Alien 3: The Reconstituted Workprint

[Valeyard]

The publicly available workprint (there are actually 3 different copies floating around) was a cutdown version of the "true" assembly cut. I say "true" assembly cut since the assembly cut for the DVD/BD is a frankenstein creation and contains parts  (basement, egg, etc) that weren't filmed at the time of the that assembly cut was finished. That's not a dig against the DVD/BD's AC, it is still amazing to watch.

Good point, I'll update the edit to remove the basement scene (I would have removed it, but it escaped my notice when I did the edit, probably because it occurs right next to a reel change on the WP). I'll also sync the other audio tracks from the BD, and I'll see it I can sync the DVD audio as well.

I can't cut the egg though as there's no scene to replace it with (it would be very easy to do in avisynth though, but then I'd have to re-encode the whole video stream).

[jonno]

None of this information mentioned in the mammoth documentary on the blu ray!
Big Alien fan and always great to hear something you don't know.
Thanks for the information, I love this forum.

Agreed! I thought I knew this film, but you've certainly taught me a thing or two, PDB.

[The Aluminum Falcon]

The basement scene was then added as a replacement to pad the time and have a one-to-one conflict with the alien. That's why it was not in the workprint (or true AC) since it was filmed in the 2nd group of pickups. Never thought of until after the WP was done.

Really? Do you mean the basement scene where Ripley wants the Alien to kill her and it doesn't? Specifically, where Ripley says, "You've been in my life so long, I can't remember anything else."

Been awhile since I've seen the movie, but I recall that scene being quite good. I thought "Rage and Wreckage" said Fincher adamantly WANTED that scene and took a camera with just him and Sigourney Weaver to get it done. Not doubting your expertise; it's just very curious to me.

Also stated here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103644/triv...=tr0760872

[PDB]

The basement scene was then added as a replacement to pad the time and have a one-to-one conflict with the alien. That's why it was not in the workprint (or true AC) since it was filmed in the 2nd group of pickups. Never thought of until after the WP was done.

Really? Do you mean the basement scene where Ripley wants the Alien to kill her and it doesn't? Specifically, where Ripley says, "You've been in my life so long, I can't remember anything else."

Been awhile since I've seen the movie, but I recall that scene being quite good. I thought "Rage and Wreckage" said Fincher adamantly WANTED that scene and took a camera with just him and Sigourney Weaver to get it done. Not doubting your expertise; it's just very curious to me.

Also stated here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103644/triv...=tr0760872

Sorry Falcon I had a whole response but lost it and then I had a family member get sick so I didn't have time to re-type it till now.

The short is the basement was a late script change well after production had begun. It was created to replaced the cocoon scene in total and proved a confirmation between the alien and the impregnated Ripley. Who thought it up? Don't know, could be Fincher, could of been Hill and Giler. All I know is it does appear in the scripts of Hill/Giler and does feel like a natural evolution of the cocoon scene but removing the expensive SFX elements. I do very much doubt Fincher shot it guerrilla style since it involves several setups. Some involve dollys, zooms and light changes which are difficult for one man to shot. They also involved a hydraulic door meaning a production team had to operate that and safety man had to be present and more importantly the Alien was there meaning the creature effects crew had to be there and a rigging crew for when the alien drops down. Its a lot of crew for being a run and gun scene.

The doc, which I haven't watched in a while is great but not totally accurate. Like them saying the bar codes and shaved heads were Fincher's idea. They weren, they were Daivd Twohy's.

The producers Walter Hill and David Giler took the Voncent Ward script and combined it with Giler's favorite other Alien 3 script the one by David Twohy. One of the scenes they wrote is a cocoon scene. That scene went through a lot of changes over all the scripts. Probably the best sources to read about are here:

http://alienexplorations.blogspot.com/19...coons.html
https://alienseries.wordpress.com/2014/0...at-locker/

Pictures for the cocoons being made comes from ADI's Youtube page:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnPOoSliSyY&t=90s

You can see them being made around the 1:05 mark. Also the Cinefex issue from the time talks a lot about it.

Anyway the scene originally involved prisoners (And maybe superintendent Andrews) being cocooned by the alien. The reasons, location and people change continuously. It was originally in a glasswork (left over from the Ward movie), then the abattoir and then in the toxic containment. The reasons also changed with the prisons being food, potential new hosts or in a cool move, turning into eggs like the Alien deleted scene. The scene also involved Ripley, then Dillon with Dillon dying at the hands (claws?) of the Alien, then Ripley and Dillon together.

Hill/Giler did, I think, 2 drafts before handing it off to a couple of different writers. I think Larry Ferguson and John Fasano took shots at it but the one publicly available script is the rewrite from Rex Pickett:

http://www.alien.it/cop3e.txt

This is the script Hill/Giler rewrite commissioned by 20th Century that was done right before production began and before Fincher really got his ideas in (he was fresh on the production). Still in the place of the basement confirmation in the coccon scene:



Moving deeper into the abattoir, Dillon finds:

GOLIC

cocooned, ensconced in fluid, and still alive!
He appears to be trying to say something.
Morse leans forward and listens.
Then he turns to Dillon:

MORSE
He's saying 'I'm sorry, sir.'

