Alan Dean Foster

Episode 39:

Alan Dean Foster

Dan: How often do you get asked about movie novelizations? Is, is this like a, a prime topic for you, or is it like, eh, once in a while,

Alan Dean Foster: Very occasionally. As far as a specific subject for an interview, it always comes up. In a general interview, which I get asked probably once every two, three weeks, but as far as the specific, making it the specific subject of the interview or the title of the interview, that doesn't happen very often.

Dan: Oh, okay. Well see. I'm glad to kind of fit in my own little, in my own little niche there. So how is it that you got started into novelizations? Because I know you were already a published author before Novelization started for you, , so how did that come about?

Alan Dean Foster: There was a switchover in editorial at Valentine Books, which then became Delray Books and still is Delray Books Science fiction line of Valentine Random House. Uh, Betty and Ian Valentine had left to do art books and another husband and wife team, Les Delray. Julin Delray came in. And among the things that editors find when they are promoted to general editorship or whatever their position is, our projects that have been left over from the previous regime.

Now one of these things was, uh, the rights to do a book version of a movie from Italy called Luana. And, uh, Judy Lynn knew that I had a, an MFA in film from ucla.

Plus, I had written some books I'd done novels already for Valentine, and she threw it at me and said, uh, we got the rights to this Italian jungle film here.

Would you be interested in trying to make a book out of it? And I said, sure. Uh, I like female tars and stuff. I grew up watching Sheena, queen of the Jungle. In fact, when we moved to Prescott, Irish McCullough, who played Sheena, queen of the Jungle was living here.

Dan: Oh, no kidding.

Alan Dean Foster: Yeah. Which I didn't know at the time, but I ran into her on a, ran into her on a street, Cortez Street, saw this really handsome older woman, much older woman.

And uh, she went into a store. So I followed her in. When she left, I asked the owner, I said, was that Irish MCC McCall? And I said, oh yeah, she lived here for years. And he turned and pointed, but these are some of her paintings. She was a member of the Western Artists of America, painted mostly Native American children.

But that's what the book was ostensibly about. It was a female Tarzan story. So I said, sure. Lynn said, well, uh, what do you need? And I said, send me a copy of the screenplay.

She said, well, we don't have a copy of the screenplay, but we'll set up a screening for you in Los Angeles. I was not married yet, and I still living in la.

So I said, well, okay. So I went to the offices of the guy who had bought the distribution rights, Sal Fried, I think his name was, to the film, which was a third floor walkup that told me something right away, I guess.

Dan: Yeah.

Alan Dean Foster: And I mean, MGM, it wasn't. And I went in and they had a little room set up with chairs and projectionists and they sat me down and I had  a pad and a pen.

Get ready to take notes. They started, the film was all an Italian and I don't speak, or at least I didn't then any Italian and there were no subtitles. So I'm watching this thing un spool. I have no screenplay. I'm trying to understand something of what's going on, just from the context, realizing that I've committed myself to make a 70,000 word novel out of this thing.

And it was atrocious. It was awful. It encapsulated all the worst aspects of Italian filmmaking, bad Italian filmmaking. So I went home and I thought, what am I gonna do? Well, freed young PR advertising guy was a fan, not of me, but he was a fan, science fiction fantasy, and he'd had the good sense to hire Frank Frazetta to do two advertising posters for the film, both of which appear on the book, one on the cover, one on the back cover.

Uh, the one on the back covers are rough. And I thought, well, that's my idea of a female Tarzan, what Frazetta would do. So I ended up novelize the film poster,

Dan: Oh wow.

Alan Dean Foster:  So this is why the book, why the book is dedicated to Frazetta, and that's how I got started doing novelizations.

Dan: Oh my goodness. How well was that received that, did that boost you in into doing other ones?

Alan Dean Foster: Well, I don't know if it, oh, well. I got more work after

that. Judy Lynn had bought the rights to do the book versions of the animated Star Trek, and she asked me to do those, do anything I want. She said, that's a whole other story, which I'm sure you'll get to. I did John Carpenter's Dark Star, which was John Carpenter and Dan o Bannon's first film, actually their USC film project, which kind of got bigger and bigger as far as boosting my career.

