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| "The bell has rung on his great career." |
"Where's Greg?"
That is the question I've gotten most frequently over the last year and a half from readers of this blog. The remarkable Greg Javer, a soft-spoken Pennsylvanian who often wrote under the name Greg Dziawer, contributed a great deal of material to this series from 2015 to 2023. He started out with numerous Ed Wood Wednesdays articles before eventually launching his own series of YouTube videos called The Ed Wood Summit Podcast. His interests were wide-ranging, even within the seemingly limited field of Woodology. He was just as likely to cover Eddie's childhood in Poughkeepsie as he was to discuss Ed's pornographic loops of the 1970s.
He was, in short, a major player in the world of Wood research and a significant presence on this blog for eight years. He was also my friend, someone I just loved talking to and working with on various projects. Then, about midway through last year, he vanished. The articles stopped. The videos stopped. Even the emails (for the most part) stopped. Where had he gone, people wondered? I am not one to pry, so I didn't. I'd occasionally hear rumors that he had other matters—perhaps personal, perhaps professional—to attend to. I trusted that he'd eventually find his way back into this strange, little world and would contact me when he was ready to start anew. It just never happened.
On Sunday, December 1, 2024, we finally received a definitive answer about what had happened to Greg, and the news could not have been worse. Not long after receiving a devastating cancer diagnosis, he died at the far-too-young age of 56, leaving behind a daughter, Elyse Rosario, and his partner of 18 years, Jennifer "Kitten" Rosario. I can't help but think how he only outlived Ed Wood by two years (Eddie died at 54 in 1978) and that both men were claimed in the month of December. I wonder if those same thoughts occurred to Greg in his final days.
I asked Jennifer to say a few words in remembrance of Greg, and here is how she responded:
A passionate admirer of Ed Wood Jr., he combined his love of film with his dedication to research and writing, leaving his mark as a contributing author. He found joy in life’s simple pleasures—reading, spending time with family, and delving into thought-provoking documentaries. One thing I want to note is that he considered all of you real friends. I could log into his Gmail right now and find numerous emails of people checking in on him, along with text messages. I can't make every name, but everyone he has worked with since the start of this Ed Wood Jr. journey would fall under this umbrella, at least 10 years or more. He would tell me a story or something that was found, and it always started with "my buddy ____" or "my friend ___." And I know he cherished each and every friendship made along the way.
Rob Huffman has started a GoFundMe to cover some of Greg's final expenses. The proceeds will go directly to Jennifer and Elyse. Please consider donating. Every little bit helps, as they say. And, if you can't afford it, please forward the link to others on social media so that they can donate. It's the least we can do, considering all Greg did for us.
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When Greg first started emailing me back in 2015, my life was in a state of flux. This blog was in a state of flux, too. That was the year I suddenly abandoned my decade-long corporate job and tried to become a full-time professional freelance writer. I had been writing Ed Wood Wednesdays for about two years and thought I was just about done with it. I was writing a lot of articles professionally at the time, mostly for The A.V. Club, and didn't really have the time or energy for my blog anymore. Dead 2 Rights might very well have ended in 2015. But there was this sweetly crazy guy named Greg who kept sending me bizarre newspaper clippings about Ed Wood!
Some of the stuff Greg sent me was so obscure that, frankly, I didn't even understand it. ("Wait, what does this have to do with Ed Wood?" I'd occasionally have to ask.) After a few weeks of emails, I simply turned the Ed Wood Wednesdays series over to Greg's care. He'd write the articles; I'd format them and edit them and post them to my blog. That was our arrangement for several years. While I had tried to write for a mainstream audience—including folks who were only casually familiar with Ed Wood and his films—Greg wrote almost exclusively for the die-hard Woodologists. "The trivia wizards," I called them. That was Greg's audience, and he served them well.
I told you before that I'm not one to pry, but Greg definitely was. He'd pry into anything and everything. While I have been shamefully squeamish about contacting the people who knew and worked with Ed Wood, Greg had no such qualms. He'd contact anyone he could track down, and it sometimes yielded incredible results. He not only found and befriended producer Jacques Descent, who collaborated with Eddie on several projects in the 1970s, he actually helped Jacques finish a long-unreleased feature film! Who does that? Greg Javer, that's who! He also became friends with '70s adult actress Niva Ruschell in the final years of her life and managed to track down actress-model Casey Larrain, who worked with Ed Wood on Love Feast (1969) and Nympho Cycler (1971).
Greg had the patience of a saint when it came to sifting through old newspapers, '70s porn loops, and vintage magazines and paperbacks, all in the hopes of finding things that were even tangentially related to Ed Wood. And, sure enough, he'd make great discoveries now and then. Greg's research, for instance, proved vital in helping Ed Wood's childhood home in Poughkeepsie receive an official historical marker from the state of New York.
Possibly the most exciting of Greg's finds was a forgotten 1975 paperback called Sex Salvation credited to one "Raoul Woody." Back in 2021, he kindly sent me a PDF of this bizarre adult novel and asked if I agreed with him that "Raoul" was actually our Eddie. My response was swift. Not only was Eddie the author, I said, but I was sure that this was the famed Saving Grace that Ed's widow, Kathy, mentioned in Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992). It was an astonishing find. This year, thanks to fellow Wood fan Dennis Smithers, Jr., Sex Salvation is finally being published as Saving Grace with Ed Wood listed as the author. Without Greg's ace detective work, this book might well have languished in obscurity forever.
God, we had some good times together recording episodes of The Ed Wood Summit Podcast. We'd start out talking about one of Eddie's films or novels or articles, but the conversation would inevitably branch out in numerous directions. Greg could talk, wittily and knowledgeably, about nearly any topic that you cared to throw at him. He was never pretentious or dismissive, and he was always open to new ideas. The podcast soon became my absolute favorite way of reviewing Ed's novels. A novel, by its very nature, contains so many characters and incidents and ideas that it's just about impossible to cover it adequately in a single written review. But when we'd hash it out together on camera—sometimes just me and Greg, sometimes with a panel—we did a much better job of it.
I was honored a couple of summers ago when Greg invited me to record a commentary track for a Wood-scripted hillbilly comedy called Shotgun Wedding (1963) that was going to be included on a Blu-ray collection from Severin called Hard Wood: The Adult Features of Ed Wood (2024). When that set was finally released a couple of months ago, it contained several lovely and informative commentary tracks by Greg and others, but our Shotgun Wedding track had somehow gotten lost in the shuffle. I'm proud to present it to you now.
And here it is as a YouTube video:
The track can be listened to on its own, but it's better when accompanying the movie. If you don't happen to have a copy of Shotgun Wedding in your collection, the entire film has been uploaded here. And before I leave you this week, let me make one more mention of the GoFundMe in Greg's name. If you could chip in a few bucks, it would mean a great deal to me.
Thank you.
And thank you, Greg, wherever you are now. You made my life better. You made a lot of people's lives better. What more can be asked of a man than that?