Do we like Ronald Shusett?
Our score: 6 out of 10. No harmful words or acts turned up, but the reporting is thin and mostly about movies, so this is a cautious middling-good score.
Ron Shusett is the man behind some of the great sci-fi of the last half-century. He co-wrote the story for Alien with Dan O'Bannon, and he spent years developing the Philip K. Dick story that became Total Recall. He was a writer-producer who worked the long game on ideas.
The Alien story goes like this. O'Bannon brought Shusett a concept from his film-school days and told him he'd been stuck past the first act for two years. Shusett helped crack the second and third acts, and by his own account they wrote the thing without an agent or a lawyer, and Fox took it.
Total Recall took even longer. Shusett says he and O'Bannon had the first two acts by 1981, but finding a proper ending took a couple more years, and the pairing with Paul Verhoeven and Arnold Schwarzenegger came after that. He also says he wrote early drafts of what became Minority Report but got no writing credit, because as an executive producer he missed the old Guild threshold.
The friction on record comes from his own collaborator. In a 2007 interview, O'Bannon said Shusett wasn't comfortable with him writing the whole Total Recall script and that “the only thing that's important to him is his name above the title.” That is one partner's view of a partnership that had its rows, not a finding of anything, and Shusett isn't heard in reply on that page.
On the harm check, we came up empty. We found no statements about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the climate from him, no campaigning, and no troubling pattern in who he worked with, though the searchable record on his later projects is patchy. We found no court cases or allegations either. That is a clean sheet, but partly because he kept a low profile, so we can't say much more.
Nothing new on him lately that we could find. As for the good stuff, we couldn't verify any charity or kind acts in the reporting we opened. His legacy is the work: two stories that changed what sci-fi on screen could look like.