Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 274: 'Conrad Talks Hollywood' (2011)

Remember My Dinner with Andre? Well, this is My Car Ride with Conrad.

"Marcel Proust was a very famous writer who used to dip biscuits in his cup of tea and suck on the biscuits, and all his memories come flooding back, and he wrote them down into wonderful novels."

-Peter Cook, "Memoirs of a Miner" (1985)

John Carpenter's debut feature Dark Star (1974) is a low-budget sci-fi comedy about a group of grungy-looking guys who have been out in space for 20 years and have gone completely buggy from the experience. Their ship, the Dark Star, has not been properly maintained and is rapidly falling apart. Their mission, bulldozing a path through space for future colonization, seems utterly pointless. They've long since lost interest in themselves and each other. And they're officially out of toilet paper. It's a real bummer, man.

Powell on ice.

To make matters worse, their leader, Commander Powell (Joe Saunders) has died, so laid-back ex-surfer Lt. Doolittle (Brian Narelle), has taken his place. Sort of. He's kind of half-assing the job, to be honest. Meanwhile, immature crew members Pinback (Dan O'Bannon) and Boiler (Cal Kuniholm) are squabbling like siblings, while the eerily zoned-out Talby (Dre Pahich) has retreated to the safety of a bubble at the top of the ship. When the Dark Star faces a life-or-death emergency (which I will not spoil), the overwhelmed Doolittle reaches a strange conclusion: "I have to ask Commander Powell." 

Yes, the dead man's body has been kept in cold storage, and his mind can still be accessed through a radio-like electronic device. The frostbitten Powell is no longer at the peak of freshness, though, and Doolittle struggles to keep him on track. (The commander is more interested in baseball than the safety of his former crew.) This plot element is imported directly from the fiction of Philip K. Dick, who wrote about communicating with the frozen dead via radio in Ubik (1969) and What the Dead Men Say (1964).

While crafting these articles, I've often found myself wishing I could access the mind of my colleague Greg Javer (1968-2024) the same way Doolittle did with Commander Powell. Many is the time I have thought, "I wonder what Greg would say about this?" Sadly, the technology that Philip K. Dick described in his fiction is not available in reality. At least not yet. We may get there someday. Until then, the best I can do is go through Greg's old articles and see if I can find some inspiration or information there.

To that end, I recently revisited an article Greg wrote in 2020 about actor/director Conrad Brooks (1931-2017), a key member of Ed Wood's repertory company and a low-budget filmmaker in his own right. Greg briefly mentioned a documentary short called Conrad Talks Hollywood (2011) that I'd never heard of. I kept meaning to watch it but never got around to it. Well, I figured that this week was as good a time as any.

Conrad Talks Hollywood is an extremely modest, unpolished 38-minute documentary in which Connie sits in the back of a car, rides around Los Angeles, and talks about whatever's on his mind, mostly his own showbiz career and the films he loved as a young man. He discusses his fondness for cowboy pictures and Buster Crabbe serials and talks about such colorful figures as Broderick Crawford and Lawrence Tierney (both excessive drinkers). Occasionally, unseen driver Donald G. Jackson will ask Connie a question or give him a prompt. But our man Brooks needs little encouragement. He seems like the kind of guy who, if you asked him how he was feeling that day, could give you an hourlong answer.

In his later years, Conrad Brooks directed his own films like Gypsy Vampire (2005) and Jan-Gel (1999). He was a staple of the sci-fi/horror convention circuit and became rather notorious for aggressively promoting his own movies and trying to wheedle money out of anyone who came near him. I've even heard people report that they went out of their way to avoid Connie in the convention halls for just this reason. On the other hand, there were those who became very fond of him, as evidenced by George Chastain's "Ridin' the Sunset Trail with the Plan 9 Kid" (2024). If you wanted to reminisce about the golden days of Hollywood, Conrad Brooks was your man.

It seems like Connie also became something of a mascot figure in the independent film world, cheerfully appearing in the works of other Grade-Z auteurs like himself. Conrad Talks Hollywood is the product of one such filmmaker: Scott Shaw, who has directed and produced literally dozens of shorts and features since the 1990s and who continues to this day. Connie starred in Shaw's One Shot Sam (2006) and occasionally wears a ballcap with that film's title in Conrad Talks Hollywood. To be honest, I am unfamiliar with the rest of Shaw's directing work. As an actor, Shaw has some very well-known mainstream credits, including Terminator 2 (1991) and a 1990 episode of Seinfeld.

