Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 38: 'It Came from Hollywood' (1982)

It Came from Hollywood... and went to videodisc somewhere along the line, apparently.

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

-Percy Bysshe Shelley 

 

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality by not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment."

-Woody Allen

Ramesses II on display in the UK.

Legacy. That's pretty much all a man has left after he dies. Will I be remembered? And if so, how? And by whom? Try as we might, plan as we may, we cannot control how others will judge us and judge our actions after we die. After the funeral, the narrative is simply out of our hands. Some fare better than others in this respect. Take a fellow like Ramesses II, the seemingly omnipotent pharaoh who ruled over the formidable Egyptian Empire over three-thousand years ago. As the most powerful man of his day, Ramesses II, who would come to be known as Ozymandias to Greek historians, was immortalized in stone many times over by his contemporary artisans. These statues, in fact, long outlived the Egyptian Empire itself.

One such likeness, called the Younger Memnon, was shipped off to the British Museum about two-hundred years ago and is still there now. It's object EA19, if you're interested. It was this particular piece, eight feet tall and carved in over seven tons of granite, along with the inscription on another massive statue of Ramesses, that inspired British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley to compose his famous sonnet, Ozymandias, in 1817. In Shelley's poem, a statue of the once-great ruler stands abandoned and forlorn in the desert. All that remains are "two vast and trunkless legs of stone," a "shattered visage," and a pedestal upon which is carved a boastful message about the importance of this long-dead man and his triumphs. These accomplishments have obviously been erased by time, however, since the shattered relic is surrounded on all sides by a bleak and barren landscape.

Interestingly, Shelley gives us all this information third-hand, so to speak. The narrator of Ozymandias tells us that "a traveler" once described the scene to him, and now he is passing the story along to us. The point of the poem, I think, is that Ozymandias is a chump. At least, that's the way Shelley sees it. The pharaoh thought he had it all figured out, lording over his magnificent empire that was supposed to last forever. And now, all that's left of it is a busted-up statue in some crummy desert. Time, Shelley implies, has neutered Ozymandias. In his lifetime, he accomplished a great deal, but in the long run it was all for naught.

"Ozymandias melancholia"

Shelley's discouraging, humbling poem must have struck a chord with filmmaker Woody Allen, because he coined a term, "Ozymandias melancholia," for his film Stardust Memories (1980) and reused it in To Rome with Love (2012). Allen defines this phenomenon as "that sad and depressed feeling you get when you realize that no matter how great and majestic and important something is at the time, in time it's going to pass." Given his advancing age and myriad scandals, Woody Allen may have some legitimate concerns about his own legacy. He's been a public figure for about 50 years, and his name is still up there in the firmament... for now. Who knows what the ensuing decades and centuries have in store for the former Mr. Allen Konigsberg?

Percy Shelley's brief life was also pockmarked by scandals -- expulsions, suicides, charges of blasphemy -- yet his work has survived at least two centuries and seems good for at least a few more. I can't imagine high school English teachers dropping Ozymandias from the curriculum anytime soon. We can all rest assured that students will be writing perfunctory, semi-incoherent essays about it for years to come. And what about the inspiration himself, Ramesses II? Sure, his empire didn't last forever, and his statue is just another exhibit at which tourists will likely gawk for a few moments before heading to the gift shop. But here we are, three millennia hence, and I'm still puzzling over him. Percy and Woody have a long way to go to catch up to Ozzy in terms of longevity. So maybe he wasn't such a chump after all. He didn't live on the way he wanted, but he did endure after a fashion.

Columbus' reputation is fading.

Lady Fortune can play some weird tricks on you even after you're dead. She's that kind of gal. Just this week, the city council of Minneapolis voted unanimously to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People's Day in honor of the city's local native tribes. The council said its decision was "not about Christopher Columbus," but I find that somewhat difficult to fully believe. In my lifetime, I've seen Columbus' reputation as an icon in the history of our country virtually evaporate. Once lauded as the man who "discovered America," the Italian explorer is now treated as a racist, lying thief and bully who brought greed, genocide and misery along with him on the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. Based on the objective historical evidence, the man is truly indefensible and doesn't deserve a holiday in his honor. Still in all, what rotten posthumous luck for Columbus! His legacy survived largely unscathed for not decades, but centuries -- well into the 1980s -- only to collapse about 20-25 years ago. Ironically, the tipping point was probably 1992, i.e. the 500th anniversary of his famous voyage. The occasion brought him back into the public consciousness but also inspired renewed skepticism and criticism. The much-lauded quincentenary fizzled, and two competing Columbus biopics were box office bombs.

