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| Ed Wood (top row, center) stars in Glen or Glenda, as released by Admit One Video Presentations. |
Last week, we got to know Admit One Video Presentations, the offbeat Toronto-based company that distributed Ed Wood's movies in Canada in the 1980s. Like numerous other companies from that era, Admit One acquired vintage low-budget sci-fi and horror films and released them profitably for home viewing, much to the delight of the emerging "bad movie" cult. You might think of them as Canada's answer to Rhino Home Video or Something Weird Video. To my knowledge, Admit One put out their own versions of all six of Ed Wood's directorial efforts from Glen or Glenda (1953) to The Sinister Urge (1960). If eBay listings are to be believed, these releases are now pricey collector's items.
I was unaware of Admit One until recently, when reader Brandon Sibley brought the company and its products to my attention. To me, the most intriguing of the company's tapes is their release of Glen or Glenda because it gives us yet another slightly different cut of the film. In the past, I've explained how Glenda was released under numerous titles and was edited to various lengths, often to appease the censors. To summarize, the main edits I'm familiar with are:
- The Rhino cut. The longest, least-censored edit I've seen, if not necessarily the best looking or sounding. It was released on VHS tape by Rhino Home Video and was included on the two-disc set Ed Wood: A Salute to Incompetence (2007) from Passport International Entertainment. The film's title card is obviously, clumsily doctored. Whatever real title appeared onscreen has been blurred out, and the title "GLEN OR GLENDA" has been pasted over it. I believe this change was made by distributor Wade Williams, who did something similar to Night of the Ghouls (1959) aka Revenge of the Dead.
- The Image Entertainment cut. The most common version I've seen on the market. This is a sharper, cleaner transfer of the film with less static on the audio track, but it's plagued by numerous omissions, including a scene in which a homosexual man (Bruce Spencer) hits on an unfriendly straight man (Conrad Brooks). The dialogue also deletes certain references to God and sex. Some shots, including part of Glen's nightmare, have been trimmed for pacing reasons. Image's cut is the one used for the colorized version of Glen or Glenda and was also the one Rob Craig consulted for Ed Wood, Mad Genius (2009). It, too, has the doctored title card.
- The AGFA cut. The most recent edition of the film and the one that has provoked the most angry reactions from Ed Wood fans. This transfer from the American Genre Film Archive features dramatically brighter, crisper images than we've ever seen before, but it is also easily the shortest, most censored cut of the movie on the market. It's missing many sequences, some of which are iconic and crucial (e.g. the buffalo stampede) and also reorders certain scenes, especially during Glen's nightmare. The film features a unique credit sequence, including a title card that incorrectly identifies the movie as Twisted Lives.
Admit One's cut of the film—kindly forwarded to me by Brendon Sibley—is very similar to the Image Entertainment cut and is missing the same material. The iron foundry sequence is a good example. During this part of the movie, we hear (but do not see) two foundry employees named Jack and Joe as they earnestly discuss sex change operations. In the Rhino cut, Jack suddenly switches up his way of talking and speaks in a sexy female voice ("Yeah, good night, Joe!") at the very end of the scene. This moment is missing from the Image version, and it's gone from the Admit One version as well.
But the Admit One version compensates in other ways! For one thing, it is the only print of Glen or Glenda that I've ever seen with what I'd call a genuine, authentic title card from the 1950s. This particular print identifies the film as I LED 2 LIVES, but in the lower right corner of the screen is a legend reading: "From the Story 'GLEN OR GLENDA.'" The background depicts the faces of babies, just sort of floating in space. The music and other credits are exactly as they are in the Rhino and Image cuts.
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| Baby face! You've got a creepy little baby face! |
Did this version of the movie have any more special surprises? To find out, I performed a meticulous, side-by-side comparison of the Admit One cut and the Rhino cut. For the most part, I found that the Admit One version was lacking all the usual stuff: the homosexual scene, the end of the foundry sequence, the beginning of Glen's dream, numerous uses of the term "sex change," etc. As stated earlier, it hews very closely to the shortened, censored Image Entertainment cut of the film.
