Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 264: How accurate is 'Ed Wood' (1994) [PART 1]

Jeffrey Jones in Ed Wood. Inset: Criswell in Night of the Ghouls.

Ed Wood Wednesdays is, by far, the longest-running series in the history of this blog. It may be the most significant project of my entire life. I started it nearly 13 years ago, and it's nowhere near completion. But within that one big project, there have been a lot of smaller sub-projects, like my reviews of every story in Blood Splatters Quickly (2014) and my 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar. These have been some of the most enjoyable articles for me to write, so I'm always on the lookout for the next possible series-within-a-series. And now I think I've found it.

What I plan to do for the next however many weeks is go through Tim Burton's glossy biopic Ed Wood (1994) scene by scene and discuss how accurate—or inaccurate—it is, compared to the real life and career of Edward Davis Wood, Jr. (1924-1978). Before you get upset, please know that I am doing this purely as a tribute to the movie. I am not trying to criticize director Tim Burton or writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski for taking liberties with the facts. I'm completely fine with them taking liberties with the facts, and I love Ed Wood just the way it is. But this series will (hopefully) allow me to talk about numerous aspects of Eddie's real life and work in an entertaining way.

Oh, and I fully expect to be corrected and nitpicked along the way by you, the readers. If you feel I've made a misstatement, let me know and I'll update the article. Anyway, let's get started.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 263: Victor Crowley himself

"Screw you, Miss Crowley."

Early in Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994), Ed (Johnny Depp) and his loyal repertory players gather at a cozy L.A. cocktail bar called Boardner's after staging a performance of Eddie's achingly earnest World War II play, The Casual Company, at a small theater in Hollywood. Even though it's raining and the press didn't actually show up for "press night," their spirits are nonetheless high. Ed even tells eager beaver actor Paul Marco (Max Casella): "Paul, your second act monologue actually gave me the chills."

A review from Miss Crowley.

Then, actor Conrad Brooks (Brent Hinkley) bounds in with a copy of The Los Angeles Register and says he has "the early edition, hot off the presses." He hands the paper to Ed Wood. As the smiling actors crowd around him, Eddie eagerly flips to a newly-published review of The Casual Company by theatrical critic Victor Crowley. But the mood soon sours as they read the article, which Burton shows us in a closeup. Here is what Mr. Crowley has to say about their efforts:

World War II, a time for brave men with "guts," forms the backdrop for "The Casual Company," which opened last night in Hollywood. Let me tell you this is definitely a play about "guts." It certainly took "guts" to stage this disappointment. Penned by one Edward D. Wood, Jr., who also has the "guts" to take credit for directing this foxhole piece, "The Casual Company" takes place on a bare stage with only rudimentary lighting. Fortunately, the soldiers' costumes are very realistic.

The actors, once boisterous, now fall silent. Bunny Breckinridge (Bill Murray) is the first to speak: "Oh, what does that old queen know? She didn't even show. Sent her copy boy to do the dirty work." Meanwhile, poor Paul is trying to figure out what "ostentatious" means, while Dolores Fuller (Sarah Jessica Parker) wonders aloud: "Do I really have a face like a horse?" 

But Eddie, the eternal optimist, zeroes in on the one compliment: "The soldiers' costumes are very realistic." Later in the movie, he'll bring this up when he interviews for a directing job with producer George Weiss (Mike Starr): "I just did a play in Hollywood, and Victor Crowley himself praised its realism!" Eddie also says that good reviews are not necessary for showbiz success and points to "the latest Francis the mule picture" as an example.

Podcast Tuesday: "Garry Marshall Drops the Ball"

Zac Efron and Michelle Pfeiffer in New Year's Eve (2011).

A vintage matchbook.

Are you a New Year's Eve person? Does that holiday mean anything to you? I can't say that December 31 holds too many special memories for me, fond or otherwise. For the last few decades—not just years, but decades—I have stayed home on the last day of the year and only intermittently glanced up at the countdown festivities on TV. So a movie like Garry Marshall's New Year's Eve (2011), in which a bunch of celebrities celebrate the titular holiday in various wacky ways, does not have a lot of intrinsic appeal for me. File it alongside Rudolph's Shiny New Year (1976). Nice try, but I'm not terribly interested.

However, if I rummage through my own storehouse of memories in search of ones related specifically to New Year's Eve, I can zero in on a now long-gone restaurant called The Greenery in Clio, Michigan. A classy place, the kind you might take your grandparents for an evening out. The food there was pretty bland, and my family definitely didn't go there on a regular basis. But, for whatever reason, my parents took us to The Greenery every New Year's Eve for years. The place's best feature was an extremely generous and varied dessert bar. That was definitely the highlight of December 31 for me. (The lowlight was the drive home, since there always seemed to be a winter storm raging that night.) Other than that, I can't say I'm for or against this particular holiday.