In the oddest of coincidences, both Christopher Columbus and Edward D. Wood, Jr. died at the age of 54. Ed is another case of a man whose reputation has taken some weird detours after his demise. The debate over Eddie's image has continued for decades now. Who was Ed Wood, Jr., exactly? A drunk and transvestite who made the worst movies of all time? A mad, misunderstood genius? A misguided but sincere outsider artist? A martyr? A fool? The film I'm covering this week, Paramount's comedic semi-documentary It Came from Hollywood, played a not-insignificant role in shaping the legend of Ed Wood in the early 1980s. In this motion picture, released only four years after Eddie's untimely death, the man's life and work are represented through the merest of remnants -- brief clips, a few questionable factoids, and some comedic conjecture.

These fragments strike me as the equivalent of the "trunkless legs of stone" described by Shelley. They don't give you the whole picture, certainly, but they do offer some insight to the life and times of a noteworthy individual. This isn't Ozymandias. It's Eddie-mandias.

IT CAME FROM HOLLYWOOD (1982)



Alternate titles: Direct from Hollywood (Venezuelan title)

Availability: Naturally, because of all the clips it contains, It Came from Hollywood is rather a nightmare from a copyright standpoint. Paramount intended on releasing it to DVD circa 2002, and one can still locate official-looking cover art for the disc. Due to rights issues, however, this DVD never made it to market. Used copies are still available in other formats, however. You can still purchase the film on VHS ($34) or laserdisc ($60) through Amazon. Additionally, a site that specializes in "Rare, Out of Print and Lost Cult Films on DVD," markets a DVD-R of the movie for $20. I have never dealt with this site and cannot say how reputable it is. Caveat emptor.

Additionally, an iOffer user named doctorkildare366 is selling it for $14. Used copies in a variety of formats -- VHS, laserdisc, and video disc -- are up for bid on Ebay, with prices ranging from $22 to $60. If that's out of your price range, the entire film has been uploaded to YouTube.

NYC's (sadly) long-gone Sutton Theatre

The backstory: Paramount Pictures obviously took note of the success of Harry and Michael Medved's The Golden Turkey Awards, the book that almost single-handedly brought Edward D. Wood, Jr. and his work to America's attention, for good or ill, in 1980. The very next year, the major studio acquired the rights to Ed's inaugural and most idiosyncratic feature, Glen or Glenda? (1953), and planned on exhibiting it prominently at New York's upscale (and now demolished) Sutton Theatre, only to back out at the last moment. Paramount's unlikely alibi was that such a release would have been in poor taste following the assassination attempt on recently-inaugurated President Ronald Reagan's life on March 30, 1981. All that remains is a remarkable ad from the "Arts & Leisure" section from a March '81 edition of the New York Times. The ad took the form of a fancy wedding announcement and contained the following text:

In the vast parade of motion pictures,
there are a few that marched to a different drummer.
Some were one of a kind originals.
Like "Citizen Kane."
Some told their story on a wide emotional canvas.
Like "The Godfather."
Some were provocatively bold, thumbing their noses at convention. 

Like "Freaks."
Some were lost, like "Napoleon."
They all had one thing in common.
They were different, more special than the other movies around them. 

Beginning on April 1st at 8:00 P.M.
The Sutton Theatre and
Paramount Pictures Presents
Edward D. Wood, Jr's
"Glenn or Glenda."