Conrad Talks Hollywood is patched together from several different interviews, some shot during the day, others at night. Conrad's hats and outfits change from scene to scene, and he and the driver stop at convenience stores a couple of times along the way, but otherwise there is little visual variety to the film. It's just Connie sitting in the back seat of a car, with gas stations and fast food restaurants visible in the window behind his head. (Look for one of those old-school Arby's signs shaped like a giant cowboy hat.) Some of this material must have been filmed during the making of One Shot Sam, since Conrad Brooks and Donald G. Jackson will occasionally refer to each other by their character names from that movie, Lazlo and Sam.

Tonally, Conrad Talks Hollywood reminded me a lot of Lem Dobbs' unproduced screenplay Edward Ford (1978), which lightly fictionalizes the strange life of character actor (and Ed Wood associate) David Ward. The title character of that unmade film also lives in a world of old-timey Hollywood trivia, and there's nothing he likes to do better than shoot the breeze with a fellow devotee who knows the names of stars, studios, and directors as well as he does. It's especially interesting to me that Edward has a list of favorite actors he calls his "big six," while Conrad Brooks has his "big five": Hoot Gibson, Buck Jones, Ken Maynard, William S. Hart, and Tim McCoy. I realize I made the same observation when I reviewed "Ridin' the Trail with the Plan 9 Kid," but it applies to this movie, too.

"A fun picture."

As I said, in addition to making his own movies, Conrad Brooks also appeared in the low budget films of other directors. Conrad Talks Hollywood goes into depth about one of those films, David "The Rock" Nelson's Conrad Brooks vs. Werewolf (1994). Apparently, the subject came up because a passerby recognized Connie from it. Our man Brooks speaks fondly of the director, whom he calls "Rocky," but is largely dismissive of the film:

"It was a fun movie, a fun picture. Shot down in Baltimore, Maryland. When the guy wanted to use me, I says, 'Fine. I'll have to use my brothers in it.' We did. My brother Henry, my brother Ted. It's about, uh, this guy lookin' for the werewolf, the character I play. I come across the werewolf. Wasn't much of a story. But the way it was put together, it was weird. Strange.

Bring your friends over. You guys wanna have a few beers together and have a lot of laughs? That's the video to look at. But from the cinematography, the artwork, forget it. It's not there. Lowkey lighting. Overexposed. What a picture. I wouldn't recommend it. But people like it.

At first I thought it was going to be a decent picture. I liked the guy's ideas, which was great. Really impressed me. But he didn't know how to put it on film. I even told the guy,  'I like ya. You're a nice guy.' He bought a lot of stuff from me at the shows. I thought I'd sorta help him as far as directing was concerned. I went ahead and suggested what we should do, actually. That really helped the picture, put it across. He wanted to give me more credit for it. I says, 'Rocky, I love ya too much. I want you to have all the credit.'

But anyway, Rocky's a good boy. Good guy. He tries hard, works hard. Give him time. He'll make it."

Happily, David "The Rock" Nelson continues to direct and act in independent films to this day. Very much like Scott Shaw, he seems to be a stubborn B-movie lifer who will hand over his camera only when you pry it out of his cold, dead hands. And he's not shy about self-promotion either. In the trailer for Conrad Brooks vs. Werewolf, he brazenly calls himself "the Ed Wood of the '90s."

But speaking of Eddie, does he ever come up as a topic in Conrad Talks Hollywood? Yes, but not until the last seven minutes or so. It's our offscreen moderator, Donald G. Jackson, not Conrad, who first mentions Ed Wood. Jackson gets the title of Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) a little bit wrong, confusing it with the documentary Flying Saucers Over Hollywood (1992), but Connie knows exactly what he's talking about. Most of what Brooks has to say about his former employer is stuff you've heard a million times before. But he has some insights into the relationship between Bela Lugosi and Ed Wood:

"Bela stuck by him. You know, Bela had a lot of problems in Hollywood. You know, drug addict. Guy couldn't even buy a job. Guy was a marvelous actor, terrific actor. But, you know, age. And, you know, being on drugs, it didn't help the situation. So like I say, it was tough for the old boy in the end. But Ed Wood stuck right by this man. And Ed tried to get all the work he could for him. 'Course, I mean, by using Lugosi, it also helped Ed Wood to raise money for his pictures. Ed was a pretty sharp boy. Nice man. The only problem is, he drank too much."