Uh, I don't think it did anything for that, but the book itself as a book was well received. And in fact, not long after the book came out, Judy Lynn got a call from somebody at Disney who obviously hadn't read the fine print on the book, wanting to know if the film rights were available.

So, Judy, Lynn and I had a good laugh and cry over that.

Dan: Oh yeah, I bet. Okay, I, I do wanna ask you about one of your early ones. Something that I know has not been published, but it fast. It's something that fascinates me that it exists, and that is the mod two episode tie in. I remember watching these episodes in syndications, so I know, I remember.

Watching , when Maude had had the very difficult abortion decision, that two episode thing, how did that come about?

Alan Dean Foster: I've done a lot of novelizations for. Delray by that time, uh, all of the ones I've mentioned already. And Random House or MA or Delray, probably Random House. Cause it wasn't science fiction had bought the rights to do a book version of that two-part episode of Maude. Maude has an abortion and they tried different writers.

I know Terry Southern had a crack at it. The guy wrote Candy. Buck Henry took a shot at it.

I know. And. Uh, they were all rejected. And so it came to Judy Lynn and she threw it at me. She said, you want to take a crack at this? Well, first I saw who had already done a try on it. I thought, look, if these guys couldn't do it, why are you asking me?

But I did, and I wrote the book. I turned it in, uh, Valentine Random House. Whoever was responsible for it, accepted it. The manuscript was approved and then it was declined. And the story I got years later was that, uh, Norman Learhad turned it down and put the kibosh on the whole project. Not necessarily because of my writing or the manuscript itself.

I have no idea why he did it. I've never met Norman Lear or I'd ask him, but, and that may not even be true.

But that's the story behind that. That's the only novelization I've ever written that's never been published.

Dan: It's a very odd choice for a novelization.

Alan Dean Foster: Yes, it is.

Dan:  What it seemed like, like we, at the time that you got that project, did you think what, why, why are we doing this two part Maude episode?

Alan Dean Foster: Well, of course that was, that's everybody's initial reaction. But then you think about it, it was so controversial at the time. And there was so much talk and noise around it that whoever bought the rights and thought we could do, thought they could do a book out of it, probably figured that all of the conversation around the episode would serve to sell the book.

I mean, that's the way I would look at it. But, uh, for the reasons I mentioned, Mr. Lear or whoever. Decided not to do it. The manuscript still exists. It's with all my other manuscripts in the special collections Department of Arizona State University in Tempe, and presumably somebody could publish it. But all of that discussion has kind of gone by the wayside.

Although abortion is just as controversial, a subject as it ever was, would be very interesting to see if a small press, a specialty press may be a woman's press. Speciali press specializing in women's issues, I don't know, could get the rights to do it and put out even a limited edition of the book, cuz I'm quite proud of the work I did.

Just like everything else I did.

Dan: That's, I would, I honestly, I would love to read that one. Like if. If I'm picking one, I might go to that one first, cuz it's just such, um, such an unusual, you know, it, it definitely sticks out among the, the bibliography that I've been looking at. So what is your process when you're working on a novelization?

So how much time do you have? How, how hard is the deadline that you're given? Uh, are, are they just handing you a screenplay and say, here you go. Do you ever, all right. One thing I always wonder is, Do you ever get to talk to the screenwriter? If you're reading a screenplay and you go, I don't understand this.

This is vague. I don't know what's going on here. Because the novel is such a, a different animal than, than the screenplay.

Alan Dean Foster: Okay, several things. First of all, you have no time. They want it yesterday. This is because the studios, uh, in, in somebody doesn't seem to realize that it takes longer to put out a printed book. Than it does to release a film. Film's already done generally, or in progress. Um, so they wanted yesterday. The deadline is almost always hard.

There are exceptions, but by exceptions I mean, well, we'll give you another week, that kind of exception.

Dan: Yes.