An ancestor of It Came from Hollywood

Note the incorrect spelling of Glen and fortuitous mention of Citizen Kane, directed by Ed Wood's idol, Orson Welles. The above account, incidentally, comes from J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbuam's invaluable text on paracinema, Midnight Movies (Da Capo Press, 1983), which states that Paramount's "interest in the film has never satisfactorily been explained." Nevertheless, the studio was still convinced that there was some gold to be mined from the Medveds' "golden turkeys," particularly the outlandish, low-budget horror and science-fiction films of the 1950s and 1960s. Harry and Michael had, if nothing else, proven that there was a resurgence of interest in such movies, one fueled partly by mid-century nostalgia and partly by the desire of younger viewers to mock the naivete of an earlier generation.

These particular movies, born of both Cold War paranoia and the rise of the American teenager as a cultural force, had a unique and potent effect on viewers of the 1980s, who reacted to them with a combination of befuddlement, incredulity, delight, and cynical superiority. The supreme and definitive expression of this phenomenon, television's Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1988-1999), would not arrive for several more years. In the meantime, Paramount gamely bankrolled an unusual "grab-bag"-type compilation film consisting of clips of dozens of these movies, interspersed with newly-shot vignettes featuring top comedians of the era.

The result, It Came from Hollywood, certainly stood out from the rest of Paramount's 1982 release schedule, which included 48 Hrs., Some Kind of Hero, An Officer and a Gentleman, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. There were a few Paramount films that year that spoofed the cinema of the past, including Airplane II: The Sequel and Jekyll and Hyde... Together Again.

This movie's clearest antecedent, however, was from another studio entirely: MGM's massively successful That's Entertainment (1974). That film, a surprise $19 million box-office hit, was a tribute to the golden days of movie musicals and consisted of clips from vintage films, interspersed with newly-shot introductions featuring such familiar stars as Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Stewart, and Liz Taylor. It Came from Hollywood was structured vaguely along those lines, only minus the reverence. Like That's Entertainment before it, this new film was a "greatest hits" reel of a particular chapter of movie history and also contained freshly-minted interstitial material.

In this case, however, the presenters were comedians who had come up through National Lampoon, Saturday Night Live and the Second City franchise in the 1970s and were poised to become major movie stars in the 1980s. And instead of offering fond reminiscences and pertinent background information about the films they were exhibiting, as the co-hosts had in That's Entertainment, the stars of It Came from Hollywood performed in madcap comedy sketches and offered smart-alecky comments about the various brief clips. Some of these cheeky remarks, in fact, were used as narration over the clips themselves, making It Came an apparent predecessor of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Perhaps we can think of this movie as a missing link between MST3K and some earlier efforts at redubbing and repurposing movies for comedic effect, including Jay Ward's television series Fractured Flickers (1963-1964) and Woody Allen's feature, What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966).

Solt and Leo's Elvis doc.

The masterminds behind It Came from Hollywood were a pair of up-and-coming producer-directors named Andrew Solt and Malcolm Leo, a Britisher and an American respectively. Solt and Leo were hot at the time, coming off the success of This Is Elvis (1981), an acclaimed documentary that combined existing newsreel and home movie footage with dramatic recreations in order to tell the life story of messianic rock star Elvis Presley. The underwhelming performance of It Came, which opened to dismal reviews (Leonard Maltin declared it "spectacularly unfunny") and lukewarm box office receipts in late 1981, does not seem to have caused long-term professional damage to either of its creators. Indeed, both Leo and Solt went on to lengthy, prosperous and still-ongoing careers making pop culture-based documentaries, though after It Came from Hollywood, they would do so separately and mostly for television. A prominent exception was Andrew Solt's theatrically-released Imagine: John Lennon (1988).

As for the star-studded cast, the first three comedians recruited for the film were all Second City alumni who had attained national fame through television. Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner had only recently left Saturday Night Live, while John Candy was still a cast member on SCTV, the shape-shifting sketch series then airing in a 90-minute block on NBC. Candy had already had prominent roles in The Blues Brothers (1980) and Stripes (1981), but according to biographer Martin Knelman in his book, Laughing on the Inside: The Life of John Candy (St. Martin's Griffin, 1998), the comedian's TV workload (he stayed with SCTV in one form or another from 1976-1983) had put a crimp in his burgeoning film career:

Because he had been consumed with SCTV, 1982 was the only year in which Candy did not have a movie coming out, except for It Came from Hollywood -- a forgettable anthology of clips from amusingly dreadful movies about aliens. Candy was one of the narrators, along with Cheech and Chong, Gilda Radner, and Dan Aykroyd. Candy's main contribution was to make jokes putting down that prodigious director of cheap, amateurish movies, Ed Wood. But the jokes seemed every bit as tacky as Ed's movies.

