HOW MICHAEL BIEHN GOT AXED

| Hicks, the tough Marine-in-space | played byactor Michael Biehn, survived the grisly travails of director James Cameron's hit 1986 sequel ALIENS, but Biehn is not slated to appear in Fox's ALIEN 3. Bichn, however, did not feel unduly left out. For one thing, the actor said he understood the exigencies of the plot, such as they are after three writers | and as many directors toiled on the script. And Biehn just didn't placea high premium on ALIEN 3's prospects for critical or boxoffice success, “I don’t think they've got much of a script,” said Biehn. “And I don't think Jim’s movie [ALIENS] can be topped, or that they could ever come close to it. From what I've been able to understand, | don’ think it’s going to work.”

After his derring-do, battling the Xenomorphs in ALIENS, Hicks reportedly gets short shrift in the new sequel, shown dead, played by a Bichn lookalike, after Ripley’s ship has crashed. Hicks’ fate in the new film is also reportedly shared by Newt, the little girl played by Carrie Henn, whose salvation at the hands of Ripley was the whole point of ALIENS. To have both characters so summarily dipatched is sure to disappoint fans of the series.

ALIEN 3 executive producer David Giler said he and his producing partner Walter Hill decided to dispense with Hicks and Newt early on because they wanted Ripley operating on her own. Such a scenario, noted Giler, offered the producers greater leeway storywise. Giler also said that “logistics” didn't favor bringing back cither Biehn or Henn. The importance of both characters is highlighted by Fox's recent release of Cameron’s “director’s cut” of ALIENS on video disc, complete with missing scenes which introduced Newt's family just before they come across the derelict ship from ALIEN and unleash the horror again.

The original script of ALIEN 3 by cyberpunk writer William Gibson showed more respect for the series’characters. In Gibson’s unfilmed story, young Newt is shown departing froma space station to live with her grandparents on Earth. And Bichn’s Hicks, as in ALIENS, was given a strong second-banana role in the action,

Sheldon Teitelbaum

WILLIAM GIBSON’S “(NEUROALIENS”

The cyberpunk genius behind Neuromancer wrote the first of many ALIEN 3 scripts.

By Sheldon Teitelbaum

Acclaimed science fiction novelist William Gibson had big plans for the third ALIEN movie whose script he was first commissioned to write. So did producer David Giler, who signed the Vancouver-based pope of cyberpunk after reading a copy of Gibson’s awardwinning novel Neuromancer ona beach in the south of Thailand soon after the release of ALIENS (1986). The result was notas memorable aseither hoped, but the experience is recalled warmly by both.

Giler said he wassoimpressed by Gibson’s book he told ALIEN 3 co-producer Walter Hill that the Vancouver-based writer would be the ideal screenwriter, Another sequel, maintained Giler, had to be sufficiently different from its two predecessors so that there would be no danger of it being viewed as a mere retread. Gibson's cyberpunk sensibility, believed Giler, was just the kind of touch that was needed.

Gibson noted that he was seminally influenced by the film ALIEN (1979). “I found a lot of things in the original that were interesting even when it first came out,” said Gibson. “I thought there were germs of stories implicit in the art direction. | always wanted to know more about these guys. Why they were wearing dirty sneakers in this funky spaceship? I think itinfluenced my prose SF writing because it was the first funked up, dirty kitchen-sink space ship and it made a big impression on me. When I started writing SF I went for that,”

Alas, by 1987, when Gibson was called upon to craft an ALIEN 3, the cyberpunk aesthetic—already ensconced in music, videos and advertising as a cultural cliche—had lost its sheen for Gibson. In Gibson's script, Giler got a more conventional political face off, based upon Giler and Hill's ideas, between the Weyland Yutani Corporation and an equally corrupt constellation of non-aligned “Third Universers.”

Gibson, who is nowjuggling three scripts based upon his own stories (two, BURN- ING CHROMEand JOHNNY PNEUMATIC, are in development at Carolco), came to ALIEN 3 with little in the way of screenwriting experience. Gibson noted he was enormously impressed with Hill and Giler. “They were arguing at the time about what the Alien metaphor meant,” said Gibson. “I expected this kind of discussion of subtext from academics, not from producers.”

Hill, in fact, argued in favor of a subtext which viewed the aliens as cancers. Not so Giler, who believed they worked asa metaphor for the HIV virus. Giler had heard someone on the radio say that human life on this planet had developed as food for viruses. Gibson liked the idea, and his script became the only one of a score of others to explicitly incorporate this theme.

Still, Gibson found himself hard put to grasp the vagaries of screenwriting. A master of surface textures, Gibson noted that he wished he'd been hired, instead, as the movie's art director. “If you look at my style asa novelist, I'm heavy on cultural detail,” said Gibson. “That's really something, as I've subsequently learned toa certain extent on other screenplays, the province of the art director. In a screenplay you only wanta little telling detail. I was writing down what people were wearingand howtheir watches functioned.”

Gibson was given the scripts for the first two films and a 12-page story treatment. Hill and Giler’s original concept was to confront the company with a separate, space-faring Earth culture of a socialist or even communist bent. It wasnt clear to Gibson or anyone at the time how quickly the concept would date. Far more obviously imminent was a Writers Guild strike, which put Gibson under pressure to turn ina manuscript—any manuscript.

