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the various production houses in Hollywood.

Eventually the production team of Walter Hill, David Giler, and Gordon Carroll came on-board writing their own version of the script. What they brought to the screenplay, their story additions notwithstanding, was Hollywood weight. They had the big names that O'Bannon and Shusett didn't. However, the film still couldn't get a green light and the script was being changed and re-written almost on a daily basis.

A major stumbling block was the fact the film couldn't get a director. No one wanted to touch it. Of course, at this early stage the film was seen as nothing more than a cheap 'B' movie in the mould of Carpenter's semi-disastrous Dark Star. Science-fiction in the 1970s was all clinical white space suits, futuristic and fantastic settings, and the stuff of comic books. The audience for science-fiction didn't exist on a large scale and no one was going to put an 'A' movie budget to a film that on face-value was nothing more than a cheap monster movie. Then, George Lucas released Star Wars and all changed. Science-fiction wasn't cheap anymore, indeed, it could potentially be the most lucrative movie genre since cinema's inception. Giler and Hill, having shopped the Alien concept with 20th Century Fox earlier in the year, got a phone call. Fox, sensing a film set in space had to be added to their release schedule in 1979, had only one movie that fitted the bill. Alien was given a budget double its original size and the film was a go-picture.

Alien tells the story of seven astronauts from the commercial towing vessel Nostromo who are awoken from hyper-sleep when their spacecraft discovers a distress signal from a nearby planet. They travel to the planet and discover a crashed alien spacecraft. Investigating the spacecraft they find a member of the spacecraft's crew to be dead. On further investigation, they find a cargo hold full of egg-like organisms. When Kane, played by John Hurt, is attacked by a creature from one of these eggs, the crew return to their ship. The crew discover the creature has attached itself to Kane's face, keeping him alive but in a coma. When they try to cut the creature off it bleeds acid which eats through the hull of the ship. When the creature eventually dies, Kane comes out of his coma and seems fine. With one last meal before a return to hyper-sleep however, Kane begins to convulse, his chest explodes and from within another, more sinister alien creature is birthed. The alien escapes, leaving

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