Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 282: 'Edward D. Wood, Jr.: A Man and His Films' (1981) [PART 1]

A remarkable fan creation from the early 1980s.

We may think we want to travel back in time, but we probably wouldn't like the past very much once we got there. For one thing, we're so reliant on modern-day technology that it would be incredibly frustrating to be without it for any extended length of time. I can remember how cumbersome research used to be when I was in school. To write just one term paper on the Old English poet Cynewulf, for example, I had to check out a whole stack of books from the college library. Today, all that precious Cynewulf knowledge would be at my fingertips whenever I wanted it.

This entire series of articles about Edward Davis Wood, Jr. (1924-1978) would not be remotely possible without the internet and the ability to access decades of video, audio, and text instantly. I marvel at the work of writers who did their research during the low-tech, pre-internet days. How did they do it? More than a decade before Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992), a couple of dedicated Wood fans in California named Randy Simon and Harold Benjamin assembled and self-published a chapbook about their favorite director called Edward D. Wood, Jr.: A Man and His Films (1981). Though crude by today's standards—the pictures are xeroxed, the text is typewritten—it remains a priceless souvenir of early '80s fan culture and a remarkable example of Wood scholarship.

This 32-page guidebook to Ed Wood's film career declares itself "a publication of The Edward D. Wood Jr. Film Appreciation Society." So what the hell is that? Did the EDWJFAS do anything else besides this? Well, maybe. In an article from the September 8, 1981 issue of The Soho News, film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum mentions the EDWJFAS in his dual review of Ferdinando Baldi's 3D Western Comin' at Ya! (1981) and Gus Trikonis' rowdy comedy Take This Job and Shove It (1981). He says that the organization has formed "recently" and "produced a marathon screening and monograph." The writer suggests that audiences are sick of middlebrow mainstream fare such as Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and are taking solace in pure trash. Rosenbaum is in favor of this.

Vintage software by Randy Simon.

The authors of A Man and His Films have vanished into the ether. Their trail has grown ice cold. It is possible that the Randy Simon who co-wrote this booklet is the same UCLA student who, in the early 1980s, developed a strange bit of software called Abuse. Its sole function was to hurl insults at the user. This software generated a handful of newspaper articles in 1981 and 1982 and seems like the kind of zany nonsense an Ed Wood fanatic might indulge in. 

As for Harold Benjamin, I can find literally nothing. His very existence remains conjectural. My guess is that, much like Ed Wood (1994) screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, Randy and Harold were college students who bonded over their mutual interest in Ed Wood and B-movies and began collaborating on various projects. Scott and Larry turned it into a career; Harold and Randy moved on.

We do have one more clue, however, about the source of this mysterious guidebook. The EDWJFAS has an address: 2265 Westwood Blvd., Suite B, Los Angeles, California 90064. This is a two-story, multi-occupant office building in a typical L.A. commercial district. Today, this area is home to various nail salons, massage parlors, restaurants, and clothing stores. At the time of A Man and His Films, this exact address was the headquarters of Stop-For-Life., a smoking-cessation business. In their ads, which ran frequently in Los Angeles papers in the early '80s, they promise to have you off cigarettes in a week. So if you wanted to learn about Ed Wood and kick a bad nicotine habit all in one trip, you could do it. Theoretically.

But what does A Man and His Films actually contain? Well, it begins with an acknowledgements page in which the authors give thanks to Harry Medved, coauthor of The Golden Turkey Awards (1980), plus many of the interview subjects from Nightmare of Ecstasy: Conrad Brooks, Paul Marco, Buddy Hyde, Charles Anderson, Phil Cambridge, and Ed Wood's mother, Lillian. Simon and Benjamin also thank the UCLA Theater Arts Library, which further suggests that the authors of this booklet were students there. On the table of contents page that follows, the entire booklet is dedicated to Kathy Wood.

The main portion of the book begins with a three-page biography of Ed Wood, accompanied by that same 1940s acting headshot we've seen so many times, the one that makes the young, mustachioed Eddie look like Errol Flynn (1909-1959). The text identifies Eddie as the "second son" of Ed and Lillian Wood, when he was actually the older of the two Wood brothers. The events of Wood's early life are pieced together from the memories of those who knew him. But Eddie was a fabulist and fabricator, so some of what they were told wasn't true. 

Did Eddie really direct a play about the Marines when he was in high school? Maybe. Did he move to Philadelphia immediately following high school? No. Did he enlist in the Marines when America entered World War II? Yes. Did he see action on Tarawa? No. Was he injured in Guam? No. Did he leave the service in 1946? Yes. Did he return to Philadelphia and/or join a traveling carnival? Possibly, but this has not been documented. Did he move to California in the late 1940s? Most assuredly. Once in California, did he stage a production of his play, The Casual Company? Yes. (Bonus points to the authors for correctly identifying Casual as a comedy and not a war drama.)