Dillon just looks at Golic, shaking his head.
The others all stand behind him, looking.
Eric continues babbling inanely in the background.

Ripley walks up to three of them now, galvanized:

RIPLEY
It could be anywhere now, we've got
to move.

So you can see gone are the prisoners (and Andrews) turning into eggs or being food. Now just Golic. Also gone is the confrontation with the Alien. This was basically the approved shooting script.

So ADI stopped working on several cocoons and focus as delivered the one for Golic to the set. The joke was Fincher would hide in it to think. Even though the production was underway Hill and Giler were still unsatisfied with the script so they rewrote it about 9 to 12 more times, basically trying to fix it on the fly. The only script that survives publicly is this one which comes long after production had begun:

http://www.scifiscripts.com/scripts/alien3_hill.txt

Finally, gone is the cocoon scene and now the basement scene we know is in its place, only its an "attic" scene:

RIPLEY
I¹m going to go find it.  We'll see how smart it is.

AARON
You're gonna go look for it

RIPLEY   *
Yeah.  I got a pretty good idea where it is - it's just up
there in the attic -

AARON   *
What attic?  We don't have an attic.

RIPLEY   *
It's a metaphor.

You can see it was marked as a script revision. I also think this is the script that Alan Dean Foster used for the novelization (about 5 hours, 45 minutes):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ix_xIr_4...LO7iysTEEf

It still says the attic in the book. In the next few drafts it became the basement.

Now did Fincher come up the basement scene or was it Hill/Giler? I don't know. We know was suppose to be the one who cancel the cocoon scene altogether. But Hill/Giler were cutting and shaping the script as best they could to get it coherent. All do know is it was add late in the game on the scripts level and wasn't shot of finished by the time the workprint was produced.


But I'm messing up Valeyard's thread, maybe we should take this over another thread?

[Valeyard]

It was created to replaced the cocoon scene in total and proved a confirmation between the alien and the impregnated Ripley.

Do you mean confrontation not confirmation? Because it's already confirmed in the CAT scan scene that she has an alien inside her, and already established the alien doesn't want to kill her from the infirmary scene.

This was basically the approved shooting script.

My understanding is they didn't start with an "approved shooting script" at all. The producers wanted two further alien films in which the Aliens would be used as biological weapons. They went between several vastly different stories - first with the military story that would see Hicks as the main protagonist not Ripley, then a script seeing all the action take place within a space colony of some sorts, then that was changed to a prison planet where the prisoners were being illegally experimented on (interestingly that part now happens in Alien Resurrection). Then there was the Ward script which changed the prison planet to an artificial wooden planet/satellite monastery in space. There's a number of reasons why that idea was problematic, how would they breathe in such low air-pressure? Hod did the monks acquire such an extravagant monastery, and why build it out of wood in the first place? Ward was also hired as the film's director.

Executives at Fox also insisted that Sigourney Weaver should be in the movie (which lead to her being written-in to Twohy's prison-planet script, and formed the basis of Ward's monastery-temptation centric script), and also that the monks had to be prisoners, and the purpose of the facility is an iron-ore refinery not a monetary in space. Ward refused and was fired. At some point during all this they began constructing sets for the movie and the producers announced the 1992 release date. So by the time the hired Fincher, some sets were already constructed, and Giler and Hill were busy re-writing the script.

[Valeyard]

I think it's a better movie than Aliens. People complain about the stupidest shit when it comes to Alien 3, but with Aliens they accept a wholly derivative story with numerous plot holes. Cameron did the same thing with Terminator 2 where he basically just made Terminator 1 again and tweaked the ending so that the future is less certain. It starts the same way, and it ends exactly the same way right down to the terminator being destroyed in a factory. He also flipped the artificial human to "good guy" - sound familiar, that's the same thing he did with Aliens.

Aliens begins the same way as Alien: They go to LV-426 to investigate a "signal" or "lack of signal". There's a lengthy battle with the inter-terrestrial beings, until everyone is either dead or incapacitated. The Nostromo is nuked to destroy the alien and Ripley escapes to the shuttle - but oh no the alien followed her on board. Same thing in Aliens, the colony is nuked and Ripley escapes to the Sulaco, but oh no the alien queen has followed her! Then, with everyone else either incapacitated or dead, she suits-up and flushes the alien out an airlock, then goes into hypersleep.

Plot holes in Aliens:

1. The company knows everything that happens in Alien because Ash communicates it to them. However the movie begins with a colony on LV-426, in close proximity to the alien spacecraft, and they have not sent anyone to investigate it?
   
2. Even if we assume they don't know about it, the alien spacecraft was sending out a distress signal. The signal is so strong and obvious that the ship's computer brings the crew out of hypersleep specifically to investigate. The ship looks as if it's been there for centuries, and the crew never disturb its computer or deactivate its signal. The signal should still be there 57 years later in Aliens and would also draw the colonists to investigate.
   