Alan Dean Foster: What I do is, what I used to do is I would have typewriter, now computer here, here, I'm pointing. Nobody can see me. Um, in front of me and then to my left on a stand, I would've the screenplay. And I learned very early on that I generally need to get three pages of manuscript from one page of screenplay, assuming it's a standard 120 page screenplay that will translate, I know from experience to 360 pages of text, which will be around 65, 70,000 words with the font I used. If it's a shorter screenplay, I know I need to get more pages per page of screenplay. That sounds very technical and uh, I know, but you have to have this in your mind when you start, or you'll get to page 20 in the screenplay and realize you only have 30 pages of book and there's no way you're gonna end up with a book.

So you have that in mind. You have to expand as you go. Now a couple of the last films that I novelized take, the two star Star Trek films for example, was actually able to put the, , screenplay up on one side of my screen cuz it was emailed and the movie itself on the left side and unspool the film as I was reading the screenplay.

Dan: Oh, well that's very cool.

Alan Dean Foster: Yeah, then I would put the screenplay, take a printed version of screenplay, put it off to the left, have my manuscript up there, switch 'em all around. So I'd have three different things up at any one time. The screenplay, my manuscript, and the film itself. But they're very careful with sending anybody the film.

Not everybody will do that. So they sent it in seven parts.

One of them anyway, when I was finished with part one, I had to eliminate it from my computer. Then they would send me part two.

I mean, this is, they're talking CIA level

Dan: Wow.

Alan Dean Foster: And, but I understand that. I understand that. Uh, and it didn't bother me.

As long as I have the screenplay to work with, I'm fine if I can get pre-production drawings, if I can get particularly shots from the set. So I see what the actual. Backgrounds look like, or, or weapons or machines. And of course the actors, which who I want to describe accurately in the book so that when you're reading about, uh, , captain Johnston, who is a six foot tall, black man with an American accent, I don't write Captain Johnson as a three foot, six inch tall, , Nordic df.

You know, you people want these things to. Correlate when they're reading the book, so that's helpful. Sometimes I get a little more, sometimes I get a little less. With Alien Covenant, I had a fair amount of material with Star Wars. I had very little.

Dan: And so when you have very little, do you. Do you end up just kind of creating like your own world or do you end up just being as vague as the screenplay because maybe you don't want to venture too far off? Like how much leeway do you have to, to go in your own direction, especially considering that you, sir, are an accomplished author on your own?

You're not simply a, a transcriber.

Alan Dean Foster: I have a lot of leeway. I assume when I start that I have a lot of leeway. If there's something wrong, I know that it will be corrected or taken out, or it will be, they will ask me to revise it, to conform to whatever the finished film is. Uh, for example, the thing, novelization of the thing, all I had was the screenplay.

I had no production drawings or anything, and it wasn't even the finished, it wasn't even the final draft of the screenplay, which is why there are a number of things in the novelization that are different from the finished film, uh, particularly the ending, which is actually better in the version that I was able to novelize.

Uh, not because John Carpenter thought it was better necessarily, but they're running outta money, is the way I heard it. And the ending in the version I had, the screenfly I had would've been much more expensive to shoot. I do have a lot of, uh, a lot of leeway, particularly now that people know, people in publisher of the studio know that I know what I'm doing.

And that they're, they're going to get a, a proper novel.

Dan: All right, so, so tell me what was the ending of the thing, because I don't know,

Alan Dean Foster: Oh, you need to read the book.

Dan: I had a feeling you were gonna say that.

Alan Dean Foster: No. There's a huge battle between, I think the character's name is McReedy and the thing, and McReedy has a bulldozer. And it's, it's a, a out on the ice in Antarctica. It's a very impressive, it's very well written by Bill Lancaster, and it would've made an ice ending, but it was, it would've been extremely expensive to shoot.

There's no CGI back then. And, uh, it was practical effects, it would've been expensive to shoot. So that's why the difference. But I generally have a lot of leeway, but it doesn't matter if I do or not, I'm going to write what I think is the best story.

Using the materials that I've been given, and if something is taken out or they ask me to cut it, I have to do that because it's a work for hire.

It's not my original material.

