Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 263: Victory Crowley himself

"Screw you, Miss Crowley."

Early in Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994), Ed (Johnny Depp) and his loyal repertory players gather at a cozy L.A. cocktail bar called Boardner's after staging a performance of Eddie's achingly earnest World War II play, The Casual Company, at a small theater in Hollywood. Even though it's raining and the press didn't actually show up for "press night," their spirits are nonetheless high. Ed even tells eager beaver actor Paul Marco (Max Casella): "Paul, your second act monologue actually gave me the chills."

A review from Miss Crowley.

Then, actor Conrad Brooks (Brent Hinkley) bounds in with a copy of The Los Angeles Register and says he has "the early edition, hot off the presses." He hands the paper to Ed Wood. As the smiling actors crowd around him, Eddie eagerly flips to a newly-published review of The Casual Company by theatrical critic Victor Crowley. But the mood soon sours as they read the article, which Burton shows us in a closeup. Here is what Mr. Crowley has to say about their efforts:

World War II, a time for brave men with "guts," forms the backdrop for "The Casual Company," which opened last night in Hollywood. Let me tell you this is definitely a play about "guts." It certainly took "guts" to stage this disappointment. Penned by one Edward D. Wood, Jr., who also has the "guts" to take credit for directing this foxhole piece, "The Casual Company" takes place on a bare stage with only rudimentary lighting. Fortunately, the soldiers' costumes are very realistic.

The actors, once boisterous, now fall silent. Bunny Breckinridge (Bill Murray) is the first to speak: "Oh, what does that old queen know? She didn't even show. Sent her copy boy to do the dirty work." Meanwhile, poor Paul is trying to figure out what "ostentatious" means, while Dolores Fuller (Sarah Jessica Parker) wonders aloud: "Do I really have a face like a horse?" 

But Eddie, the eternal optimist, zeroes in on the one compliment: "The soldiers' costumes are very realistic." Later in the movie, he'll bring this up when he interviews for a directing job with producer George Weiss (Mike Starr): "I just did a play in Hollywood, and Victor Crowley himself praised its realism!" Eddie also says that good reviews are not necessary for showbiz success and points to "the latest Francis the mule picture" as an example.

At this point, Ed Wood is already freely intermingling fact with fantasy, so let's untangle what is historically accurate about this sequence from what is imaginary. First, the true stuff:

1. Ed Wood wrote a play called The Casual Company inspired by his experiences in World War II. After staging it back East to moderate success, starting in 1946, he directed and starred in a short-lived production of the play in Los Angeles after relocating there in the late 1940s.
2. The play was negatively reviewed in a Los Angeles newspaper, leading to its closure.
3. In October 1948, Ed wrote a letter to his parents in which he says that the local drama editor was sick and sent a "copy boy" to review the play, hence the "bad report."
4. Boardner's is a real cocktail bar in Los Angeles that Ed Wood and his cronies might well have frequented in the 1940s and '50s.

So what is fictionalized here? Well...

1. Eddie's play The Casual Company is not a "foxhole piece" and does not take place on the battlefields of Europe or the Pacific. Instead, carrying the subtitle The Laugh of the Marines, it is a lighthearted office comedy that takes place entirely in the United States. Tonally, it is comparable to such TV shows as Gomer Pyle USMC and Sgt. Bilko as well as the comic strip Beetle Bailey.
2. Of the historical figures depicted in this scene, only Ed Wood himself was involved in The Casual Company. Conrad, Bunny, Paul, and Dolores had nothing to do with it. The play's real-life cast did include such future Wood stars as Don Nagel and Jean (Jeanne) Stevens, but they are not depicted here.
3. This production of The Casual Company occurred in 1948. The first Francis the Talking Mule movie, simply titled Francis (1950), did not premiere for another two years.
4. There was no Los Angeles Register or theater critic Victor Crowley. In real life, The Casual Company was negatively reviewed by critic Henry Arnsten in The Valley Times on October 26, 1948. Arnsten called it a "ho-hum production" and declared it dated and unfunny.

Robin Van Sharner.

Even though Ed Wood fictionalizes these events a great deal, the Boardner's sequence is still effective because it gives us a sense of what Eddie's life in Hollywood was like in those lean early years. He's trying to get his work out there, despite the scorn of the critics and the indifference of the wider world. And he's providing some work for his friends (and his girlfriend) at the same time. Ed Wood quickly establishes that Eddie's professional life and personal life overlap to a great extent.

So, if there never was a Victor Crowley, whose picture do we see in that newspaper article? I found out by appealing directly to the source: Ed Wood co-writer Scott Alexander. Via Facebook, he identified the man as actor Robin Van Sharner (1929-2015), who served as Martin Landau's uncredited stand-in during the filming of Ed Wood. Robin was also Landau's stand-in on B*A*P*S (1997) and The Majestic (2001). Robin's other credits include the movies Tron (1982) and Vanilla Sky (2001), plus the TV shows Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Voyager, and Mr. Show with Bob and David. He even merits an entry in the Star Trek wiki. 

And there's another strange twist to this saga. Do you remember the Hatchet movies? The four films in this horror franchise (2006-2017) feature a recurring character called Victor Crowley, a deformed hermit who kills people with (you guessed it) a hatchet. The fourth entry in the series is actually titled Victor Crowley. Victor is the main antagonist of the entire Hatchet franchise, equivalent to Freddy Kruger, Jason Voorhees, or Michael Myers. But was he named after an extremely obscure, offscreen character in Ed Wood? Well, it's debatable. 

The Hatchet franchise was created by Massachusetts-born writer-director Adam Green, who traces the origin of the character back to a spooky urban legend he heard as a child at summer camp in the 1980s. But the character in Green's story was originally named "Hatchet-Face." How did "Hatchet-Face" become Victor Crowley? Is it possible Green saw Ed Wood and got the name stuck in his head? Consider that Green was also in a band called Haddonfield, which takes its name from the fictional locale in John Carpenter's Halloween (1978). Consider, too, that the Hatchet films are famously referential and include actors from other famous horror franchises. In other words, these are movies made by and for horror nerds, people who know the trivia. I don't think it's impossible for there to be a hidden Ed Wood reference in these films.

You may wonder why I did a deep dive into an extremely brief and not-terribly-consequential scene from Ed Wood. Well, the truth is that I've been planning a series of articles in which I would break down the biopic scene by scene and discuss what's real and what isn't. This Victor Crowley article is essentially a pilot for that proposed series. How did you like it? Should I do more? Let me know.