Anger Burger

One of my great heroes, Dan O’Bannon, died earlier this month and I only just now found out.  It’s grim news, and for several reasons.  The first is that at 63, I consider him to be a young man.  The second is that he died of Crohn’s disease.

I don’t mean to get all dramatic or anything, but I think sometimes I’m doing a disservice to myself and to others by behaving so flip about Crohn’s.  People live in terrible pain and die from this affliction, but I tend to focus on the day-to-day aspects of it, which might be not seeing the forest for the trees.  Or maybe this is how to stay sane… ish.

But enough of that garbage.  I was hugely influenced by O’Bannon, first as a conceptual writer and then later as a screenwriter.  Dark Star… now there’s a movie I would watch back-to-back with Dr. Strangelove and think, those guys knew how to make movies.  O’Bannon had a wicked sense of humor but was also a profound observer of human nature; part of the reason he wrote the aliens the way he did in Alien was from asking himself “What are men afraid of more than anything else in the whole universe?”  Two things that they believe they are essentially safe from: oral rape and impregnation.  Ha!

He would go on to lend his creative skills to Total Recall, The Return of the Living Dead, Heavy Metal, and a handful of other films.  He even did special effects work on Star Wars.  It breaks my heart to read over at the L.A. Times that he was writing a sci-fi/horror screenplay based on his experiences with Crohn’s disease, both because of  how close it makes me feel to him (“I’m in terrible agony all the time… how can I make this entertaining?”) and because we may now never see it.  I wish his wife and son peace.

Keep on keepin’ on, Dan.

Much love,

Sunday