Dan: Yeah. When you get something and, and we don't have to name any films, but when you get something and maybe it's not such a good screenplay,

 Is now the work a little harder for you, just in terms of one getting through it or two not wanting to alter it as much as maybe you would like to, cuz all of a sudden maybe you'd make it completely different.

So what is it like when, when it's, it's a situation like that where you're, where you recognize this probably isn't that great.

Alan Dean Foster: I do the best I can with what I'm given,bearing in mind that I can only deviate so much. I think I've developed a certain feel for what I can get away with is another way of saying it.

Dan: Yes.

Alan Dean Foster: Uh, because if I go off on a tangent, even to fix something that I think is bad, Crow is a good example. It's a very pretty film with good people in it.

But the people who made it could not decide whether they were making a science fiction film or a fantasy film. Now, I'll give you an example. There's a big battle there between beasts, bad guys, his minions. You never know where all these minions come from. I mean, every film seems to have lots of evil minions anyway. , and there's a big sword fight and they're fighting with these things that look like pikes long and they stab and slash and the good guys have swords and axes. And then at the end of the fight, the Beast sum minions turn their weapons around and shoot laser beams out of them. So I'm sitting there, I'm reading this description cuz I haven't seen the film of course.

And I'm thinking, well, Like any reasonable science fiction fan would do, why didn't they shoot with the laser beams in the first place? I mean, is this some kind of Olympic event on the Beast's home planet where they have to fight with with edged weapons first? So there's no way to fix that without going directly against what appears in the film.

So I just wrote it as best I could. I forget what kind of excuse I throw it through in there. I always throw in an excuse.

Dan: Have you had situations with studios where they've looked at what you've written and they said, No, you have to do this again. There's, there's, we don't like this, or you didn't do it right, or you've changed too much. Or something. Like, if you, if you've gotten one back where you had to do, like, do a revision, do it again.

Alan Dean Foster: Only one time, I had done the, I am going to tell you, I had done the novelization of Alien. I did the novelization of Aliens, and so they handed me the novelization or the the screenplay to do the novelization of Alien 3 and I read it. And, uh, started mentally marking what I thought were the bad things in the screenplay.

And that list got really long, really fast. There were a lot of bad things in that screenplay that I did not agree with, uh, the story. Now everybody knows it’s David Fincher’s first film as a director. Constant interference from various sources at the studios, and it ended up being a hot mess, is the best way to describe it.

So I wrote it the way I would do any novelization trying to fix these things as I went along. Let's give you an example. The most, most obvious example is the beginning of the film. Uh, a little girl Newt, who escapes from aliens dies, she's dead, and then they do an autopsy on her, which was the word I used, was obscene.

Uh, and the other guy who gets away from aliens, uh, with Newton Ripley. Also dies. Michael Biehn’s character.

I think it was Biehn’s Character, excuse me. There's no reason for that. So I fixed that. They left that alone. But there was a bunch of other stuff in there. And what happened was we got a letter from Walter Hill, one of the producers, or Warner did, I didn't, and Warner forwarded it to me saying, basically, and I'm paraphrasing, this was a long time ago.

Uh, you can't do this. You have to write the book exactly as the film is written. So I threw up my hands again, it's a work for hire and I went back and I changed many things. I had written backgrounds for all of those prisoners on that prison planet. I took a lot of that stuff out. Uh, I re I did not take out the fix for Newt and, uh, Michael Beihn's character's death. I wouldn't do that. I, they left that in. But when they asked me to do Alien Resurrection,

Dan: Yeah.

Alan Dean Foster: the book version, I said, no. And, and funny, they, uh, they hired AC Crispen, well known writer, and I got a letter out of the blue sometime later after I'd already forgotten about all this and put it aside.

Uh, and the letter said simply, “Alan, why didn't you tell me?” So it, it was an ongoing thing. I, certain things, uh, just one more example. There's a scene in there where I think it's, is Ripley in one other character going through this mountain. I've used batteries trying to find some batteries with some juice in them for their flashlights, I guess. And I'm sitting there thinking, what is this?

