Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 267 The great 'Hollywood Rat Race' auction of 2026

This eBay auction is a veritable smorgasbord.

This is not the article I planned to write this week. I actually wanted to get back to my ongoing series about Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994). But something unusual has happened in the world of Ed Wood fandom, and I feel it is my responsibility to record it for the sake of posterity before we all forget that this ever happened. I strongly suspect that this is the kind of one-off oddity destined to fall down the memory hole never to be recalled again.

On March 16, 2026, Bob Blackburn (co-inheritor of the Ed Wood estate) posted on Facebook about a very intriguing eBay auction he'd learned about through fellow fan Patrick McCabe. It seems that a legitimate memorabilia dealer called NEOvintage was selling a treasure trove of rare Ed Wood materials from the 1960s, including a manuscript of Hollywood Rat Race typed by Eddie himself and some ultra-rare cassette tapes including unreleased interviews with Ed and others talking about Bela Lugosi. The asking price for these precious goodies? A mere quarter of a million dollars, though the seller is willing to offer a $50,000 discount to the right buyer. If you have a spare vacation home you're not using or perhaps a Scrooge McDuck vault of gold coins, maybe consider it.

Here is the seller's own, quite fascinating description of the material being offered:

This is a superb one of a kind Ed Wood unpublished book / memoir AND lot of unpublished original audio cassette tapes of Ed talking about his films, his life and Bela Lugosi. This book is not only signed by Ed on the face but he has also written a note assigning its legal rights over to his friend. This is hand typed by Ed Wood himself on his typewriter! Near the end of his life, Ed was contacted by Bill Obbagy, the creator of the Bela Lugosi Fan Club. Bill was looking for any information he could about Bela’s life with the goal of writing a book. He interviewed Ed extensively and they became close friends, and in 1969, Ed gave him this memoir / book to do with as he wanted. A small portion of this 150 page manuscript was turned into ‘Hollywood Rat Race’ which was published by Bill in 1998, but a large majority of this work is unseen by anyone, until now! THIS IS THE ONLY COPY AND IS 100% ORIGINAL AND TYPED BY ED WOOD. WE HAVE NOT MADE ANY COPIES OF ANY PAGES.

The other half of this listing is a lot of 23 original cassette tapes of interviews done by Mr. Obbagy with Ed Wood and various other people in regard to Ed and Bela Lugosi. These tapes are the original unpublished recordings, and the only copies. WE HAVE NOT MADE COPIES OF THESE. This lot is really an Ed Wood treasure trove of previously unknown writing and audio recordings talking about his career, life and relationship with Bela Lugosi. It’s impossible to set a price on something so unique that has potential for licensing to documentaries, books and more. I am not a lawyer so I do not know how that all works but I am sure it can be done. Serious offers will be considered and given the high value of this item, pickup in person would be preferable. Everything in the photographs will be your legal property with no other copies of this material anywhere, period. We will require bank transfer for funds upon purchase.

See our other listings. We are currently selling one of the biggest rare movie poster and memorabilia collections in the country! Any questions do not hesitate to ask!

Bill Obbagy.

A very tempting offer, no? Too bad I live in poverty and have to think twice about even buying a sandwich. If I sold every last thing I owned, I couldn't even raise one-tenth of the asking price for this lot. Only once did I ever participate in an Ed Wood auction, buying a poster and some lobby cards for a few hundred dollars back in 2015. I have regretted that decision many times in the ensuing years, but I have stubbornly held onto the items I purchased back then. 

Naturally, once word of this auction reached the greater Ed Wood fan community, it was the subject of some speculation and debate. Since none of us will ever be able to afford what the seller is asking, all we really have to go by are the pictures included with the original eBay auction. While the cassettes are obviously still a mystery, we at least know a little of what's in that manuscript. The seller claims that the manuscript contains a great deal of material that didn't make it into the published version of Hollywood Rat Race from Four Walls Eight Windows in 1998. Author Paul Apel (I Watched Football Early the Day I Died) compared the pictures in the auction to the published book and found merely "editorial" differences "not changing the meaning of the text, just polishing it stylistically."

Then there is the involvement of Bela Lugosi superfan Bill Obbagy, to whom Ed Wood has apparently given "the right to sell this novel in my name." Bill is never mentioned once in Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992), but Eddie's handwritten note on the cover page of the manuscript looks genuine. Obbagy really was planning to write a book about Bela Lugosi and interviewed a number of people for the project, including Ed Wood. Nothing ever seems to have come of this, but Richard Klemensen remembered interviewing Obbagy for Little Shoppe of Horrors magazine back in 2014. Bob Blackburn confirmed that Obbagy has since passed away.

Meanwhile, Bob has been in communication with the seller, who claims to have received a six-figure offer "from someone well known in (and out) of Hollywood." Likely candidates include Bobcat Goldthwait and Dana Gould. My hope is that the mystery celebrity does buy this material and then makes it available to the general public in some form down the road. The cassette tapes might be even more interesting than the manuscript. Besides Ed Wood, the interviewees include Criswell and Hope Lugosi.

I honestly don't know what to make of any of this. Without going through the manuscript and the cassettes personally, it's impossible to say what they contain and whether it's of any great value to the world. But the few scraps we got from the eBay auction are intriguing enough. Who knew, for instance, that the alternate title for Hollywood Rat Race  was Hollywood Sext Book? It seems that Ed Wood was using the word "sext" decades before it came into common parlance!

If there are any further developments in this story, I may or may not write about them here.