For me, Paxton was by all definition the "wild card" in his choice of character role. I can't think of one performance where I wasn't either rooting for him as a good guy, or rooting for him as a bad guy. He just master minded a character and image that fitted into both.
Although his career started before hand my first memory of Bill was, "Hey I think this guy is a couple of cans short of a six pack." From James Cameron's 1984 SI-FI classic, "The Terminator." You see every think was VHS back in the day and we were young at this time. We had no real ways of knowing when we could see him next.
So my friends and I would watch unbeknownst to us a "genre" of movies that Bill was in fact in. "Hey," would be the cry followed by one of us pointing to the screen, "that's that guy from Terminator." as we watched "Weird Science."
Appearing along side Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Commando" as yet another victim It wasn't until James Cameron gave Bill the role and a machine gun that we had been waiting for. "Private Hudson" in the definitive SI - FI film, "Aliens." His cult status was there for the taking and did his portrayal of Hudson take it? All the way.
Mean while, one day as me and my friends were on the couch depressing the play button on the VHS.. "Holly shit, its that guy from Aliens." And we had reached, "Near Dark." To be reunited with the crew of the "USS Sulaco" In a 1987 stand alone
Vampire film that to this day, is a game changer was unprecedented. My friends and I were now visiting comic book shops and looking threw the pages of "Fangoria" to find out more about our new sub culture hero's and anti hero's we were rooting for.
From here on in when you saw a movie with Bill Paxton you would say to your self, or your friends, this is going to be "state of the bad ass art."
With a release date of May 12th the crew @paperthincomics decided to talk to a true fan of the "Alien" franchise, and as it happens, a crafts man in his own right.
Andy Rowlands
Andy Rowlands. A fan of the "Alien" franchise has built him self a reputation in the model building community, as well as a space ship. On seeing this revelation of his work, a model maker building no other than the freighter "Nostromo" from the 1979 original "Alien." The crew @paperthincomics wanted to share with you his story, and a lot more.
"My interest stems from watching the original Alien movie in the early 1980's on TV, and being very impressed with the design of the interior sets of the "Nostromo" spacecraft. I decided to see if I could build a model of one section of the lower engineering deck, and once that was finished, I carried on for about a year, ending up with seven separate sections that can be butted up to each other in various ways to represent different parts of the ship."
"I tried photographing it with a then-current film camera, but having to set the focus meant much of what I photted was badly out of focus, so the models spent the next 30 years sat in a wardrobe, until the advent of digital cameras with their large depth of field."
"I added some pics on a Facebook modelling page, and the responses were very favourable, & I was invited to show them at an event at the National Space Centre in Leicester in 2015. Since then, I've been invited to show them at three other events, with equally favourable comments, which has very much surprised me, as I built them purely for my own interest, with no intention that anyone else would ever see them."
"With only that wobbly pausing of VHS cassettes to aid me, as this was well before the internet, some of the dimensions are wrong. In particular the hatchways are too wide, but as the idea is to see them in low light like in the movie, most of the errors are effectively hidden." "What are your thoughts to the new trailer?" " The new trailer looks interesting, but you can't really tell what a movie will be like until you see it. I just hope it will be easier to understand than Prometheus." CLICK HERE FOR TRAILER
