Word: hurd
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Credit for this accomplishment belongs primarily to just two people, Cameron, who will turn 32 in August, and his wife Gale Anne Hurd, a year younger, who produced the picture and had an editorial say in the script ("Jim does most of the writing; I do most of the deleting"). It was their passion for the project, very much the result of adolescent years spent watching movies and reading science fiction, that rescued Aliens from being one of those tempting ideas that Hollywood loves to lunch over and hates to launch...
...Corman's famous schlock shop, where directors as divergent as Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese had done their early professional work. There he also met his future wife, who was Corman's executive assistant. Cameron left in 1982 to direct his first feature, Piranha II. By 1983 Cameron and Hurd had written an original script called The Terminator, and Alien's proprietors were impressed with it. They called Cameron in to discuss another project, about which they could not reach agreement. Before he left, however, Producer David Giler threw out the possibility of working on a new Alien. "I felt...
...find ways of cross-referencing to it, reminding viewers of a beloved source, which he managed in both small and large ways (they still serve corn bread on spaceships, and Aliens' voyagers do not like it any better than the Alien crew did). At the same time, Cameron and Hurd, who had by now become partners, had to find ways of bursting generic bonds...
Ripley's bonding with Newt is inevitable, as Hurd says, "because they were both survivors of their own particular group's encounter with extraterrestrial species. They knew what they were up against, and the others didn't. In Alien, people had to fight or die. Now Ripley could save herself but chooses to fight to save Newt." It is, in part, the unexpectedness and depth of her feelings that give the film its propulsive power, fueling the final hour to at least two more heart-stopper endings than the average thriller...
...this was beginning to take promising shape on paper in late 1983. But paper is not celluloid. And Cameron and Hurd needed a track record to support their developing vision. Luckily, it came in a rush. First, casting and finance finally came together for The Terminator script, which he directed and she produced. (It was during postproduction that their professional relationship turned into a romance that led to marriage ten months later.) In the meantime, he finished the script on which Sylvester Stallone did his usual devastating rewrite -- and turned into Rambo. The Terminator was a low-budget ($6.5 million...