Dark Star is a low budget sci-fi comedy concerning 4-5 guys who have been in space way too long. Dan O'Bannon multi-tasked on Dark Star, acting, scripting, production design, editing, all sorts. So compelling were his computer graphics (really animation) that George Lucas hired him for similar chores on Star Wars. One incident concerns a comic beachball alien that escapes into the gizzards of the ship causing mayhem. O'Bannon revisited this scene and that begat the Alien franchise.

O'Bannon cornered the market for a while in scripting movies from the novels of Philip K. Dick, Total Recall and Screamers. Although O'Bannon and Carpenter fell out, Carpenter always mentioned an O'Bannon directed USC short concerning a bathroom suicide as being something special, O'Bannon finally got to direct a feature with the hilarious Return of the Living Dead.

Dan O'Bannon, one of a kind. RIP

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Jennifer Jones, Oscar-winning actress, dies at 90
Discovered by future husband David O. Selznick, Jones won the Academy Award for 1943's 'The Song of Bernadette.' She also was married to industrialist and art collector Norton Simon.
By Claudia Luther

10:13 AM PST, December 17, 2009

Jennifer Jones, the actress who won an Academy Award for her luminous performance in the 1943 film "The Song of Bernadette" and who was married to two legendary men -- producer David O. Selznick and industrialist and art collector Norton Simon -- died today. She was 90.

Jones died of natural causes at her home in Malibu, according to Leslie C. Denk, a spokeswoman for the Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena.

Jones oversaw the museum following Simon's death in 1993, but she was best known for her movie career.

In all, she starred in more than two dozen films, playing opposite such A-list actors as William Holden, Joseph Cotten and Gregory Peck.

In addition to her best-actress win for "Bernadette," Jones was nominated for an Academy Award for leading roles in three other films: "Love Letters" (1945), a soaper in which an amnesiac is cured through the love of a man, played by Cotten; the western epic "Duel in the Sun" (1946), with Peck; and "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing" (1955), in which she played Dr. Han Suyin opposite Holden. She also was nominated as best supporting actress for "Since You Went Away" (1944), in which she starred with her first husband, Robert Walker.

The tall, sensitive Jones might never have risen to stardom but for Selznick, who was the first to see something special in the beautiful "big-eyed girl" who showed up in his New York office to test -- although not very well -- for the part of Claudia in the 1943 film of the same name. (Dorothy McGuire won the role.) After seeing her second test, he decided she was "the best sure-fire female star to come along since Leigh and Bergman" --referring to Vivien Leigh and Ingrid Bergman, both then under contract to the producer.

He found the young actress a new name and began grooming her for stardom, finding Jones her first big role in "Bernadette" and, afterward, producing or choosing most of her films. He endlessly pestered Hollywood with his memos about her makeup, her camera angles, her costumes. She was his protégé, his obsession, his crusade, eventually his lover and, finally, his wife.

His adoration of her, said film critic David Thomson, shaped the rest of his life and fueled "one of the great gossip-column melodramas of the time."

"She was an ardent young actress before she met Selznick," Thomson wrote in his "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film." "But it is hard now to be sure whether we would know her if his great wind had not picked her up like a leaf."

Jones was born Phylis Isley in Tulsa, Okla., on March 2, 1919, the daughter of the owners and stars of Isley Stock Co., a tent show that toured the Midwest. She became interested in acting during her school years and eventually studied at Northwestern University and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York.

It was at the academy that she met Walker, whom she married in 1939 and with whom she had two sons, Robert Walker Jr. and Michael Walker.

After several failed attempts to break into Hollywood, the two actors settled in New York City, and finally Jones got her chance for a screen test with Selznick.

By that time, Selznick was almost 40 and had already produced the epic "Gone With the Wind" and a string of popular and important films, including "David Copperfield," "A Tale of Two Cities" and "Rebecca." He was looking for another "GWTW" -- and another star to discover.

"It was a sudden fusion of supply and demand. She needed his help, he desperately needed to give it to her," Selznick's secretary, Frances Inglis, would later tell Thomson, who is also author of "Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick" (1992).

"The Song of Bernadette," a 20th Century Fox film directed by Henry King, was the vehicle Selznick picked to introduce Jones to the American public.

It was, everyone agreed, perfect casting. Jones, who was Catholic and had gone to a convent school, had the kind of wide-eyed innocence that made her believable as Bernadette Soubirous, the French peasant girl who saw a vision of the Virgin Mary in a grotto.

"I cried all the way through 'Bernadette' because Jennifer was so moving and because I realized then I had lost the award," said Ingrid Bergman, who was Oscar-nominated for her role in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" the same year Jones won.

At the time, Jones was a wife and mother, but even that tame image was not what the studio wanted for the actress it had playing a virginal mystic. For months, Jones was asked to hide her family life and present herself as a real-life Bernadette.

That changed after Selznick arranged for Jones and Walker to play opposite each other in Jones' second starring film, the World War II tear-jerker, "Since You Went Away." To promote that film, publicity stories were churned out about "Mr and Mrs. Cinderella" and their contented home life with their children.

By then, however, the relationship was a sham, and it was difficult for them to perform the love scenes. The film's director, John Cromwell, said that on two occasions Jones' "emotional upsets caused her to flee the set in tears."

