Screenwriting & the Snowpocalypse

“When they offered me the remake of The Thing, rather than remaking the original film I thought I’d go back to the short story which I felt was never done.”
Director John Carpenter

Monster Blizzard…how long until that comes out as the title of a Hollywood film? Or maybe a sequel to Buried, Buried…in Snow. Perhaps the movie, Jim Cantore—Force of Nature.

 

Lake Shore Drive in Chicago— AP/Kichiro Sato

 

 

The best thing about the snow storm that (as I type this) is hammering a chunk of the country is I’m getting a lot of writing done. I thought I’d share with you what I’ve come up with overnight while all cooped up:

Okay, maybe that’s from The Shining, but have you noticed that  snow storms in movies tend to bring out the worst in people? Probably because one of the key elements of drama is conflict. Bad weather usually equals conflict. Just look what it did to poor Jack…

Over the years there have been a few films where bad weather is like a character in a film.  Here are a handful of films that are either “man vs. nature” stories or stories where unusual atmospheric conditions serve as the backdrop for stories:

The Perfect Storm
Twister
Touching the Void
White Squall
Ice Storm
The Thing

A quirky screenwriting sidenote to The Thing (1982) is it was written by Bill Landcaster, who just happened to be the son of Oscar-winning actor Burt Landcaster (Elmer Gantry). And if that’s not odd enough, how about the fact that Bill Landcaster not only wrote that classic sci-fi film, but his first feature was the comedy Bad New Bears starring Walter Matthau and Tatum O’Neal.  And to top it off, The Thing was directed by John Carpenter and starred Kurt Russell who had worked together on the excellent TV movie Elvis (1979). That’s a lot of genre mixing talent. (And just for the record, I think Russell is the king of Elvis impersonators.)

While Carpenter said that he loved the 1951 film The Thing from Another World, for The Thing he decided to return to the original short story/novella Who Goes There written by John W. Campbell. (Campbell also wrote under the name Don A. Stuart.)  Isaac Asimov called Campbell (1910-71) “the most powerful force in science fiction ever.”

Here’s a taste of The Thing and The Thing from Another World and some behind the scene stuff with John Carpenter.

Scott W. Smith

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Dan O’Bannon 1946-2009

“Although I have only a small driblet of fame and fortune, it’s enough. My life has gone very well in all spheres except for my physical health.”
Dan O’Bannon

Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon died earlier this month after a 30 battle with Crohn’s disease. He’ll be most remembered in film history for writing Alien.

O’Bannon was born in St. Louis and stated that his early creative influences were comic books, monster movies of the 1950s, and H.P. Lovecraft novels. He would go to Washington University in St. Louis and MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Illinois, before going on to USC where he earned an MFA.

William Froug, in his book The New Screenwriter Looks at The New Screenwriter, had this to say about O’Bannon, “Looking back over twenty years of teaching at both USC and UCLA, I single out Dan O’Bannon as the most original, unique student I encountered. Dan was a quiet, modest young man, quite a bit undernourished, gentle, and soft-spoken. Dan was also something of a loner. It was clear he had his own vision, and it was the vision of an iconoclast. I was fond of him from the first time we met in one of my non-writing classes.”

O’Bannon met director John Carpenter in film school at USC and they made a student film together called Dark Star that they later expanded into their first feature film. After Alien O’Bannon went on to make several other films including The Return of the Living Dead, Total Recall, and Blue Thunder.

In an interview that he did with Froug I’ve pieced together what O’Bannon said was his way of working;

“I’m a structuralist myself. We believe in discipline, hard work, and architecture. Writing a script is like carpentry…In my early days of writing, I was afraid that working it all out in advance would destroy the creative impulse. Now I don’t even start seriously writing until it’s all worked out on paper…I keep retyping from the beginning. I list all my scenes. Then I rearrange them into three acts. I just keep working on it until I run dry of stuff that should go into an outline, and then I start on the script. I don’t start writing the script until it’s completely working in an outline. Until all the pieces are there…So the first big thrust is to get the structure first and then the script goes fairly quickly.”

O’Bannon was part of solid list of writers & filmmakers from Missouri. (See post Screenwriting from Missouri.)

There is a Dan O’Bannon website that is up and running as well as being in the process of being further developed and is sure to be a wealth of info on his writings.

Scott W. Smith

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