“We got the opposite of what we expected,” said Giler. “We figured we'd get a script that was all over the place, but which would have many good ideas we could mine. It turned out to be a competently written screenplay but not as inventive as we wanted it to be. That was probably our fault, though, because it was our story. We had hoped he'd open up the story and don't know why it didn't happen.”

“I was glad to have something to hang onto storywise,” responded Gibson. “Being given free rein really means an infinite budget. The impression I had, though, was that budget parameters argued against introducing the aliens into something that was the equivalent of the BLADE- RUNNER set, which I admit would have been my natural impulse.

“Failing that, I worked through a series of semi-abandoned space station ideas, my favorite of which was a space station that seemed to be a shopping mall underconstruction—Somtow Sucharitkul's Mallworld, but unfinished. I've always found unfinished shopping malls extremely spooky.

“The most fun I had with it, though, was working ovt this kind of futuro-socialist third world culture that seems to be in opposition to the company but in fact was just as corrupt. It’s like the crew of the Enterprise running into a spaceship full of Stalinists.”

Gibson described the finished manuscript, which he turned in just before thestrike, as “moody, very moody.”Said Gibson, “We're talking arty science fiction novelist attempts to come to grips with cinema form. The TV Guide synopsis would read, “Space commies hijack alien eggs—big trouble in Mallworld.

“It’s not a script I'd want people to use to judge my screenwriting talents,” continued Gibson. “But my imagination has been trained in the course of writing a couple of SF novels to move ina particular way. But it was really, I think, initially, an extremely ungainly and even totally unworkable way to proceed as a screenwriter, | have subsequently had to train an entirely new group of muscles without entirely losing the others.”

Gibson did not hear back from Hill or Giler for the duration of the writers’ strike. “It seemed to go on fora very, very long time,” said Gibson, who lost little sleep—having been paid—fretting over the script’s fate. Eventually, Gibson flew back for a new wave Chinese food lunch with Hill, Giler and director Renny Harlin, who by then had been signed on (and would later quit) as ALIEN 3's director. The producers suggested Gibson undertake a rewrite with Harlin, But by then, Gibson was being asked to adapt his own stories as screenplays, a task he found more meaningful.

Recently, Gibson was sent a stack of scripts for ALIEN 3by the Writers Guild, which has begun the arduous task of assigning credit for the script and story. Gibson said he was happy todiscover that only one of his ideas survived—one of the characters in the film has a bar code tattooed on his body.

“What would have been horrible,” said Gibson, “was if there had been some fragment left in it and I had to fight for partial credit or some sort of cut. But I was lucky. It was nice to get paid for working on a first draft of a high profile Hollywood film, get off scott free and get more work on the basis of that. That amazed me more than anything.

“I'm really interested in seeing this new film. From the screenplays, it struck me as good in the ways the first two films were good, and dumb in the ways they were dumb. They had a choice between opening this thing up and expanding the meaning of the two previous films or going for closure. They went for closure. They had an emotionally logical conclusion and that’s what they went for.

“I think its success will hinge on the look of the film. If it looks great it will be very satisfying; if not, there will bea problem.” Oo

Gibson, whose unused script—his first—ied to adapting two of his books for the screen in a deal at Caroico.

THE FATE OF RIPLEY AND ALIEN 4

When Fox ran trailers for ALIEN 3 last July, tagged on the front of their summer flop POINT BREAK, the film was advertised for a Christmas release, with the voiceover suggestion that the third film in the series would have an Earth setting. That was before extensive reshooting to fix their troubled production, planned for August and reportedly budgeted at $10 million, fell through. Rumor had it that Sigourney Weaver refused to shave her head again to match the existing prison planet footage of Fox’scostly $50 million production.

Some reshooting has taken place. Fox executive producer Jon Landau supervised effects filming at A.D.I. in November, shooting an opening scene in which the alien bursts forth from the body of a dog. Fox was reportedly still interested in shooting a newending. Previews of the work in progress in mid- February showed little evidence of the film being “fixed.”

Producer David Giler refused to discuss the film's production difficulties, but defended the decision to make the story a “prison picture.” Said Giler, “Part of what makes an ALIEN movie work is they're a reworking of other genres of movies. We felt the first was truck drivers in space; the second was marines in space; the third would be tough guys in space, keeping genre elements that had worked well before—the claustrophobic environment, a lot of people no one cared much about in theory, the flotsam and jetsam of the future.”

Giler said Newt, the little girl played by Carrie Henn, saved by Ripley in ALIENS, wasn't brought back for two reasons: one, it gave them greater freedom storywise and two, Henn had grown up, aging drastically by deepspace hibernation standards. The film’s original script by cyberpunk author William Gibson had addressed this problem, by showing Newt going off to live with her grandparents. Killing the character makes the scenario of James Cameron’s ALIENS rather pointless.

Without confirming that the film's original ending, in which Ripley dies, has been changed, Giler suggested that ALIEN 3 won't necessarily be the end of the series. “Your biggest obligation,” said Giler, “is to make it different from the first two, to try to keep it fresh, not just make it a sequel. You can't see this series as a trilogy. The idea that she [Ripley] dies at the end, and it’sa trilogy and it’s over, is silly. If everyone loves this movie, there will be a fourth one. It's science fiction—there are nine million ways to bring Ripley back, ortodo other alien stories. You could bring it back to the planet of the aliens, never mind Earth.” Sheldon Teitelbaum

ALIEN 3 executive producer David Giler.

Fox's trailer for ALIEN 3 last summer, promised @ Christmas release and suggested that the flim was sot on Earth, not a prison planetold in space.