{"id":58,"date":"2011-07-11T15:03:45","date_gmt":"2011-07-11T19:03:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/?p=58"},"modified":"2020-12-06T21:36:07","modified_gmt":"2020-12-07T02:36:07","slug":"plan-9-from-out-of-sequence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/?p=58","title":{"rendered":"Plan 9 from Out of Sequence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Plan 9 from Outer Space <\/em>(1959) gets the name of being the worst film ever made.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t; it isn\u2019t even Ed Wood\u2019s worst film.\u00a0 <em>Plan 9<\/em> does have that oddly poetic Wood dialogue that doesn\u2019t make sense and can\u2019t quite be read properly by his actors.\u00a0 It also has a raft of really awful cinematic mistakes, particularly in editing.<\/p>\n<p>Some of you may be unfamiliar with the film.\u00a0 It\u2019s a low-budget story of aliens who come to Earth and re-animate dead people.\u00a0 For some reason, the aliens believe this will frighten the living into listening to a dire warning: mankind is on the brink of a discovery that could threaten the entire universe.\u00a0 If this doesn\u2019t make sense, then you should watch the film, because that doesn\u2019t make sense either.\u00a0 <em>Plan 9<\/em> is also notable for being <em>Dracula <\/em>star Bela Lugosi\u2019s last film.\u00a0 Lugosi died suddenly in 1956 during tests for a movie that was to be called <em>Tomb of the Vampire<\/em>.\u00a0 Three years later, Wood cribbed this footage and used it to make Lugosi seem to be one of the walking dead.\u00a0 For most of the picture, he\u2019s awkwardly doubled by a guy holding a cape over his face.<\/p>\n<p>When I teach classes in film history, I use the graveyard scene chase from this <em>Plan 9<\/em> as an example of bad editing.\u00a0 The scene is intended to be a tense chase through an old cemetery.\u00a0 The walking dead chase Mona McKinnon as she struggles to stay ahead of them. This aim fails completely, because Wood has cut it in such a way that there is no consistent geography to it.\u00a0 The shots are all over the map, some out of sequence, and some just wrong.\u00a0 Now, that monster is&#8230; over there&#8230; and&#8230; over there, and she ran through that set once, no, now backwards, and that monster moved left to right and now right to&#8230; oh, I give up.<\/p>\n<p>The other problem that the editing exposes is the utter poverty of the film.\u00a0 Bela Lugosi\u2019s double basically trips over a cardboard gravestone, and we see it bobble.\u00a0 Wood hired an actor with a gigantic posterior to pick up Mona McKinnon at the end of the scene, and he cut it so that the posterior is seen far too often.\u00a0 Tor Johnson has a nice shot in which he is seen emerging from his grave, but the bulky actor can\u2019t quite stand upright, and struggles to get to his feet.\u00a0 Rather than cut away&#8230; please CUT, Wood leaves it in, because big Tor looked so cool.<\/p>\n<p>Watch Ed\u2019s cut for yourself.\u00a0 Now that I\u2019ve pointed out the myriad errors, we can move on from there.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/8wVYDyK13TM\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"480\" height=\"390\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>This is a sequence that lends itself to reordering, because the soundtrack is essentially just the Plan 9 theme.\u00a0 The music is actually pretty good.\u00a0 The monsters are at least somewhat spooky.\u00a0 The photography is fine.\u00a0 The problem is that the sets are cheap, and the editing is horrid.\u00a0 Apart from one shot at the beginning of the sequence, there\u2019s not a single shot with a monster and Mona McKinnon in view at the same time.\u00a0 This is not fixable, but a good editor can minimize it.<\/p>\n<p>I noted several key problems with the scene:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em><\/em>Mona McKinnon takes forever to run out of the shot with Lugosi\u2019s double, and there\u2019s no sense of drama in it.\u00a0 Too long.<\/li>\n<li><em><\/em>Tor Johnson\u2019s grave emergence takes too long and slows the pace.\u00a0 If we start it earlier and shorten the whole thing, making it seem as if he\u2019s coming out just as McKinnon is going through the cemetery, then we\u2019d have more tension.<\/li>\n<li><em><\/em>McKinnon goes through the same set 3-4 times in different directions to pad out the scene.\u00a0 It\u2019s confusing, and too long. CUT.<\/li>\n<li><em><\/em>The actor who rescues McKinnon at the end takes too long getting around the car and his posterior is embarrassing.\u00a0 Let\u2019s help him out by minimizing that.<\/li>\n<li><em><\/em>OK, we all know that Bela Lugosi was long dead by the time this movie started shooting.\u00a0 Wood\u2019s use of test footage is actually pretty clever, but the double (Dr. Tom Mason) is glaringly obvious because he looks nothing like Lugosi.\u00a0 In order to give us a little illusion, let\u2019s not hold on long shots of Mason.\u00a0 Let\u2019s also not use the same shot of Lugosi six times just because he\u2019s billed in the film.\u00a0 If it doesn\u2019t make sense, it needs to go.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I had to fudge a little.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t have access to the sound stems (the separate tracks for music, sound effects, and dialogue), so I was stuck using the sound as it was on the finished soundtrack.\u00a0 By the time dialogue occurs, late in the scene, I\u2019d cut the better part of a minute out of it, so I had to overlap two pieces of disparate music to make it work.\u00a0 Here\u2019s what I did with it:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/WIyQ8e09DMM\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"480\" height=\"390\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The point in all of this is to show what an editor does.\u00a0 People think he just cuts out the boring parts of a movie.\u00a0 That can be true (it was in this case!), but he\u2019s also responsible for making the film flow properly.\u00a0 He takes a bunch of shots that the director supplies him and has to make sense of it.\u00a0 If the film\u2019s shooting was a disaster, then he\u2019s essentially trying to rescue the film at the last moment.\u00a0 There are people known as film doctors who specialize in taking footage from troubled films and creating something better out of them.<\/p>\n<p>One of the episodes of the <em>Dr. Film <\/em>TV show will be dedicated to editing techniques and how films are put together, as we trace the development of the art through the years. Look at this and sort of a sneak preview of what is to come if the show gets picked up.<\/p>\n<p>Stephen King directed <em>Maximum Overdrive<\/em> (1986).\u00a0 He told an interviewer that when he saw the \u201crushes\u201d of the film with his editor, he thought he had another <em>Plan 9 from Outer Space <\/em>on his hands.\u00a0 The editor told him that all films look like <em>Plan 9 <\/em>until they\u2019re cut properly.<\/p>\n<p><em>Plan 9 <\/em>would never have been a good movie, but Wood\u2019s editing makes it a lot worse than it had to be.\u00a0 Sometimes it\u2019s what you do with the lemons that makes all the difference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) gets the name of being the worst film ever made.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t; it isn\u2019t even Ed Wood\u2019s worst film.\u00a0 Plan 9 does have that oddly poetic Wood dialogue that doesn\u2019t make sense and can\u2019t quite be read properly by his actors.\u00a0 It also has a raft of really awful &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/?p=58\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Plan 9 from Out of Sequence&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"powered_cache_disable_cache":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[207,4],"tags":[29,31,28,30,27],"class_list":["post-58","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-views-and-reviews","tag-bela-lugosi","tag-demonstration","tag-ed-wood","tag-editing","tag-plan-9"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":621,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions\/621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}