Me, last September:

At the moment, I have about a dozen vague ideas for my next spare-time creative project, and I’m stumbling from one to another until one strikes my fancy. One of these ideas is to, as a writing experiment, remake Plan 9 From Outer Space into something that doesn’t suck.

After all, at its core, the movie is about aliens who try to conquer the Earth by raising an army of zombies — you’d think that could be a seed for a decent action-horror flick. Besides, Hollywood always remakes the movies that were good to begin with. Why not take a crack at an awful one?

The finished script would go directly into a drawer upon completion, since the original is not public domain, but at least I would see if I could do it.

First of all, I was wildly wrong on that last count. Plan 9 apparently went into the public domain some time last year and I had no idea.

And of course, since it’s in the public domain, someone staked out an early claim and announced a remake, to be released on 9/9/2009.

At this point, I’m used to having a great idea, being too lazy to follow up on it, then seeing someone else do it — usually better than I ever could. I’m not sure that applies in this case, though. As Screenrant points out, the production company’s track record includes nothing but z-grade horror flicks, none with a budget higher than $8,000. Isn’t the idea here to make a GOOD version of Plan 9? Ed Wood already made the shitty version, and he did it in the most magically shitty possible way.

Io9′s post and comment thread on the topic is mostly filled with jackassery, but one commenter makes a good point I never realized, but probably should have:

Someone has already remade Plan 9 From Outer Space, and made it into a character-driven horror movie about people terrorized by the dead, reanimated by outer space phenomenon.

It was called Night of the Living Dead…

Huh. Zombies rising from the grave. Vague rumors of an alien origin of the plague. A house near a graveyard where most of the action takes place. It’s not that much of a stretch. Who knew that Plan 9 + talent = Night of the Living Dead?

The irony is, thanks to muddled business dealings, Romero’s film went into the public domain almost immediately, while Wood’s film was protected for 50 years. I wonder how many remakes, sequels, and spinoffs we can expect… and whether a major studio would take a shot at a big budget version or every last one will be shot on digicams in backyards for spare change.

It’s not actually true that everyone in the world does a webcomic, even if it seems like that sometimes. However, Bitstrips might make it so.

After spending some time experimenting with its staggeringly deep character creation tool, it literally took me all of ten minutes to whip up this three-panel gag using nothing but the stock characters and props. (And a copy button. And Google.)

As far as I can tell in my small time working with Bitstrips, it has no tool for creating backdrops, props or clothing, which limits your storytelling options. It’s hard to do, say, Order of the Stick without castles or swords or wizardly robes. But it’s still only in beta, so who knows what’s coming next.

If you’ve followed my posts marked research, you’ve noticed many of them are news about how American society might change and harvest energy in a post-oil world. Ever since I read James Kunstler’s The Long Emergency in 2005, I’ve thought that world would make a fascinating yet realistic setting for a book or comic or screenplay. So I’ve been slowly accumulating bits of news that might make it into my eventual story.

That is, until last month, when a couple of weeks ago, when James Kunstler had a novel published called World Made By Hand, about American society in a post-oil world.

And you know, fair enough. It’s his sandbox anyway, so it’s only right that he plays in it first. It reminds me of the time I had this great idea to record MST3K-style podcasts to be played along with the original movie on DVD… and then Mike Nelson debuted Rifftrax two months later. In both cases, I wanted to fill a genre niche I would personally pay money to experience, only to find it had been filled by the originator of the niche. So naturally, I raced out to Borders and purchased Kunstler’s novel.

And my god, it is… so… not very good.

Let’s get the praise out of the way first: the best part of the novel is, as expected, the setting. Kunstler’s strength lies in his dystopian futurist speculation, and here he imagines, for example, exactly how suburban homes would be stripped of useful materials in ways I might not have imagined. And his writing style, as always, is smooth and readable.

But his plot is wooden, his dialogue clunky, and his ending is eighteen layers of awful. Plot threads are introduced, then never pursued. On top of that, Kunstler’s own prejudices come through too strongly. His protagonist is a thinly-veined version of himself: about the same age, lives in the same area, has the same distaste for cars and suburbia. Naturally, the town names him Mayor because he’s such a great guy, and three different hot women throw themselves at him during the course of the book.

