Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 257: Carl Anthony (1932-2021) [PART 2 OF 2]

Is there more to say about Carl Anthony? I'd better hope so.

Last week, as you'll recall, we were talking about actor Carl Anthony (birth name: Carl Anthony Wuco), who played prominent roles in two of Ed Wood's best-known movies, Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) and The Sinister Urge (1960). We discussed how Carl grew up the youngest of three brothers in a Croatian-American family in the suburbs of Cleveland before pursuing a career in show business, first as a daredevil pilot in Florida and then as a film and television actor in Hollywood. 

Quite an intiguing character, this Carl Anthony. But I neglected to talk about the thing Carl's actually remembered for: his film career.

Frustratingly, this aspect of Carl Anthony's life is not as well-documented as it should be. His IMDb profile, for instance, is extremely spotty, only mentioning five credits. He has a second IMDb profile under the name Carl Wuco, but it yields just two more titles. It's a near-certainty that Carl had more TV and film roles than these, but they have somehow gone unrecorded. I also have a strong suspicion that, like the similarly-named Anthony Cardoza, Carl may have been one of Ed Wood's backers in the 1950s.

 

Last week, I mentioned that Carl merited his own card in Drew Friedman's The Ed Wood Jr. Players (1993). (He's the ninth card in the series out of 36.) His bio there says: "Anthony was a long-time friend of Ed Wood's, lending a hand in many capacities. During the filming of Plan 9, he not only assisted in fundraising but fetched and carried gravestones for Bela Lugosi's cemetery scene." Coincidentally, we talked about that very scene not long ago and Carl Anthony's participation therein.

Perhaps inspired by Ed Wood, Carl briefly became a screenwriter himself. As an anonymous reader alerted me, the actor registered a screenplay called Hollywood Comeback on February 7, 1956. This can be confirmed by the Catalog of Copyright Entries, Third Series. Parts 3-4: Dramas and Works Prepared for Oral Delivery Jan-Dec 1956: Vol 10 No 1-2. Thanks to that anonymous reader for the heads up.

My eternal source.

Today, our best source of information about Carl Anthony is Rudolph Grey's always-indispensable Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992). Carl is one of the interviewees in that book and is quoted throughout. It is Carl, for instance, who opines in the book's introduction that Ed Wood "ate, drank and dreamt motion pictures 24 hours a day." Carl also talks about Eddie's musical taste, stating that the director "loved classical music, Beethoven, Liszt, Prokofiev." These quotes suggest to me that Carl and Ed must have spent a lot of time socializing, not just making movies.

In a chapter entitled "The Method to His Madness," Carl Anthony says that Bride of the Monster (1955) made money, but not enough to pay off all the backers. Very much like Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) and Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) in Mel Brooks' The Producers (1967), Eddie sold "more than 100%" of the production and then couldn't possibly repay his investors. The difference is, Gene and Zero in The Producers did this intentionally as part of a scam. (Their goal was to keep the excess money and run away with it.) According to Carl, Eddie did this simply because he wasn't a bookkeeper or a businessman and "got carried away."

Later in that same chapter, Carl speaks knowledgeably about Ed Wood's ultra-quick working methods, further suggesting that the actor and the director must have collaborated on multiple projects. It is Carl's contention that Ed wrote his scripts around whatever stock footage he could find. There is a scene very much like this in Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994) in which Ed (Johnny Depp) says, "Why if I had half the chance, I could make an entire movie using this stock footage." He then starts devising a scenario in which some "mysterious explosions" have been "upsetting all the buffalo." It's possible that this moment in Ed Wood was influenced or inspired by Carl's quote. 

Here's another Carl Anthony quote from Nightmare of Ecstasy that inspired some dialogue in Ed Wood:

Bela compares Ed Wood to the directors at Universal.

In the biopic, during the making of Bride of the Monster, Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau) remarks: "At Universal, we used to shoot one or two scenes a day. But Eddie can knock off twenty, thirty. He's incredible!" Again, this is almost word-for-word what Carl Anthony said in Nightmare of Ecstasy.

As the Mystery Science Theater 3000 wiki points out, however, Carl Anthony is not depicted in Ed Wood. The film's entire third act is devoted to the making of Plan 9, but only two of the uniformed patrolmen in that movie are included in the biopic: Paul Marco (Max Casella) and Conrad Brooks (Brent Hinkley). In fact, as reimagined in Ed Wood, Carl's lines from Plan 9 are given to Paul! In winnowing down the story to something manageable, screenwriters Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander had to jettison numerous important figures in Ed Wood's life, including Carl. (Alex Gordon and John Crawford Thomas were also excised for the sake of storytelling clarity, as Alexander and Karaszewski explain in the published version of the screenplay.)

