Swear all you want because profanity shouldn't even be a thing

Maybe he's about to say "friendship." I doubt it, though.

We humans didn't always have a sophisticated written and spoken language the way we do today. No, we probably started out with mere grunts and groans. Only after a lot of trial and error did we decide that certain grunts and groans indicated particular things. And look at us now. We have hundreds of thousands, perhaps even a million, words in the English language alone. If that doesn't suit you, there are over 7,000 other languages to choose from on this planet, each with its own rich, diverse vocabulary.

But somewhere along the line, we decided that particular words are so powerful that their use should be regulated, restricted, or even banned outright. Some of these words are hateful insults aimed at races, religions, sexual orientations, etc. We call such words slurs. But many other "forbidden" words simply refer to distasteful topics or express extreme frustration. We call these words profanities.

I understand the stigma attached to slurs, which can be used to denigrate people and may even incite violence. But I have never understood—and will likely never understand—the concept of profanity. What a useless, anti-helpful idea. Who benefits from this? What possible gain is there from making certain words restricted or forbidden? Whose life has been improved by this? All I know is that there are people in this world who take great offense at profanity. And because of them, sentences with these "naughty" words have to be bowdlerized or lobotomized before they can be expressed. How dumb.

You know what really irks me about this? What really drives me up the wall? It's the pious, phony hypocrisy of it all. To me, the most obscene, hateful, offensive, destructive sentiments ever expressed by human beings have not been loaded with profanities. Instead, they have been couched in the perfectly "clean," respectable language of government and commerce. A political leader might issue an order that leads to thousands of deaths. The head of a pharmaceutical company might raise the price of a life-saving drug. An influencer might deliver false and even dangerous information to millions of followers. And not one of these people will use a single so-called "profanity." But we carry on as if "four-letter words" were the greatest plague ever released on humanity.

If you are one of those people who make a big show of being offended by profanity, I have no respect or sympathy for you. To me, it's akin to superstition. If you feel the opposite way, you can express that in the comments section of this article. But you'll have to make an awfully convincing case before I am swayed.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 267 The great 'Hollywood Rat Race' auction of 2026

This eBay auction is a veritable smorgasbord.

NOTE: The following article is about the sale of some rare Ed Wood material. Because this sale is happening on eBay (an auction site) and because the seller is willing to entertain offers (or bids) from interested parties, I am referring to this as sale an "auction." JB.

This is not the article I planned to write this week. I actually wanted to get back to my ongoing series about Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994). But something unusual has happened in the world of Ed Wood fandom, and I feel it is my responsibility to record it for the sake of posterity before we all forget that this ever happened. I strongly suspect that this is the kind of one-off oddity destined to fall down the memory hole never to be recalled again.

On March 16, 2026, Bob Blackburn (co-inheritor of the Ed Wood estate) posted on Facebook about a very intriguing eBay auction he'd learned about through fellow fan Patrick McCabe. It seems that a legitimate memorabilia dealer called NEOvintage was selling a treasure trove of rare Ed Wood materials from the 1960s, including a manuscript of Hollywood Rat Race typed by Eddie himself and some ultra-rare cassette tapes including unreleased interviews with Ed and others talking about Bela Lugosi. The asking price for these precious goodies? A mere quarter of a million dollars, though the seller is willing to offer a $50,000 discount to the right buyer. If you have a spare vacation home you're not using or perhaps a Scrooge McDuck vault of gold coins, maybe consider it.

Podcast Tuesday: "Potsie Weber, Wanted Fugitive"

Margaret Willock and Anson Williams in The Money Tree.

I have surprisingly fond memories of corny, old-fashioned educational or "classroom" movies. My father was a high school teacher—his subjects were history and economics—during the primitive, pre-VCR days when you actually needed a projector and a screen to show a movie in class. I remember accompanying him several times to the Flint Public Library to procure these precious film reels that came in heavy, gray boxes that you needed to secure with luggage straps. For some reason, I found all of this to be unbearably exciting.

It was even better when one of my own teachers at Springview Elementary would show a movie in class. Again, I grew up in the movie projector era, before TVs strapped to wheeled carts became ubiquitous. What a thrill to hear that noisy projector whirring away as the images flickered on the screen. I think I liked the Disney nature movies best, but I generally enjoyed them all, even the really bad ones. It was a wonderful, much-needed break from the tedium of the school day.

