“We used a beach ball as an alien!” John Carpenter for the fantastic sci-fi comedy Dark Star | Science fiction and fantasy films

John Carpenter, writer and director

In 1970, I partnered with Dan O’Bannon, a classmate at the University of Southern California, on a major student project. We wanted to make a sci-fi movie inspired by Dr. Strangelove and 2001. We had no money but we had huge ambition. Dan co-wrote it, was also the production designer and editor, and starred in the film as Sergeant Beanback.

We started with some money from my dad, shooting in 16mm. It was a very long process of filming one scene, then pausing to raise money to film the next scene. Dan and I built the sets with the help of college friends, and students also played the cast and crew. The computer voice in Dark Star was Barbara “Cookie” Knapp, the photographer’s wife.

Dirty Space was a choice we made because we thought, knowing humans, that the kind of sterility we saw in science fiction like 2001 wouldn’t happen. Of course, it was cheaper. The spaceship was designed by Ron Cobb, a friend of Dan’s. The premise of a deep space spaceship bombarding unstable planets never really made sense – the movie was always humorous.

By the summer of 1972, we had 45 minutes of footage, marketed it and got the money to turn it into a feature film. We went looking for a distributor and Jack Harris, who had produced The Blob, took it up. He was looking for a space movie, but there were a few things he wanted to include — a bunch of clichés, like a meteor storm. We needed distribution, so we did it. I wrote the soundtrack, as well as the music for the song Benson Arizona, which plays during the opening and closing credits. Lyrics written by Bill Taylor, special effects technician.

Additional footage taken to make it feature included scenes with the alien. By that point, we were full of comedy. We were using a beach ball to represent a planet – it had a pair of sinkers stuck to the bottom – and one day I saw it being carried by a crew member. I thought it looked so ridiculous that we should try something similar to the alien! Nick Castle, who played the alien, gave it a lot of personality. Later he continued the tradition by playing The Shape in Halloween.

Brian Narnell played Lieutenant Doolittle

Filming was supposed to take a month but ended up being done in chunks over three years. The first scene we shot was in a closet in the student building – I don’t think the set for the spaceship control room was finished. A women’s group was having a meeting in the next room; The noise they were making made things difficult for us and we were disturbing them. Coincidentally, George Roy Hill was filming the pool scene for the movie Slaughterhouse-Five in the gym over the street.

The buttons in the control room were upside-down plastic ice cube trays, and my spacesuit had an upside-down plastic dish drying rack stuck to it. When I was wearing the helmet, I had to function without oxygen. After each line, O’Bannon would remove the helmet, grab my ears, and escort me outside for some cool air.

In the scene where the crew members are relaxing, Cal Kunniholm, who played Buehler, improvised the trick in which he stabbed a knife back and forth between his spread fingers. He accidentally moved his finger for real, but he didn’t flinch or break character. Once Carpenter shouted: “Cut!” He said, “Fuck! Oh my God!” You don’t hear the stab in the movie, but I can still hear it in my head. I watch Dark Star now, and turn away when that happens.

Although Doolittle made two trips to speak with Sergeant Talby in the ship’s observation cupola, each side of the conversation was filmed at different times – I was really talking to a light on a stand. In fact, I didn’t meet Dre Bahic, who played Talby, until the first show. His voice in the movie is actually John’s. John also voiced the deceased Commander when Dolittle visited him in the refrigerator for advice. The ice vapor below was made of kerosene spray, something you don’t want to breathe. In between takes, I had a wet cloth on my face and was trying not to slip and break my butt.

Dark Star opened in 45 theaters: a movie starring nobody that nobody knew, that people didn’t understand, that was a comedy. Dan O’Bannon left a show as 12 curious people walked in and didn’t know what they were looking at. “Fuck them,” he said. “If I can’t make them laugh, I’ll scare the hell out of them.” This was the seed for the screenplay for his film Alien.

A few years later, at San Diego Comic Con, I was introduced to Ray Bradbury. I was thrilled to meet this literary legend, but when Bradbury heard I was playing Dark Star, he let me have it, claiming it took away ideas from his own writing. He was wearing these Coke bottle glasses and I felt like a bug being burned under a magnifying glass.

Dolittle’s character—and the entire movie—is summed up in one line: “Don’t give me any of the intelligent life crap, just find me something I can blow up.” At the moment, this situation seems even more disturbing. Nor is Dolittle’s failure to convince the bomb not to explode a monument to our chances of victory over artificial intelligence. The film has things to say about today that it wouldn’t have said in 1974.