey takes you.”
Gaikokumaniakku: When wargaming started it was a Prussian exercise meant to teach Prussian soldiers how to think. It did not claim to be fun or entertaining. In the intervening years gaming has mutated in many directions. One such mutation was Civ. I usually played Civ as a conquer-the-world game, where I tried to get some kind of unfair advantage so that the enemy factions did not pose a challenge. Probably Sid Meier would say I missed the point; probably Sid Meier would have wanted me to respect the...
Phileas Frogg: The Great Western Retreat is already well underway and irreversible. It started with the spiritual retreat, was followed by the political retreat, and is finally entering the economic retreat. From the US to Germany, from France to the Netherlands, we’re busily eliminating the last vestiges of our major industries, which we were already slowly losing dominance of to begin with. The final component will be a cultural retreat, where the non-Western countries openly challenge the...
Bob Sykes: The eras of the Roman expansion and the High Middle Ages were relatively warm, and many of the passes through the Alps were ice-free. Napoleon, however, fought his wars during the Little Ice Age, and many Alpine passes might have had substantial ice barriers.
David Roman: The idea that only Hannibal and Charlemagne had crossed the Alps with armies before is ludicrous. Multiple French armies crossed the Alps into Italy on their way to be trounced by the Spaniards in the 16th century. Before Charlemagne, a ton of Frankish warlords did the crossing to fight the Lombards and/or the Byzantines. Under the Roman Empire, crossing the Alps on the way to fight a civil war was routine.
Jim: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Zx_0KlKOIG0
T. Beholder: Another curious thing fished from the old memory hole: One of the fantastic freshnesses of Tarantino’s Manson movie was its willingness to see Manson as his own time saw him: as, first and foremost, a hippie. Nowadays we think of Manson as unique — not a member of a class at all — perhaps he was a hippie, certainly he was ugly; but his ugliness does not contaminate all hippies as a whole. At least, now it doesn’t. But then, it did. Tarantino’s genius is to take you back in time before this...
T. Beholder: Ah, generalizations… We actually started to understand the psychology of gamers. When something bad happens, often they blame it on the computer, or the designer, or some other outside force. They would think it wasn’t fair, and they would reload the game. And this right here is the difference between the Wikipedia Fantasy crowd and the Dwarf Fortress crowd. :]
Jim: Morbid.
Redan: You should skip viewing the Tate and LaBianca autopsy and crime scene photos.
Phileas_Frogg: Isegoria, Ha! That’s hilarious since I also struggled with what to do with the Boer’s and black Africans. It actually consumed far more time/mental energy than it should have. If I remember, my first solution, I ended up essentially kidnapping the women under the pretense of keeping them safe, while using any anticipated protestations about protecting their property to then call the matter settled: The Menfolk will remain at home to keep the farm safe, and the women will come...

Isegoria

Creative Screenwriting Magazine: Alien

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