Carl relates another anecdote that implies he worked with one of Eddie's heroes, Orson Welles, on a motion picture. Here's what the actor has to say about that experience:

Carl Anthony on Orson Welles.

Interesting, right? And did Orson Welles ever film any famous scenes in a garbage dump? Well, yes, he did. In fact, it was in Touch of Evil (1958), the very film that Welles (as portrayed by Vincent D'Onofrio) discusses with Eddie in Ed Wood. Carl Anthony is not listed as a cast or crew member in Touch of Evil, but he still might have been involved in that production, which was mostly shot in Los Angeles in early 1957. Carl was definitely in town and working at that time.

Carl Anthony's greatest claim to fame is playing the always-grousing Patrolman Larry in Plan 9 from Outer Space. Larry's main function in the film is to serve as a sounding board for Duke Moore's character, plainclothesman Lt. Harper, but Larry also has some moments with the bumbling, cowardly Kelton (Paul Marco). In Nightmare of Ecstasy, Carl talks about what life was like during the making of Plan 9:

Carl Anthony on the making of Plan 9.

Lots of fascinating information in this one paragraph. First, we learn that Carl Anthony and Ed Wood were roommates on Bronson Street in Hollywood at some point in the 1950s. Second, Carl was involved in the fundraising process for Eddie's movies. Third, Eddie met his second wife Kathy during the making of Plan 9. And finally, Eddie's drinking was already a problem at this relatively early stage of his life. Elsewhere in Nightmare of Ecstasy, Carl reveals that Plan 9's musical director, Gordon Zahler, was "a paraplegic [who] scored films all off of records, library music."

Johnny Ryde.

Perhaps Carl's most challenging screen role was as racketeer Johnny Ryde in Ed Wood's crime thriller The Sinister Urge, which rips off both Psycho (1960) and Dragnet (1951-1959) while also serving as an expose of the adult entertainment industry. In this grungy and often-disheartening movie, Johnny and his raspy-voiced partner Gloria (Jean Fontaine) illegally make and distribute underground smut films, including some with a bondage theme. But one of their employees, a young greaser thug named Dirk (Dino Fantini), is a loose cannon who kills women for sexual thrills, having been driven mad by exposure to pornography. Dirk's horrid crimes attract the attention of the police (Kenne Duncan and Duke Moore) and ultimately lead to disaster for Johnny and Gloria. The moral? Always vet your employees carefully. And keep away from smut.

Nightmare of Ecstasy devotes an entire chapter to the making of The Sinister Urge, which some purists consider Ed Wood's "final film." (It's really nothing of the sort, but it's arguably his last semi-mainstream effort.) Appropriately, since he plays such a prominent role in the movie, Carl Anthony is quoted several times in this chapter. He speculates that his costar, Dino Fantini, later became a KFC franchisee. (I cannot verify any part of this.) He also says that his other costar, Gloria Fontaine, was married to a doctor who "worked long hours." According to Carl, Gloria only pursued acting "as a hobby." Reminds me a bit of Fawn Silver in Orgy of the Dead (1965). She, too, was a mere dilettante in the film industry.

But what of Carl Anthony's other, non-Ed Wood film roles? As I mentioned previously, the internet is of little help here. On the IMDb, I can only find a few credits from the 1950s, i.e. the "Ed Wood era" of Carl's career. He's supposedly in a 1950 episode of the dramatic anthology series Studio One (1948-1958). Was he? I couldn't tell ya. While some episodes of that show have made it to the internet, Carl's isn't one of them. If you're looking through the archives, he's allegedly in Season 3, Episode 4, "Trilby," airing on September 18, 1950. He's also credited with a guest appearance on the one-season legal drama Grand Jury (1959-1960). He's supposed to be in episode 22, "Boxing Scandal," which first aired on January 3, 1960. This, too, has vanished.

After that, Carl Anthony Wuco largely disappears from the public record for a couple of decades. (He'll eventually resurface.) I did mention last week that Carl married a woman named Lydia La Marca in 1961. This week, I found another mention of their nuptials in the June 24, 1961 edition of The Cleveland Plain Dealer, this time with a photograph of Ms. La Marca.

"They Are Engaged."

As discussed last week, in addition to being an actor, Carl Anthony Wuco was also an experienced pilot. Well, he seems to have gone back to that line of work, but it got him into some legal trouble in the 1970s, as revealed by this article in the October 8, 1974 edition of The Los Angeles Times.

