Dan O’Bannon and the story of ‘Alien’

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Charles Champlin, writing in The Times on May 20, 1979, predicted big things for a new movie called ‘Alien.’

‘ ‘Alien’ seems as certain as anything can be to become the new film phenomenon in succession to ‘Jaws’ and ‘Star Wars,’ even though its horrors are too convincingly visceral and its frights too successfully frightening for the movie to have the whole-family outreach that ‘Stars Wars’ did,’ he wrote.

The movie wasn’t all about special effects, Champlin noted, praising the work of Dan O’Bannon, who died Thursday at age 63.

‘The story, by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, scripted by O’Bannon, is storybook simple, a bestiary tale turning on a latter-day dragon, a scaly and serpentine creature with a sulphuric drool and an unkind disposition, certain to populate nightmares for a long time to come. Who’ll survive, if anyone does, is quickly the question and the answer is impossible to guess.’

You can find the obituary on O’Bannon here.

--Keith Thursby