Pizza & A Movie 86: “Alien”
“I can't lie to you about your chances, but ... you have my sympathies.”
1979 • R • 1h 57mins • Watch trailer • Rent it • Stream on Hulu
👽 Alien(s): An Alien and Aliens double-feature
You’re reading Pizza & A Movie. You walk into your pizza joint and the air smells like a Friday night. You pick up your pie and ask the guy at the counter, “Hey, what should I rent from Hollywood Video next door?” Tonight, he says, “You ever see that one with the face-palm alien that gets guys pregnant? That loom lady’s in it.” I think he means 1979’s Sigourney Weaver in space picture, Alien. Let’s blast off.
Here’s the plot. We’re aboard space ship Nostromo as it hauls ore in deep space. Seven crew members slowly wake up: Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt), officers Kane (John Hurt), Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), and Lambert (Veronica Cartwright), science nerd Ash (Ian Holm), and workmen Parker (Yaphet Kotto) and Brett (Harry Dean Stanton). A mysterious distress signal beams in. The crew don space suits to investigate. What they find is a dusty planet with an alien ship that seems to have skipped a few cleaning days. Kane finds a nursery full of giant eggs. Should he touch one? No. But does he touch one? Of course. Out pops a hand-shaped alien which grabs Kane’s face and, like red wine on your best white shirt, it’s not coming off.
The crew brings Kane inside to the infirmary, and the alien with him. Wise? Probably not. The face-hugging alien lets go and dies; Kane mysteriously heals. But then a baby alien bursts through his chest at dinner! Turns out it was Kane’s last supper. The baby alien flees the scene only to grow up quickly in the bowls of the ship into something far more fearsome. And far larger. When it begins picking off the crew one by one, can the humans outsmart it? What stops this thing? And what is Ash, who seems to know a little more than everyone else, really up to?
Alien’s Eleven
How’s somebody come up with a bonkers movie like Alien? Truth is, it takes an Ocean’s Eleven of weirdos. Alien’s Eleven? I’m workshopping it. Anyway, let’s meet the men (c’mon you knew it was men) behind the menace.
The Ideas Guy
The year is 1972 and a USC film student named Dan O’Bannon is working on Dark Star for John Carpenter. O’Bannon, green as an unripe banana, had to do a little of everything. But making Dark Star’s alien out of spray paint and a beach ball was his favorite. Making a beach ball alien for a comedy made him wonder, what if a movie took its alien really, really seriously? O’Bannon dreamed of more. Specifically, a realistic scary delivery device disguised as a movie.
The Other Writer
O’Bannon meets our next recruit, fellow screenwriter Ron Shusett. They share the same wavelength. Shusett’s hacking away at the screenplay for what would one day become Total Recall, and O’Bannon still wants his alien picture. Like a couple of Olsen twins in a ‘90s movie, the two join forces to make each other’s dreams come true. They’d work on one screenplay until it got made, then focus on the other. How’d they pick which project to start with, you ask? Simple. They chose the one that’d be cheaper to make.
The Guy Who’s Actually a Movie
We’re in the mid-‘70s now. O’Bannon and Shusett have a script they used to call Star Beast but wisely retitled Alien, but nobody will make it. They pitched Alien as “Jaws in space” to everyone in Hollywood. A 20th Century Fox subsidiary, Brandywine, eventually bought it and rewrote it to naturalify the dialogue. And added robot Ash. And they made Ripley a woman. O’Bannon and Shusett had written their characters to be gender-agnostic “space truckers”—they didn’t care. But still the script sat with no budget and no director. Fox saw zero bucks to be made in space pictures. But then something changed their minds. In ‘77 a little movie you mighta heard of called Star Wars shook up the whole industry. Before you know it, Alien’s light was green, their budget funded and the director’s chair filed with Ridley Scott (Blade Runner).
The Danny Ocean
Newish director Scott threw himself into making what he called “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre of science fiction”. He loved the picked-off-one-by-one plot. Loved the burn that was slow-slow-slow. Loved the scary alien. But he had one giant problem. Alien doesn’t work unless the titular alien is scary. Scratch that, super scary. Everything they tried ended up tossed in the trash can.
The Swissman
Then O’Bannon remembered a freaky Swiss artist he met a few years earlier while working on Jodorowski’s doomed Dune—H.R. Giger. Giger’s futuristic fusion of organic and mechanical elements charged with nightmarish sexuality scared the beegees out of O’Bannon. But it was exactly what Ridley Scott was looking for. Scott hired Giger based on his painting Necronom IV. We wouldn’t be talking about Alien now if it wasn’t for Giger, who would go on to win an Oscar for his creature design.
Our Alien’s Eleven is coming together nicely. But it wouldn’t be much of a movie without a cast.
How’d They Talk Them into This?
⭐️ Sigourney Weaver: Most of her resume was Broadway. Weaver took the role as a swing at a film career. Her previous credit was “Pepsi Model” in “Pepsi: Have a Pepsi Day”. Alien made her a movie star.