As for Cheech and Chong, the only performers in the film outside the Second City bubble, their appearance seems to have been an afterthought by a worried studio. In Cheech & Chong, The Unauthorized Autobiography (Simon and Schuster, 2008), Tommy Chong tells an anecdote about going to Vancouver Island for his mother's funeral, only to be met there by two Paramount executives, who had chartered a Cessna to track him down. After expressing their condolences, they gave him a pitch:

     "We need a favor from you and Cheech. Cheech is already onboard. So now we need a favor from you. We are doing a movie, a spoof actually, about Hollywood. It's called It Came from Hollywood and we need you and Cheech to do a cameo. And like I said, Cheech is already onboard, so..."
     "Sure. I would be glad to be in your movie," I answered. I still wondered why they went through all this trouble.
     The very next morning bright and early, we boarded the little Cessna and flew to Seattle, Washington, and then took a commercial flight to Los Angeles. The "we" being Jeffrey Katzenberg, Larry Marks, and me. Katzenberg was one of the top guns at Paramount at the time. The movie It Came from Hollywood was in trouble and needed some star power to put some butts in the seats. Cheech and Chong were the hottest movie stars at the time, so Jeffrey flew to Vancouver Island to get my support. [...] Cheech and I shot our part in It Came from Hollywood in one afternoon, ad-libbing the entire shoot and having a ball with the rest of the celebrity cast -- Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, and Gilda Radner among them.

So for Cheech and Chong, whose partnership was nearing its end, this was a pleasant experience on the back half of their career. (The duo broke up in 1985.) It Came from Hollywood was not a complete commercial failure, as I had remembered. It grossed $2 million on what must have been a very modest budget. The new segments were all shot within the confines of Paramount Studios in L.A., with only a few rudimentary interior sets (a movie theater, an operating room, a suburban home) and exteriors that were obviously filmed on the backlot, with its permanent cluster of fake-looking buildings. After a brief theatrical run, it enjoyed a fairly healthy afterlife on VHS and cable before disappearing into obscurity. In a truly bizarre coincidence, the film opened two days before Halloween in Los Angeles but did not go national until December 10, 1982 -- the fourth anniversary of Edward D. Wood, Jr.'s death.

Ed Wood gets a posthumous "salute" from Paramount.

Ed Wood dominates It Came from Hollywood as much as -- or more than -- any of the high-profile comedy stars on the marquee. The compilation includes clips from dozens of films by dozens of filmmakers, yet almost none of these are specifically named... except Eddie's movies. The directors of It Came, Andrew Solt and Malcolm Leo, drew their source material mostly from the movies of the 1950s and 1960s, but It Came from Hollywood spans nearly a half-century from the late '20s to the late '70s. Apart from an affectionate roll call (set to the strains of "Hooray for Hollywood") at the very end of the picture, however, almost none of these clips are identified in any way, either by onscreen captions or by the presenters. Leo and Solt merely selected noteworthy clips from the original movies and grouped them into a series of fast-paced montages*, each with its own theme ("Gorillas," "Aliens," "Troubled Teenagers," etc.), bookended by the shenanigans of the five famous comedians. Except for Phil Tucker's Robot Monster (1953), the only films specifically identified by the hosts are those made by Ed Wood.

In fact, about 22 minutes into the film, there is an entire segment entirely devoted to the infamous auteur entitled "A Salute to Edward D. Wood, Jr." This passage is anchored by John Candy, who begins by delivering the following monologue directly to the camera while standing amid a variety of props, including a flying saucer:

One man who usually gets singled out when people talk about third or fourth-rate movies is Ed Wood, the man who brought you such classics as Glen or Glenda? and the science-fiction epic Plan 9 from Outer Space, which could have used this flying saucer here. As a matter of fact, I'd like to present a salute to Ed Wood, a true master of the B-movies. Well, D-movies. You judge for yourself.

