There are THREE great lessons in this story for all screenplay writers and wannabe screenplay writers:
REWRITE, REWRITE and REWRITE!
On every street corner in Hollywood there are screenwriters moaning about how the studio ruined the original vision of their screenplay.
But what we never hear about is the opposite side of the coin where some truly horrific piece of writing got turned into a awesome motion pictures that became amazing successes.
It we believe the facts, it turns out that some of your favorite movies started out as truly terrible screenplays that somebody had the good taste to rewrite (and rewrite several times in some cases) before the cameras ever started rolling.
In 1976, screenwriters Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett decided to expand on an unfinished O'Bannon screenplay titled MEMORY. This was a sci-fi story about a spaceship crew answering a distress call on a desolate planetoid.
By simply adding an alien monster to the story, everything about the story changed and the new script was titled STARBEAST.
Then, lightning struck and they immediately realized that Starbeast was a f**king terrible title! They had the inspiration and the good sense to come up with a better title and they renamed the screenplay ALIEN.
READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE By Steve Clark - http://www.cracked.com/article_16716_7-terrible-early-versions-great-movies.htmlCopyright © 2005 - 2007 Cracked Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved. CRACKED, CRACKED.COM and the "CRACKED" logo are trademarks owned by Cracked Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved.
Labels: Alien, alien monster, Dan O'Bannon, Memory, Rewrite, Ronald Shusett, Sci-Fi, screenplay, screenwriters, Starbeast