The narrative becomes more accurate as it moves on to Eddie's film career. A Man and His Films is to be commended for describing two of Eddie's early, aborted Westerns from 1948: Crossroads of Laredo (referred to here as The Streets of Laredo) and the unfinished Conrad Brooks vehicle we now call Range Revenge. This is followed by an accurate-enough account of the production of Glen or Glenda (1953), Ed Wood's own cross-dressing, and Eddie's personal and professional relationship with aging Hungarian horror star Bela Lugosi (1882-1956). The biography mentions that Bela relied on a "noxious" medication called paraldehyde to manage his other addictions. Somehow, this detail mutated into an absurd urban legend that Bela consumed formaldehyde. Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994) includes this colorful canard; A Man and His Films does not.

The biography states that Ed Wood had a number of potential scripts for Lugosi, two of which (The Vampire's Tomb and The Ghoul Goes West) went unproduced and two more of which (Final Curtain [1957] and Revenge of the Dead [1959]) were filmed without Lugosi. According to the authors, the footage of Lugosi that Ed Wood used in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) was apparently intended for The Vampire's Tomb. I'd agree with all of that.

The next section of the biography details Ed Wood's stock company of actors, a mixture of "veterans," "friends," and "unknown performers." Mentioned here are Lyle Talbot, Criswell, Tom Keene, Kenne Duncan, and Bud Osborne. Not mentioned: Conrad Brooks, Paul Marco, Tor Johnson, and Don Nagel. The biography also states that Wood married two of his actresses, Dolores Fuller and Norma McCarty, before finally settling down with his third and final bride, Kathy Wood. In truth, as we know, Eddie and Dolores were never actually married. As for the speculation that Ed Wood fathered a daughter, this has never been proven or disproven to my satisfaction, so I will not comment on it.

We now get into the speculative or interpretive section of the biography. Simon and Benjamin praise Ed Wood for his "enthusiasm and optimism," plus his determination to get his films made against all odds. At the same time, however, the authors say Ed's films are undermined by their low budgets, excessive dialogue, and static camerawork. Perhaps the problem was Ed Wood's own ego or stubbornness, his insistence on doing too much with too little skill or talent. But these very flaws are what make Ed's movies distinctive and memorable. 

Simon and Benjamin say that Wood's real talent was in promoting his extremely low-budget films and in getting people involved in them—sometimes as investors, sometimes as participants, sometimes as both. Again, the authors praise Eddie for his "charm, enthusiasm, [and] intelligence" but say his lack of talent kept him from becoming "a major force in the film business." A Man and His Films also acknowledges that Eddie was known to stretch the truth occasionally in the interest of telling a good story. It was Eddie, for instance, who started the false story that Bela Lugosi mispronounced "gentle as a kitten" as "gentle as a kitchen" in Bride of the Monster (1954). The authors also suspect (correctly) that Eddie's oft-told tale of wearing women's underwear beneath his Marine uniform was untrue. 

The authors then describe, with admirable fealty to the facts, how Wood's career evolved over the years. After Revenge of the Dead, which was "made in 1959" but "never released"—the film's long-delayed home video release hadn't happened yet—Eddie completed just one more feature, The Sinister Urge (1960). He scripted films for other directors, too, including Orgy of the Dead (1965), The Violent Years (1956), and Shotgun Wedding (1963). We now know that Eddie directed at least three more features in the early 1970s, but these films (all of them pornographic) were not widely documented in the early 1980s.

What's really interesting is that A Man and His Films includes some of Eddie's other film work from the 1960s. They say he worked on "industrial films," which must allude to the short instructional movies he made for Autonetics in the early 1960s. But the authors also refer to "a city-sponsored documentary on Hollywood." This, I must admit, is news to me. I would very much like to know more. They also say he worked on "campaign literature" for LA. mayor Sam Yorty. While I was familiar with the connection between Wood and Yorty, I'd genuinely like to see something that Eddie is known to have written for Sam.

At the time this booklet was produced, Ed Wood's numerous adult paperbacks of the 1960s and '70s were not nearly so well-researched as they are today. But the authors of A Man and His Films have their facts pretty much correct here, too. They know Eddie wrote under numerous pen names, including Dick Trent, and that he was an extremely fast author capable of producing book after book in a very short amount of time. (I'm not sure if he could actually write an entire novel in a day, as they claim, but he was quick.) Although they seem not to know the title Lugosi: Post Mortem, they do know that Eddie was working on a biography of Bela Lugosi in his final years. They're even aware that the never-completed project was supposed to be underwritten by an independent record label.

Every Ed Wood fan knows how the director's story ended: alcoholism, poverty, eviction, and early death in the home of a friend on December 10, 1978. A Man and His Films relates all of that without much fanfare. Once again, Simon and Benjamin have some good details here, including the fact that Eddie was cremated and that there was a football game playing on TV when he died. Having related all this information, Simon and Benjamin reach their conclusion:

With the popularity of "Golden Turkey" Festivals and other "Worst Film" activities, Edward Wood has come to the public's attention. Details of his transvestite habits, awards for "Worst Director," and so on, have brought much attention and, usually, ridicule. The sad thing is that even this kind of attention would have pleased Wood. According to his friends, if wood had been cornered by one of today's bad film fans, he would have bellowed: 

"Well, Goddamn it, at least I did it! What have you done?" 

And such should be the epitaph of Edward D. Wood, Jr.: He got it on film.

Well said! There is still a great deal to discuss in Edward D. Wood, Jr.: A Man and His Films, so let's meet up again in a week and talk about the rest of this highly unusual chapbook.