new plan for flaky ’50s flick
For many people Plan 9 From Outer Space may be the worst movie ever made, but to Gene Kosowan it’s a motherlode of artistic possibilities.
The Edmonton-based experimental musician has watched the famously reviled 1956 film by Ed Wood a number of times over the years, enjoying, like others, the wooden acting, awful special effects and hilariously bad dialogue, but he also sees more.
After assembling a lineup of musicians to provide improvised soundtracks to a number of silent films (plus the 1936 anti-marijuana classic Reefer Madness) at the Wunderbar back in February, Kosowan decided the film would also be a good setting in which to engage his instincts for musical hijinks.
“Originally I wanted to do something with the film Sharktopus, but Plan 9 made more sense because it’s in the public domain,” he says. “It’s unintentionally funny and an innocent movie in many ways, especially considering that Ed Wood genuinely loved film. There’s a lot of room to work in; I thought that maybe we could find some happy musical accidents that might punctuate the nuances of the film.”
To do so Kosowan has stripped Plan 9 of its soundtrack and added subtitles. While he’s had to paraphrase chunks of the dialogue, he’s made an effort to keep in as many of the best lines as possible. He’s also punched up action sequences with comicbook-style effects like “PoW, blam and socko.”
Finally, Kosowan invited an impressive group of musicians from both the experimental and classical worlds to try providing improvised soundtracks for sections of the film.
“The idea was to see what they can come up with when they have a weirdly formed ball like that thrown at them,” he says. “At first we were just going to do separate segments, stop the film and set up a new performer. Then Gary (James Joyce, who often performs as Clinker) suggested that we should run it with no breaks. It makes the transitions between performers dicey, but more interesting. Probably we’ll find that there’ll be some overlap there.”
Each performer has 15 minutes to work with. Joynes, whose audio visual installations have won him a profile in cities like Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver, London, Madrid, Dublin, Amsterdam and Bristol performs under the name Wind Rose. Parker Thiessen, a.k.a. Bong Sample, plays keyboards for pot-rock band KRANG and provides chaos in noise gurus Zebra Pulse.
On the classical side, Reinhard von Berg is a new music composer who studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen and is now an organist at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church. Allison Balcetis has been the Instructor of Saxophone at the University of Alberta since 2009, performing both as a soloist and as a member of Anubis Quartet, a critically acclaimed, Chicago-based saxophone quartet.
Kosowan is taking part in the event under the name fl3m, bringing stripped down accompaniment for his eight minutes.
“I have no idea what anyone else is doing, but I’ll be bringing a monophonic keyboard with pedal effects,” he reveals. “Then we’ll see what instincts kick into place when the scenes I’m working on show up on the screen.”
Plan 9 has shown up in many different forms over the years, not only as a midnight screener for lovers of bad films.
There’s been a documentary (Flying Saucers Over Hollywood), a 1997 musical, a comic book sequel, even a video game; it’s an essential part of Tim Burton’s affectionate biographical film Ed Wood. That such an incompetently made film has lasted longer and had more of a cultural effect than some more serious endeavours is an irony not lost on Kosowan.
“The funny thing is that maybe if it was written better and had different actors it might have ended up being a half decent Grade B outing. Who knows? But if that happened then maybe it wouldn’t be remembered so many years later.”