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we turn our attentions to a somewhat forgotten 1971 educational film called The Money Tree starring Anson "Potsie" Williams in one of his earliest roles. He plays a young married man who gets into major debt by renting furniture and buying a new Ford Mustang on credit. And he drags his poor wife (Margaret Willock) down with him. What did we learn from this film? Well, you can find out below.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Lost Greg Javer/Keith Crocker Commentaries [PART TWO]

Yes, it's already time for a sequel.

I can still remember a few years back when Greg Javer aka Greg Dizawer excitedly emailed me about an Ed Wood project he was working on for Severin Films. To be honest, I didn't quite understand what the project was. I knew that it had something to do with a company restoring and rereleasing some of Ed's adult movies from the 1960s and 1970s, but beyond that, I was in the dark. Eventually, what resulted from all this was a three-disc collection called Hard Wood: The Adult Features of Ed Wood (2024).

It gives me some consolation to know that Greg was still alive when Hard Wood was released on Blu-ray. It's also nice to know that Greg lived to see Ed Wood receive an official New York State historical marker in his hometown of Poughkeepsie, NY. Greg's time on this planet was far too brief, but he managed to have a lasting impact on the field of Woodology.

And we still haven't heard the last of Greg, a year and change after his death! Recently, reader Brendon Sibley sent me some commentary tracks that Greg recorded with film archivist Keith Crocker that were intended for Hard Wood but did not make it into the released version of that set. Drawing on their vast knowledge of vintage erotica, Greg and Keith recorded their reactions to six of the Swedish Erotica loops that Eddie allegedly made in the early 1970s. What was the full extent of Ed's involvement in these silent movies? That's been a subject of debate for decades, and these commentary tracks hopefully provide some insight.

Last week, we presented Greg and Keith's thoughts on The Virgin Next Door (parts 1 and 2) and Western Lust. This week, let's enjoy their commentary tracks for Girl on a Bike, 15" Commercial, and Devil Cult. Again, I had to distort the visuals just a bit to appease the YouTube and Blogger censors, neither of whom would have allowed me to post these films as they originally appeared. You'll just have to imagine actor Keith Erickson's skin tag, among other things.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Lost Greg Javer/Keith Crocker Commentaries [PART ONE]

Keith and Greg talk Ed. (Header image by Brendon Sibley.)

Not long before he died, Greg Javer (aka Greg Dziawer) contributed some commentary tracks to the deluxe three-disc collection Hard Wood: The Adult Features of Ed Wood (2024) from Severin Films. Looking back, this was one of the last major Wood-related projects of Greg's too-brief life. If you purchase that set, you can hear him give his thoughts on Necromania (1971), The Only House in Town (1971), and The Young Marrieds (1972). If you're missing Greg, and I know many of you are, these tracks allow you to spend some time with him.

But these were not the only recordings Greg made for Hard Wood. He and I, for example, recorded a jovial and hopefully informative commentary for the rowdy, rural comedy Shotgun Wedding (1963), which Eddie scripted for director Boris Petroff. Unfortunately, that track got lost in the shuffle and never made it into the finished set. If you're interested in hearing it, I have made it available in a previous blog entry.

Meanwhile, teaming up with film historian Keith Crocker, Greg recorded commentary tracks for six (!) of the adult loops that Ed Wood made as part of the Swedish Erotica series in the early 1970s. These, too, were unfortunately lost in the shuffle and did not make it into Hard Wood. But fear not! Recently, reader Brendon Sibley forwarded these tracks to me and asked for me to present them on my blog. How could I resist an offer like that? 

In fact, I will devote this week and next to the lost Javer/Crocker commentaries. Three this week, three next week. Does that sound like a plan? For obvious reasons, I cannot present the loops without some visual distortion. YouTube has very little sense of humor about these things.

Podcast Tuesday: "The Top 5 Garry Marshall Movies of All Time"

Garry Marshall sure did make some films, I tell you what.

