Finally, a release date was chosen: May 25, 1979, exactly two years after the release of Star WarsLadd had come to believe that the timing was fortunate for the studio.
“I remember being in a horrible office in Times Square and staring at a sign that said, ‘Alien “…In space, no one can hear you scream,” Scott says. “I could also see a line going around the block. I haven’t seen that since.” Star Wars. So at that point, I thought we were going to be in good shape.”
In fact, Alien It would become one of the highest-grossing films of 1979, breaking records in its opening weekend and grossing $106 million at the worldwide box office. However, critical reaction was mixed at best.
In the late 1970s, science fiction as a genre rarely received a fair shake from middle-aged critics. But in this case, they seemed unable to look past Scott’s exuberant Madison Avenue style and see the substance behind it. While some hailed Scott as a new kind of horror film visionary, and both Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert applauded him, others considered him little more than an “empty bag of tricks.”
Despite the skeptics, As 1979 drew to a close, Alien The film would go on to be nominated for two Oscars, for Best Art Direction and Best Visual Effects. It would win a statuette for the latter award, thanks to Swiss madman H.R. Giger. Meanwhile, due to the film’s runaway financial success (the only metric that really matters in Hollywood, critics be damned), Scott became a much sought-after filmmaker.
Just a couple of years earlier, he had been afraid of being pigeonholed as a director of lyrical art-historical films. Now, after AlienHe was inundated with offers to direct big-budget sci-fi films. This time, however, he wasn’t worried about being pigeonholed. At least, not yet. Which is how Scott found himself sitting in the opulent office of Italian movie mogul Dino De Laurentiis to discuss the producer’s massive adaptation of author Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel. Dune.
In fact, Scott would continue working on Dune For more than seven months with screenwriter Rudolph Wurlitzer (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid) in London, trying to shoehorn its vast and complicated story into a manageable two-hour script. But every step forward seemed to be followed by several steps back.
“I worked in Dune “It seemed like an eternity,” Scott says. “But with each step we took, it became more and more apparent that this was going to take another year and a half to two years of hard work until we could finally get started.”
In retrospect, Dune It seemed like a cursed property from day one. The first option was Planet of the Apes Producer Arthur P. Jacobs in 1972, his big-screen adaptation sat in development purgatory until his death in 1973 and remained there for the next two years while the producer’s heirs sorted out the intricacies of their contractual estates. Then, in 1975, a French consortium led by a wealthy Parisian with Hollywood dreams named Michel Seydoux purchased the rights from Jacobs’ heirs. He subsequently persuaded Alejandro Jodorowsky to make a film from Herbert’s source material.
