Masters Papers
The Xenomorph Project: Taxonomy of the Creature; Textuality of the Alien
Abstract: *course design + syllabus* In brief summary, the preparation of a proposed syllabus for examining the textuality of the xenomorph reveals an expansive discourse on the Alien franchise and its key figure. The Alien franchise is ever-growing , lending strength to the thesis that the xenomorph is a rich textual object of media. After completion of the reading list and assignments, the goal would be to turn to Henry Jenkins’s work on ‘fan-text poaching’ in order to distinguish the hermeneutical relationship between ‘fan texts’ and ‘franchise texts’. The xenomorph can potentially be shown to have a varied textual quality (both open and closed) depending on the media and texts in which the xenomorph is represented and discussed. This claim could prove to be valuable to the general discourse on textuality, semiotics and hermeneutics.
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art by Sambor
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Earlier Research on the Xenomorph...
I wrote an undergraduate paper on the Aline Quadrilogy for my Business of Film course. In the paper, I did a quantitative analysis for the four films using the Cinemetrics tool. I made some conclusions about the economics of special effects in filmmaking. However, my paper also included an interesting historical overview of the production of the four films. I will share that here on this page.
History of the Alien Quadrilogy
It has been considered that the Alien films are all part of the same story or “symphony”, as evidenced by them all being produced by 20th Century-Fox and fixing on a single character, Lt. Ellen Ripley.6 The series was founded on the success of Kubrick’s 2001 (1968) as a sci-fi art film and Lucas’s Star Wars (1977) as a money-making behemoth.7 Fox was excited about the original Alien project and was happy to support Giler and Hill’s story (the founders of Brandywine Productions and creators of the Alien characters and story concept). Giler and Hill requested being able to film in England and Fox approved, thus allowing Ridley Scott to employ many of the crew from Star Wars.8 In addition, Fox added money to the budget at different stages of pre-production, allowing Swiss surrealist artist, H.R. Giger, to present his designs for the film.9 Fox reported film rentals worldwide of $48.4M at the end of the first run and a stunting effect had been acknowledged due to a slow platform release (91 theaters) prior to the broad national release a few weeks later.10 Fox had allowed for a bloated marketing budget that had P&A at $18.8M and, by the end of the year, Fox was still reporting a net loss of $2.4M on the movie.11 The numbers belie the success of the film as Fox was openly criticized for ‘creative accounting’ and masking profits from participants (there were only net participant contracts for the film).12 This set the stage for many developments through levels of production on the sequels.
The sequels presented their fair share of obstacles. Sigourney Weaver was increasingly demanding as she became empowered as the essential element of the series (salary for the four films in order: $30K, $2M, $5.5M, $11M).13 Cameron’s sequel was almost never made due to Fox sitting on their hands about making a deal with Weaver and ultimately Cameron had to ruse the studio with a threat of re-writing the script sans Ripley.14 Fox was stingy on the Cameron sequel’s budget ($12M increased only to $17.5M after two stages of renegotiation).15 The war-epic-gun-fetish Cameron sequel did not appeal to Weaver’s liberal sensitivities while Weaver’s age didn’t appeal to Brandywine’s concern about her playing an action role when preparing for Fincher’s sequel. It was clear that Alien 3 would have to be gun-free and not derivative in the slightest of the first two Alien films.16 Fox had been reporting net losses on Aliens (1986) as late as 1992 and this led Brandywine, Cameron, and Weaver to separately take legal action which was then resolved privately.17 Alien 3 was mired in scorn, much like the alien queen herself at the epic end of Cameron’s sequel. Six rejected scripts, Weaver’s ballooning salary, Giger’s open criticism of frugality on special effects, Fox’s cost-cutting with endless script re-writes and revisions during production, all led David Thomson to describe the film as “a classic example of how not to do it”.18 The film history will help mitigate the understanding of my Cinemetrics and quantitative analysis.
N.B. Footnotes can be found in the original draft of this paper.
The sequels presented their fair share of obstacles. Sigourney Weaver was increasingly demanding as she became empowered as the essential element of the series (salary for the four films in order: $30K, $2M, $5.5M, $11M).13 Cameron’s sequel was almost never made due to Fox sitting on their hands about making a deal with Weaver and ultimately Cameron had to ruse the studio with a threat of re-writing the script sans Ripley.14 Fox was stingy on the Cameron sequel’s budget ($12M increased only to $17.5M after two stages of renegotiation).15 The war-epic-gun-fetish Cameron sequel did not appeal to Weaver’s liberal sensitivities while Weaver’s age didn’t appeal to Brandywine’s concern about her playing an action role when preparing for Fincher’s sequel. It was clear that Alien 3 would have to be gun-free and not derivative in the slightest of the first two Alien films.16 Fox had been reporting net losses on Aliens (1986) as late as 1992 and this led Brandywine, Cameron, and Weaver to separately take legal action which was then resolved privately.17 Alien 3 was mired in scorn, much like the alien queen herself at the epic end of Cameron’s sequel. Six rejected scripts, Weaver’s ballooning salary, Giger’s open criticism of frugality on special effects, Fox’s cost-cutting with endless script re-writes and revisions during production, all led David Thomson to describe the film as “a classic example of how not to do it”.18 The film history will help mitigate the understanding of my Cinemetrics and quantitative analysis.
N.B. Footnotes can be found in the original draft of this paper.
| cinemetrics-alienquad.docx |
