Originally appeared in Overstreet's FAN #8, January 1996.

by Daryl F. Mallett & Kim Baltzer

Alan Dean Foster: I was a law major at UCLA when I discovered the film studies program. I found this class where you could get credits for watching movies. That appealed to me. I thought "This has got to be more fun than studying and looking up precedents," which is what lawyers do. Most people think that all lawyers are like Johnnie Cochran, parading and posturing in court, but lawyers start out researching and looking things up. So this seemed much easier. So instead of going to law school, I entered graduate school in film studies. So my B.A. is in Poly Sci and my M.F.A. is in Screenwriting. My thesis was on Henryk Sienkiewicz's story about the Cossack rebellion in Poland. You're supposed to write an original screenplay as your project, but my mentor, Larry Thor (who provided the voice of Tock the dog in The Phantom Tollbooth) went to bat for me with the committee, telling them I already had experience writing originals and I should be allowed to write this adaptation. It's in my archives at Arizona State University.

I had thirteen short stories rejected before my first sale. I sent my first novel, The Tar-Aiym Krang, to John Campbell. He sent me a thirteen-page rejection letter, as was his style. Doubleday rejected it second and, on my third try, Betty Ballantine bought it in 1972 for a $1,500 advance. Bloodhype was my second novel. Icerigger, my third, sold a lot of copies and surprised everybody, and I started getting real advances...like $3,000.

I had a job writing public relations material for two years while I lived on the beach in Santa Monica...back when you could afford to do such a thing. I also taught classes at Los Angeles City College.

I remember seeing a screening of the film before it was released and going to Hamburger Hamlet across the street from Grumann's Chinese Theater (now Mann's Chinese Theater) with John Carpenter and talking about how he wanted to be a director and I wanted to be a writer. That was twenty-one years ago, and, of course, John, Dan O'Bannon and I all went on to success. And if you look at the credits of that film, it wasn't just John and Dan. Greg Jein went on to design the mother ship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and has had other projects, and Ron Cobb eventually worked on Star Wars, among many other things. A lot of talent came out of that movie.

In graduate school, I was always looking at the bulletin boards where they advertise student projects. You know, act and do lighting in such-and-such movie for credit, sometimes pay, usually just lunch, and I came across a note that said, "Wanted: Writer to develop two sci-fi stories." So I answered it. I met this guy who was sleeping on the couch at his mother's house and somehow he'd gotten the money to option two of Bob Bloch's stories. I wrote the screenplays with these huge contracts that promised everything and delivered nothing (which is how things are done in Hollywood). But years later, when I was asked to do the novelization of Alien, I get the script and see "Story by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett." Ron was the guy from the couch! I met up with Ron again at the screening and he said he and Ridley Scott were sitting in London and Ron remembered my name. So, if you stick with things long enough...

I wrote the text for Charles Barkley and the Referee Murders. Bruce Hamilton from Another Rainbow Comics called me and asked me if I liked comics, and I said, "Sure." He asked me if I liked basketball, and I said, "It's my favorite sport." He said, "All I have is a title: Charles Barkley and the Referee Murders...and I need it right away." So I thought about it for a bit and said, "I think I can do that." It was fun. I wanted to be very careful about writing about a living person because I didn't want to get anything wrong. I didn't want to offend him [Barkley].

No, I never met him. Bruce flew to Houston, where Barkley was playing in a pro golf tournament and they took this custom jacket, which is featured in the comic, and for an hour Barkley did everything they asked, getting into all kinds of positions and was a real gentleman. Barkley did put in the line, "Well, you know how we all look alike," regarding black people. I never would have tried to get away with a line like that. But they asked him if he wanted to add anything, and he did. It was a great little project, and I got a chance to make a point about drug addiction and how it destroys lives.

I'm open to any kind of writing. One of the hardest books I've done is a gaming book. Shadowkeep was a terrible book to write because I had to stay true to the game and all the rules. I hate rewriting. With novels, I do a twenty-page outline, a rough draft, final draft and a polish. I sit down with a tape recorder and dictate my outline into the recorder, and that's my rough draft. Then I transcribe the tape into the computer, and that's my final draft.

