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It was like, John Carpenter’s Christine, directed by John Carpenter, music by John Carpenter … what an egotist!”Ĭarpenter chose the pseudonym Frank Armitage, which is a character from H.P. “It was a reaction to seeing my name all over these movies,” Carpenter explained to Entertainment Weekly in 2012. "I think the height of it was Christine. With that in mind, he decided that he’d use a pseudonym for They Live’s screenplay credit. But by the time They Live came around, he’d grown a little disillusioned with the idea of continuing to have his name plastered absolutely everywhere. John Carpenter wrote They Live under an alias.Ĭarpenter has always been a multi-hyphenate kind of filmmaker, directing, writing, producing and scoring his movies. "They’re still here, making more money than ever, and they’re still among us,” he said. “I wanted to strike out in some way, so I cast the Republicans as alien creatures,” Carpenter later recalled.Įven years later, Carpenter continues to believe in the relevance of the rich-get-richer conspiracy at the heart of the film.
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In a 1988 interview with Starlog promoting the film’s release, Carpenter noted that he’d begun watching television more frequently while developing the story, and realized “it’s all about wanting us to buy something,” which further influenced his take on the material. They Live was a response to Ronald Reagan's America.Ĭarpenter has described They Live as a “primal scream against Reaganomics,” a story that uses a science fiction concept to pour on social commentary about the way he saw what was happening to the American middle class in the 1980s. He bought the rights to the story and began adapting it, changing hypnotism to the very 1980s notion of Americans being controlled via subliminal messaging. Though Carpenter liked the idea of the entire populace being controlled subliminally by an alien menace, he wasn’t too keen on the hypnotism idea. He has only until eight o'clock in the morning to solve the problem." "When he awakens, he realizes that the entire human race has been hypnotized, and that alien creatures are controlling humanity. "'Eight O’Clock in the Morning is' a D.O.A.-type of story, in which a man is put in a trance by a stage hypnotist,” Carpenter told Starlog in 1988. Intrigued by the idea of aliens enslaving humanity, Carpenter then sought out the original prose work. But John Carpenter’s more direct inspiration was an Eclipse Comics adaptation of Nelson’s story, which he stumbled across in the mid-1980s. They Live is an adaptation of Ray Nelson’s science fiction short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning,” which was originally published in the 1960s. They Live was inspired by a comic book adaptation of a short story. We have come here to chew bubble gum and give you 10 facts about the making of They Live … and we’re all out of bubble gum.
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The result is one of greatest cult films of the 1980s, which also happens to feature one of the greatest movie lines of all time.
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Teaming with professional wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper for the lead role, Carpenter and company set out to make a film full of alien ghouls (most of which were the same guy), borrowed props, and a fight scene that seemed like it would never end. That story became They Live, Carpenter’s cult masterpiece about an American everyman who sees the world for what it really is with the help of a very special pair of sunglasses. A lifelong fan of science fiction, Carpenter saw a metaphor lurking there that tied the aliens to Reagan-era Republican politicians, and a story began brewing in his mind. In the mid-1980s, John Carpenter stumbled upon a comic book story set in a world where aliens were secretly controlling the entire human race.