Nevertheless, in this week's edition of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we are tackling the aforementioned New Year's Eve movie from 2011. As with Valentine's Day (2010), Garry Marshall assembled a boatload of TV stars, movie stars, and pop stars and put them in little, interconnected vignettes, all happening on one special day. If you've ever wanted to see Jon Bon Jovi, Halle Berry, Hilary Swank, Robert De Niro, and Ludacris in one movie.... well, here's your chance. Our review is included below. Do me a favor and listen to it. Thanks.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 262: B-Movie Maniacs (2014- )

Some of the Ed Wood movies featured on B-Movie Maniacs.

It's tempting to say that social media has been nothing but a blight upon the human race. And it's not difficult to find evidence to support that argument. People tend to revert to their worst selves online, and social media platforms allow us to spread gossip, hatred, and misinformation at an alarming rate. Meanwhile, thanks to Instagram and TikTok, we're chasing after material possessions we don't need and body types we can't attain. Even when we're not attacking our neighbors or draining our bank accounts, we're rotting our brains by doomscrolling through photos and videos for hours on end.

No doubt about it, social media has done some terrible things to us as a species. It may even be the invention that ultimately dooms the human race, accomplishing what nuclear bombs, automobiles, and cigarettes couldn't do. It could be deadlier even than Solaronite. I'm definitely part of the problem. I mean, just look at the sidebar on this blog (it's that column of text on the right side of the screen). You'll see that I have accounts on over a dozen different platforms. I'm as addicted to this junk as you are. Maybe more.

To be clear, I'm no fan of Mark Zuckerberg or what he has created. For me, Faceboook is mostly a nuisance, a place where my old high school classmates post their alarming political views and brag about how well their lives are going. Yuck. But Facebook also has an active Ed Wood fan community, and that has played a major role in the history of this series. Social media has allowed Woodologists to get in touch with me and share information, photos, articles, and more. Without those fans, I might have been tempted to ditch FB and many other platforms years ago. (So, yes, you guys are enabling my addiction.)

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 261: More about 'The Sun Was Setting' (1951) and other things

A typical New York sunset, as (not) seen in The Sun Was Setting.

When I started writing this series of articles back in July 2013, my plan was to blitz through Ed Wood's filmography in just a couple of months. And so, I covered a great deal of territory in each article. In the very first week alone, I briefly covered Ed Wood's youth in Poughkeepsie and reviewed Crossroads of Laredo (1948), The Sun Was Setting (1951), Crossroad Avenger (1953), and even Eddie's failed attempts at making TV commercials in the late 1940s. That's absolutely nuts. Nowadays, each one of those topics would get its own individual article, perhaps more than one.

Cut to January 2026. I'm now giving greater attention to these and other topics related to Ed Wood. Last week, for example, I did a deep-dive into Ed's 15-minute made-for-TV melodrama The Sun Was Setting. This strange story, centering around a terminally-ill New York woman (Angela Stevens) who cannot leave her apartment, was the one and only production of a short-lived company called W.D.B.C. Films that Eddie formed with his pal Don Davis and two other men, Milton Bowron and Joe Carter. Bowron and Carter were Los Angeles real estate salesmen who never dabbled in show business again. (I'm guessing it was a "fool me once..." situation.)

Podcast Tuesday: "Jennifers, Julias & Jessicas"

"Starring everybody and me!"

"Hyperlink cinema."

 It's a term I'd either forgotten or had never heard until recently. Either way, it refers to those movies that are sort of like anthologies but not quite. "Hyperlink" films tell multiple, basically self-contained stories, but the characters in those different stories know each other and occasionally interact. Some characters even take part in more than one story per movie. Think of Pulp Fiction (1994), Magnolia (1999), Nashville (1975), Crash (2004), and many more. In Pulp Fiction, for example, there are three different stories ("The Bonnie Situation," "The Gold Watch," and "Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife"), and John Travolta's heroin-shooting hitman is a factor in all three of them.

Toward the end of his career, director Garry Marshall (1934-2016) got way into hyperlink cinema. He made three of these movies back-to-back, the first being Valentine's Day (2010). The setup is very simple: it's Valentine's Day in Los Angeles, and we follow the romantic ups-and-downs of various characters, all played by major movie stars. It's actually kind of mind-boggling how many Oscar winners there are in this one, extremely slight romcom.

But does "slight" equal worthless? That's what we aim to find out in this week's edition of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 260: The lingering mysteries of 'The Sun Was Setting' (1951)

Angela Stevens swoons in the arms of Tom Keene aka Richard Powers.

