ALIEN, the movie that Star Wars saved

Just checked out one of those directors cut / anniverary edition copies of Alien with like five hours of interviews and making of specials on a second DVD in the case. Learned some interesting stuff, Ripley was written as a man, in fact all characters were but the writers were mindful of Fox's rep for pushing woman's empowerment at that time out a note on the script that any of the characters could be women. John Hurt called the chest bursting scene his birthing scene and seemed quite amused by it, I doubt he's had many birthing scenes in his career so one cannot fault him on that. The studio was completely rewriting the script over and over mwking it worse and the screen writer announced on the first day that he didn't know anything about science fiction and he didn't like it. He also had a cqmpaign going to change anything and everything to deny the writer a writing credit. But then out came star wars as a hit and suddenly Fox wanted a sci fi product to bring to film like right now and Alien was the only thing available so the went with the original script and dropped 8 mill to pay for it. Thank you George Lukas.