Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 237: The not-so-endless reaches of time

No matter who you are, time is coming to get you.

Ed Wood died at 54. My colleague Greg Javer, who researched the life and work of Ed Wood, died at 56. My own mother died at 46, her father at 54. I turn 50 in a couple of months. I am acutely aware that my time is rapidly running out. You know the scene in The Wizard of Oz (1939) in which Margaret Hamilton shows Judy Garland a giant hourglass full of red sand?

"Do you see that?" she yells, turning the hourglass upside down. "That's how much longer you've got to be alive, and it isn't long, my pretty! It isn't long!"

Cut to Judy Garland, sobbing in mute horror. That's how I feel right now.

I'm currently working a full-time cubicle job as a clerk at a mortgage company. Most days, I come home from the office feeling like garbage and not wanting to do much of anything. In what spare time I have, mostly nights and weekends, I do a biweekly podcast and maintain this blog. If you're reading this article, you probably think that I only write about Ed Wood. In fact, you may think this entire blog is called "Ed Wood Wednesdays." It isn't, but I've stopped correcting people on that point. 

SIDEBAR: The name of this blog is Dead 2 Rights. "Ed Wood Wednesdays" is a series of articles on that blog, sort of like how Saturday Night Live (1975- ) is a series on NBC. Most weeks, the Ed Wood stuff on D2R isn't even what gets the most clicks. My articles about Fat Albert, What's My Line, and Patience & Prudence consistently outperform Ed. In fact, of the ten most-viewed articles in the entire history of this blog, only two are about Ed Wood. And one of those is the index page.

Eddie may have known his time on this earth would be limited, largely due to his drinking, smoking, and poor eating habits, not to mention his stressful and heartbreaking job. Maybe that's why his characters muse about time so often. In Glen or Glenda (1953), Bela Lugosi dreamily mentions "the endless reaches of time." The actor died three years later. In Orgy of the Dead (1965), Criswell confidently remarks that "time seems to stand still" and that "there is always time." But Cris himself died in 1982. On this very blog, eleven years ago, I pointed out that the word "time" is used 252 times in Blood Splatters Quickly: The Collected Stories of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (2014). 

So what do I want to do with the limited time I have left? I look at the Ed Wood-related stuff I still haven't talked about, and it stretches in front of me like an endless highway. There are so many books about Ed Wood and by Ed Wood that I cannot possibly cover all of them. Occasionally, I am asked about writing my own book, repackaging material from this blog. I'm not terribly interested in doing Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Book, though, largely because the older articles are wildly out of date and contain inaccurate information. In some cases, my opinions have shifted since I wrote them.

I do eventually want to write another book of some sort, but maybe not an Ed Wood one. There are so many pet projects or fantasy projects I'd like to complete: a biography of Stan Freberg or Tom Lehrer, for instance, or perhaps a full-length original novel. There's a really wild true-crime story from the 1980s that has fascinated me for years, and it's only a matter of time before someone writes a book about it. My fondest dream is to write a book about the cult film Andy Warhol's Bad (1977). I know exactly how I want to approach it, too. It'd be a Scripts from the Crypt-style book containing the complete screenplay, supplemented with commentary and essays about the film and the people who made it.

In all likelihood, none of the projects I've just outlined will ever be started, let alone completed. My day job commands a lot of my time and energy, and I'm slowing down drastically as a creator. Just writing this modest little article took me quite a long time. How am I ever going to write a 300-page book if I struggle to produce a few hundred words a week for my blog? Another problem is that I have no connections to anyone in show business (or any business, really), so I have no idea how to get in touch with the people I'd need to interview to do my research.

There is one major Ed Wood project I want to write, and it's a doozy. I've joked in the past about doing a sequel to Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994) about Eddie making pornographic films and drinking himself to death in the 1970s. Well, I think I actually have a three-act story for Ed Wood 2. How factually accurate would it be? Let's say every bit as accurate as the first film. My plan is to write the whole thing up in screenplay format and then self-publish it as an e-book, charging as little as possible. (If I can make it 99 cents, I will.)

There are some problems with the Ed Wood 2 plan, however. I'm not sure there would be a great deal of demand for the book once it was completed, and writing it would mean putting this blog on hold for weeks or months. Essentially, "Ed Wood Wednesdays" would have to go on extended hiatus for me to write Ed Wood 2. And would it be worth it? I have my doubts. Again, I have to carefully ponder how to use the time I have left. The clock never stops ticking.

Let me tell you an embarrassing story from my past. In high school, I struggled in my math and science classes, not to mention gym, but I was always a teacher's pet in my English classes. One teacher had such faith in my abilities that she gave me permission to take an entire week of class time to write whatever I wanted. Instead of going to her class, I could go directly to the library and sit in a study carrel and write. There were some real creeps in this class, so I was grateful to be away from them.

Now, at that time, my parents had just given me a copy of The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (1983), and I was obsessed with studying the personal and professional ups-and-downs of the singers and bands in it. I'd even come up with fake bands and then keep track of their (imaginary) lineup changes and their (fictional) albums. So when my teacher gave me carte blanche to write anything I wanted, I knew I wanted to tell a story about a washed-up rock singer. I gave him a dumb but semi-plausible stage name: Johnny Melody. I was probably thinking of Johnny Maestro.

AI rendering of Johnny Melody.

The story that I eventually wrote was called "The Return of Johnny Melody." I'll give you as much of the plot as I remember, thirty-plus years later. It starts with a middle-aged man getting into an argument with his wife over something trivial: his mother-in-law is coming to visit for a week. (My view of marriage was largely shaped by The Flintstones.) In his frustration, the guy gets in his car and starts driving around aimlessly for a while. 

Along the way, he sees that his childhood hero, a 1950s crooner called Johnny Melody, is performing at a crummy little bar and grill near the highway. He goes into the joint and watches Johnny's entire, sparsely-attended performance, then chats with Johnny himself at the bar. Johnny's life on the road seems kind of depressing and lonely, and the man decides to go home to his wife. He thinks he'll pick up a bottle of amaretto for his mother-in-law on the way home. The end.

Okay, not exactly War and Peace (1869), but what do you want? I was about 15 at the time. I remember being wracked with guilt about the whole experience. Was this story good enough to merit an entire week of class time? Had I taken this golden opportunity and squandered it? I handed it to my teacher and muttered some kind of apology. The teacher gave the handwritten story a cursory glance, frowned a little, then filed it away somewhere in her desk. She never brought it up again and certainly never gave me another week away from class to do a personal project ever again. I knew I had failed.

I desperately do not want another "Johnny Melody" situation. And that's what I think could easily happen with Ed Wood 2. The funny thing is, in the time it's taken me to tell you all this, Eddie would have written three short stories, two articles, and a film script.

P.S. Have I ever told you about the movie I want to make? The 1970s-style horror anthology in the Dan Curtis tradition? Yeah, that's a whole thing. I feel like, at some point in my life, I should make a movie of my own.