22nd, 23rd, 24th century, they're still using D cells. Stuff like that drives me nuts cuz it's easy to fix and there's no reason for it. So that's, that's the only example. It's the only time I've had to go back and do that much work. Uh, now with Terminator Salvation, I did rewrite a great deal of that, but that's because, , the movie people kept sending Titan Publishers, the publisher of the book, constant revisions in the screenplay that were being constantly revised in the film.

And I got one after I had turned in my last draft of the manuscript and had it accepted and been paid my, and they said, can you please go back and just do a couple of little things so that the book will accord more perfectly with the film? And there were huge changes that had been made at the last minute in the film.

And I thought about it and I went back and I basically went through the whole manuscript. And rewrote the whole thing. Not every word, but I tried to incorporate every change that they had sent at the last minute because I still have my name on the book even though it's not my original work. And I did that for the reader.

I did that for the fans because I wanted the book to accord with the final version of the film as closely as I possibly could. I did that over a weekend. That was a very busy weekend.

Dan: Wow. Wow. See, this is. This is some dedication that you have to the craft is what I'm learning here, Alan. This is not just work for hire.

Alan Dean Foster: It’s got my name on it. Somebody's gonna go out and shell out seven or eight or nine bucks for a paperback book. They should get the best book possible. It's just like what I was working on, the novelization of The Black Hole.

Another film that I thought could have used some tweaks here and there. That's the favorite word in the movie industry.

Tweak just needs a little tweak. So when I was getting near the end of the novelization, I put together a list of 75 things that I thought could be adjusted in post.

In other words, after the, if you know what post means, after all the live action shooting will be done, I never heard a word about it.

Forgot about it. Figured it had been ignored. Like all such things generally are in Hollywood. And sometime later I was having lunch with somebody who knew people at Disney. And I mentioned this to him cuz I know he had done work at Disney. Said, oh no. Said they had a big meeting about it and people were yelling and screaming and none of the suggestions were adopted. But at least I know that my. My fan work, my free work that any fan would do just to make a better movie. At least people saw it so nobody can say that. I didn't try.

Dan: I gotta say that, that does sound like a long list of things for the black hole, which having seen the black hole, I understand this list. I having not seen it. I understand this list. Uh, now you mentioned the fans a lot, and that's something that I really, I'm curious about when it comes to your work, because a lot of what you end up doing, a lot of genre work, star Wars, star Trek, alien Legions of fans who really care about this material and where, whereas probably when you're first starting doing this, your interactions with fans is not quite as.

What it's, I'm gonna guess become over time because it's easier to now to get to you. Right. So what's it like with dealing with fan interactions? Do, do you have a lot, do people tell you, Hey, this was wrong. Why did you do this? This guy's supposed to have, you know, an elongated uh, fingernail on his pinky.

You didn't mention that. Things like that. What's the fan interaction like for you?

Alan Dean Foster: I've. I still get a lot of emails along those lines, but I think people have become more sophisticated and they realize that the person who writes the film adaptation, the book adaptation of the film is not responsible for what's in the film. Um, but I do still get, still get, uh, emails. I used to get printed letters.

I still get emails like that all the time. Asking about, you know, why this was done a certain way. Well, a good example. It's not a novelization, but splinter the mind's eye.

Dan: I was gonna ask you about this anyway, so Sure. Go ahead.

Alan Dean Foster: It's uh why are Luke and Leia like this, their brother and sister? That of course, is the big one. Why? There's a little romantic for song in Splinter, the mind's eye, because at that point, George, frankly, uh, as far as I know, had not decided that Luke and Leia were brother and sister. And in fact, there's a famous cut scene from the Empire Strikes back where, , princess Leia gives Luke a non brotherly kiss as Han looks on, it's in all the histories, and you can look it up and see it.

I, so I think that decision must have been made, uh, during the production of that film. I don't know this for a fact, I'm just supposing. But certainly at the time Splinter was done, there was no indication that there were anything, uh, like brother and sister. So there is that little spark, that little interaction between the two of them.