But I did make one more unexpected find in this cut of Glen or Glenda. We all remember the scene in which Glen (played by Ed Wood himself) flashes back to his earliest crossdressing experiences. It all started with wearing his sister's dress to a Halloween costume contest and taking first prize. The flashback starts with a shot of the infamous dress hanging from a rack in the middle of a room. There are no human beings in the shot, but we do hear Glen and his father arguing from offscreen. In all the cuts I've ever seen of Glenda, Glen's first line is garbled. In the Admit One cut, however, it's clear as a bell: "I asked Sis to let me borrow her dress." When the ultimate edition of Glenda is assembled, do not forget to grab this one line from the Admit One tape.
As of this writing, Glen or Glenda is the only release from Admit One Video Presentations that I've screened personally. It's possible that their versions of the other Ed Wood movies have some unique material as well, but I doubt it. What I can say, however, is that Admit One had a flair for packaging, which was important in the 1980s when you wanted to stand out from the competition on video store shelves. Their tape boxes included colorful images on the front and witty, informative text on the back. Glen or Glenda is a good example. Here, a black-and-white cast photo has been garishly colorized, making Ed and his actors look like clowns or whores.
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| The front and back covers of Glen or Glenda. |
Ed Wood's Jail Bait (1954) is arguably the least-loved of the features he made during his prime years, probably because it's a noir thriller rather than a sci-fi/horror film, but Admit One released their own version of it anyway. The description on the back is especially unflattering, calling the movie "a slimy, smelly melodrama" and declaring that "you almost feel the need to take a shower after seeing it." Lead actress Dolores Fuller, meanwhile, is inaccurately described as Ed Wood's wife rather than his girlfriend. The packaging makes no reference to the film's infamous minstrel show sequence, but this tape came out long before Rhino's blackface-free "director's cut," so I'm guessing that Cotton and Chick Watts' performance is intact.
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| "By no means an exploitation picture." Well, by most means, I'd say. |
Bride of the Monster (1955) is next, and it's packaged exactly like you'd guess. The film is described as "hilarious high-camp horror," and the blurb on the back emphasizes that this is Bela Lugosi's "last speaking role." The saga of the film being financed by the McCoy family is also mentioned here. If you were a nerdy Canadian kid in the 1980s and you were browsing the video store shelves on a Friday night, perhaps this tape would have jumped out and bit you.
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| Admit One's Bride of the Monster tape. |
As far as I know, Admit One did not bother with The Violent Years (1956) or The Bride and the Beast (1958), two films that Ed Wood wrote but did not direct. And so, we move on to the granddaddy of them all: Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), by far Eddie's best-known, most-seen, and most frequently-released film. Admit One was obviously eager to get to this one, since it carries a catalog number of AF101, suggesting it was their very first release of any kind. By contrast, Bride of the Monster is AF109 and Jail Bait is AF123. Harry and Michael Medved's book The Golden Turkey Awards (1980) is prominently mentioned on the cover, so it looks like the company definitely was trying to cash in on that publicity with their line of Wood tapes.
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| This release puts Tor Johnson's Inspector Clay front and center. |
Also worth noting is that Admit One released Plan 9 on the much-maligned Beta format. I mean, just look at this freaky-looking tape!
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| "Do not touch the inside." Plan 9 on Beta. |
As we discussed last week, Admit One Video Presentations was heavily involved in finding and releasing Ed Wood's long-lost Revenge of the Dead aka Night of the Ghouls (1959) in the early 1980s. Unfortunately, I cannot currently find any copies of the film with an Admit One logo. Therefore, we will wrap up our look at the company with their edition of The Sinister Urge (1960), Ed Wood's last mainstream film as a director and his last feature directorial effort of any kind for a decade! This tape carries a catalog number of AF130, which means it may also have been the last Wood film that Admit One released on tape.
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| Giving the public what they want: Dino Fantini and plenty of him! |
It may seem silly to devote a two-part series to an extremely obscure, short-lived Canadian video distributor like Admit One Video Presentations, but I think this Toronto-based company played an important and interesting role in the larger Ed Wood saga. I've talked about Eddie's posthumous popularity coming in waves, and Admit One was definitely part of that crucial first wave, along with The Golden Turkey Awards and It Came from Hollywood (1982).
In retrospect, it's remarkable that a Canadian company cared enough about Eddie back then to put out so many of his films on tape—not just the Bela Lugosi ones either! Most of all, these articles have given me an opportunity to relive my own early days as a Wood fan, back before there was an internet and cult movie fanatics had to rely on late night television and their neighborhood video stores to find the films they craved.