Yuku free message boards

PhantomXCI wrote:

---

Bela never stepped foot on the PLAN 9 set, because he died three years before it was shot.  His "big" cemetery scene was little more than a few feet of home movie footage- shot in 1956, in a genuine cemetery, during the day, without Tor Johnson. 

I pretty much agree with the rest of what you've written, but a couple of minor factual corrections here: the 'real cemetery footage' was shot in November 1955 (with the shooting mentioned briefly in the Los Angeles Times of November 27th), and there was no 'three year gap' - in fact, Ed Wood had PLAN 9 'in the can' and completely edited in its currently known form by November 1956; he really did rush it out after Lugosi's death. The movie previewed as GRAVE ROBBERS FROM OUTER SPACE on March 15th, 1957, and DCA was already making PLAN 9 available to theaters as early as June/July 1958 [link to a thread with several pre-1959 ads for it playing around the country]. The 'new release' dates for movies which DCA fed to the trade press (in the case of PLAN 9, that was July 1959) generally seem to bear little relationship to when DCA actually started distributing the movie in question, which was usually many months earlier (a factoid which perhaps ties in to the various complaints which have been related over the years, including by some in Wood's circle, about DCA 'hiding profits' from producers).

Ted Newsom wrote:

---

Appropos of such things, there was an interesting comment in a FilmFax article years ago from one of the Baptist investors, where some friend pointed out that "his movie" was showing in town, under the title "Grave Robbers from Outer Space." That was the first the investor heard about it, and this was apprarently quite some time before the official 1959 release.

DCA certainly had at least one print with the GRAVE ROBBERS FROM OUTER SPACE title on it, and when the movie was first sold to television by DCA's 'successor', the Valiant Film Corp., between June 1960 and 1964, it frequently aired as GRAVE ROBBERS FROM OUTER SPACE...

PS:  DCA, Distributors Corporation of America, was a Hal Roach Jr. company, wasn't it?  And was it not around this time that he went bankrupt?  That certainly might interfere with steering profits back to participants, no?

Bankruptcy would certainly be a reason, but there seems to be a wider tradition of 'shady dealings' throughout the history of DCA's operations between 1954 and 1959. Throughout that period, DCA consistently announced movies as 'new releases' between four and fourteen months after it had already started distributing them widely (in slightly more out-of-the way areas), which I would have to say qualifies as an unusual practice, at the very least.

As for the Hal Roach connection (mentioned in numerous Wood articles), DCA was never really Roach's; rather, it was purchased in January 1959 by the Scranton Corporation, to whom the Hal Roach Studios had been sold in May 1958. This affiliation of course dates from after DCA's acquisition of PLAN 9. The Scranton Corporation intended to distribute new Hal Roach product through DCA, and wanted to rebrand it as the 'Hal Roach Distributing Corporation.'

But that never happened, and the intended first release of the Hal Roach Distributing Corporation, was instead distributed as the first feature released by the Valiant Film Corp. in June 1959, a company headed by former DCA exec Fred J. Schwartz. DCA officially went belly-up in September 1959, but the very next day, its entire back-catalog was available anew through the Valiant Film Corp., which never even bothered to rebadge DCA prints or DCA movie paper in its own name.