And fans would write in and say, well, how can you do this? This feels weird. And I have to say, well, it didn't feel weird 50 years ago. You know, a lot of things didn't feel as weird 50 years ago as they do now, but when you get somebody who was born 30 years after the film came out, and they start asking you questions like that.

So I'm, I try to be as polite and diplomatic as possible. I understand people don't understand these things, and I answer to the best of my ability, and sometimes I simply say, well, I don't know. You'll have to write the studio.

Dan: So tell me a little bit about, the Star Wars process, because I know you, you, I, I guess it's officially that you ghost wrote the Star Wars, uh, first novelization and, and then contracted for Splinter afterwards. So,

Alan Dean Foster: Well sort of.

Dan: Okay. Please educate me sir.

Alan Dean Foster: It was a two book contract. The idea being, um, to, well, to write the book version of the film and to write a sequel novel, and the only restriction that was put on me with the sequel novel and I could do anything I want, which I did, was that it had to be filmable on a low budget. George's idea with contracting for a sequel novel was one to have more Star Wars material out there until he could put out another film, which he would hopefully be able to do. And two, if the first film was not a huge success or a complete failure and he wanted to make a sequel film, he wanted to be able to reuse as many of the props and costumes and technical stuff as he could because he would have a much lower budget.

So he is thinking ahead there. So it was a two book contract, and of course Splinter was finished before Star Wars came out.

Dan: Oh wow.

Alan Dean Foster: It was six months, as you know, between the time the novelization came out and the film was released and all of that. ,

Dan: How is the difference in, or do you know the difference in sales in between that time between when the, the, the novelization first comes out and then after the movie?

Alan Dean Foster: Are you talking, you talking about Star Wars? The book went nuts. Nobody. It was just like the film went nuts. Nobody could believe anything connected with this Star Wars phenomenon. so when the film came, the book went crazy. It came out six months before the film and there was obviously something there.

Word got around very quickly. Wait a minute. This is real science fiction or prefer preferable term science fantasy.

Everybody said, science fiction, this is gonna be on the screen. I can't believe this. You have to read this. And people would tell their friends and neighbors and everybody else, you have to read this if this, this is gonna be on the screen.

I felt the same thing when I was writing the novelization. I thought they're never gonna get this on the screen the way it's written,

Dan: Really? Of course. I bet.

Alan Dean Foster:  But if they do, it's going to be something else. And in addition, it's being, uh, being able to go to a cast and crew screening of the film. I went to the first public screening of the film, I think it was 10, in the 10 in the morning at Groman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood.

And I sat in the back of the theater and watched the audience. And when the Star Cruiser came over, the audience went nuts. It was the first time in my life I ever heard. A round of spontaneous applause practically before the movie had even gotten started, and at that point I knew this is gonna be something extra special.

Dan: When you saw that, right, you see this reaction. You say, okay, this thing is going to be huge. Are, when do you start thinking about how that's going to affect your other work with splinter?

Alan Dean Foster: Well, it didn't, um, I had already written Splinter before the film came out.

Dan: But I, I mean, in terms of that would've been the next sequel if Star Wars maybe is

Alan Dean Foster: Oh that. Well, yeah. Uh, once the film came out and suddenly started making a dollar or two, it became clear to everybody concerned that George could make anything he wanted to. And he obviously, I'm sure, had other ideas in mind while I was writing Splinter that were expensive to do. And in fact, splinter, the original manuscript opens.

There's a whole chapter at the beginning, which opens with a fairly complicated battle in space, which explains why Luke and Leia are forced down on Miba on this jungle planet. And George said, you need to take that out because it would've been too expensive to film, not because there was anything intrinsically wrong with it. So actually, splinter starts with chapter two, basically.

Dan: Mm. Okay. Gotcha. Um, Having that experience of watching Star Wars after you've done the novelization. So I'm just curious about what it's like for you. Uh, you know, when you get a screenplay and you don't have a movie and all right, now you're gonna work with it however long it takes you to, to write a book and then to watch the movie afterwards.

Like, what is that, like, that must be sort of a, a, I can't even imagine what that experience is like. It's gotta be sort of a, an odd feeling when it's like, oh, well this is what they did with it.

