Hot on the heels of Chris Foss talking the Nostromo, the beautiful bastards at Den of Geek got Syd Mead to write up an article on the Sulaco.
The NOSTROMO was a masterpiece of design in the ‘new’ genre of rocket ships that didn’t look like they could ‘go fast.’ It was, in fact, a lumbering commercial inter-whatever facility.
I was one of twelve judges for that year’s Miss Universe competition in Floriida. By that time I’d done STAR TREK:TMP (the V’ger entity), BLADERUNNER (all the vehicles, street set proposals, various artifacts and post –productiono matte preliminaries) and TRON. (all of the transport vehicles except the ‘butterfly’ ship at the end of the film, designed my Moebius.) I read the script FedExed to me by Jim and on the way back to Los Angeles on the plane sketched my visual interpretation of the script saying...’a forest of antennae comes into frame followed by the mass of the SULACO.’ So, I drew a ‘forest of antennae’ on the front end of a massive ‘ball-shaped’ mass. I drove up to (then) Jim’s and Gale Ann Hurd’s ( Jim’s wife at the time and also the line-producer) house on Mulholland Drive and Cameron saw my sketches. I paraphrase;
“Syd? I’m going to have the SULACO move past the camera and a sphere will require pulling focus. Here’s sorta how it should be’ and he drew a quick sketch of a flat kind of thing, sort of like a huge, flat submarine. I went back to my studio and produced the final design in the next two days.
The SULACO, in my mind, was again basically a commercial freighter with a military contingent onboard to confront the ALIEN threat. I designed the overall exterior of the ship with its row of LOADING DOORS down the side replete with a gantry that supported a traveling loading crane, the power plant at the rear end and two HUGE gun-like fixtures on each side that could be for defense, whatever.
It combined a utilitarian, functional look with an overlay of surface detail articulation and a suggestion of being a well-armed ship. Inside, I designed the drop bay for the drop ship, the assault de-orbital craft which contained the assault vehicle and started on two other design jobs. Here’s what happened. The production moved to Pinewood pretty early in process.
The drop ship was first designed as a full-sized prop piece inside my drop ship bay set (using every inch of Pinewood’s largest sound stage) and the model was made to look like it. The drop ship prop only had to be photographed from the left side as the shot looked down the length of the set.
The assault tractor was a dressed 747 towing tractor with the lead removed. I also was asked to start designing the look of the off-world installation; pressure exterior doors and some of the interior laboratory sets that had originally been started by Ron Cobb. That never happened. I also designed a start on the hospital room where Sigourney Weaver’s character was being revived. That never happened either.
The sequels got progressively worse with each one. I received a request from the director of the first sequel to design the ‘lifeboat’ thing which was supposed to be one of the exterior hull freight doors I mentioned earlier. I quoted them a fee and heard nothing more, typical Hollywood lack of business manners.
For anyone who cares (and you bloody should), you can read the whole article, in which Mead has also written up on
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