When Jackson asks if Ed lived in Hollywood, Conrad replies:

"Yeah! Yeah, he spent 40 years [sic] in Hollywood, the poor guy. Yeah, he lived all over Hollywood. Yucca, right off of Hollywood Boulevard. Yeah, Eddie was a Hollywood man. Yeah, he loved Hollywood when Hollywood was really nice. You know, back in the day."

But this leads to another topic that Ed Wood wrote about frequently in his own novels: the numerous riots that Los Angeles experienced in the mid-to-late 1960s, particularly the Sunset Strip riots and the Watts riots. It's clear that Connie and Eddie felt the same way about these events.

Jackson: Remember the riots? 

Brooks: Do I! Hey, listen, I was scared. 

Jackson: Remember all those hippies with the long hair? 

Brooks: Yeah. They sort of... They're the ones who really messed up Hollywood. 

Jackson: You never had long hair, did ya, Lazlo? 

Brooks: Well, I started losing my hair, Sam. You know that. (laughs) 

Jackson: Remember when we used to eat at Musso & Frank's? 

Brooks: Yep, well, you got me down on Hollywood Boulevard. (looks out the window) Hey, in fact, we just went by Musso & Frank's. Your favorite place! We went there, how...? At least twice a week. And all the show people go there. You know, people from way back. Clark Gable, Lana Turner, and Betty Grable.

The film ends with Conrad Brooks decrying the current state of Hollywood and how today's movies have too much dialogue and not enough action. ("They talk the story away!") And he lists the former landmarks that have disappeared, including the Brown Derby, Ciro's, and the Mocambo. He also insists that the Hollywood Palladium is "a dump now." I'm not sure if this footage was shot before, after, or during the renovation of the Palladium in 2007-2008. The venue seems to be hosting some high-profile acts these days. 

Whatever the case, Brooks' lamentations are similar to the views expressed in Ed Wood's own, posthumously-published Hollywood Rat Race (1998). That book was supposed to be Eddie's guide to show business, but it reads more like his eulogy for the Hollywood that was dying. Connie was even more of a hardliner than Eddie. Ed Wood was famously a TV addict and desperately wanted to launch a series of his own, but Conrad had little interest in the medium. At one point, the driver asks Conrad about Dragnet's Jack Webb, but Connie demurs: "He's a TV star, but I still prefer the old movie stars, you know, on the big silver screen. Man, that's what I look up to! Eh, TV, you know, everything was shrunk. Yeah, they started to shrink these movie stars!"

There are shades of Norma Desmond and her famous pronouncement: "I am big. It's the pictures that got small." Come to think of it, Norma was also against all that darned dialogue mucking up the movies. Too bad Conrad Brooks didn't show up at Norma's doorstep instead of William Holden. Things might have turned out differently.

Incidentally, in Greg's article from 2020, he says that Conrad discusses the unfinished Western Range Revenge (1948) in this documentary. But I've sat through this movie two or three times now, and I haven't caught any mention of that project. Connie talks about many, many, many topics in this documentary, but Range Revenge isn't one of them. Greg may have been thinking of the Cult Movies documentary Hellborn: The Aborted Masterpiece of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1993). In that documentary, Connie does talk about (and show) the test footage he and his brothers made with Ed Wood in 1948.

Conrad Talks Hollywood is not a great achievement in cinema, nor was it attempting to be one. Even calling it a movie is generous. This is really more of a souvenir in video form. It feels like a companion piece to the extremely slack documentary On the Trail of Ed Wood (1990), which was also built around some easygoing interviews with Connie Brooks. You may not learn a hell of a lot from this documentary, but if you want to know what it's like to take a long car trip with one of the stars of Plan 9 from Outer Space, this movie is your best bet. Watching it really does feel like hanging out with this guy for an afternoon.