Alan Dean Foster: It is cool and sometimes it's disappointing. I don't wanna say heartbreaking cause it's a work for hire,

but let's say I've written a scene that I'm really proud of in the book that's not in the movie, and that part of the movie comes along. And I know that scene's not there, but mentally I'm thinking this is what goes there in the film.

I'll give you a good example.

Dan: Yeah.

Alan Dean Foster: Uh, Force Awakens,

Dan: Sure.

Alan Dean Foster: I had finished the book, turned it in, and we, I mean, my agent, my editor got a note from the Star Wars group. There's now, of course, a Star Wars group saying, look, we have this problem. , , , our road pilot is forced down on this planet, desert Planet and his ship crashes, and we don't see him anymore until much later.

He's back with the resistance again. What happened? How did he survive the crash? We know how John Boyega character survived it, walked away from it, but we don't see. Give a name.

Dan: Is it, is it Poe? I'm, no, I don't know.

Alan Dean Foster: It is Poe. Okay,so the ship crashes, Boyer Boyer walks away from it, and we don't see Poe until sometime later in the film when he is back with the resistance.

Dan: Yeah.

Alan Dean Foster: And this was, this was egregious enough to where it was caught, and we got a letter saying, can you fill in something there explaining what happened to Poe after his ship crashes.

So I wrote a whole scene in there, well, a whole sequence in there where he's, he's dazed and he goes the opposite direction from John Boyega.

Dan: Yeah.

Alan Dean Foster: And he's picked up by a local, um, I forget merchant or something, and they have to fight off some, some bad guys. And that's why the merchant helps him get back to contact with resistance people.

And that's how he gets back. So as I'm watching the film, I'm thinking, well, this would've been great if they could have filmed this sequence.

It's a very exciting sequence

and it just wasn't there. But in my mind, it was there. And then people who read the book, it was there.

I'll tell you the most, most fun I had with that book, one of the most enjoyable things I did in every, any novelization. of course have that, um, absurd scientific sequence in there. Where you have this super weapon and it's on a planet and it blows up in another, so it blows up an entire solar

Dan: Okay. Yeah. Yes, yes. I remember

Alan Dean Foster: Okay. I realize this is science fantasy,

Dan: Mm-hmm.

Alan Dean Foster: but that's what's really pushing the bounds of anything with the word science in it. So I said, even though I did not have to do this, could have written it exactly as it was in the screenplay exactly as it appeared on the screen, said, I'm gonna make this work.

So I took the, I started doing some research, physics, astrophysics. How would you go about theoretically utilizing what we know blowing up a planet in another solar system? How would you do it without blowing up the planet that your weapon

is supposedly on? For all sorts of reasons. Uh, because if you have enough, if you have enough science to bring, uh, energy down from a sun, You have enough energy to, you don't need, this is what it's, or plus, if firing the weapon would immediately blow all the atmosphere off the planet, the weapon is mounted on and everybody and everything on that planet would die.

Little things like that.

Dan: Yeah.

Alan Dean Foster: So I started getting into things like quintess and really, abrus astrophysical terminology. And there's about four pages of it in the book. That explains how it works. Utilizes dark energy. I just thought that was fun. Dark side, dark energy.

Dan: Sure.

Alan Dean Foster: Um, so it's a whole different thing.

Would've been really nice to see filmed actually maybe one of these days. Some fans out there who, uh, are using some Good Max will actually do it. But I did the best I could with the physics. I could understand. It's about four pages and I was sure they'd take it out. Was sure they'd take it out of the book.

They left it in. And I think the only reason they left it in was because they figured nobody's gonna understand what he is talking about here anyway, so there's no harm done. But I'm real proud of that. Four pages.

Dan: Do you have any particular novelizations that you are proud of? Like, I really nailed this one. Uh, you know, maybe more than others.

Alan Dean Foster: Well, I'm proud of all of them, but you know, people ask that

question. If I had to pick one, it would be Alien. I. Because there's not a lot of action in the sense of we're not blowing up other space ships or cities on planetary surfaces. It's very claustrophobic. You don't have dozens of characters. And the main thing was when I got the packet, uh, no internet back then from 20th century, Fox containing materials that had pictures of the main characters, had pictures, pictures, of the nastro, , But there was something missing.

