name) for Best Special Effects. He was retained to supervise special effects for an Alejandro Jodorowsky production of Frank Herbert's Dune. That project fell apart in 1976 and the movie was never made, reportedly because the major Hollywood studios were wary of financing the picture with Jodorowsky as director. O'Bannon's role is prominently featured in the 2013 documentary Jodorowsky's Dune. The collapse of Dune left O'Bannon broke, homeless, and dependent on friends for his survival. According to The Guardian, "George Lucas was impressed enough with his hand-animated, faux computer screen graphics to hire him to do similar work on Star Wars, but otherwise this was an incredibly lean period for him." He eventually abandoned technical film work for scriptwriting. While living with his friend Ronald Shusett, they came up with the story for O'Bannon's career-making film Alien (1979), for which he wrote the screenplay and supervised visuals. 1980s In 1981, O'Bannon helped create the animated feature Heavy Metal, writing two of its segments ("Soft Landing" and "B-17"). O'Bannon voiced his displeasure with his next big-budget outing, John Badham's Blue Thunder (1983), an action film about a Los Angeles helicopter surveillance team. Originally written with Don Jakoby, Blue Thunder also underwent extensive rewriting, losing some of its political content. He and Jakoby also scripted Lifeforce (1985), a movie based on Colin Wilson's novel The Space Vampires and directed by Tobe Hooper that veers from alien visitation to vampirism and an apocalyptic ending. It was not well received at the time, and was considered a box office flop. O'Bannon would again collaborate with Jakoby and Hooper for the 1986 remake Invaders from Mars. Purists considered it inferior to the 1950s original and it also performed poorly at the box office. O'Bannon also worked as a consultant for C.H.U.D., helping to create the design concept for the title creatures. In 1985, O'Bannon moved into the director's chair with The Return of the Living Dead, a sequel to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Like Alien, the film met with success, spawned numerous sequels, and became a cult classic. That year, he was awarded the Inkpot Award. 1990s In 1990, O'Bannon and Shusett again teamed up as writers on Total Recall, an adaptation of the short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale by Philip K. Dick. This was a project the two had been working on since collaborating on Alien. With