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.

Podcast Tuesday: "Sixty-Three Years Cool"

You're never too old to be cool. Or are you?

             

On Happy Days, Arthur "The Fonz" Fonzarelli (Henry Winkler) stubbornly clung to the music and fashions of the 1950s, well into the 1960s. The sitcom takes place over about a decade, but Fonzie is often hesitant to update his style to match the times. There are a couple of episodes of the show that deal with this, namely "Who Gives a Hootenanny?" from Season 10 and "The Spirit is Willing" from Season 11. In the former, Fonzie learns to cope with the fact that folk music is replacing good old-fashioned rock & roll; in the latter, he has a terrifying vision of what could happen to him if he doesn't stop living in the past.

Presumably, Fonzie had to deal with the social and cultural upheaval of the 1960s, '70s, and beyond. Even during the 11 seasons of Happy Days, he undergoes massive personal changes. At the beginning of the sitcom, his life revolves around motorcycles and "chicks," and he's only a few years (months?) removed from being a gang member and getting into rumbles in the back alleys of Milwaukee. By the end of the show, he is a professional educator, a local business owner, and an adoptive father. And he doesn't get into fights anymore. At least not as much.

But suppose our favorite mechanic had refused to change. Ever. Suppose he kept being the same juvenile delinquent punk he'd been in the 1950s because those were the greatest years of his life. In 2001, radio host Tom Scharpling and musician Jon Wurster gave us a worst-case scenario of how this might play out when they performed their legendary sketch "The Gorch" on The Best Show on WFMU. In this segment, Scharpling warily interviews a 63-year-old man from York, PA named Roland "The Gorch" Gorchnick (played by Wurster), who claims to be the real-life inspiration for Fonzie. Over the course of a half hour, this combative gentleman reveals himself to be a pathologically violent, antisocial human being.

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we finally get around to talking about "The Gorch." This is an episode I've wanted to do for years. I really hope you enjoy it.

P.S. While editing this episode, I realized that The Gorch's memories are strikingly similar to those of American Splendor comics writer Harvey Pekar (1939-2010), who grew up on the mean streets of Cleveland in the 1950s. In one story, Pekar even names a thug who, like The Gorch, fought with chains! 

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 281: Johnny Legend remembers Tor Johnson (1982)

In 1982, Fangoria ran a heartfelt tribute to the departed Swedish wrestler.

Now that we have books about Bela Lugosi, Vampira, and Criswell, Tor Johnson (1903-1971) is arguably the most famous person in Ed Wood's acting stable not to have a biography on the market. Perhaps someday that will change. The Swedish-born wrestler, born Karl Erik Tore Johansson in Stockholm at the beginning of the previous century, is best-known to cult movie fans for his roles in three of Ed's most-seen movies: Bride of the Monster (1955), Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), and Night of the Ghouls (1959). But this was neither the beginning nor quite the end of the Swede's lengthy career.

Bob Hope (left) with Tor.

For the sake of the story, Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994) pretends that Eddie himself discovered Tor at a wrestling match in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s and cast the large, baldheaded man in his first-ever movie role. But, in truth, Johnson started getting film work in the 1930s shortly after he moved to America. His movie and (eventually) television career continued to the 1960s. We may associate Tor with low-budget sci-fi and horror movies—and he did several of those—but his filmography is surprisingly diverse, ranging from comedies to crime thrillers. He worked alongside such legends as Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Tony Curtis, Eddie Cantor, William Powell, Abbott & Costello and more!

With his shaved head, imposing physique, and heavy Swedish accent, Tor was an unmistakable presence onscreen. But his outsized, boisterous personality made him just as memorable offscreen. Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992) includes numerous, colorful anecdotes about the wrestler-turned-actor—the massive meals he ate, the toilet seats he broke, etc. He seems like a jovial, fun-loving guy. But there are some potentially upsetting details about Tor in the book as well, including a quote from actor Tony Cardoza who says that the wrestler hired the services of an underaged prostitute while touring India. In some interviews that Grey left on the cutting room floor, Plan 9 actress Mona McKinnon remembers Tor becoming intoxicated at a party and carrying her away against her will.