3. Burke seems to be acting on his own authority motivated by greed. But anything the colonists found the company would learn about the instant that they transmit their findings back to Burke.
   
4. Burke attempts to smuggle alien embryos hidden inside Ripley and Newt back to Earth. Ripley claims that his plan is to jettison all the marines cryotubes and make up a story to get Ripley and Newt past quarantine. While that part of the story might at first make sense, it falls apart the instant we think about moving the bodies. He can't use Bishop because he's already piloting the Surlaco's second dropship from the colonist's transmitter, which means the marines will find out what Burke did the instant that either Ripley and Newt tell them, or they discover what has happened. They would then kill Burke and have Bishop remove the embryos either in the colony's infirmary, or using the Surlaco's.
   

The only real plothole in Alien 3 is that we never really find out why Ripley can't just pilot the Surlaco's drop-ship to Fury 161. We never find out how serious the fire on the Surlaco is, however we do know it starts in the cryo-chamber (caused by a facehugger cutting itself), not the loading bay, and it's reasonable to assume the ship's computer would seal off the affected area of the ship once launching the EEV. If they could remote pilot the drop-ship, then they could have all escaped to the Surlaco and nuked the prison from space, which is what Ripley and the marines wanted to do in Aliens so we know that it has the weaponry. Then they would just orbit the planet while waiting for the rescue team, simple.

It's interesting that the Egg and facehugger/s are what people seem to get caught up about. Well that and Newt and Hicks being killed instantly. People seem to think if something isn't explained clearly that must mean there's a plot hole. You could just call it a retcon, there are far worse offenders out there then that. Like The Matrix Reloaded and Independence Day Reassurance. Even Terminator 2 retcons the future war. The queen alien is a retcon too. I never had any problem with the Egg, to me it makes sense that the Alien Queen laid it back in Aliens. There are plenty of other possibilities, including that Bishop planted it and intended to freeze it in a cryotube (that would explain very neatly why it's in the cryochamber to begin with), he could even have done it earlier in the movie using the first drop-ship if he'd wanted to. I always assumed the facehugger is what saved Ripley from dying in the EEV crash - it was established back in Alien that the facehugger helps you breathe (Kane's suit was busted, he would have suffocated in the atmosphere of LV-426 had the facehugger not been feeding him oxygen). Newt drowns, but Ripley doesn't. To me the beginning of the movie has always made sense. But it's also left to interpretation, people are free to decide for themselves who put the alien egg on the Surlaco.

[spoRv]

I like Alien Resurrection, too, so I got no problems with Alien 3...

Agree, T2 is similar to Terminator, as Aliens to Alien, Star Wars The Force Awakens to Star Wars A New Hope, Die Hard 2 to Die Hard 1, Riddick to Pitch Black, Evil Dead 2 to Evil Dead (or, better, pretty the same!), and I can go on for ages. History repeats itself, and in the movies seems to repeat a bit too often... but many of us love the movies even when they are so similar... that doesn't preclude the fact we like to talk about this, though!

P.S. May Riddick be born on Fury 161? He's Furian, he's bold, so...

[Valeyard]

Oh shit I forgot one of the big plot holes in Aliens. Ripley goes to save Newt. I think we can all understand that. But she shows no desire whatsoever to look for the other marines that may still be alive, nor does she come across any when she finds Newt. At the very least she should come across some of them already impregnated, after all the aliens took Newt to the central spawning ground.

[spoRv]

Just finished to watch Alien 3 Special Edition on BD; I must admit that, even if I have it since years, and I have also the Quadrilogy 9 DVD box set, I can't remember it - maybe I have never watched it before (shame on me...)

Well, I liked it much more than the theatrical cut; it's more complete, new plots, more characters development; the only thing I missed is the "hug" at the end...

I'm pretty sure that, apart obvious dog related ones and the "hug", some shots are present only on the theatrical cut; I wonder if they could be reinserted back without ruining the story.

P.S. I read somewhere that in the workprint, there is a scene where a prisoner fall and cut himself with a scissor; I'm pretty sure I watched it in a television broadcast years ago... *maybe* some of the scenes from the workprint ended up in a television version? If so, it's possible to find out a better quality version of them, in comparison to the available workprint...

[Valeyard]

I like Alien Resurrection, too, so I got no problems with Alien 3...

Resurrection isn't a great film IMO. Little of it makes coherent sense, and some of the stuff in it is just... bizarre and wrong. Like when Number 8 Ripley finds 1-7, and one of the earlier clones begs number 8 to kill her - what does number 8 do? Does she give her a quick and painless death? No! She burns her alive, and she may not even end up dying, if the ship's sprinkler system puts out the fire. Ripley's story should have finished at the end of Alien 3, which is why I'm not too fussed about the news that Alien: Covenant is unlikely.

It's very sad news though that John Hurt has died.