So I called Fox, my contacted Fox, and I said, , somebody left out pictures of the alien. And he said, well, we're not letting any images of the alien out. I said, well, I'm not out. I'm writing the book. I have to know what the alien looks like to write about it. He said, I'm, I'm really sorry, but Fox is not letting any images of the Alien Act.

So I had to write the book without knowing. Not having a clue what the alien looked like. Uh, so I'm pretty proud of the fact that that works as well as it does. Nobody had ever heard of HR Geer. Of course, I didn't even know who he was or associated with the film. So if you read the book, there's no description of the alien, an alien.

Dan: So it just, the alien appears and like that. There's

Alan Dean Foster: , I tried to be as love crafty and as possible about it. You know, you have the nameless gibbering horror sort of thing and you, um, you exercise your use of adjectives, but there's no nouns.

Dan: Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do, I guess.

Alan Dean Foster: That's right. So I was real proud of that. I.

Dan: All right, so is this a lucrative business to be in?

Alan Dean Foster: No,it's not.

It never, it never was. I probably did better than a lot of people,

But it was good for me from a financial standpoint, since you ask.

Dan: Okay.

Alan Dean Foster: because I'm a very fast writer. So if it had taken me six months, even if I'd been given six months to write a novelization, I couldn't have done it. It wouldn't have, it wouldn't have made sense from a financial standpoint, but being able to write it in, well, alien I did in three weeks, for example,

Dan: Oh wow.

Alan Dean Foster: being able to write, write the book in say, three to six weeks, that made it financially worthwhile.

Dan: Is, is that a typical deadline, three to six weeks, or you're just that fast?

Alan Dean Foster: I don't know what a typical deadline is. I only know what my deadlines were.

Dan: Oh, okay. So, uh, uh,

uh, a typical deadline for you? Was it around three to six weeks? Was it something like that? Not a lot of time.

Alan Dean Foster: Generally be two months.

Dan: Two months. Okay. All right.

Alan Dean Foster: so, you know, two to three months sometimes. But, uh, I, if I, if it was, if I knew I could do it in two months, I'd ask for three months. Just in case, you know,

some, some crazy old lady hit me with her bus or something and, uh, I was laid up for a while. You, le you let yourself have as much leeway as possible for those unforeseen uh, interruptions.

Dan: So my, my, I think this is my last question for you, by the way. So, Has novelizations, , positively affected your original work as an author? Like maybe having the name act recognition out there, or maybe it hasn't affected it at all?

Alan Dean Foster: No, there's certainly a lot of people who would never pick up an original science fiction novel who would pick up a novelization of a science fiction or a fantasy film. Because they liked the film and they wanted more of it. Now there's less of it these days because nowadays people have DVDs or they stream and there's director's cuts.

Uh, what I was doing essentially for decades was my own director's cuts, adding material and fixing things just like any fan would do when they see a film. Be sitting in a theater going, well, you know, that's all wrong. That color scheme is all wrong back there. Fans do all that where it doesn't match the previous shot.

Fans are very sophisticated anymore. You can't fool, you can't fool science fiction fans anymore. Uh, but the name recognition certainly didn't hurt. It didn't hurt the sales of my original books. It probably hurt the critical opinion of my work. There's just, there's no getting around it. Uh, there's no question that a lot of people say would say or said.

I had it said to me that, uh, you know, you're a real good writer, but he's the guy who writes those movie novelizations. I just throw up my hands. And what I would tell people is, well, you, you take a book like Ben Herr and you have two guys make a screenplay out of it, out of this huge bestselling book, and they get academy awards for adapted screenplay, but there's no reverse of that.

Nobody, uh, takes a novelization, which is much harder to write a novelization of a screenplay than it is to get a screenplay out of a book and say, this is a great work of literature. And I'm not claiming it is. I'm just saying it doesn't make any sense that it's all one way and all one way or the other.

And I've always felt that way.