In the book Hello, He Lied by Linda Obst, Alien franchise producer Gordon Carroll said that James Cameron pitched himself as the writer/director of Aliens (watch it HERE) by walking into a pitch session with the producers and the head of 20th Century Fox “without so much as a piece of paper. He went to the chalkboard in the room and simply wrote the word, ALIEN. Then he added an ‘S’ to make ALIENS. Dramatically, he drew two vertical lines through the ‘S’, ALIEN$. He turned around and grinned. We greenlit the project that day for $18 million.” During a recent interview, the folks at Cinema Blend took the chance to ask Cameron if that story is true – and he confirmed that it is! (Basically.)
Here’s how Cameron remembers it:
Yeah, it’s true. (Making the dollar sign) just popped into my mind in the moment. It was actually on the back of a script, or some kind of presentation document. It might’ve been the treatment. I can’t remember. I was sitting with the three producers, and we were in the office of the then-head of 20th Century Fox. And I said, ‘Guys, I got an idea for the title. And it goes like this.’ And I wrote, ‘Alien’ in large block letters. And I put an S on the end. I showed it to them. I said, ‘I want to call it Aliens, because we’re not dealing with one. Now we’re dealing with an army, and that’s the big distinction. And it’s very simple and very graphic.’ And I said, ‘But here’s what it’s going to translate to.’ And then I drew the two lines through it to make it a dollar sign. And that was my pitch. And apparently it worked! Because they went with the title. They never questioned it.”
Cameron was right to turn the S into a dollar sign, because Aliens was a financial success and one of the top-grossing films of 1986.
Aliens has the following synopsis:
After floating in space for 57 years, Lt. Ripley’s (Sigourney Weaver) shuttle is found by a deep space salvage team. Upon arriving at LV-426, the marines find only one survivor, a nine year old girl named Newt (Carrie Henn). But even these battle-hardened marines with all the latest weaponry are no match for the hundreds of aliens that have invaded the colony.
Weaver and Henn are joined in the cast by Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton, Paul Reiser, Lance Henriksen, and Jenette Goldstein.
Had you heard of this Aliens pitch session before?