By KEVIN HOOVER
Plan 9 from Outer Space is best enjoyed as a sum of the whole; dissect the minutiae and the pile which lay jumbled before you would resemble a thousand pieces from a thousand different jigsaw puzzles. The Ed Wood guidebook to filmmaking enshrines the principle of doing “whatcha can with whatcha got,” and that’s exactly how the tale of space aliens resurrecting the dead to stop humankind from destroying the universe came to even be filmed at all. When the coffers aren’t overflowing with movie-making money, you use shower curtains, balsa wood, stock footage and whatever else is within arm’s reach to manifest your monster. Once scarlet lettered as one of the worst films ever made, Plan 9 has since developed the following – and appreciation – that Wood always desired. And deserved.
Author Bret Nelson is no stranger to the strange. Having penned several works for Encyclopocalypse Publications, including those based on Steven Kostanski’s Manborg and the intro-to-body-horror children’s picture book The Part Mart, no one was better positioned to bring all that is Plan 9 to the printed page. His upcoming novelization retains the endearing misfires of the source material while fleshing out the universe at large. Nelson threw back the shower curtain to divulge to RUE MORGUE why, when the other eight plans fail, Plan 9 is bound to work.
You’ve written for Encyclopocalypse several times before, but how did this project land on your radar?
Author Bret Nelson
Last year, Jeff Strand wrote the novelization for Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, and it was genius. I got on the phone to Mark (A. Miller, owner of Encyclopocalypse Publications) and said, “How does this happen and I don’t hear about it?” I was pestering him, half laughing about it. He said, “Jeff came to me! He was in a convention somewhere and said if anybody can get the rights the film, I’ve got an idea on how to novelize it.” Mark had the rights, and it just happened that way, but he said it was Jeff’s idea to do it. Then he asked me, “What do you want to do?” I told him I wanted to do either The Green Slime, Plan 9 from Outer Space or a third one – I can’t remember what it was, but it might have been Theater of Blood. He said, “Go see who has the rights.” The Green Slime, which I thought was in the public domain, was part of that big MGM library sale to Warner about fifteen years ago. You’re just as likely to get The Green Slime as you are to get Lord of the Rings. But Plan 9 is one of like two Ed Wood movies that are public domain. Nobody owns it.
The film’s genius lies within its absurdity. How do you even attempt to translate that into a book?
I treated this thing like an X-Files episode. We’ve got this mystery of strange goings-on in the graveyard and the government’s covering it up. The only thing that’s missing is Mulder and Scully getting to the bottom of it. But I tried to write it as straight as I could. All the dialogue is from the movie. When the characters start talking, you could probably take a highlighter and go through the shooting script and the book and find all the dialogue. I added some words just to make sure that it all made some kind of sense. The aliens said they were using a universal translator. I just said that it didn’t work very well. So sometimes when the aliens and the humans were hearing each other, maybe it’s not quite what they were trying to say.
(The film’s narrator) Criswell was on TV at this time. He did work for KCOP Channel 13 and was on every night at 6:30. He’d come on and do a little piece, but it’s all lost now. He was also a syndicated newspaper columnist. Whatever he said on TV, he’d transcribe it, and it would run in a little column in a bunch of papers across the country. Instead of having him be the narrator for the book, he’s now in people’s living rooms, talking through the TV. You still get his lines. You still get the dialogue from the movie and those sorts of things, but it’s coming out of somebody’s TV. I tried to ground it all in as much reality as I could because that’s what was missing from the film. Everything in here that isn’t in that script is real: the places they go, the restaurants they eat at, the streets and everything on them – all of it is 1950s Los Angeles stuff.
Part of the fun in working with a novelization, especially for a story that’s in the public domain, is that you get to shore up some of those elements that didn’t play so well with each other in the original film. How much of the book would you say you’ve added or had to strengthen?
There’s this whole cloth I tried to make. Colonel Edwards, the chief character that was the soldier in charge of field operations, he seemed to be the guy that the government was sending all over the place chasing flying saucers. I made him central to what was going on. And then Jeff Trent, our stalwart pilot, I made him kind of completely unimportant to the aliens, because that’s the way he’s treated once they get on the ship. I think Edwards is exactly the sort of person the aliens been trying to get ahold of because he can actually get their message to the government. Trent – his house just happens to be over the fence from the cemetery where they’re raising the dead – he’s got as much to do with the aliens as Don Knotts. Where I really filled things out was on the alien’s side. I gave them more motivation and more back story to want to deal with our little upstart planet.
When you dig into it, Wood was trying to make a serious film: a cautionary tale in which mankind is the monster. Within your book, does that sentiment come across?
I don’t want to spoil the ending, but I did add an epilogue. And in that epilogue, we at least have a clue as to what Solaranite is. I had to literally dig to figure it out. What could it be? Do we have it? Is it on our planet? Are we in danger? And of course, the big question with all of these – are we going to listen? The human race has heard this warning, but are we going to listen to what’s being said? Colonel Edwards flat out tells the aliens that he’s going to carry their message to his superiors. And Jeff Trent, chuckling, says, “Make the Solaranite bomb. We’ll be an even stronger nation than we are now.” He sees this not as the destruction of the universe, but that we’re going to be the biggest badasses in the universe because we have this weapon of ultimate destruction. All these views are represented. The way Woods set this thing up in his last scene was a pretty good construct. We have these aliens on the ship, and standing there, we have the everyman pilot who flies our aircraft, a policeman who enforces our laws and a soldier. We’ve got the law, we’ve got the Army and we’ve got the citizenry, all ready to hear the message.
