Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 234: The Ed Wood Polo Shirt Odyssey (Guest Author: W. Paul Apel)

What does this humble garment have to do with Ed Wood? Let's find out!

As long as he’s been infamous, Ed Wood has always been linked with clothing. The "worst director of all time" bit has gone hand in hand with the cross-dressing bit since the beginning of his rediscovery in the '80s, almost as if one is a bonus added punchline to the other. Not only did this guy direct Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), goes the legend, but he did it in an angora sweater.

Much has been written about Eddie's passion for women's clothing, including a lot by Eddie himself. He started his career with the semi-autobiographical plea for tolerance, Glen or Glenda (1953), and ended it with stacks of adult paperbacks filled with cross-dressing and gender-bending characters, each clad in outfits Eddie never failed to describe in loving, microscopic detail.

Very little, by comparison, has been written, whether about or by Eddie, concerning men's clothing. And that's the corner of Eddie's closet I’d like to get into today. Let's push aside Eddie's alter ego Shirley's sizable wardrobe and look at what he wore by day. Specifically, his polo shirts.

This odyssey all began with one of the aforementioned adult paperbacks, an adaptation of the Wood-scripted Steven Apostolof flick Orgy of the Dead (1965). Ever since I first read in Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992) that this feature length series of striptease acts had been improbably adapted into a piece of literature by Wood himself, and saw the striking cover art by Robert Bonfils, I knew I had to own my own copy someday.

When that day finally came, decades later, I was struck by an oddity among the many photo illustrations. I had heard the tale of how Eddie had absconded with publicity stills taken on the set of Orgy by Robert Charles Wilson for use in this publication, but I wasn't expecting to see, inexplicably, a photo of Eddie himself right there on page 107.

Podcast Tuesday: "TRUE STORY: I'm in a Happy Days Documentary"

Am I an official Cunningham now? No, but I can dream.

I've been putting original content on the internet for over 30 years now, most of it totally for free. I started posting on Usenet newsgroups and AOL forums in the mid-1990s, and I've never stopped creating material (songs, scripts, stories, etc.)  and trying to get it out to the world somehow. It's really just an evolution of what I was doing in junior high and high school. In my pre-internet days, I made little hand-drawn comics and passed them around class. I also wrote for the school newspaper. You'd think the internet would connect me with a much larger audience than I had back then, but so far that's not really been the case. My appeal has always been extremely limited, bordering on nonexistent.

I suppose I hoped that, eventually, something I made would catch on and I'd garner some kind of following. It just never happened for me, though, at least not on any grand scale. Whatever the zeitgeist is, I've never captured it. About a decade ago, I briefly made an attempt at being a professional freelance writer. I got some things published, but again success eluded me. Then, the work dried up altogether and I had to give it up. Still in all, I've been doing this blog since 2009 and These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast since 2018, and I have no plans to stop either one of them any time soon. I'll keep creating and releasing this stuff for as long as I can, even if my only audience is myself.

These days, I'm always surprised and grateful when anyone reads anything I've written, listens to anything I've recorded, or watches anything I've filmed. It's not often that people find my work, but I'm happy when they do. Recently, I was contacted by a production company that was making a documentary about Happy Days for CBS. I'm not exactly sure how they found me, but they did, and they asked me to be a part of their show. This was pretty extraordinary. This week on the podcast, I talk about that experience and what I learned from it. If you're interested in hearing it, just press the play button on the episode below.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 233: Let's endure Ed Wood's 'Devil Cult' (1973)

This young lady is either having a great time or a terrible one in Ed Wood's Devil Cult.

I don't know sometimes, you guys.

Since my colleague Greg Javer died last December, I've occasionally found myself wondering what kind of articles he would have written for this series if he had lived. It's impossible to say, since Greg's interests went in so many different directions. There was no aspect of Ed Wood's life or career that escaped his attention. At any given time, Greg might have been pursuing a dozen different threads simultaneously. Occasionally, I'd nag him into turning something he was exploring into an article that I could actually publish on my blog. And he would.

Quite a few of Greg's articles dealt with the loops, i.e. the short, usually silent 8mm pornographic films (both gay and straight), that Ed Wood made in the 1970s. Eddie wrote and/or directed many of these films himself, and especially "hot" scenes from his features like The Young Marrieds (1972) and The Only House in Town (1970) were also marketed separately as loops. These short films were generally sold through mail-order—and none too cheaply, either—so that viewers with their own projectors and screens could watch them in privacy at home. Hey, this was life before the internet, folks.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 232: Criswell Predicts an Accurate Glimpse of the Future (2023)

Want a whole lotta Criswell in one book? 

Criswell was the Liberace of futurists. 