So who was this man? Until someone pens Super Swedish Angel: The Tor Johnson Story, what we have are various newspaper and magazine articles about Tor that have appeared over the years. A very intriguing example is "I Remember Tor," originally published in issue #22 of Fangoria from October 1982. In it, the late wrestling manager, musician, and film producer Johnny Legend (1948-2026) shares his memories of Tor, who had been deceased for over a decade but whose films were just then coming back into vogue thanks to The Golden Turkey Awards (1980).

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 173: The weird, wild works of Spenser & West (updated in 2026!)

Ed Wood wrote several books (for different publishers!) under the name "Spenser & West" in the late 1960s.

NOTE: I promised last week that I would complete my review of The Oralists (1969) today, but I unexpectedly received bonus information about some other, related Ed Wood books and decided that they deserved an article of their own. The second half of my Oralists review will appear on this blog next week instead. - J.B.

Last Wednesday, I published the first half of my review of The Oralists (1969), Ed Wood's truly depraved guide to oral sex and those who love it. Eddie wrote this book—and possibly a few others—under the pen name Spenser & West. Jean Spenser and Roger West are supposedly a married couple of sex researchers who write books together. It's all bunk, of course, but it theoretically makes the books seem somewhat more credible. (This isn't just smut. It's science.)

I'd always assumed these fictional sexologists, Jean and Roger, were inspired by William H. Masters (1915-2001) and Virginia E. Johnson (1925-2013), two famous real-life sex researchers who actually were married to each other for over 20 years. While M&J's pioneering book Human Sexual Response (1966) was already out on the market and very well-known to the public, including Ed Wood, William and Virginia didn't actually tie the knot until 1971. They divorced in 1993.

In The Oralists, Eddie refers to a previous Spenser & West book called Sexual Fantasia. I was initially unable to find any information about this book whatsoever and assumed Ed Wood just made it up to bolster the fictional resume of Spenser & West, but reader James Pontolillo corrected me on this issue. Like The Oralists, Sexual Fantasia was published by Tiger in 1969. James kindly provided pictures of the front and back covers.

The front and back covers of Sexual Fantasia.

According to James, Sexual Fantasia is quite rare. In fact, his copy might be one of the few left in the world. Naturally, since this book is a companion volume to The Oralists, I wanted to know if Ed Wood had also written it. Here's how James answered:

I've read through it once very breezily and I will say a provisional "Yes". But I really need to take it back out and go through it much more carefully before rendering a final verdict. It definitely has that "Late Wood" porn novel characteristic mixture of corny writing ("my forest is on fire, baby.... get that big hose out and go to work already") with disturbing content (example: very young-age pedophilia). I need to come up with a reasonable solution to scan the rare paperbacks I have in order to get them circulating to interested parties. Perhaps I'll drop some serious $$$ on this in a few years when I retire and will have the time to scan books.

That certainly sounds promising! 

James also helpfully sent me a copy of the table of contents page from Sexual Fantasia as well as the front cover of yet another Spenser & West book, The Prostitutes (1968). The page from Sexual Fantasia is especially interesting because it contains summaries of the book's seven chapters. It's obvious from the summary of Chapter Two that Sexual Fantasia revisits some of the same disturbing themes from The Oralists. The book doesn't appear to be limited to the topic of oral sex, however.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Ed Wood Summit Podcast vs. 'The Curse of Ed Wood' (2003)

The council of elders has reconvened to cover a most unusual movie from 2003.

Making a movie is hard, you guys. I mean, just so ridiculously goddamned hard. Merely getting the actors to show up when and where you told them is a chore in and of itself. And then you actually have to film them saying and doing stuff. It's a nightmare. Something can (and probably will) go wrong at any point in the moviemaking process—from preproduction to production to postproduction. Even after all that turmoil and strife, the fate of your film is in the hands of skeptical viewers, jeering critics, and a vast network of middlemen and sleazeballs.