History can play some funny tricks on us. Circa 1947, for example, a twentysomething ex-Marine named Ed Wood migrated from Poughkeepsie to Hollywood with dreams of becoming part of the motion picture industry. But that was just when an upstart called television was becoming a serious threat to the movies. 

The earliest scheduled TV shows, including such mainstays as The Texaco Star Theatre (1948-1956), The Lone Ranger (1949-1957) and The Ed Sullivan Show (aka Toast of the Town) (1948-1971), all came into existence during this time. I Love Lucy, another game changer, debuted in 1951. Clearly, it was a time of upheaval in the entertainment industry.

An unsold pilot.

And so, Ed Wood's early resume is littered with attempts to break into television, almost entirely without success. Many of his hopes were pinned on his friendship with Tom Keene (real name: George Duryea) (1896-1963), a handsome if somewhat bland New York actor who had been a prolific B-Western star in the 1930s and '40s. In the 1950s, television was overrun with cowboy shows, and Keene guested on several of them, including Judge Roy Bean, Hopalong Cassidy, and Corky and White Shadow. 

Given Tom Keene's name recognition and past success, Eddie thought a weekly Keene series was a slam dunk, so he kept making pilots starring the actor such as Crossroad Avenger (1953) and The Showdown (1952), all of which went unsold. Some of these did see the light of day, though, on anthology shows like Cowboy Theater that served as dumping grounds for orphaned pilots. In those days, there wasn't a lot of content to go around, and TV stations had to fill the hours with something.

Around this same time, Keene and Wood were involved a very different sort of TV production, one that had nothing to do with cowboys, Indians, or the range. The Sun Was Setting (1951) must be considered one of the true oddities in the Ed Wood filmography: a soapy 15-minute melodrama about a terminally-ill woman named June (Angela Stevens) who cannot risk leaving her New York apartment, though she desperately wants to. Keene, billed as "Richard Powers," costars as Paul, June's loving but understandably nervous boyfriend. And Phyllis Coates, just a year away from playing Lois Lane on the first season of The Adventures of Superman, rounds out the cast as June's supportive friend, Rene.

What makes The Sun Was Setting so unusual is that it is a straight drama, something Eddie rarely if ever attempted in his career. He made horror films, sci-fi films, Westerns, crime thrillers, and countless adult movies over the course of 30 years in show business, but The Sun stands apart from everything else on his resume. One wonders, then, why Eddie made this little movie. What were his hopes for it? Where did he think it would lead?

One Song at a Time: Remembering a (failed) series on this blog

They can't all be winners, as this series proved.

When this blog started in 2009, it was a spinoff of a podcast called Mail Order Zombie to which I regularly contributed material. As such, for the first few years, Dead 2 Rights was mostly about zombie movies and zombies in general. In fact, I even wrote the blog in character, using my "living impaired" alias from the show. But MOZ went dark in 2013, and I'd already been experimenting with non-zombie material a little by then. Once the podcast was kaput, I decided to ditch the pseudonym altogether and write about whatever interested me.

And what was that exactly? Well, the Ed Wood Wednesdays series started in 2013 and is still going in 2026. For some people, that's all this blog is. Which is fair: there's a lot of Ed Wood stuff on here. Like it or not, there's been a lot of Happy Days stuff on this blog, too. So I'm not just the Ed Wood guy. I'm the Ed Wood and Happy Days guy. I'm fine with that. 

But there's other stuff on Dead 2 Rights, too. I've tried many different approaches over the years, hoping something will break through. Nothing really has. I regret that I dropped the Comedy Classics articles. It's just that they were a lot of work for very little response. I still owe you guys 22 more of them in addition to the 78 I already did. (Maybe someday.) Comics and cartoons have long been a part of this blog, too, but those are more for me than they are for you.

One of my biggest disappointments was a series called One Song at a Time. The premise was pretty simple. Rather than talk about whole albums or genres of music, I'd concentrate on individual songs that meant something to me. I'd relate a little about the history of the song and add a personal story from my own life related to that song. I really thought this series had a chance of connecting with readers, but it apparently didn't. The series lasted from June 2014 to October 2015, then disappeared without a trace. C'est la vie.

The thing is, I've occasionally thought of reviving One Song at a Time, namely because there are a couple of music-related articles that have done fairly well by the standards of this blog. One is about the 1950s duo Patience & Prudence. Another is about the song "Be My Baby." Those still get views every week. In retrospect, the "Be My Baby" article served as the pilot for One Song at a Time.

Anyway, if you're just here for Ed Wood stuff, none of this may interest you. But if you want to know your humble blogger a little better, check out One Song at a Time.