The young writer was quickly learning the feast-or-famine nature of the movie business. A couple years earlier, O'Bannon had made a splay-legged splash in the Hollywood pool with Dark Star, a cheapie feature that he and fellow USC classmate John Carpenter expanded from a student film. O'Bannon co-wrote, handled the special effects for and appeared in the sci-fi satire, which startled critics with the promise it foretold for its two creators. But after that precocious beginning, the wanna-be auteur struggled through a sophomore slump, making the rounds with a variety of stories that couldn't find their way into production.

Rather than becoming disheartened, through, O'Bannon redoubled his efforts. Bedded won on a friends couch; he started anew; fashioning an outline with collaborator Ron Schusett about a mysterious, seemingly unconquerable alien that a research crew accidentally trundles aboard its spaceship. The story was a reworked version of an earlier unproduced O'Bannon script, in which gremlins nest in a World War II bomber, causing endless problems for the pilots. The working title of this new effort was Star Beast, and it featured a vicious alien that, in designs that preceded H.R. Giger's involvement, resembled a snarly octopus – a sophisticated version of the claw-footed beachball that taunted O'Bannon in Dark Star.

The initial response to the horror story among the studios was uniformly positive but once again no development money was forthcoming. Then a little outfit called Brandywine Productions got ahold of the script. Directors David Giler and Walter Hill – who, along with producer Gordon Carroll, made up Brandywine – rewrote O'Bannon's script and took it to Twentieth Century Fox. This time, Alien, as O'Bannon had renamed it, got the green light – and the film went on to become a genre classic.

Almost two decades later, the fourth Alien film is nearing production. The monsters have become part of our movie mythology, as identifiable as Frankenstein or Darth Vader. Through Sigourney Weaver has made a career of destroying these bio-mechanical menaces, we're pleased that she hasn't been able to finish the job.