Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Magazine Odyssey, Part Twelve by Greg Dziawer

Annette Haven (left) and John Holmes worked for Danish Films. Did Ed Wood?

Prudish & Proper

Even Seka wore the scarf.

While we like to debunk false claims of Ed Wood's authorship around here, every now and then something comes up compelling us to go against the grain and make a claim of authorship of our own. In this week's Ed Wood Wednesdays, we're going the latter route, looking at an uncredited text from a now-obscure magazine.

The Danish Films loop series, a brief series running for roughly 20 (currently known) titles, was related to Swedish Erotica. These loops are clearly the forerunners of the next wave of Swedish Erotica loops: cast members, aesthetic, even the de rigueur candy-colored chiffon scarves the girls wear tied around their necks. Often all they are wearing, and done for branding purposes, those trademark scarves appear sporadically through SE loop #132 in 1978 and remain standard from that point forward right into the videotape era. It all carries over. Even an expert would be forgiven for mistaking a Danish Films loop for a Swedish Erotica loop. And there were corresponding magazines that featured images and on-set stills from the loops accompanied by anonymous text, just like the Swedish Erotica film review magazines.

Of course, the majority of these loops were neither Danish or Swedish, but rather shot in '70s SoCal and often featuring the biggest stars of Golden Age hardcore. The Swedish Erotica loop series, as is now generally agreed, kicked off with Ed Wood making the first 19 loops circa 1973. I could go into far greater detail, and will in future articles, but for now it's only necessary to sketch these highlights for context. 

What we're really interested in is answering this question: Did Ed Wood write the following text?

YOUNG AND PROPER — #1010

A censored image from the article.

John Holmes plays a writer who is in need of a temporary secretary to help in the preparation of his new book since he admits to the fact that he is not a very good typist, and speed is necessary to keep a date with his publisher. The lovely young girl arrives and she is immediately ushered into John's well stocked library/study where the work will take place. 

But the girl is lovely and it is quickly noted that John can't keep his mind on the work at hand. He stutters and stammers in his dictation, making little sense out of what he is saying. But he makes a good stab at it for a time, and it is also apparent that the girl knows what the guy is feeling, as she keeps looking at his crotch where the well known bulge is all too evident. 

She tries to keep John from noticing where she is looking but that is next to impossible. Finally he can take it no longer. He goes very close to the girl, and she responds by standing up next to him, very close. We can almost smell her perfume drifting around the room, an alluring odor which turns John on even more than he had been moments before. Then her hand drifts down to the front of his trousers and unbuckles his belt. His pants fall down around his ankles and he steps out of them. And there it is all hard and throbbing, ready for anything the beautiful girl can handle. And handle she does. She is locked in desire from the moment the cock has presented itself out in the open like it is. She kneels down to it and takes the mammoth head between her lips and sucks the instrument down deep into her throat. Few girls have ever been able to take all of John's enormous cock, but this cute little trick does her best, and probably takes more of it than any other girl has ever done before.  

John is not ready to blow off his wad just yet. There is much more to be done, as he fondles her now naked breasts and lets his hand caress the soft hairs at her crotch, permitting his finger to rub lightly over her clit. But that is also the spot where he wants his tongue to rest. He then kneels down in front of her and buries his face deep into the sweet smelling muff. As a muff-diver, Long John is one of the very best. Never has a girl complained that she couldn't get it on with Long John Holmes. And this YOUNG AND PROPER girl suddenly begins to twitch all over her body. She has the uncontrolled beat of climax after climax caused by the searching tongue of the young man. 

But Long John has more adventures in store for the vivacious little lady. He places her ass up on his dark leather couch, and drifts her head down toward the floor. He gets up on the couch in front of her and stabs his prick into her luscious cunt from this position. But the position is rather difficult for the girl and soon she is up on her hands and knees and John takes her dog-fashion for a time. 

The girl goes wild in the frenzy of the situation. She wants more and more, she wants all of John that he can give her. He jams it right up to his balls which are bouncing on the soft pink cheeks of her ass. This is what she wants. She has every inch of him inside her, and the enormous swelling of his cock fills the entire cavern of her cunt.

But again she wants to take him into her mouth. She turns around and lets her hands drift down the length of his body, until both her dainty hands have captured the cock. She fondles it a long time, her eyes never leaving the sight of the tool she holds. Then again her bright lips part and she puts his thing into her mouth. The pressure of her sucking shows immediately on John's face. His eyes close and he bends far back, straining every ounce of his system into his cock and balls. He wants to blow the heaviest one yet, because the girl has been very good and has pleased him no end. 

