Ronald Shusett

On today's episode, we watch 1981's Dead and Buried.

It's a sci-fi horror film starring Jack Albertson and James Ferentino, directed by Gary Sherman, written by Alien creators Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett.

It follows a small town sheriff investigating a string of grisly murders where the deceased are resurrected by the local mortician to create an undead community.

My dad plays an undead townie and is likely bad.

But David Cronenberg clearly believes otherwise due to the similarities that he saw in his earlier films with Alien, especially the commonalities with the mechanisms of transmission of the alien being through a proboscis-like extension from the facehugger down the throat of Kane's character, and some other fairly icky examples that we could get into.

But as an interesting coincidence, Cronenberg ended up working on the film Total Recall, which was written by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, the writers of Alien.

At the point that film started becoming more of an action film, Cronenberg decided it wasn't for him, and he moved on to other projects, leaving Paul Verhoeven to take over directing chores.

All right, so at this point, let's get into the actual analysis of Alien itself.

Okay, I want to list a negative real quick because I think it's tied to the positives.

Because this movie is sort of in name only associated with Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett.

They're both listed as writers.

But they just wrote the good alien that people like and not this, which is written by Fede Alvarez and directed by Fede Alvarez, who we've talked about extensively.

exactly.

It was written by Dan O'Bannon, based on a story by O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett.

It was directed by Ridley Scott.

It stars Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm, and – and I looked this name up, and I practiced, so I'm going to do my best – Yafit Khodo.

Screenplay by Dan O'Bannon.

Story by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett.

Produced by Gordon Carroll, David Giler, Walter Hill.

Starring Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto.

Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, anyway, um, so, uh, Ronald Shusett.

Is that right? I'm, I'm-

Gary Sherman shot a hell of a movie.

Ron Shusett, I love him.

Of course, I ran into him later on Total Recall.

So we got to be good friends on Dead and Buried.

And he's the sole writer on this movie.

And of course, the movie's gonna credit Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett just for creating the character of Ripley.

Yeah, that was a fun name to see, familiar-ish name, and Joss Whedon, someone who's become a lot more popular, so very fun.

And James, starring in this movie is, of course, our homegirl Sigourney Weaver, 'cause it's Alien.

It just means a lot that there was, you know...

I, I thought about it one day and I thought about people like Ron Shusett, with whom Dan wrote, um, Total Recall, they share credit on Total Recall, and I thought about Don Jakoby, who he wrote Blue Thunder with, and I'm part of that group now.

I'm, I'm part of the group of Dan O'Bannon writing collaborators, and it's, it's very, it's very humbling to, to be in that kind of company.

Yeah, it, it definitely is.

And I had a chance a couple years ago, shortly before the book came out, uh, the Egyptian Theater, which is a great repertory theater on Hollywood Boulevard here in LA, uh, showed Total Recall.

They had a 70 millimeter archive print of it from, uh, from the Sony archives.

And they showed the film and Paul Verhoeven and the two surviving screenwriters, Ron Shusett and Gary Goldman were there, and did a Q&A after the film.

And it was wonderful to be in a packed house of people and see that movie, which at that point was over, you know, now it's going on, I think, God, it's 25 years old almost, 26 years old.