At least he kept up his flying skills.

Naughty boy, Carl! Here's another article about the case, as printed in the October 8, 1974 edition of a Palm Springs paper called The Desert Sun:

Enough pot to keep Tommy Chong occupied for at least a month!

Truthfully, after studying the world of low-budget filmmaking for years, this story does not surprise me in the least. But I was surprised to stumble upon some additional information about the deaths of Carl's parents, Anthony and Gloria Wuco, in August 1965. The assumptions I made last week about their lives and deaths were quite wrong!  This article in the August 20, 1965 edition of The Los Angeles Times sheds some light on the true and terrible facts of the case.

How Carl Anthony's parents really died in 1965.

I had assumed that Carl's parents stayed in Ohio, since their obituaries ran in an Ohio newspaper. But it seems they followed their son to California. They were living in Cypress, just south of Los Angeles. Obviously, their lives in Cypress must have taken a terrible turn for the worse in the 1960s. Could this have accounted for their son's disappearance from show business and his eventual career in drug smuggling? One can only speculate.

One of Carl's Filipino films.

But Carl's acting career was not over! Not by a long shot. As both Carl Anthony and Carl Wuco, he resurfaced in some Filipino exploitation movies of the 1980s. For those who may not know, the Philippines became a haven of low-budget filmmaking for a few decades. Countless horror and action movies were made there, with an emphasis on outrageous violence and salacious sex. 

This colorful and entertaining era in motion picture history is covered in a delightful 2010 documentary called Machete Maidens Unleashed! directed by Mark Hartley. Carl is not an interviewee, but this movie gives you a good idea of what the Filipino film market was like during these years. You'll hear from such luminaries as Roger Corman, John Landis, Joe Dante, Pam Grier, Sid Haig, Dick Miller, R. Lee Ermey, and even film critic Danny Peary, who is a big reason why this Ed Wood Wednesdays column even exists!

How many Filipino action movies did Carl Anthony actually make, though? I found exactly three on the IMDb: Raw Force (1982), PX (1982) and Intrusion: Cambodia (1983). He's billed as Carl Anthony in Raw Force and as Carl Wuco in the other two. I have tracked down both Raw Force and PX and can confirm that the actor in these movies is indeed our Carl Anthony from Plan 9 and The Sinister Urge. It's easy to find a nice, bright, colorful copy of Raw Force on Tubi, while PX is a muddy, barely-watchable bootleg. But it's our man, alright. No mistaking that. And the movies are as sleazy and unhinged as you could possibly want. They feel like they were made specifically for fans of trash cinema. Carl's acting is... let's say, consistent.

Yet again, I have to imagine that Carl has way more Filipino credits than these three movies but they have gone unrecorded. What I did find was a very intriguing thread on The Classic Horror Film Board in which a woman who identified herself as Carl's daughter said that her father died in the Philippines in 2021. My Spidey sense tells me that this woman is the same Lesli Wuco-Baker who wrote Carl's IMDb biography.

Carl in Flying Saucers Over Hollywood.

Apart from being interviewed in Nightmare of Ecstasy, Carl Anthony's last major contribution to popular culture was appearing as an interview subject in the 1992 documentary Flying Saucers Over Hollywood: The 'Plan 9' Companion, directed by the late Mark Patrick Carducci. As the title indicates, this documentary focuses on the making and legacy of Plan 9, but it actually covers a fair amount of Ed Wood's life and career. For this project, Carducci interviewed many people who worked with Eddie over the years, plus some who were inspired by his work. 

In the documentary, looking dapper and sporting the same mustache as in his later Filipino-made movies, Carl tells a gruesomely entertaining anecdote about how Tor Johnson would "score" the top of his head with a razor blade an hour before a big wrestling match so that it would bleed impressively when he got hit on the head by his opponent. And Carl talks a bit about Ed's business dealings:

Ed was always being approached by distributors for many of his projects. But he didn't want to tie in first, because you know the thrill of producing is having a sleeper on your hands. And if you tie it up with a pre-release, then you're limited to a budget. The distributor or releasing company will generally have one of their production men there riding herd every minute. And when it's all over with, they wind up owning it all. You know, so your end is very small for all your efforts. So he preferred to take the gamble, the risk. Do it as cheaply as possible and try for the best distribution you can get.

Carl also explained Ed's unique working methods:

He always kept things going where he could change the script right in the middle and do something else. And as long as his favorite expression was dramatic license, if he thought something would be passable without bringing too much criticism, okay, let it go. So Dracula was both a vampire and someone else in the same picture. So what? Nobody really paid that close attention.