The entire country has become a terrifying wasteland — except for upstate New York, where the novel is set, and where Kunstler happens to live. I would say this is a case of writing what the author knows, except for two things: LA and DC have been nuked by Muslim terrorists and every other major city is unlivable due to race wars. The Long Emergency included a passage about how Mexicans were illegally crossing the border in order to take the southwestern US back for Mexico, a belief held by people such as Pat Buchanan and rebutted well by Jon Stewart. Basically, if American society collapsed due to a lack of gasoline and electricity, Kunstler believes the first thing brown and black people would do is conspire to Kill Whitey, and only racially unified areas will be livable. Um… okay.

Kunstler also hews a little too closely to The Long Emergency, which is not unexpected. If he didn’t think everything in that book would happen, he wouldn’t have included them in the first place. Still, even Kunstler admits that the world will never entirely run out of oil, it will just become too scarce to run an economy, so it might have been nice for some oil to show up in World Made By Hand. I also would have liked some ingenuity in repurposing those cars and suburban homes, re-opening lines of communication, etc. We live in a world with cheap, handcranked laptops, yet Kunstler believes that when confronted with an apocalyptic lack of electricity, America will immediately give up and either go feral or go Amish?

Meh. Maybe he does believe it, or maybe he just finds that a more interesting story to tell. Either way, perhaps there is room for a post-oil America story of my own… if I ever get back to my writing.

I was pretty good about regularly updating the blog for a couple of weeks there, wasn’t I? So much for that. I was far too busy drinking whiskey and playing Oblivion working on Narbonic, vol. 5 to pay attention to this place.

To make it up to you, here are some writery linky things:

• I sympathize with Christopher Moore’s feelings on turning 50, which are probably more common than he thinks. It’s the stuff midlife crises are made of, after all. Even at 32, I freak out about the doors that have slammed shut or will soon, and about the “life list” stuff I may never do. Of course, Moore has a successful writing career and a cult following, which is more than most people ever achieve, so he shouldn’t feel THAT bad (and I’m sure he doesn’t).
• Jane Espenson’s blog is making me consider trying to break into TV again. Did you know that these days producers like to hire new writers based on original pilots instead of specs of existing shows? Original pilots like the first screenplay I ever wrote, way back in college? Or that they also like to hire writers who have worked for a while outside the industry and can bring that knowledge into a writing room? Somebody may need to stop me from moving to LA. No, seriously. I’m not kidding. An intervention may be required at some point.
• And finally some more apocalyptic research:
  

  Arctic vault takes shape for world food crops

  LONGYEARBYEN, Svalbard (Reuters) – In a cavern under a remote Arctic mountain, Norway will soon begin squirreling away the world’s crop seeds in case of disaster.

  Dynamited out of a mountainside on Spitsbergen island around 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole, the store has been called a doomsday vault or a Noah’s Ark of the plant kingdom.

At the moment, I have about a dozen vague ideas for my next spare-time creative project, and I’m stumbling from one to another until one strikes my fancy. One of these ideas is to, as a writing experiment, remake Plan 9 From Outer Space into something that doesn’t suck.

After all, at its core, the movie is about aliens who try to conquer the Earth by raising an army of zombies — you’d think that could be a seed for a decent action-horror flick. Besides, Hollywood always remakes the movies that were good to begin with. Why not take a crack at an awful one?

The finished script would go directly into a drawer upon completion, since the original is not public domain, but at least I would see if I could do it.

Anyway, I’ve just been rewatching the original on my laptop, and I discovered my DVD program has the ability to play the movie at different speeds with sound intact: 1.25x, 1.5x, 1.75x, etc.

Here’s something weird: Plan 9 is actually a better movie at 1.5x. At that speed, Tor Johnson doesn’t painfully stumble over his lines, he just sounds like he has an accent. Everyone else delivers lines at an Aaron Sorkin clip. People no longer wander aimlessly from scene to scene, they walk with a purpose. The zombies move like they could actually catch someone. The terrible production values aren’t on screen long enough to be dwelled upon.

Such knowledge wouldn’t have helped Ed Wood much, though. With an even further reduced running time, he would have had to pad out the film with even more stock footage…

Things have been so boring around here that I haven’t had much to blog about. That sounds like a complaint, but believe me, it isn’t — after a hectic couple of months, I’m glad for a spot of boredom.

I’ve been on two different kinds of steroids for the last week to clear up the allergy-based coughing fits. I’m done with one set, hopefully for good, and will take the inhalant-based ‘roids until the allergy shots take full effect. I’m feeling surprisingly good right now, and as a side benefit I’ve hit 73 home runs since last Tuesday.