Liberace: The Criswell of music?

There are so many connections between these strange, mid-20th-century entertainers, even though one predicted the future (dubiously) and the other played the piano (flamboyantly). Criswell and Liberace—one bisexual, the other gay, both products of the Midwest—were popular during roughly the same time period, from the 1950s to the 1970s. They both went by catchy, one-word monikers. They both favored flashy tuxedos and fancifully-coiffed hair. They were both fixtures of the TV talk show circuit. They were both widely parodied and mocked but didn't seem to care as long as they kept making money. 

Above all, Lee and Cris related to their fans in very similar ways. In fact, I think there's significant overlap between the Liberace audience and the Criswell audience. I picture a lot of middle-aged and older ladies with impatient, irritated husbands.

"Honestly, Gladys, I don't get what you see in that fruitcake!"

Liberace is actually name-checked numerous times in Fact, Fictions, and the Forbidden Predictions of the Amazing Criswell (2023), Edwin Lee Canfield's thorough biography of the famed Indiana-born prognosticator. But Canfield oversaw another Criswell book in 2023. Together with Charles Phillip Wireman, he compiled a generous volume called Criswell Predicts an Accurate Glimpse of the Future. I see Accurate Glimpse as a companion or supplementary volume to Forbidden Predictions. When you read about Cris' life, you'll likely want to explore the man's work in further detail. Accurate Glimpse draws material from Criswell's many books, audio recordings, magazine articles, and newspaper columns. The editors pop in from time to time to offer some historical context.

Podcast Tuesday: "The Teaches of Beaches"

Barbara Hershey and Bette Midler in Beaches.

Remember the so-called "monoculture"? If you grew up in the 1980s or earlier, you certainly do. Back then, due to the constraints of technology and commerce, we mostly consumed the same media at the same time as everyone else. Whatever the "big" movies and TV shows were, that's what we watched. Whatever was in the Top 40, that's what we listened to. This may not sound like an ideal system, but it gave us a common frame of reference. When we talked about "the media" in the abstract, we were referring to the same material. Cable and home video started to erode the monoculture just a bit in the '80s, but the '90s was when the entertainment world truly started splintering into a lot of little hyper-specific facets.

Nowadays, thanks to the internet and the rise of personal devices like smartphones and tablets (meant to be used by an individual rather than a group), the entertainment we consume is well-tailored to our various demographic groups and delivered to us by algorithms that know us better than we know ourselves. We stay in our lanes, culturally speaking, and it's considered "weird" (read; undesirable) to do otherwise. In 2025, it's very possible to have a supposed "hit" song that most of the country has never heard or a "hit" TV show that most of the country isn't even aware of. If it's not intended for you, it generally doesn't reach you. I suppose the last vestiges of the monoculture are the big franchise films that dominate the box office: the sequels, remakes, reboots, and adaptations of familiar intellectual properties.

Director Garry Marshall's fifth film, Beaches (1988)—a tearjerking melodrama starring Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey as lifelong friends with clashing personalities—is a definite product of the monoculture. Produced by Walt Disney's Touchstone Pictures division, it's a film designed to appeal to the widest-possible audience. And it did just that! Not only was the film a hit in theaters and on video, it launched a massive hit single ("Wind Beneath My Wings") and led to one of its cast members (Mayim Bialik) getting her own prime time sitcom. I don't think any of this would be remotely possible in 2025. Today, a film like Beaches, if it got made at all, would be shuffled off to a streaming service and quickly forgotten. Indeed, a 2017 remake of the film went straight to cable and was largely ignored.

So Beaches is a reminder of who we once were and of what pop culture used to be. But is that a good thing or a bad thing? We'll try to figure all that out as we review it in the latest installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 231: Catching up with some recent reader feedback

What can I say? I love a cheap pun.

I have some very knowledgeable and attentive readers. This is mostly a good thing, but it can be a little worrying sometimes. Niche fandoms tend to attract people who are passionate and detail-oriented when it comes to their chosen subject matter, so I know that some complaints and corrections are (potentially) headed my way whenever I post a new article in this series. For the most part, however, Ed Wood's dedicated fans have been extremely generous in sharing books, articles, scripts, videos, photographs, and more with me. I'm truly grateful for that. Many articles in this series have come about because of the items people have sent me or because of the information they've shared with me.

Generally, the day I post a new Ed Wood Wednesdays article, I'll mention it on my various social media accounts, including the very active Ed Wood Jr. Facebook forum moderated by Bob Blackburn. These Facebook posts often inspire some interesting and informative responses. But social media is, by its very nature, ephemeral, so I wanted to document some of these responses before they evaporate forever from my memory.