⭐️ Harry Dean Stanton: This guy told Scott he didn’t like sci-fi or monster pictures. Scott replied that he wasn’t making sci-fi so much as an And Then There Were None-type thriller. Stanton plays the part like he’s a normal guy working a normal job when something weird happens. And boy, it works.
⭐️ Yaphet Kotto: He didn’t need convincing. Kotto had been the baddie in 007 picture Live and Let Die (’73). For whatever reason, he turned down a juicy role to make this.
⭐️ Ian Holm: The future hobbit was a working character actor with 20 films under his belt. What convinced him? A paycheck. He comes off as a pro because he is a pro.
⭐️ Veronica Cartwright: She tried out for Ripley. They didn’t tell her until she showed up for wardrobe that she got Lambert instead. "They convinced me that I was the audience's fears. I was a reflection of what the audience is feeling." Pretty good line. Might even be true.
⭐️ Bolaji Badejo: I dunno how they talked this skinny 6’ 10” 26-year-old student into playing the alien, but they did. Scott figured if they designed their xenomorph suit around a guy with Badejo’s frame, no one would think a human was inside. If I had those measurements I’d move somewhere warm year-round and only wear shorts. Bet buying 6’ 10” pants is expensive.
Know what this cast has in common? They’re old. Weaver was young, but most weren’t. As reviewer Roger Ebert pointed out, "Tom Skerritt, the captain, was 46, Hurt was 39 but looked older, Holm was 48, Harry Dean Stanton was 53, Yaphet Kotto was 42, and only Veronica Cartwright at 30 and Weaver at 28 were in the age range of the usual thriller cast." Why’s that weird? Slashers usually feature teens and twenty-somethings. They’re kids running from a monster. But Alien? It scares the pants off you by showing you scared adults. These are serious people with a job to do who don’t scare easily. So why are they this worried? Should we be worried? And then suddenly we’re as scared as they are. Mighty effective.
Q&A
That’s who it took to get Alien made. Not one weirdo, but many likeminded space-heads dedicated to making something interesting. Next I’d like to move onto a strained analogy I’m pretty excited abou—oh, questions? You know what, sure, we can take a few.
What’s on your mind?
Are the space suits real?
What, no, of course they’re not. Wait, I get what you’re doing. You want me to say that they were sealed like a real space suit! (You beautiful genius.) You’re right, they forgot to design breathing holes for the space suits, which made them dangerous and super hot (the suits, not the production designers (though who am I to say)). When a heat wave hit and the cast almost passed out wearing the suits, nurses stood just off-camera with oxygen tanks in hand. Seems like a good time to call your union rep if you ask me.
But at least only grown-ups wore those suits, right?
If only, pal. Director Scott wanted those alien ship chamber scenes to feel huge, so he put his own kids in the suits and filmed ‘em walking around. Dubbed the actors’ voices over. His stunt with the short fries worked, those sets feel massive. But I don’t love that Scott knowingly put his kids in what were essentially Ziploc bags. Yikes.
So the space suits are fake. Next you’re gonna tell me the ships aren’t real either?
More bad news. The exteriors were miniatures made out of a lot of models glued together. Pretty normal back then. The interiors though? Those were built on soundstages at Shepperton Studios near London. Two decks of the ship were on adjacent sets with crawlable passageways built to connect them which were used for filming ductwork scenes. So the claustrophobic am-I-there-yet expression on Dallas’s face? Probably not acting at all.
I know the xenomorph is fake. Did Giger come up with it all?
Giger made it scary, but screenwriters O’Bannon and Shusett dreamed up the idea. O’Bannon began with the alien’s final form. But it had to get on the ship somehow. Here’s Shusett: “Dan [O’Bannon] put his finger on the problem: ‘What has to happen … is the creature has to get on the ship in an interesting way. I have no idea how, but if we could solve that, and it can't be that it just snuck in, then I think the whole movie will come into place.’ In the middle of the night, I woke up and I said, ‘Dan I think I have an idea: The alien screws one of them ... it jumps on his face and plants its seed!’ And Dan says, ‘Oh my god, we've got it, we've got the whole movie!’ ” And that’s why you don’t eat spicy stuff right before bed, Ron.
Wow, I do not like that. Thank god the xenomorph’s totally fake though?
Sort of, which is not the right amount of xenomorph fakitude. Lemme break it down. The egg: FAKE. That’s sculpted fiberglass plus a flashlight plus Scott himself’s hand in a glove flapping around inside. Not scary. The Facehugger: REALISH. Cow intestines and fish guts make up most of the ingredients list. Looks like when you dissected a heart or lungs in high school Biology class. No thank you. Chestburster: FAKE. That’s just a penis-looking puppet. Unconcerned. Big Boy Xenomorph: REALISH. Statistically speaking it’s 95% alive but that’s because a human guy was inside it. They made the suit itself out of yucky stuff like a human skull and animal bones. The drool is K-Y Jelly, which Amazon tells me is “A Water-Based Personal Lubricant”. Can we talk about something else?
I ask the questions! Tell me about the alien ship!