And Carl described the working conditions at Quality Studios:

At that time, the neighborhood where Quality Studios was located was, like, you know... It would be, if you were just walking by there on an evening's walk or something, a very depressing place. But when Ed Wood's company would be shooting there, the whole block came alive. I mean, you know, he was always a lively person, and everybody else was happy around him. And suddenly, the whole block took on a whole new character, and everybody would be milling about. People would be walking off the streets to see what's going on there  'cause it was such an unlikely place for a studio in the first place. But a lot of work got accomplished there.

Having gone through all this material, do I now have a greater appreciation of Carl Anthony's work? I mean, that was ostensibly the point of this entire two-part series. It's tough to say. This man lived a very interesting, action-packed life, filled with triumph and tragedy. But I can't really say he's one of the most compelling thespians to ever hit the silver screen. Even in his later Filipino films, his acting tends to be stiff, halting, and self-conscious. (It doesn't help that he's awkwardly dubbed in Raw Force.) One reason he doesn't turn up in Ed Wood is that he doesn't have the magnetism or visual appeal of Criswell, Bela Lugosi, Vampira, and Tor Johnson. Talent-wise, I'd say he's about on par with Conrad Brooks, if that's any consolation.

Carl Anthony and Duke Moore.

Nevertheless, it must be said that Carl has a number of memorable moments in Plan 9 from Outer Space. It's his job to converse with Tor Johnson—to the extent such a task is possible—during the wrestler's infamous dialogue scene at the cemetery. Carl also gets to treat Paul Marco with open contempt, as do most of the characters in the movie. One amusing moment comes when Paul points out to Carl that Tor Johnson's character, Inspector Daniel Clay, has come back as a zombie. Carl responds with this snarly little monologue;

I'm seeing it, that's the only reason I'm listening to you. Look, I've got an idea. Hurt him or not, we've got to try something. I'm going to sneak up behind him and whop him over the head. That oughta make him move. Follow me. Even when Clay was alive he couldn't run fast enough to catch me, so when he does, you grab Mrs. Trent and run like lightning in the opposite direction. 

You have to wonder why Tor Johnson ever had a reason to chase after Carl Anthony, huh? Was this some little game they'd play back at the station house? Even here, Carl's lack of finesse as an actor shows through. He pauses right before the word "lightning," which is probably the worst place in this speech to pause.

Carl Anthony's main function in Plan 9 from Outer Space is to serve as a scene partner for Duke Moore as the latter investigates the strange goings-on in the cemetery. During one of their conversations, Carl is the one who observes, "Say, lieutenant, you get that funny odor?" This line usually gets a laugh at the Plan 9 screenings I've attended over the years, partially because of the way Carl contorts his face as he says it. And when Duke Moore utters arguably the most famous line in the entire movie ("One thing's sure: Inspector Clay is dead, murdered... and somebody's responsible!"), he's talking to Carl! Elsewhere in the movie, Carl is the recipient of one of Duke's other great, inexplicable lines: "Larry, you'll be out of that uniform before you know it!" This is supposed to be a playful threat, but it has obvious sexual undertones that Duke Moore seems unaware of.

Carl and Duke form a strange comedy team in Plan 9. Their conversations have an odd rhythm to them. I've always taken particular pleasure in this run of dialogue between Moore's Lt. Harper and Anthony's Patrolman Larry.

LARRY: What do you suppose that noise was?

HARPER: Whatever it was, it's no more strange than the other things happening around this cemetery.

LARRY: Spirits like Old Farmer Calder talked about.

HARPER: Heh. Maybe.

LARRY: The only spirits he saw tonight were those I smelled on his breath.

HARPER: Well don't forget Mrs. Trent claims to have seen them, too. She didn't have anything on her breath.

LARRY: She was hysterical.

HARPER: Well, true, she was frightened and in a state of shock. But don't forget that torn nightgown and the scratched feet.

LARRY: Yeah, I hadn't thought of that. I guess that's why you're a detective lieutenant and I'm still a uniformed cop. 

HARPER: Sometimes it's only the breaks, Larry. 

What makes the scene amusing is the intersection of improbable writing and uncertain acting. Ed Wood could craft dialogue that no human being would ever utter aloud, and his actors were capable of delivering this dialogue in a way that was just as alien. Decades before CG or AI, Ed Wood took us straight to the uncanny valley with his films. And Carl Anthony Wuco was a part of it.