Candy then shows the audience a few representative excerpts from Plan 9 and Glenda, remarking on the chintzy special effects ("You can hardly see that string!") and unconvincing acting ("Oh, look at the motivation! The deep concern! The confusion! Marvelous performance!"), but also mixing in a few factoids about Ed and his career, information likely cribbed directly from the Medveds' book. Some of what Candy says is accurate. Yes, Ed wrote and directed these films and played the lead in Glen. Yes, that's a shower curtain in the cockpit from Plan 9. Yes, Ed used his wife's chiropractor as a stand-in for the late Bela Lugosi. Some of the information, though, is the stuff of urban legends. No, Plan 9 was not made for $37 and those flying saucers are not hubcaps.

Generally, the clips here are well-chosen -- Duke Moore scratching himself with his gun; wobbly UFOs zooming past a matte painting; Dolores Fuller dramatically removing her sweater -- the kinds of memorable moments that would make strong impressions on viewers who had never seen Ed's work before. By far, though, the most stunning aspect of "A Salute to Edward D. Wood, Jr." is its ending, in which a bra-wearing Dan Aykroyd joins John Candy onscreen and the two comedians, their voices dripping with mock sincerity, re-enact the crucial "angora sweater hand-off" scene from the climax of Glen or Glenda? before zooming off in Aykroyd's motorcycle.

Dan Aykroyd (left) and John Candy re-enact the climax of Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda?

And this surreal scene is far from the only Ed Wood-related content in It Came from Hollywood. In fact, clips of Eddie's work are interspersed throughout the entire film.. and not just the familiar titles like Plan 9 and Glenda, but the obscure ones as well, including The Violent Years, The Bride and the Beast, and even Married Too Young. The very first glimpse of Plan 9 arrives about two minutes into the proceedings, with a clip of Dudley Manlove and Joanna Lee as aliens Eros and Tanna prompting this reaction from a baffled Tommy Chong: "I want my money back!"

In a later segment sarcastically called "Technical Triumphs," John Candy offers some whimsical thoughts on the production values of Ed's Bride of the Monster. He describes a laboratory scene between mad scientist Bela Lugosi and test subject Tony McCoy thusly: "A man with a spaghetti strainer strapped to his head gets tortured by a photo enlarger on a microphone stand." Maybe not the greatest compliment in the world, but this is (again) one of the rare instances in which the stars of It Came from Hollywood bothers to name one of the movies he is mocking. Ed Wood might have very well appreciated the fact that he was getting some name recognition from a major studio production like this. After all, there's no such thing as bad publicity, right?

*Interestingly, one of the editors who labored on this movie was Janice Hampton, who was John Waters' resident cutter from Hairspray (1988) to Pecker (1998).

The ill-fated DVD release.

The viewing experience: That will vary greatly depending on what kind of viewer you are and how seriously you take your B-movies. As regular readers of this feature will know, I've taken a moderate, pragmatic stance on the "to laugh or not to laugh" issue when it comes to the work of Ed Wood and other low budget filmmakers of his era. While I never want to be snide or dismissive in these articles, I cannot help but be moved to laughter occasionally by these often-ridiculous, delirious movies. It was laughter that originally made me a fan of Ed Wood in the first place. If, however, you are one of those ultra-orthodox fans who cringe at the very thought of these science-fiction and horror films being treated disrespectfully, you will want to give It Came from Hollywood a wide berth. Certainly, such viewers will be offended to see such well-made and highly-regarded films as The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), and War of the Worlds (1953), included alongside and thus essentially equated with such no-budget bottom feeders as The Creeping Terror (1964), as if any older film that included monsters or aliens was inherently worthless.

Personally, that last point bothered me more in theory than in practice, since the jokes lobbed at these movies throughout It Came from Hollywood are strictly softballs. "On Earth, we throw a dog a bone. We don't turn him into bones," goes one of Dan Aykroyd's typically toothless non-zingers after witnessing an alien casually dispose of a defenseless pooch with a laser gun.

