Comprehensive and definitive volume telling the complete story of how Alien was made, featuring new interviews with Ridley Scott and other production crew, and including many rarely-seen photos and illustrations from the Fox archives. In 1979 a movie legend was born, as Twentieth Century-Fox and director Ridley Scott unleashed Alien and gave audiences around the world the scare of their lives. To celebrate the movie's fortieth anniversary, author J.W. Rinzler (The Making of Star Wars) tells the whole fascinating story of how Alien evolved from a simple idea in the mind of writer Dan O'Bannon into one of the most memorable sci-fi horror thrillers of all time. With brand new interviews with Ridley Scott and other key members of the original production crew, and featuring many never-before-seen photographs and artworks from the archives, The Making of Alien is the definitive work on this masterpiece of popular cinema.
Author
J. W. Rinzler has authored over 20 books including two New York Times bestsellers and a #1 best-selling graphic novel. With more than 600,000 copies in print, his books have been translated into seven languages. J. W. Rinzler grew up in Manhattan, New York City, and then in Berkeley, California. He fell in love with old monster films, such as Dracula and Frankenstein, as well as Robin Hood and other adventure movies. He was an avid comic-book and novel reader, an intrepid moviegoer, and had his mind blown by The Beatles, Star Trek, Bruce Lee, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Frank Frazetta, Michelangelo, and Mad Magazine. Rinzler drew his own comic books (badly), then, in his 20s, moved onto figurative oil painting (okay-ly, but self-taught). He lived in France for almost 10 years, where he began writing. Back in the USA, he worked as executive editor at Lucasfilm for fifteen years, chronicling the work of George Lucas and his genial collaborators in a series of books about Star Wars and Indiana Jones. During this time, Rinzler also directed and wrote an animated short Riddle of the Black Cat, based on an Edgar Allan Poe story, which was accepted into several festivals, including the Montreal World Film Festival. His latest book is an epic historical fiction thriller called ALL UP, an epic about the first Space Age, published in July 2020. The sequel will be out in a year or two... Meanwhile his book on Howard Kazanjian, producer, is due in May 2021; and on Kubrick's The Shining in fall 2021. Rinzler is married and has two daughters and one grandson. He lives on the northern California coast.