The couple divorced in 1945. Walker, who had starred in "See Here, Private Hargrove" and opposite Judy Garland in "The Clock," died in 1951.

In 1948, Selznick divorced his wife, Irene Mayer, daughter of MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer. Selznick, 47, and Jones, 30, were married in 1949 on a yacht off the Italian Riviera.

More than 30 years later, Jones told the Washington Post of her relationship with Selznick: "I felt appreciated right from the beginning. I felt totally at ease. I don't know whether that's love at first sight."

But she said the stories of Selznick's domination were overblown.

"I had good roles, and I had David to guide me," Jones said.

Selznick's "Duel in the Sun" (1946), a western, earned Jones one of her best-actress Oscar nominations.

Selznick intended "Duel" as a sweeping epic in the tradition of his greatest triumph, "Gone With the Wind."

But the 1946 film, in which Jones played a woman of mixed race caught between two brothers (Peck and Cotten), ran into publicity problems when the Catholic Church issued a statement saying the story "tends to throw audience sympathy on the side of sin" and that Jones "is unduly, if not indecently, exposed." The Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood removed posters of her that showed cleavage, and much was made of the difference between Jones' role in "Duel" and her role as the innocent in "Bernadette."

"Duel," although a box-office hit, today is remembered with some humor by critics. Thomson dubbed it "a masterpiece of the primitive," and Leonard Maltin, writing in his movie guide, called "Duel" a "big, brawling, engrossing, often stupid sex-Western."

Among Jones' other major roles were "Portrait of Jennie" (1948) and, in the 1950s, "Carrie," "Beat the Devil," "Ruby Gentry," "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," "Good Morning, Miss Dove," "The Barretts of Wimpole Street" and "A Farewell to Arms." She played Nicole Diver in 1962's "Tender Is the Night."

"Talented, charming Jennifer was the most insecure actress I ever worked with," actress Joan Fontaine, who played Jones' sister, Baby, in "Tender Is the Night," wrote in her 1978 autobiography," No Bed of Roses." "Despite her Academy Award for 'Song of Bernadette,' I felt that acting was a torture for her."

Starting in the mid-1960s, Jones went through a bleak period. Her film career was on the wane and, in 1965, Selznick died.

Two years later, on the day her good friend Charles Bickford died at the age of 78, Jones attempted suicide. She was found by sheriff's deputies in the surf at the base of a 400-foot cliff in Malibu, where she had collapsed after taking sleeping pills and, it appeared from evidence at the scene, drinking wine.

"I don't think I wanted to die," she told the Washington Post several years later. "These accidents happen."

Jones' penultimate film, "Angel, Angel, Down We Go" (1969), was so bad that film historian Edward Margulies, co-author of "Bad Movies We Love," referred to the film in labeling Jones "the true standout" among former Oscar winners who "slid into grade-Z trash" in their later careers.

Jones' final film role was a supporting role as Fred Astaire's love interest in the 1974 film "The Towering Inferno."

But by then, Jones life had taken a turn for the better after having met Norton Simon.

The couple -- he recently divorced and she widowed for half a dozen years -- met in May 1971 at a reception in Los Angeles for a New York magazine editor. Simon was 64, and Jones was 52.

At that time, Jones had retreated from Hollywood and was raising her daughter by Selznick, Mary Jennifer, and working with the Manhattan Project, a group of Salvation Army residential treatment facilities for young people addicted to narcotics. Simon said later that, of course, he found Jones beautiful but that they connected because of her activism.

Simon by that time had severed his last managerial ties to his business empire and was one of the world's leading art collectors, mostly of old masters.

By the end of May, the couple had embarked on a trip to Paris together, stopping over in London, where they decided to get married. Their wedding was aboard a boat with a view of the white cliffs of Dover.

"It was very romantic," Simon told a reporter.

Jones said that she had considered museums boring until she met Simon. She changed her mind on a trip to Siena, Italy, with her husband.

"For the first time, I looked at paintings of the Madonna and child and saw them as abstracts, which Norton had been telling me they were all along," she told the Washington Post. "Suddenly the subject matter went away and I could see, for instance, that Matisse had been here."

Jones, in turn, opened Simon's mind to other cultures. According to Times arts reporter Suzanne Muchnic's 1998 biography of Simon, "Odd Man In," it was Jones, a longtime yoga practitioner, who persuaded Simon to take his first trip to India, where he was "smitten by the art of regions he had scarcely considered before." Simon became a major force in the Indian and Southeast Asian art market.

Jones eventually became an important part of Simon's art empire. When he became incapacitated by Guillain-Barré syndrome, he named his wife president of the Norton Simon Museum of Art. After his death in 1993, she became chairwoman of the Norton Simon Foundation Board, overseeing a $3-million renovation of the museum's interior, designed by museum trustee Frank Gehry, and the gardens, by landscape designer Nancy Goslee Power.

Jones herself was surprised at the many turns her life had taken.

"Actually," Jones told the Washington Post in 1977, "every time I stop to think about it, I'm really amazed. I think I've had an extraordinary life. And lots of times I can hardly believe it's me."

Jones is survived by her son Robert Walker Jr., eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Her son Michael Walker died in 2007. In 1975, her daughter with Selznick, Mary Jennifer, committed suicide. Services will be private.

news.obits@latimes.com

Luther is a former Times staff writer.

Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times