Not a question at all but okay. Giger got to design all of that too. It’s a rare case of a complete artistic vision—he think-brained the planet surface, ship exterior and ship interior. Giger himself sculpted with bones and hand-airbrushed the alien sets. Here’s Veronica Cartwright’s review of his work: “It's big vaginas and penises ... the whole thing is like you're going inside of some sort of womb or whatever ... it's sort of visceral.”
Why doesn’t the Nostromo look like that?
A whole different person did the Nostromo’s sets to contrast the alien against the human. Problem was, they’d sunk a bunch of the budget into Giger’s designs. Where do you find someone who knows how to build space ship sets for cheap? Star Wars. They hired a guy who worked on Star Wars to make Nostromo sets out of actual no-lie trash. Giant mirrors simulate super long hallways that were actually short. They used chunks of an old bomber plane for parts of the corridors. No expense was not spared.
That makes me think of the escape pod at the end. Did the movie always end that way?
Nope. As shot, it ended with Ridley blowing up the ship and whizzing away in the pod. Scott talked Fox into the extra mini-act we watched with Ripley fighting the alien during her escape. Actually, Scott wanted to have it bite her head off, but the studio vetoed that part. Sequels woulda been real different. Though Ridley fights an unkillable monster, from the xenomorph’s perspective, Ripley is the true unkillable monster.
Horror Lasagna
Plenty of movies have tried to copy Alien’s success since ’79, including the franchise itself. But they never get the recipe right. Here’s what you’ll need to bake yourself up a delicious horror lasagna like Alien.
Noodles
Our wobbly, wavy friends. Alien builds layers of unknown that form the structure of the story. Planet unknown, alien unknown, mission unknown, location unknown. While lesser films deploy just one glob of unknown, Alien layers it over and over again. We’re never sure what the rules are.
Filling
To pace out the noodles of the unknown, we need spicy sauce, creamy ricotta and salty grated parmesan. That’s right, solid noodles stacked with goop between. Unexpected! But In Alien, after every weird new development, something unexpected happens. On the alien ship, scientific curiosity begets a facial attack. The Facehugger, uh, sticks its alien stuff down Kane’s throat and lays eggs in his tummy. But then it falls off and Kane seems fine! Next, Kane unwillingly gives birth to yet another alien via what used to be his chest. The lil’ fella disappears and the coast seems clear again. But our alien grows up and stomps around mouth-mouthing everybody to death. To what end! We never find out. Each bite of Alien is more of the saucy, creamy unexpected. Mama mia!
Cheese on top
A good lasagna uses gooey mozzarella sparingly and only on top. Alien knows to use its actual alien as little as possible. A little cheese goes a long way. Scott made sure we see the scariest stuff only in our minds.
Bursting Through the Theatrical Chest Cavity
That’s how you make a cinematic classic. But did moviegoers stand in line in ’79? When Alien opened on Memorial Day weekend, audiences lost their minds, buying tickets to the tune of $143M worldwide. That’s about $607M buckaroos in early ’24 money. It may have made the most money per screen of any movie to date according to Variety.
But reviewers, as they often are, were mixed. Siskel and Ebert gave it respective thumbs up, though Siskel called it “not the greatest science fiction film ever made”, which is both not very nice and not very mean. In Time Out a British man called Leslie Halliwell said it was an “empty bag of tricks whose production values and expensive trickery cannot disguise imaginative poverty”. Settle down, Leslie. It went on to win an ’80 Oscar for Best Visual Effects. Take that, Leslie.
Reviewers expected new science-y concepts from Alien. What they got instead were horror thrills in space. Sci-fi Horror is a tricky subgenre that yields cult classics more often than classics. Looking at you, Event Horizon. But sometimes one gets through, like this or Jurassic Park. And it’s really special when it does.
We wouldn’t get another Alien movie for seven years. Why? Hollywood accounting, that’s why. In ’80 Fox claimed, in spite of huge box office totals, that Alien lost $2M in its first year. They just said it to cheat profit-sharing partner Brandywine. Folks industry-wide cried foul. Brandywine sued Fox. I’m no expert, but I think just making more money is more productive than stealing someone else’s. Fox eventually settled and funded Alien 2.
And we’re gonna talk about it! What happens when James Cameron takes over the franchise with Aliens? Next time.
Hope you enjoyed this one! And hey, if you did, share it with a pal who would too! It really does help.
Notes:
Alien’s excellent poster features a chicken egg because they hadn’t made the fiberglass props back when the marketing material was being made. Seeing a regular egg crack open in the trailer doesn’t do it for me either.
O’Bannon and Shusset retitled their script “Alien” because that’s the word that occurred the most frequently in it. They liked that it worked as both an adjective and a noun.
“Who’s that one guy?” “You mean Tom Skerritt?” “He’s like a hotter Kris Kristofferson.” “Yeah that’s Tom Skerritt.” “I think he’s Top Gun’s boss in Top Gun” “Tom Skerritt!” “Wasn’t he on Cheers?” “IT’S TOM SKERRITT!”
You can buy an H.R. Giger funeral urn if you want to. Price on request.
Kids are scared of death. Grown-ups are scared of not knowing what’s going on.
We just saw John Hurt in Snowpiercer!
Read more about the process of filming Alien in American Cinematographer.