Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 265: How accurate is 'Ed Wood' (1994) [PART 2]

Ed Wood (1994) references this production of The Casual Company.

When Edward Davis Wood, Jr. (1924-1978) relocated to Hollywood from his native Poughkeepsie in the late 1940s after his stint in the Marines, his goal was to break into the movie business. The silver screen had fascinated him as a boy, so once he became a man, he took Horace Greeley's famous advice: "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country." Once settled in California, instead of relying on job offers from the major studios (Universal, Fox, Paramount), Ed Wood attempted to produce and/or direct his own low-budget movies. This was a youngster with initiative. A dreamer, you might say.

A young Ed Wood.

Unfortunately, Eddie's earliest Hollywood projects, like the crude Westerns Range Revenge and Crossroads of Laredo (both 1948), were never truly completed during the filmmaker's lifetime and were only released posthumously. I've pinpointed the made-for-TV melodrama The Sun Was Setting (1951) as the first production Eddie actually saw all the way through to completion, though I can find no record of it airing anywhere. Ed's attempts at making television commercials "on spec" and then selling them to clients likewise proved futile. You can still watch some of Eddie's self-made TV commercials today, but I don't think any companies ever used them.

What's most remarkable about Ed Wood's earliest years in Hollywood is how many short-lived production companies he managed to start and how many backers he managed to sweettalk into giving him money, despite having no proven track record of success. Eddie's graveyard of failed ventures includes: Wood-Thomas Productions, Story Ad Films, W.D.C.B. Films, Atomic Productions, and more.

Meanwhile, to earn a little money and (potentially) get his name out there, Eddie did a little theater work during those early years in Hollywood. The great James Pontolillo covers this topic extensively in his book, The Muddled Years of Edward D. Wood, Jr., 1946-1948 (2025). Besides acting in The Blackguard Returns, Eddie managed to stage a farce he'd written himself called The Casual Company: The Laugh of the Marines. This lighthearted office comedy, based on Ed's own military experience, had a brief run at the Village Playhouse in late 1948. In the October 26, 1948 edition of The Valley Times, critic Henry Arntsen described it as a "three-acter" revolving around "a group of pencil-pushing Marines at a Naval hospital." 

Nearly half a century later, when Eddie's life was dramatized in Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994), this obscure, ill-fated production of The Casual Company became the basis for a memorable sequence in the film. Last week, I talked about the biopic's prologue and opening credits sequence, all of which I deemed extremely accurate, but the story proper starts with Eddie (Johnny Depp) directing some of his friends in The Casual Company at a small, unnamed theater. And here is where the film's fictionalization kicks in.

When we first see Eddie, he is pacing nervously in front of the theater on a miserable, rain-soaked evening. The screenplay tells us this is happening in 1952, but the movie does not specify when exactly the scene is taking place. It's "press night," and Eddie is impatiently waiting for local theater critic Victor Crowley to show up and review the play. But Eddie's friend Bunny Breckinridge (Bill Murray) emerges worriedly from the theater and tells him: "It's 8:15! We can't hold the curtain any longer!" And so, Crowley or no Crowley, the show must go on.

Onstage are two actors, both friends of Eddie: Conrad Brooks (Brent Hinckley) and Paul Marco (Max Casella). They're playing two weary soldiers on a WWII battlefield. Paul's character, Tommy, swears he saw a mysterious "woman dressed in white floating above the dunes," Conrad's character, Bill, is not impressed; that's just "kiddie spook stories." Suddenly, actress Dolores Fuller (Sarah Jessica Parker) makes the most dramatic entrance possible. She is lowered in by wires from above, dressed in white and accompanied by a harp glissando. She offers a symbolic "bird of peace" to an astonished Tommy and Bill. Meanwhile, throughout all of this, Eddie himself stands in the wings and mouths the dialogue along with the actors, clearly proud of what he's written.

In some ways, this production seems threadbare and more than a little depressing. After all, there are exactly five people in the audience, at least two of them asleep, and the theater's roof is leaking. In other ways, however, this play seems pretty lavish and well beyond what Ed Wood could have actually done at this stage in his career. For instance, Eddie has provided quite professional, convincing costumes for Dolores, Conrad, and Paul. And the set they're on is fairly impressive, too. There's a very nice painted backdrop of the sky, and in front of it is a three-dimensional representation of the battlefield. We see a dead tree, some hills, and some sandbags. What's more, Conrad and Paul have both been supplied with very legitimate-looking firearms: authentic WWII-era carbines.

Was the real Eddie this obsessed?

As for the "bird of peace" Dolores carries, there's a deleted scene in the screenplay in which Eddie fashions it (at the last possible moment) from Dolores' shoes to replace the real dove that just flew out the window. Which means that this production of The Casual Company must have had access to a dove at some point! And let's not forget the harness, cables, and pulleys that must be involved in making Dolores Fuller appear to "fly." That's not exactly easy, especially for untrained amateurs, so Dolores might be putting herself at great risk by agreeing to do this scene.

I have already mentioned that, in real life, The Casual Company was a lightweight comedy about clerical workers, not a battlefield drama. Ed Wood directed the October 1948 production in Hollywood and acted in it as well, but Dolores, Conrad, Paul, and Bunny were not involved in any way. The excerpt of the play that we see in Ed Wood was written entirely by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, and I must say they capture Eddie's writing style very well, especially Conrad's line about "kiddie spook stories." But it's not remotely representative of the real play. Based on descriptions of the play that I've read, I'd imagine that the staging was extremely basic, verging on spartan.

And then, there are the shots in which we see a transfixed, wide-eyed Eddie saying the lines from the play along with the actors. I think this is meant to convey that Ed Wood took his writing very seriously, even though it seems utterly ridiculous. To us, it's gibberish. To him, it's poetry. Is that fair? I've heard conflicting reports about this aspect of Wood's personality, but I remain unconvinced that Eddie ever considered himself a "genius" or that he considered his work to be high art. After all, the real Casual Company was a lowbrow comedy, and its characters had silly pun names like Lemmey A. Dime and Elbo Joints. Not exactly Strindberg. You might say that Ed's script for Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) has a "serious" message about the escalating arms race, but don't forget that it also features the bumbling antics of Paul Marco's Officer Kelton.

 

Anyway, that'll just about do it for the second installment in this series. I've already covered the scene at Boardner's where Eddie reads a negative review of the play. Incidentally, several people pointed out to me that the fictional critic "Victor Crowley" was probably named in honor of real-life New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther. If it bothered you that I didn't mention it two weeks ago, well, I'm mentioning it now. We'll pick this up in a week when the film peeks in on Dolores and Eddie at home.