Ben Hecht (The Front Page, Gunga Din) is my favorite screenwriter. Other influences include Herman Melville and Carl Banks. I always tried to meet older writers who had been out of the picture for a while. I met Daniel F. Galouye. I also met Donald Wandrei, who helped start Arkham House Publishers, and asked him why he stopped writing. It turned out his mother was ill and he devoted his life to taking care of her. What a waste of his talent! He could have done that and kept writing! He went on about how August Derleth was ruining H. P. Lovecraft's name. I also met E. Hoffman Price. But it gives me a direct line into history...from me to Donald Wandrei to H. P. Lovecaft. And then I'm able to extend that line by telling the story to you.

My agent, Virginia Kidd, got a call from Tom Pollack, now one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. Tom was George Lucas' representative at the time. They were doing this science fiction film called Star Wars and wanted someone to write a sequel book for the movie. So I went down to Industrial Light & Magic which, at the time, was in a little warehouse, and met George Lucas--who, to this day, is the nicest guy I've ever met in the film business--who took me through and showed me this whole wall of material, like World War II tanks and model kits and things, which they were picking parts off of to build the ships and models for the movie. George showed me the Death Star, which was this beach ball thing. A guy named Samuel Bass came through while I was there, whom I knew from teaching documentary films, and I met John Dykstra. And so that's how the two books came about.

Yes. Splinter of the Mind's Eye and Star Wars.

Yes. George said he wanted to put his name on the book, and I said, "Okay, whatever..." I had a contract where I couldn't say I was the author and had to lie to a lot of people about it. But a book about the making of the film came out and credited me with the book, so I got permission from Lucasfilm to be able to talk about it. I went to the screening of the film and bumped into Gary Kurtz and said, "Wouldn't it be great if you showed Duck Dodgers in the 24th-and-a-Half Century before the film?" He kind of laughed and left. We sat down and my wife poked me. I turned to look at what she's talking about and I saw this long-haired guy behind me. I turned to her and said, "So?" And she said, "Don't you know who that is?" And I said, "No." And she said, "That's Alice Cooper! Say something!" "What am I going to say?" So I turned to him and said, "Wouldn't it be great if they showed Duck Dodgers in the 24th-and-a-Half Century before the film?" And he looked at me with a strange expression and said, "You like Warner Bros. films?" So we spent ten minutes talking about cartoons. They did show Duck Dodgers before Star Wars to loosen everybody up because everybody had a lot riding on the success of the film. And after the movie, where we all knew we had seen a landmark film, my wife poked me again and said, "You spent ten minutes talking with Alice Cooper and all you could talk about was cartoons?"

Oh, yes. You knew from the first scenes that it was great. On opening night, I went to Grumann's Chinese Theater and snuck into the back and watched the audience reaction. People would spontaneously cheer and applaud during the movie.

I had a six-book contract with Ace. I sent them Cat-A-Lyst as book five. Susan Allison, my editor, called and asked for book five and I said I had already sent it. Then the British publisher, I think it was Orbit, called and asked for book five, and I told them I had already sent it and that they should contact Susan. I thought that was weird. It turns out that somehow I was a year behind schedule, that Cat-A-Lyst was really only book four, and I had nothing in mind. So I asked if I could send her this graduate school screenwriting project I had written as a novel. She said yes and I sent her Greentheives, which became book five. And I just turned in Jed the Dead, which will be released in 1996.

My agent got a call from John Silbersack, who wanted me to write an X-Files novel. I told her that I'd heard about the show but didn't watch it and said that I wasn't really interested. Then she told me how much they were offering and I nearly fell out of my chair. She said when she heard how much they were offering, she nearly fell out of her chair. So [Star Wars author] Kevin J. Anderson and I are doing the next two.

©1995, 1998 Gemstone Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

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