No one knew these struggles better than writer-director Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1924-1978). From the late 1940s to the late 1970s, he struggled to get his ideas and his stories onto the big screen. Along the way, he faced any number of obstacles: a scarcity of money and resources, hostile and humiliating reviews, shaky or nonexistent distribution, his own out-of-control alcoholism, and (according to some) a total lack of aptitude. But despite all this, he managed to make some movies that have resonated with viewers for generations, including the immortal Glen or Glenda (1953) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). It's no wonder he's become a hero to low-budget, independent filmmakers everywhere.

Sometimes, those indie filmmakers pay tribute to Ed Wood through their own weird little movies. And that's how we get films like Tim Swartz's surreal softcore effort Barely Lethal Lebanese Vampires: The Curse of Ed Wood (2003). (I'm disguising the title somewhat in an effort to flummox the censors.) I was recently made aware of this totally-forgotten film thanks to an unexpected Google Alert. After watching five minutes of it, I decided I needed to get some other Woodologists involved. 

In short, it was time for a new episode of The Ed Wood Summit Podcast. The redoubtable James Pontolillo did some in-depth research into the history of this misbegotten film, including contacting its director. W. Paul Apel and Rob Huffman brought their own insights and ideas to the table. And I was there to add some moments of levity. Naturally, none of this would have been possible without the late, great Greg Javer, who created the podcast in the first place. You can watch the latest episode right here:

Podcast Tuesday: "The Most (To Say the Least)"

Donny Most just wants you to listen to some songs, okay?

"Strike while the iron is hot." 

That's the saying, right? You've gotta take advantage of opportunities, especially financial ones, when they come along. If you wait too long, they could disappear. As a wise man named Jerry Reed once said (or half-sang), "When you're hot, you're hot. And when you're not, you're not." But what does that mean if you're an actor on a top-rated TV sitcom? Sure, the iron is hot, but how exactly do you strike it? What do you strike it with? Do you try to get a movie deal? Endorse a chain of frozen yogurt places? Start a chain of frozen yogurt places?

These were the questions facing Donny Most in 1976. A showbiz lifer who'd been performing since childhood, he was suddenly mega-famous due to his portrayal of jokester Ralph Malph on Happy Days. This was as hot as the iron was ever going to get, and Donny struck it. Specifically, he signed a deal with United Artists and recorded a mix of golden oldies and relatively recent tracks for the label. The resulting LP, cleverly titled Donny Most, was not exactly a chartbuster in its day but gained something of a following among Happy Days fans and was even reissued on CD some years ago. 

But is the darned thing even listenable to modern ears? That's what my cohost and I try to find out this week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast. We were both familiar with one track, the boldly-titled "Rock is Dead," but what about the other nine? I hope you will accompany us on this strange musical journey.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Paperback Odyssey, Part Five by Greg Dziawer

The elusive T.K. Peters, sometimes misidentified as Ed Wood.

Encyclopedia of Sex ad

As I prepared to write this week's Ed Wood Wednesdays article, I decided to do a quick search of eBay, to see if the old myth of Dr. T.K. Peters being a pseudonym of Ed Wood still persists. You guessed it (merely one example, sadly). Apart from inflating prices, it continues to muddy the waters of Woodology, this muddying now its own niche within the larger spectrum. Dr. T.K. Peters was real, and we'll refute some counter-claims that his esteemed name was "borrowed" from the real "Kim" in future Ed Wood Wednesdays.

In the past, Pendulum Publishers, Inc. and its myriad offshoot imprints (covered ad nauseam in previous posts) published two series of photo-illustrated sexual paperbacks in the early 1970s, sourced from the comprehensive sexual study by Dr. T.K. Peters that he sold to Pendulum boss Bernie Bloom (itself rooted in his work as a marriage counselor in Atlanta from 1950 through 1965, following his retirement from Oglethorpe University...but that's another story that WILL be told). 