He blows off and the drool fills her mouth to overflow, but she licks it all down, and hungers for more. John has plenty to give, but when it is over he is limp and exhausted.

The loop in question.

For context, the text accompanies images from the Danish Films loop #1010 Young and Proper, starring John Holmes and Annette Haven (a red scarf tied around her neck). It describes the onscreen action with reasonable accuracy, embellished with dramatic detail. Since I buried the lede in the opening paragraph, you already have figured out that I believe Ed wrote it. 

For those familiar with Ed's paperbacks and his short stories from the Pendulum-family mags of the early '70s, I can understand an immediate reaction of "nope, not Ed." But, as Ed's life sped to its premature close, we know he continued writing for the next phase of the Pendulum-family mags, the Swedish Erotica era. Gallery Press phased out and the anonymous "triple-dot" mags briefly appeared circa 1976. That was the same year that the loop Young and Proper was released to the 8mm home market. 

The photo feature and accompanying text appeared in Danish Films magazine #1. And while the text certainly does lack obvious, surface signs of Ed's hand (i.e. angora or the presence of Shirley/Shirlee), there are signatures rooted in the work of his final few years. His mag writing was increasingly uncredited and the content more perfunctory (some may say desultory) and graphic than the fanciful work of a few years prior, where Ed's themes and obsessions coalesced into a genuinely auteurist body of work. 

So what, then, you may be wondering, makes me believe it was written by Ed? It would take a volume of its own to get into it all. Here's a brief summary:

• There are a few keywords oft-used by Ed: "luscious," "lovely," and "dainty." The latter, especially, is very telling.

• Lots of adjectives, and action verbs that occasionally possess a violent association (i.e. stabs).

• Make what you will of the phrase "cavern of her cunt," but know that Ed characterized that particular part of the female anatomy in a similar fashion elsewhere. You can, additionally, take a Freudian reading on that phrase and fall down the rabbit-hole of Ed's sexuality.

• A propensity for present tense overall (but frequent conflict of tense within the same sentence). 

• Improper use of/lack of hyphenation.

A poster for The Cocktail Hostesses.

Although my initial suspicion was that Ed wrote this, it was only upon subsequent readings that I truly became confident in the attribution. I decided to get a few other opinions, and two Woodologists whose opinions mean a great deal to me reacted as follows:

Joe Blevins, proprietor of this blog and founder of Ed Wood Wednesdays, agreed: "Yes, this has a very Wood-ian feel, especially the secretary angle (a la The Cocktail Hostesses)." And Joe also mentioned that it's interesting to see typing as a plot point. Recall that Ed was a lightning-fast, champion typist.

Jim Pontolillo, a longtime Wood collector, whose eye for Ed's work is unparalleled and whose insights into Wood's writing have been immense in growing my perspective and understanding, concurred: "Sounds Ed-like to me, mainly the odd sentence structure."

Syntax is key to understanding Ed's writing style, odd indeed. From the Young and Proper text, I could cite more than a few signatory lines, like this one: "She is locked in desire from the moment the cock has presented itself out in the open like it is."

Ellipses,of course, are oft-considered tell-tale of Ed's hand...but lots of folks use ellipses...lots of them. It's relevant,of course, but merely one dimension; and I suspect frequent ellipses have sometimes led to mis-Ed-tributions.

Ultimately, we'll likely never know definitively if Ed wrote this. It came years after the titles he listed on his own resume, and like nearly all of the Swedish Erotica era texts, is uncredited. By 1976, we have no evidence that Ed was still working in loops in any direct capacity as director, editor, writing captions and/or boxcover/catalog summaries. He was, though, writing texts to accompany photo features rooted in the loops. This is one of them. What do you think?

In future Ed Wood Wednesdays, we'll take a closer look at Young and Proper, as it just also happened to be released in the Danish Films International loop series as Prudish Secretary. That imprint, like Danish Films and Swedish Erotica and Swedish Classics, like SECS paperbacks and Calga and Libra Press mags, like Dansk Blue Books paperbacks, Cinema Classics loops, Edusex mags, like the flagship Pendulum...it all came from North Hollywood, produced under the aegis of Ed's boss and patriarch Bernie Bloom.And that release, Prudish Secretary, just happens to have onscreen captions.


We wish you and yours a Happy Thanksgiving from Ed Wood Wednesdays, where we possess a sense of irony skewering obsession from the New England Historic Genealogical Society (AmericanAncestors.org):

John Holmes was always a wild one.

Additional uncensored images related to this week's article can be found at the Ed Wood Wednesdays Tumblr. Enjoy.