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.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 273: 'Plan 69 from Outer Space' (1993)

This was director Frank Marino's other Ed Wood parody from the 1990s.

It is surprisingly easy to romanticize the adult film industry of the 1970s. This was the decade of "porno chic" when it briefly became fashionable, even respectable, for couples to attend X-rated movies. The stars of these productions, like Linda Lovelace, Harry Reems, and Marilyn Chambers, became household names. The movies themselves were shot on actual film, and directors like Gerard Damiano and Radley Metzger actually attempted to tell stories. This is the era eulogized in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights (1997), which ends just as the industry is pivoting to home video.

Podcast Tuesday: "Cyndiana Jones and the Temple of Goldblum"

Cyndi Lauper and Jeff Goldblum in Vibes.

Thanks to MTV, the music video became the format of choice in the 1980s. Rock stars were accustomed to recording albums, releasing singles, and performing concerts, but they were now expected to star in little four-minute movies as well. Some of them proved exceptionally good at it, and it's only natural that a few would try their luck at making full-length motion pictures. And so, photogenic MTV superstars like Madonna and Prince embarked upon movie careers with wildly mixed results. Occasional hits like Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) and Purple Rain (1984) were inevitably followed by flops like Shanghai Surprise (1986) and Under the Cherry Moon (1986).

New York-born songstress Cyndi Lauper was a little late to the party when she made her motion picture debut in the quirky supernatural comedy Vibes (1988) opposite Jeff Goldblum. It arrived in theaters a year after Madonna had suffered her second major flop with Who's That Girl (1987). If the American economy could not support Madonna's movie career, what chance did Cyndi have? Not much, as it turned out. Vibes bombed hard during a busy movie summer dominated by Cocktail (1988) and Die Hard (1988), and Cyndi Lauper mostly went back to singing with only occasional movie and TV roles.

Was this fair? As luck would have it, Vibes was written by two Happy Days veterans, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. That makes it a fitting topic for the latest installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast. Join us this week as we weigh in on both the film and Cyndi Lauper's viability as a movie star.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 272: The world's on fire so we might as well watch "Glen and Glenda' (1994)

What a difference a conjunction makes! This is not Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda.

"The eastern world, it is exploding." So what else is new? The eastern world was exploding before I got here, and it'll be exploding long after I'm gone. Look, folks, we may be hurtling toward World War III any day now. Or we may not. I just know that I get a sinking feeling whenever I make the mistake of checking the news. If Armageddon is just around the corner, we'd better have some fun now, huh?

Case in point: recently, reader Edward Fisher contacted me to ask if I were ever going to review the 1994 adult film Glen and Glenda, a direct parody of Ed Wood's debut feature Glen or Glenda (1953). He wrote: "It's an adult film that uses Ed's script almost word for word. Other than the sex scenes it's basically a remake." Normally, I might turn up my nose at something like this. A mid-1990s shot-on-video cheapie probably made in an afternoon or two by people I've never heard of? Not too appetizing. But I'm in a Tyler Durden-ish "let's burn it all down and start over from scratch" kind of mood lately. So what the heck? Let's watch this thing.

Edward kindly offered to lend me his DVD, but the movie itself was pretty easily located online. No, I'm not going to link to it. Do you know how much I already had to censor that header image up there to make it "acceptable" on this platform? Well, it was a bunch. We are living in the golden age of cyber-prudes. I can't take chances. You know how search engines work. Find it yourself. But be forewarned! The Chucky franchise has characters called Glen and Glenda, too, so you'll have to scroll through a lot of "killer doll" stuff before you get to the movie.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 271: How accurate is 'Ed Wood' (1994) [PART 4]

Young Eddie (Johnny Depp) carries a palm tree across the Universal backlot.

"He worked at Universal, and he never recovered."

That was the verdict of actor, raconteur, and noted fabulist John Andrews (1941-1991) on his friend and occasional employer, Edward D. Wood, Jr. The story is almost too perfect to be believed: Eddie grew up in Poughkeepsie, NY watching classic Universal productions like Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931) and then actually got to work for the studio when he moved to Hollywood as a young man. While there, he saw how Universal would provide whatever resources a director might need—like, say, piles of sand for an Abbott & Costello picture set in the desert. As a no-budget, no-frills independent filmmaker, Eddie often struggled to provide such niceties as sets and props for his own movies and would think back wistfully to his days at Universal.

I have never seen much evidence to document Ed Wood's time at Universal Studios. No time cards, paycheck stubs, contracts, employee IDs, or even photos of him on the backlot. In the documentary The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1996), actor Lyle Talbot recalls working with Eddie at Universal, but the film he mentions is Chinatown Squad (1935), which was made well before Eddie's time there. Lyle might be thinking of a completely different kid named Eddie. The only other remnants of Ed Wood's tenure at the studio are some vague anecdotes from Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy:The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992). I've compiled all the relevant quotes from that book I could find:

Podcast Tuesday: "The Young People of Today, Am I Right?"

Tom Bosley voices Harry Boyle (center), a harried suburban dad on Love, American Style.

There are two basic types of classic sitcom dads: the grouchy, cantankerous ones who yell at their kids and the calm, reasonable ones who say things like, "Gosh, I'm very disappointed in you." In the early days of TV, most sitcoms had the second type. Witness such series as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952-1966), Leave it to Beaver (1957-1963), My Three Sons (1960-1972), and Father Knows Best (1954-1960), all of which had even-tempered patriarchs. Danny Thomas started to change that with Make Room for Daddy (1953-1964), and by the 1970s, we were finally ready for Archie Bunker (Carroll O'Connor) on All in the Family (1971-1979).