Fully three-fourths of the Peters' titles constituted SECS Press' (an unincorporated Pendulum imprint) Encyclopedia of Sex, the rest being the Sexual Enlightenment Series published under the Calga imprint, unleashed just on the cusp of legal, accessible and affordable hardcore sexual imagery via multi-media. For some alchemical reason, the censorship damn bursting encouraged a propensity toward the weird, the extreme and the just plain fucking nuts. In all, between Ed's own resume and an additional few titles in his collection with title-page inscriptions by him, Ed wrote or co-wrote roughly 25% of the Peters paperbacks. That index, too, is another story. Suffice to say that Ed's cohort on West Pico in the Pendulum mag office played a large role in the Pendulum Peters canon. Ed collaborated with fellow staffers Charles D. Anderson and Leo Eaton. William D. "Bill" Jones produced Peters, and so did Robin "Redbreast" Eagle. They did this under a slew of pseudonyms, one of them, Norman Bates, still falsely claimed a pseudonym of Ed. It's impossible to talk about T.K. Peters without running into these clumsy mis-Ed-tributions. That's a charitable statement and I'll leave it at that.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 87: "What Would We Have Done Without Them?" (1975)

This week, Eddie takes us back into nudie movie history.

A coin-operated peep show.

Edward D. Wood, Jr. is, for better or worse, still known primarily as a filmmaker rather than a writer. Even though Eddie's books and articles represent a vast and colorful body of work, rich in themes and ripe for rediscovery, most documentaries about the man make only passing references to his writing career. A typical doc might show a couple of paperback covers from the 1960s before going back to talking about Ed's movies. Cue the umpteenth clip of model flying saucers dangling on the ends of strings.

If people haven't read Nightmare of Ecstasy or Muddled Mind, they may have no idea that Ed Wood was a writer at all, other than his screenplays. Part of the problem has been availability. Due to rights issues, only a few of Ed's dozens of novels (Killer in Drag, Devil Girls, Death of a Transvestite) are readily available on sites like Amazon today. The rest are expensive collectors' items. In recent years, the anthologies Blood Splatters Quickly and Angora Fever have made nearly a hundred of Eddie's short stories easily accessible to his fans. But this represents merely a tiny fraction of Wood's written output

And Ed Wood's nonfiction remains even less known than his fiction, if that's possible. While Eddie's short stories and novels have been somewhat neglected over the years, his fact-based articles and books, nearly all of them sexual or sex-adjacent in nature, have been basically abandoned. Almost no one writes about this material, voluminous though it is. So, today, I thought I'd shed some light on one of Eddie's lesser-known nonfiction works from later in his career.

The story: "What Would We Have Done Without Them?" Originally published in Body & Soul, vol. 8, no. 1, May/June 1975. Anthologized in Short Wood: Short Fiction by Edward D. Wood, Jr. (Ramble House, 2009).

A "camp" classic.

Synopsis: Though the porno film may seem like a relatively recent phenomenon, it's actually part of a heritage that goes back to the earliest days of filmed entertainment. In the old days, there were arcades with hand-cranked machines that allowed the viewer to flip through photographs. Then there were primitive "peep shows" that displayed brief filmed striptease routines. Eventually these shows evolved, adding color and full nudity. Many of these shows focused on nudist camps, since that setting allowed filmmakers to present nudity in a non-sexual way. Eventually, the appeal of these nudist films wore off, and the coin-operated machines weren't profitable enough for film producers or arcade owners.

The next step was projecting these films onto a big screen for an audience, rather than showing them to one viewer at a time. Nudity started becoming commonplace in theatrically exhibited films made after World War II and shown at burlesque theaters. Some of these films had stories, but many were simply the same old strip shows of the past. Patrons back then would sit through live strippers and old newsreels before getting to see the films. Even though these films were cheaply made and shown in black-and-white, they initially attracted long lines of curious spectators.

But this, too, lost its novelty, and producers realized they would have to invest more money in these movies. Some of that money came from theater owners who depended on the producers to stay in business. By the mid-1960s, the movies featured some "petting and kissing" between boys and girls. And, at long last, color became standard. But the stories were still "weak." Ultimately, knowledgeable audiences simply demanded that the films include actual sex. And this practice continues now, despite the efforts of "pressure groups," who have only succeeded in making sex films into a thriving multi-million-dollar business.