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Walter Frederick Morrison, inventor of the frisbee: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8512198.stm
Tough break - if he hadda invented the boomerang he woulda had a chance of coming back
Dan O’Bannon: Sci-Fi writer
Dan O’Bannon was never quite famous, but his name was revered by fans of science-fiction cinema. He wrote Alien (1979) and Total Recall (1990), worked on special effects for Star Wars (1977), and collaborated closely with John Carpenter on his debut film Dark Star (1974), in which O’Bannon also played one of the main characters.
He was a purist, keen to defend the artistic and narrative integrity of his films. He repeatedly fell out with collaborators, responding to a critic’s negative comments on Alien with a long letter of agreement. “The script that was committed to the film was self-contradictory, confusing, one-dimensional, clichéd and bargain-basement as science-fiction,” he wrote in a letter to Starburst magazine. He blamed the producers.
Most viewers seemed to think Alien worked well enough — the film was an international hit, spawned a franchise, proved enormously influential and currently figures in the Top 50 films of all time, as voted for by the public on the Internet Movie Database website. Its success helped generate interest in O’Bannon’s other projects and he might have made more were he a little more ready to compromise his visions.
Born in St Louis in 1946, he studied film at the University of Southern California, where he met John Carpenter. Dark Star began as a student film about four astronauts whose job it is to travel through space blowing up unstable planets. They are accompanied by a pet alien, a beachball with claws. O’Bannon and Carpenter wrote it together and financed the original 45-minute, 16mm version themselves, with Carpenter directing and O’Bannon doing virtually everything else, including acting, editing and production design. There was not much action, but a lot of humour and imagination — the ship’s captain is dead, but still conscious in the freezer, and the alien beachball is becoming increasingly belligerent. Carpenter described it as “Waiting for Godot in space”. Producer Jack H. Harris put up the money to expand it into a feature film for commercial release.
Carpenter went on to become one of Hollywood’s top directors. O’Bannon meanwhile worked on digital visual effects for Star Wars and determined that he would like to do another science-fiction film about an alien on a spaceship, but with the focus on horror rather than comedy and a purpose-built alien rather than a modified beachball.
He and Ronald Shusett co-wrote Alien and they pitched it as “Jaws in space”, though O’Bannon said his creature had been inspired by earthy bugs and the life cycle of parasitic organisms. “One thing I realised hadn’t been exploited in science fiction movies were the physical aspects,” he said. “The real world offered many examples which were extremely loathsome, and I thought, if it’s good enough for Mother Nature, maybe it will work on an audience. One review said that watching this movie was like turning over a rock and finding something disgusting. That was a pretty good description of what I was going after.”
They almost signed to do it as a low-budget feature with Roger Corman, but Walter Hill got involved as producer, reworked the script and steered it into production at 20th Century Fox. Key changes included changing the sex of the main character, played by Sigourney Weaver. O’Bannon also got one of the most memorable aliens in cinema history, designed by H.R.Giger.
O’Bannon was one of the writers on the cult sci-fi animation anthology film Heavy Metal (1981) and he and Don Jakoby co-wrote Blue Thunder (1983), a hit thriller with Roy Scheider as a police helicopter pilot. There was a spin-off TV series, to which O’Bannon also contributed, though he was unhappy about changes in the original script.
He wrote and directed the zombie horror film The Return of the Living Dead (1985), which again put a heavy emphasis on black comedy. It was a hit, there were several sequels and it retains a passionate following, though it was one of only two films O’Bannon directed. He worked with Jackoby again on the space vampire movie Lifeforce (1985) and the remake Invaders from Mars (1986).
He also continued to work with Shusett, on an adaptation of "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (1966), a Philip K. Dick story about implanted memories. Shusett had been working on it since before meeting O’Bannon. It was eventually shot as Total Recall with Arnold Schwarzenegger and was a major hit. But O’Bannon fell out with Shusett over the ending and again he was unhappy with the final film.
Other credits include Screamers (1995), another Philip K.Dick story that he adapted. He had been suffering from Crohn’s disease for years. He is survived by his wife and son.
Dan O’Bannon, writer, was born on September 30, 1946. He died on December 17, 2009, aged 63
Bon Scott's 30th Anniversary today.
Judge The Dog/Wonderly Wagons O Brien aka Eugene Lambert
http://www.newstalk.ie/news/puppeteer-eugene-lambert-dies/
Aw no. I know his Granddaughter. Her Aunty was Bosco. What a family.
Mr Lambert once sang Happy Birthday through one of his puppets to pop star Michael Jackson.
Jackson befriended the veteran puppeteer after playing a concert in Dublin in 1992 and visited him again with his three children on his birthday in August 2007.
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