Meanwhile, over in the world of animation, Hanna-Barbera shows like The Flintstones (1960-1966) and The Jetsons (1962-1963). were allowed to have agitated, grousing husbands and fathers. You could say that Fred Flintstone and George Jetson made the world safe for Harry Boyle, an overworked, overstressed suburbanite voiced by Tom Bosley on Hanna-Barbera's syndicated series, Wait Till Your Father Gets Home (1972-1974).

As it happens, the pilot episode for Wait aired as a segment on ABC's comedy anthology Love, American Style (1969-1974). Yes, this was the same place where the Happy Days pilot had aired back in 1971! This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, my cohost and I give our opinions on that pilot. Click below to hear our take on "Love and the Old-Fashioned Father."

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 270: The Ed Wood/Chuck Berry double feature of 1959! [PART 2]

Two 1950s icons: Chuck Berry and Vampira!

Last week, we talked about how Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) was teamed up with Paul Landres' Go, Johnny, Go! (1959) for a popular, widely-seen double feature that played at dozens of theaters and drive-ins, including numerous bookings in Texas, Florida, Ohio, Delaware, and Connecticut, among many other places. This was how thousands of American teenagers (and a few Canadian ones) saw Eddie's most famous film for the first time, and it must have made a major impression on at least some of them. Who knows? Maybe some future filmmaker attended one of these screenings and thought, "I could do that."

Hal Roach.

As I said, it was likely Plan 9 investor Ed Reynolds who sold the film to a New York company called Distributors Corporation of America circa 1958. That company retitled the film (it had originally been Grave Robbers from Outer Space) and created a vigorous marketing campaign for it, including an iconic if somewhat misleading poster designed by artist Tom Jung. To this day, most prints of the movie still begin with the DCA logo. While none of this was financially advantageous to Ed Wood, at least the movie he considered his pride and joy was getting in front of audiences.

While it was a natural to pair a sci-fi movie with a rock & roll movie, since both genres had such strong teenage appeal in the 1950s, the real connection between Plan 9 and Johnny might have been legendary producer Hal Roach (1892-1992), best known for his work with Laurel & Hardy, Harold Lloyd, and the Our Gang series. Roach's name turns up periodically in the Ed Wood story as well. Eddie, for instance, remembered meeting comic actor Franklin Pangborn at Hal Roach's studio. And Heather Tanchuck, daughter of screenwriter Nathaniel Tanchuck, had a vague memory of Eddie himself working for Roach. (Considering the Pangborn story, she might've been right!)

Hal Roach bought DCA in 1958, right around the time the company purchased Grave Robbers from Outer Space from Ed Reynolds. In Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992), actor Gregory Walcott suggests that it was Roach who brokered the sale. And Hal's son, Hal Roach, Jr. (1918-1972), was one of the producers of Go, Johnny, Go! In his self-titled 1987 autobiography, Chuck Berry recalled spending "five days in Culver City, California, working at the Hal Roach Studio" making Go, Johnny, Go! and being impressed by "all the big movie cameras and technical equipment." The two films also shared a marketing firm, Ben Adler Advertising Services. Adler employee Tom Jung designed the poster for Johnny as well.

Ed Wood Extra! An interview with Andrew J. Chambers, director of 'Orgy of the Dead 2'

It's finally time to go back to the cemetery.

Director Stephen C. Apostolof and screenwriter Edward D. Wood, Jr. never got to do a proper sequel to their infamous 1965 nudie cutie Orgy of the Dead, which tells the story of a square couple (Pat Barrington and William Bates) who survive a car crash but end up witnessing a strange occult ritual presided over by a mysterious robed Emperor (Criswell) in an abandoned California cemetery. The film remains Apostolof's best-known by far, and he did plan to do a follow-up in his later years, but the project never came to fruition. He died in 2005, seemingly putting the final nail in the sequel's coffin.

A long-delayed sequel.

Well, thanks in part to an Indiegogo campaign, maverick filmmaker Andrew J. Chambers has changed that. His raunchy, scatological comedy Orgy of the Dead 2 is now available on Blu-ray and can be streamed on YouTube and Google Play. With its gore, gross-out jokes, and topical references, this bizarre film differs markedly from the now-quaint original. And yet, it carries the official seal of approval of Steve Apostolof's youngest son, Chris! When I saw this movie, I realized that I needed to know more, so I reached out to Mr. Chambers, who happily consented to the following Q&A.

What initially made you want to write and direct a sequel to Orgy of the Dead (as opposed to any other movie in the history of movies)?

Other than it being a perfect fit for my style? I really saw a lot of potential for improvement. I loved the idea of the original, but being from a different time, I found it boring throughout most of the film. In the '60s you didn’t need much other than dancing naked ladies to capture the attention of the audience because that’s what nudie cities were for. Now that everyone is desensitized, it needs a little more. Some other writers and directors might think it needed a good story line and better acting. Not me. I think it needed comedy and gore.

Steve Apostolof wrote his own sequel script for Orgy of the Dead. Did you take any ideas from that or was the script totally yours?

I actually haven’t read Steve's script. Chris wanted a script before he agreed to a sequel deal, so I wrote exactly what was floating around in my brain in the months leading up to our first chat. He offered to let me read it after my script was finished to see if I wanted to pull anything from it, but ultimately we decided it was best to have something completely fresh. He did tell me it was written as a comedy, though.