The script for It Came is credited to comedian and writer Dana Olsen, whose CV includes such cartoon-to-screen adaptations as George of the Jungle and Inspector Gadget. Olsen is currently working for an upcoming Nickelodeon series called Henry Danger. As you'd expect from those credits, Olsen's work here is innocuous -- amiable, if not exactly funny. (To his credit, Olsen has also written screenplays for beloved cult directors like John Carpenter, Greydon Clark, and Joe Dante.) Given the improvisational backgrounds of literally all the film's stars, it's difficult to say how much of the finished movie can truly be attributed to its screenwriter.

By any yardstick, however, the sketches in It Came from Hollywood are fairly weak, and the commentary by John Candy and the others is fairly puerile and witless. The clips themselves are the true stars here. The comedians mostly get in the way. I will say, though, that the hosts genuinely appear to be having fun, which in turn made this film more fun for me as a viewer. Aykroyd gets to ham it up as a German-accented mad scientist. Gilda Radner trots out her famous "Judy Miller" character, a hyperactive and talkative child, from Saturday Night Live. She also stars in one of the more successful interstitial routines, portraying a hapless housewife who all but destroys her own living room trying to heed the urgent advice of a radio announcer. And Cheech and Chong chortle at the pitifully-inaccurate depiction of the dope-smoking lifestyle in Reefer Madness (1936), with Chong pointing out that the potheads in that film don't hold the smoke in their lungs but just puff and puff.

John Candy: Canadian sincerity.

MST3K viewers will no doubt notice that a great many of the films excerpted in It Came From Hollywood were later used as full-length episodes of the long-running cable series. But MST took a sharper, more critical approach to the films it used whenever necessary (e.g. Jerry Warren's interminable The Wild World of Batwoman), diplomacy be damned, and their jokes tended to be specific, esoteric, and obscure. The humor in It Came from Hollywood, on the other hand, tends to focus on the same basic subjects over and over, namely the shoddiness of the props and sets, the stiffness of the acting, and the overall implausibility of the plots. The grand message of this film is: "Gee, aren't these old movies kooky, folks?" That's pretty much it.

Make no mistake: It Came From Hollywood is a PG-rated major studio comedy aimed at a broad audience. The actors in it are clearly playing to the gallery, to borrow an idiom from the theater.

Perhaps for more timid viewers, It Came could serve as a "gateway drug" to MST3K or at least a "sampler platter" of the sci-fi and horror flicks of the Eisenhower and Kennedy years. If only the clips were better labeled, this would be a terrific "what to see next" guide for adventurous viewers. In addition, It Came from Hollywood is recommended to Ed Wood fans, as it is one of the first mainstream acknowledgements of the Wood cult, more than a decade before the famous Tim Burton-directed biopic. Although the principal point of this movie was to hold Ed and his work up for ridicule, it is difficult to become too offended by It Came from Hollywood.

A lot of that has to do with the onscreen persona of the late John Candy, who was one of the most gregarious and ingratiating screen personalities of the 1980s. With his tousled hair and rumpled, loose-fitting attire, Candy very much resembles an overgrown kid in this movie. And there's a touch of humble Canadian sincerity to this ostensibly comedic monologue, which Candy delivers about two-thirds of the way through:

You know, up until this point, there's been a lot of laughing and sneering going on, directed at some of the films we've been watching. And I've gotta admit, I've been laughing a bit myself. Thing is, you've gotta keep an open mind about these things. Most of these guys were working under a very tiny budget. And when that's the case, even the most fundamental things become difficult, if not impossible. Like makeup and wardrobe. Just because you can't afford the best doesn't mean it's bad filmmaking.

I'm sure Eddie would have agreed very heartily with that sentiment. After all, he knew from first-hand experience just how true those words were.

In two weeks: My humble little "Ed Wood Wednesdays" series takes a tuneful detour with its first album review. "The sick musical flowering of a twenty-year obsession with the extraordinary life, work, and sexual paraphilia of Ed Wood, Jr., pornographer, war-hero, director of unspeakable celluloid tortures, big-time lush and cross-dressing angora adorer." So says the ad for a bizarre concept LP about Poughkeepsie's favorite son. And it was created by a musician and journalist of some prominence, no less! How could I resist such a trinket? Mosey on back here in a fortnight, folks, when I sink my fangs into Josh Alan Friedman's The Worst! (2007)