On Friday May 7, at 8pm ET, the 2021 TCM Classic Film Festival on Turner Classic Movies will air an SF Sketchfest Presents table read of Ed Wood’s 1959 no-budget sci-fi classic, Plan 9 From Outer Space, adapted by comedian Dana Gould and featuring Maria Bamford, Bobcat Goldthwait, Oscar Nuñez, Laraine Newman, Bob Odenkirk, David Koechner, Janet Varney, Jonah Ray, Paul F. Tompkins, Gary Anthony Williams, Baron Vaughn, Deborah Baker Jr. and Kat Aagesen. The table read will be followed by the film itself at 9:30pm Eastern, as well.
Earlier this week, I was lucky enough to hop on a roundtable interview with Dana Gould and Janet Varney to discuss the whole process of putting together this table read, because it is so much more than just a series of Zoom screens featuring folks reading lines. Thanks to miniatures by Mike Carano and a spooky score by composer Eban Schletter, along with some fantastic prop and costume choices by the performers (Bamford and Tompkins, especially), this is a smashing combination of old-time radio broadcasts and the funniest low-budget play you’ve ever seen.
I highly recommend you check this out, because the fact that something this creative and this weird is airing on a major cable channel–and in primetime, no less–deserves as many eyes on it as possible.
Scene-Stealers: Dana, you’ve talked quite a bit about. Over the years about your relationship and friendship with Maila Nurmi, who was Vampira. Do you see this live read as being a bit of an homage to her? Also, how do you homage in a reading someone whose character is mute?
Janet Varney: Give her a line!
Dana Gould: That’s a great question. I always wanted the Vampira character in the live show, because she’s such an intrinsic part of the movie. Even though she doesn’t have any lines, she did have lines in the script. Maila was not a fan of the script, but was a fan of money, so she didn’t want them. And then as we did the show, we found a way to put Vampira into the show and then it just grows. It’s one of those things where you do it once and you get an idea and you try it and get it better.
Kat Aagesen, who plays Vampira in this production has a great look and she’s very gifted in terms of the way she evokes what Maila did and I was really happy to do it that way, but I think that Maila would have liked it and approved of it.
Here’s a weird story: In the late ’90s, I took Maila to see Plan 9 at the Cinerama Dome here in Los Angeles at a midnight show on Halloween. And no one knew that she was Vampira. She’s this old lady. We’re sitting there and it was pretty packed and when Vampira came on screen and the place erupted, and she said, “Oh, there she is,” which I thought was sweet. And then, you could feel her sort of beaming a little bit. It was really sweet.
The thing that makes doing a Zoom read different than doing one live in a theater is that you can have a score and you can have all of these miniature sets. How did you reach out to Mike Carano and Eban Schletter to come up with these and what directions did you give them?
Dana Gould: Well, Eban has always done the show. Eban has done the live show. The beautiful thing about Sketchfest is, one: it’s all of your friends, but in addition to all of your friends, there’s always amazing new things that the other 11 months of the year, Janet is looking at tapes and finding new talent–or, not new talent, but exposing talent–but then there’s always the people that you have known.
I think Eban has scored everything I’ve ever done. Janet and I did a show together called Stan Against Evil and Eban scored that. I don’t know of a thing that I’ve done, that Eban hasn’t scored. And he does it live when we do it in the theater.
Mike Carano, I’ve known forever. He worked for the Improv. I don’t know in what capacity, but he was a photographer on staff. I think he managed one of the clubs.
Janet Varney: He’s also an attorney. Like, he is a full-on attorney. Many people don’t know this about Eban Schletter, and he is an attorney.
Dana Gould: Please don’t let Mike Carano be an attorney in court, but Mike Carano is yes, a social butterfly. Mike Carano is a truly unique talent and a gadfly and one of the best follows on Instagram. I’ll just be on Instagram and it’s a Tuesday afternoon and I look on there and Mike is in Death Valley filming. He, he found a coyote skeleton and he has a copy of Captain Kirk’s chair and he’s putting the coyote skeleton on it. He’s a true artist and he does these little models on his Instagram thing.
I literally just said, “Would you ever want to?” but when we decided to do it on Zoom, I said, “Do you want to come up with something?” It really was one of those things where like I thought he would do 5% and he brought in 90%. It was like, “Not only do we need this, but if we fill them in black and white on this filter, everything will be–we didn’t know how much we needed him. Put it that way.
Janet Varney: Yeah. And I would say too, my memory of of you asking him was like, if there’s a way I could have gotten the email that he was in faster than the email in which you posited asking him. It was like, “I could ask him, he’s in.” He just immediately had all of these ideas and it was amazing.
Dana Gould: Mike Carono: follow him. I just want to camera crew following him around all the time. It’s that great.
SF Sketchfest presents Plan 9 From Outer Space Table Read, adapted by Dana Gould, airs at 8pm EST / 7pm CST on Friday, May 7, as part of TCM Underground at the 2021 TCM Classic Film Festival.
Nick is a self-described “rock star journalist,” which is strange, considering he’s married with two kids and three cats. This is just further proof that you can’t trust anyone online. In addition to his work for Scene-Stealers, Nick can be found bitching about music elsewhere on the Internet at his blog, Rock Star Journalist, and as Music Editor for The Pitch.
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