Halb Mensch. Halb Ding.
For whoever might have the time for such things, there’s a seed for a longer dissection of the entertainment-industrial complex in this Ridley Scott quote:
“The xenomorph did very well,” laughs Ridley. “He survived; he’s now in Disneyland in Orlando, and no way am I going back there. How did he end up in Disneyland? I saw him in Disneyland, Jesus Christ!” #
Holy. Fuck. I’ll tell you, I know more about Star Wars than most people, but here’s a thing I didn’t know. Roger Christian (Set Decorator on Star Wars, Production Designer on Alien, director of Battlefield Earth(!), second unit director on Episode 1) directed a small film called Black Angel which showed in front of The Empire Strikes Back, funded by Lucas. That and a lot more in this extensive interview.
It has tons of awesome trivia stuff, like:
[Travolta] said every director that he put up for Battlefield Earth, he would first go to Quentin and ask his approval. And Quentin said ‘no’ to all of them. And [Travolta] said ‘When I mentioned your name, he screamed and yelled “Yes!”’.I asked him what this was based on, and he said ‘Didn’t you know? The Sender, the first film you made, is one of his all-time favourite movies.’ So [Travolta] said ‘Right, I’m going to put you together with him!’, and he put us together on a plane from New York – we had to fly back from the premiere. So I was there on a plane with Quentin and he spent about an hour going on about my film The Sender. [laughs]
[Tarantino] told me that when he was a video assistant he’d seen [The Sender] on television and taped it. He said ‘When it first came out in the cinemas, I realised that the studios were just against you on this, so I took people every night to see it, because I knew it wouldn’t be in the cinemas very long.’
So he’d taped it from television, and when the video rental came in, he looked at it and said ‘They’d cut some of your scenes’. He said ‘On my own money, and I was only a video assistant, I went and re-cut it – and I cut back in the scenes that they cut out, from my television recording’ [laughs]. ‘And that’s what we rented out. I’ve still got the copy somewhere at home’.
How I never heard of this, I have no idea, but it restores my hope that there are still undiscovered gems for me to discover about Star Wars.
Update: There’s another interview at Den of Geek, in which Roger says:
… because Ridley pulled his Directors Guild rights to have a screening with an audience. They [the studio] were really not backing it. And at that screening people were running out – and I remember somebody broke their arm running out into the toilets – and they told me people were stuffing towels into the speakers in the toilet they got so scared. That screening made the film a hit, when it got out.
You will be hard pressed to find anyone who has been involved in such a wide swath of the most influential movies out there. Terminator, Aliens, Predator, The Thing, Edward Scissorhands, Jurassic Park, Artificial Intelligence and not to mention a lot of less iconic, but equally impressed films in their own right, like Monster Squad, Leviathan, Constantine and despite the actual movie not being too impressive, no one can deny the absolutely stunning work on the suits for Burton’s Planet of the Apes. Oh, and about a gazillion other films as well.
Stan Winston darn pretty well invented the modern day Hollywood iconography in creature design.
I recommend that you get The Winston Effect, which is a fantastic rare look behind the scenes of these great movies and their creatures; and a look into the mind of the guy behind them.
My young and teenage self live in the shadow of the work this man did, and I salute him.
I just found out that there’s an Alien: Director’s Cut being released on October 21st this year! Until right now I didn’t know that?! This’ll be… interesting. I’m going to go Google it a bit and see what I find.
1 minute later: Here’s the official trailer site. (and here’s the official site, though there’s nothing there) I haven’t seen it yet.
While I wait for the download: I’m thinking that perhaps Scott went back and inserted some of the deleted footage (which can be found on the current DVD), but why? Alien certainly didn’t need it, and most of the deleted scenes were better left out as it is. So unless they dug up some previously unseen footage then I doubt this was entirely necessary. I haven’t heard of any such footage, and I have looked into this thoroughly in the past. Now Alien3 on the other hand has tons and tons of unreleased deleted scenes that would do the movie a great favor if inserted into a special edition. But I fear that it will continue to be child that was left behind :(.
The reason for it being re-released deleted footage or not, is probably to raise interest for the new 9-disc Alien Quadrilogy DVD set coming out at some point. Information is still scarce, but it’s definitely coming.
Having seen the trailer: Well the trailer only shows one of the scenes originally deleted from the theatrical release back in ’78. Namely the scene where Ripley finds Dallas cocooned in the bowels of the ship. It’s a cool scene, but I must admit being somewhat apprehensive about them re-inserting it, mostly because it half-way breaks some of the continuity in the Alien movies; a continuity which is broken enough as it is. This scene was obviously conceived before any of the other movies were even thought of, but the idea is that the Alien cocoons people and slowly turns them into eggs. Which of course, according to the gospel of Aliens, isn’t how that whole thing works, what with the Queen and all?
It is however cool news in the sense that it is re-released to cinemas and it lends itself superbly to the silver screen. Being probably the most aesthetically pleasing – and to me – most hauntingly scary movie of all time. I was of course born a tad bit too late to have seen it when it was first released. But I managed to catch an Alien marathon in Copenhagen back in ’97, and it was spectacular (and expensive!). But the copy of Alien we saw looked like it could have been the original released reels; more scratches than you can shake a facehugger at.
I just wish they would give Alien3 the Special Edition treatment instead, but I doubt that they ever will due to its poor reception at the box office. But hey, who am I kidding. Of course they will revisit it again — When the third DVD box set is released :)
Update: Dark Horizons says that: “A trailer is tipped to be sent out ‘loose in the film can’ with the ‘Alien Director’s Cut’ release on Halloween.” — That indeed would be interesting to see. That can crash so bad that it would make T3 look like a critically acclaimed masterpiece.
Update: This site says that the cocoon scene in fact is the only new scene… Some Director’s Cut eh? I would’ve expected a bit more from Ridley Scott. But if his excuse is that he’s busy working on the fabled Blade Runner DVD Box Set, then I could care less.
Update: Here you can find a complete list of deleted and never filmed scenes. Also, rumor has it that if this release goes well Aliens will also get the cleanup, buffed up soundtrack and re-release tour.