The Turner Classic Movies Film Festival got off to a brilliant start last night featuring a screening of Michael Curtiz’s Doctor X, and in just a couple of hours at 8 pm ET, they’ll be showing a table read of Plan 9 from Outer Space.

The hilarious adaptation by Dana Gould of Ed Wood’s classically terrible sci-fi film features performances by Janet Varney, Maria Bamford, Bobcat Goldthwait, Gary Anthony Williams, and more! In anticipation of the event, Gould and Varney sat down with iHorror to talk about the project’s genesis and the inherently sincere weirdness of the film.

“When you say you’re a fan of Plan 9,” Gould said as we began, “the weirdo part is implied.”

Truer words have probably never been spoken. The film has one of the strangest plots imaginable involving aliens who, determining that humans are accelerating their technology too quickly, are on the way to creating a weapon that would destroy the universe. So, in an act of desperation, the aliens decide to enact Plan 9 which involves raising the earth’s dead from their graves in the hope that the resulting chaos will make humans listen to reason.

Wait, that can’t be right. Is that right? Yes, it is.

So, where does one even begin to adapt something like this for a live performance and whose idea was it to begin with?

For those answers, we have to go back to the source with SF SketchFest where writer/comedian Dana Gould had mounted other table reads in the past. One of those reads included the script from a Jerry Lewis film called The Day the Clown Cried which was filmed but never released and for obviously good reason. It was a “concentration camp comedy” that centered around a clown who would lead children into the gas chambers.

Chris Nichols, a writer for Los Angeles Magazine and a friend of Gould’s, saw one of those performances and suggested they should do Plan 9.

The Cast of the SF Sketchfest Table Read of Plan 9 from Outer Space

“I had the script as a book that was published because I’m a weirdo fan of Plan 9, and I just thought it needed something cause it’s beautiful,” Gould explained. “The movie itself is beautiful but as a live performance it needed something. So as I began to write, I would add in this sort of narration that sort of commented on it as it went along. And that, I thought, brought it up. And then we did it and it was 20 times funnier than I thought it would be. People really brought their a-game to the performance. Janet does the accent of this actress named Mona McKinnon that…well, it never struck me that you could do an impression of Mona McKinnon but Janet figured it out.”

“I remember when we did it the first time,” Varney added. “Dana and I just kept sitting there looking at each other like, elbowing each other and smacking each other going, ‘Oh my god it works! It’s so funny!’ I didn’t know it would be funny until that moment.”

After the first performance, it became a piece that Gould would pull out for special occasions and Halloween performances, tweaking it a little each time and refining the script. Those tweaks have included little details in the commentary that even a longtime fan of Ed Wood’s film might not have picked up on in previous viewings.

For example, the cemetery that is so pivotal to the film…isn’t a cemetery.

“It’s not just the obvious things like it’s daytime and then it’s nighttime and then it’s daytime and then it’s nighttime,” he said, laughing hysterically. “I don’t even care about that! That’s not a cemetery! That’s the woods. ”

“That’s the brilliance of what Dana did,” Varney continued. “You would think that that would or could detract from the experience. There’s a world in which having it circled in bright yellow marker sort of pulls away from the ridiculousness of something but that’s not what happens here. It lifts everything up and makes it even funnier, and it preserves the reality of the film and makes it so much more extraordinary in so many different ways.”

With all of their success performing this particular table read in the past, however, neither expected to find themselves on the TCM Festival in this particular way. It oddly came together after Scott McGee, a mutual friend who works at TCM, saw their livestream from SF Sketchfest from earlier this year. The crew was originally meant to perform the show live, but when TCM decided to take the festival virtual for the second year in a row, McGee suggested they use the livestream they had previously done.

It’s an opportunity that neither Gould nor Varney take for granted, and they’re excited for an even wider audience to see this particular performance.

“One of the things about Plan 9 is there is so much sincerity to it and charisma,” Gould pointed out. “The same goes with our show. It’s not cynical at all. It’s very caring and positive and affectionate. It’s like…I think, especially after the last couple of years, people need a break. I love that this is very positive and silly and purely stupid in a smart way. It’s my favorite thing in comedy. A smart of version of stupid.”

You can see the Plan 9 table read at 8 pm ET on TCM followed by a screening of the Ed Wood classic.