Meanwhile, here’s what’s amusing me lately:

• I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: They Are All Gay. And as with Mark Foley, Ted Haggard, Jim West, Jeff Gannon, and Glenn Murphy Jr, Allen couldn’t just have a normal, healthy affair with a dude — it always involves teens, chat rooms, public restrooms, and/or prostitution. I have to admit, though, as far as excuses go, “I’m not gay, I’m racist! I offered to blow a black guy in self-defense!” at least has the virtue of never having been tried. Ant has more.
• The Yangtze River Dolphin has gone extinct. Douglas Adams wrote about the dolphin in Last Chance to See twenty years ago. You can read passages here.
• TPMtv has been posting videos from last week’s YearlyKos convention in Chicago. I miss last year’s coverage from CSPAN and Air America, which offered live feeds of entire panels instead of focusing on the main speakers and debates. Yes, I’m such a nerd.
• Creator interviews from Joss Whedon and Matt Fraction have me pondering my next creative endeavor, now that I’m settled and relatively healthy. I also stumbled upon Jim Butcher’s blog, where he offers in-depth thoughts on the craft of writing.
• I snagged a copy of the Pushing Daisies pilot episode, a new series from Wonderfalls creator Bryan Fuller. Sharply written, although it remains to be seen whether it will resonate with me as deeply as Wonderfalls did. Debuts Oct. 3.
• Shaenon writes about the Comic-Con that was: “Once again, Seth Rogen failed to stop by my table and realize that he must produce and star in the television adaptation of Narbonic. I don’t know what’s up with that.”

Tons of neat stuff from the last couple of days:

• After a season and a half of seemingly meandering storylines and dull flashbacks, Lost has been running on all cylinders for the last half-season. Now that it’s giving out some answers to go with its new mysteries and there’s an end in sight (48 more episodes over 3 seasons), I’m back on board for good. And on that note, check out this nine-minute fan-edited reconstruction of the events of the Flight 815 crash with all the stuff we know now added in. (Spoilers if you haven’t been keeping up, obviously.)
• Take one Bruce Campbell. Seat him at a piano surrounded by adoring women. Have him sing a lounge version of Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf.” Enjoy.
• What would happen if two online chatbots talked to each other? Discover Magazine provided some seed questions, then let the chatbots go at it. The results are fascinating, in a funny way.
• NY Times Magazine profiled Jonathan Coulton as part of a story about musicians who make a living online.
• Al Gore has a new book coming out called The Assault on Reason. Based on this excerpt, it reads like a less scholarly, more politically-oriented sequel to Amusing Ourselves to Death.
• According to the Machine of Death website, the editors were so overwhelmed by story submissions that they are delaying the selection announcements for another month until June 30. I’m not sure that bodes well for my chances.

I just submitted my entry for the Machine of Death anthology, over 24 hours before the final deadline of April 30.

Whew! This writing stuff is harder than it looks. But I think the story came out pretty well.

Now I wait and see if it is accepted. They’ll have the final selections by May 31, and will let everyone know between then and June 15.

My procrastination skills have been on full display as I attempt to write a Machine of Death story before April 30.

Yesterday I sat down at my laptop with a beer and a completely free day’s schedule… and I immediately spent the next two hours in iTunes creating the perfect writing mix.

Eventually, I got 500 words down (of a planned 3-4,000), but the whole week has been like that: wait, first I gotta do my taxes… oops, this Netflix DVD has been out for a while, better watch it… hmm, better clean the place up a bit… ooh, here’s a demo of Puzzle Quest… hey, the Cardinals are playing on ESPN2 Opening Night… hold on, I should read this Prime Time Adventures game book Ron loaned to me…

And now I’m blogging about procrastinating. Heh.

Next week doesn’t look promising, either. Guitar Hero II comes out for the 360 on Tuesday, and Kristie comes back to town next weekend. Curse my ADD!

All right. Back to work. For real. Er, after I check my RSS reader…

Kristie is here again this weekend, after a three week absence, so there won’t be much in the way of blogging until Tuesday at the earliest. In the meantime, check out this video of Demetri Martin covering Viacom’s lawsuit against Google/YouTube. Sadly, the same lawsuit forced YouTube to take down all copies of the clip, so it’s hosted by iFilm (which I can’t embed in my blog).

Still, it’s hilarious. I’ve been making Kristie crack up the last couple of days with “Blah ba-blah ba-blah!”