Every pretentious film geek on the internet has a "hot take" on the movies of Quentin Tarantino, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorsese. And they probably have plenty of opinions about David Fincher, Steven Spielberg, David Lynch, and Paul Thomas Anderson, too. But how many of them have bothered to watch all the movies of Garry Marshall, huh? Probably not too many. Well, that's why you come to my blog. I pick up where the others leave off. I go where no nerd has gone before.

Garry Marshall was a very successful writer and producer of TV sitcoms in the 1960s and '70s, scoring hits with The Odd Couple, Happy Days, and Laverne & Shirley. (Of course, there was also the occasional Blansky's Beauties or Me and the Chimp. Hey, they can't all be winners.) By the 1980s, he naturally wanted to graduate to feature films. And so, he made 18 of them, including some box office smashes and a few major bombs. Along the way, he worked with some of the biggest actors in movie history and turned more than one newcomer into a superstar. For all these reasons and more, I think his films—good, bad, or indifferent—are as worthy of study as those of any famous director.

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, my cohost and I give you our picks for the Top 5 Garry Marshall Movies of All Time. And we talk about what we liked and didn't like about our journey through Garry's filmography. Doesn't that sound like fun? Click the play button below and find out.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 266: How accurate is 'Ed Wood' (1994) [PART 3]

Ed Wood (Johnny Depp) looks guilty in this scene from Ed Wood.

It just isn't true, okay?

The "Dolores Fuller" character in Tim Burton's movie Ed Wood (1994)—the temperamental, ambitious-to-a-fault ingenue played by a peroxided Sarah Jessica Parker—is not a fair or accurate depiction of Indiana-born actress and songwriter Dolores Agnes Fuller (1923-2011) who dated Edward D. Wood, Jr. in the early 1950s and appeared in three of his best-known movies. In transforming Eddie's messy, complicated life into a tidy, two-hour biopic, screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski streamlined certain aspects of the story and exaggerated others. Somehow, along the way, Dolores got turned into a cartoon. I honestly think the culprit was this extended quote from Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992):

Dolores Fuller explains why she left Ed Wood.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 265: How accurate is 'Ed Wood' (1994) [PART 2]

Ed Wood (1994) references this production of The Casual Company.

When Edward Davis Wood, Jr. (1924-1978) relocated to Hollywood from his native Poughkeepsie in the late 1940s after his stint in the Marines, his goal was to break into the movie business. The silver screen had fascinated him as a boy, so once he became a man, he took Horace Greeley's famous advice: "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country." Once settled in California, instead of relying on job offers from the major studios (Universal, Fox, Paramount), Ed Wood attempted to produce and/or direct his own low-budget movies. This was a youngster with initiative. A dreamer, you might say.

A young Ed Wood.

Unfortunately, Eddie's earliest Hollywood projects, like the crude Westerns Range Revenge and Crossroads of Laredo (both 1948), were never truly completed during the filmmaker's lifetime and were only released posthumously. I've pinpointed the made-for-TV melodrama The Sun Was Setting (1951) as the first production Eddie actually saw all the way through to completion, though I can find no record of it airing anywhere. Ed's attempts at making television commercials "on spec" and then selling them to clients likewise proved futile. You can still watch some of Eddie's self-made TV commercials today, but I don't think any companies ever used them.

What's most remarkable about Ed Wood's earliest years in Hollywood is how many short-lived production companies he managed to start and how many backers he managed to sweettalk into giving him money, despite having no proven track record of success. Eddie's graveyard of failed ventures includes: Wood-Thomas Productions, Story Ad Films, W.D.C.B. Films, Atomic Productions, and more.

Meanwhile, to earn a little money and (potentially) get his name out there, Eddie did a little theater work during those early years in Hollywood. The great James Pontolillo covers this topic extensively in his book, The Muddled Years of Edward D. Wood, Jr., 1946-1948 (2025). Besides acting in The Blackguard Returns, Eddie managed to stage a farce he'd written himself called The Casual Company: The Laugh of the Marines. This lighthearted office comedy, based on Ed's own military experience, had a brief run at the Village Playhouse in late 1948. In the October 26, 1948 edition of The Valley Times, critic Henry Arntsen described it as a "three-acter" revolving around "a group of pencil-pushing Marines at a Naval hospital."